Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

He needs this to be true for his god to exist.  At the end of the day, he'll insist that a fact is wrong rather than concede he got a fact wrong.

As I said before, I think you're confusing necessity with sufficiency. When was the last time you did some mathematics..? 

Let's break it down again, if there is a valid argument that proves x exists given causality. This means that causality is a sufficient condition for x to exist, if causality turns out to be invalid, this doesn't mean x doesn't exist.

Your commentary above shows that you think sufficient conditions are also necessary conditions, i.e. that causality being wrong means that the assertion "x exists" is wrong. This is a basic logical mistake. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency

On the contrary, it is an example of extrapolation from known cases and is thereby an example of analytic knowledge. All claims I have found for a statement being synthetic a priori have been easily seen to be wrong.

If your assertion is an extrapolation from known causes, then it is based on empirical data, and thus is a posterori by definition, and definitely not analytic. Your assertion "there is no synthetic a priori" is therefore self-refuting. 

Also, if there were synthetic a priori statements that turned out to be wrong, this doesn't mean that all synthetic a priori statements are wrong. Black swan fallacy..

Nope. It *describes* the behavior. it does NOT explain specific instances of the behavior. For example, there is no explanation of why any particular nucleus decays at one time as opposed to another. it does describe the probability of decay, though.

I agree that QM is descriptive like any physical theory. But you are asserting here that QM is acausal without providing reliable sources for this claim.

From wiki, we learn that the label "acausal" that is sometimes used in some interpretations of QM is, actually, misleading.

Quote:"Confusion between causality and determinism is particularly acute in quantum mechanics, this theory being acausal in the sense that it is unable in many cases to identify the causes of actually observed effects or to predict the effects of identical causes, but arguably deterministic in some interpretations (e.g. if the wave function is presumed not to actually collapse as in the many-worlds interpretation, or if its collapse is due to hidden variables, or simply redefining determinism as meaning that probabilities rather than specific effects are determined)."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)

In other words, QM being acausal doesn't really mean that, under some hypothetical scenario, you can precede your mother's existence, as Nudger thinks, it just means our physical theories about the world are inherently limited and can't identify the causes of observed effects at the quantum level, we can merely assign probabilities. To state it differently, saying that there are effects without causes at the subatomic level is an appeal to ignorance, an appeal to the limitations of scientific investigation. 

The only thing these recent advancements in physics prove is that we should be less ambitious about what we can ever know about reality.

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As HappySkeptic said above, one can't impose some state in QM. Atheists seem to forget that the theory exposes the inherent limitations of our knowledge. The skirmishing about causality at the subatomic level arises merely because we just can't point out a cause to such and such effects, not because we actually observe things popping into existence. QM undermining causality is maybe to be expected in pop sci magazines, our observations/measurements are inherently limited forever as per the uncertainly principle, and thus we can't really observe a violation of causality (in its classical sense) to begin with......

The door is wide open for the theist to interpret these permanent gaps of knowledge in his worldview. It's true that many god-of-the-gaps arguments are weak because they appeal to ignorance. But thanks to QM, there really is inherent and permanent ignorance about what happens at the subatomic level.