Terrible Atheist Argument #1

[Statler Waldorf]

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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 one facepalmtastic objection. Typically the atheist is some 12 year old who thinks he's "refuted religion". If he is, it's no use trying to reason. But if there are smart atheists, they ought to know why this is a terrible 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.

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.

If you disagree with this idea, you can either:
i) Challenge the claim that the causal chain is finite, arguing that it is infinite in the past.
ii) Challenge the claim that the first cause must be God.

What you cannot do is imply that God needs to be caused by something.

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I am not a huge fan of the cosmological argument-although you are absolutely right-this particular objection to it is absurd.

I walked into my kitchen the other day, and there was a freshly baked cake setting on the counter, and I asked aloud, “Who baked this cake?”
As I was asking the question I was half expecting an atheist to jump out of the closet shaking his finger, “No no no! You cannot ask that because then we would have to ask who baked the baker!” To think that some people actually think this is a legitimate objection is rather troubling.