Terrible Atheist Argument #1

[Simon Moon]

Okay, so there are smart atheists and there are dumb atheists.

Some dumb atheists make some piss poor arguments. Here I'll deal with one that comes up a lot.

1) "If God created everything then who created God?"

This is not an argument against the existence of a god. It is an argument to demonstrate that theists are often guilty of the fallacy of special pleading.

I have never heard a single atheist use this as an attempt to disprove the existence of a god.

This does not bode well for you that you seem to misunderstand the use of this argument.

a) There are various beings that are called "God", and they all have different features. But philosophically, the most rigorous concept of God is called the "Maximally Great Being", or a being that possesses all the categories of greatness to such a degree that nothing greater can be conceived. Such a being is almost always thought to be personal rather than impersonal.

Just because a being can be conceived of that possesses all categories of greatness, does not that it exists. It does not even offer a shred of evidence for the possibility or the probability that it exists.

b) One of the features of this maximally great being is it's role as the "First cause" or "uncaused cause". ]To understand what this is, you have to look at everything in the world in terms of cause-effect relations. Everything contingent has a cause that leads backwards in a causal chain. Does the causal chain go on infinitely, or is it finite? Theists argue that the causal chain is finite, and it begins at an uncaused cause, or first cause which was not itself caused by anything. This is God.

Fallacy of composition. Just because things within the universe have cause and effect relations, does not mean that the universe itself does.