Atheism is unreasonable

[Mister Agenda]

What the hell are you talking about? I said "anything that can be explained or described by natural law has to exist within a universe, and anything beyond that (the natural realm) is supernatural".

And I don't agree with your definition. Since you pulled it out of your ass instead of out of a dictionary, I don't see any logical reason why I should adopt it, especially since it leads to silly ideas like quantum vacuum not within a space-time continuum being 'supernatural'.

A finite universe means that the past is infinitely long...but again, there are some philosophical problems with that...and no physicist will be able to help you out in that regard...you know why?

Because it doesn't make sense to say a finite universe means the past is infinitely long?

Based on the infinity problem and causation...no single event within the universe (and by "universe" I mean all natural reality ANYWHERE) could ever come to past...and if no single event within the universe could ever come to past, that mean that nothing that is within the universe can be used to explain the fact that events DO come to past....and since causes within the universe can't explain it, that would mean that we need to posit a cause OUTSIDE of the universe...and that cause is the source of the universe as a whole, and every part within it.

What did elipses and sentences a paragraph long ever do to you, to deserve such abuse?

You haven't proven infinity is a problem, a similar apparent paradox (Zeno's) indicates you could never walk across a room because there are an infinity of dimensionless points to cross, yet we manage. You've asserted a problem, but not proven it.

And you have no knowledge of whatever greater universe may exist beyond our cosmos, so that the same rules hold outside our cosmos is another assertion.

I did, with Esqualax (whatever his name is). But ok, I will pass the hot potato to you, because it is clear that he couldn't handle it.

If there was an infinite number of births which preceded your birth, how will your birth ever come to past? For every single birth that came to past, there is an infinitely many more births to go..so your birth would never come to past.

Stating the apparent paradox isn't proving it really is a paradox. Zeno's Paradox has never been fully solved, yet Achilles can still pass the tortoise in a race. If there is an infinite past, then it's not a real paradox, because here we are. If God has an infinite past, God has the same 'problem': God will never have gotten around to creating anything.

Or better yet, if me and you are on a road, and I told you to begin walking, and after you've taken an infinite amount of steps on this road, you will receive a trillion dollars...and you began walking...at what point would you "traverse" infinity...and receive the money?

I can never take an infinite amount of steps, but that doesn't prevent me or the road from existing. You might not be able to tell how far along I am if it's infinite in both directions, but I'm on it somewhere.

If you can answer either of these questions adequately, I will become an atheist.

Please don't become an atheist.

I am talking about infinity, and you are talking about some damn quantum foam?

Quantum foam may well be infinite. As I pointed out earlier, it has all the salient features of a creator God except mind, personality, and 'supernaturality'.

Answer the above analogy. If you can do that, then no syllogism is needed.

'If you don't know the answer, that proves me right' is the argument from ignorance in a nutshell.

Logically absurd concepts are untrue.

Logical absurdities can be demonatrated in a syllogism. It's not a logical absurdity, it's absurd in your opinion.

False. Objective moral values mean that things like rape and murder are wrong no matter how many people think that they are right. The "rightness" or "wrongness" transcends what man think or doesn't think.

You say in reply to an example about hypothetical aliens.

So if you have one group of people that believe rape is wrong, and another group that believe that rape is right...which side prevails?

Can you name a group of people that thinks rape is right? Not even rapists think that.

And not only that, but again, where does moral values come from? Nature? Nature doesn't know right from wrong? Where does it come from in the first place?

You keep confusing human nature with nature in general. It's our nature as a social species that has to cooperate to survive and has a myriad of other characteristics in common that determines what is right and wrong for humans, but it's not mystically revealed to us, we have to figure it out, largely by trial and error, in fits and starts, often taking a step backwards for two steps forward.

Well, Charles Manson was asked do he regret anything that he did. And his reply was "No, I wish I had done more."

Well, Charles Manson wasn't most rapists, was he?

So right and wrong is based on what society thinks? So if the society allowed it, then that would make it right?

You are so hard to get through to. No. I JUST said that a society that disallows rape is OBJECTIVELY better to live in that one that allows it. What about the idea of living in a rapey society strikes you as okay just because the people in it think it's acceptable? As a rule, humans don't like being raped. It's traumatizing. It's still traumatizing if it's socially acceptable.

If the Bible has within it the commandments and laws of a omnibenevolent Being who is just and holy, then there is no subjectivity to it.

One, your decision to believe the author is just and holy is subjective to you. You cannot escape using your own judgment. Second, if God determines the laws of morality, they could have been otherwise, and therefore are subjective to him...and pretty arbitrary to boot. If God discerns the laws of morality, then they are inherent and potentially can be discerned without God...and the universality of laws against murder indicates that we can at least figure out the big ones.

You just said above that moral values is objective, now you are down here talking about subjectivity?

That some degree of subjectivity is inescapable does not mean there are no objective facts. We each only have the knowledge, brain, senses, and personal experiences we have with which to work. Even objective facts we can only apprehend with some subjectivity, because we have little choice in the matter. Much of the usefulness of science is that it gives us a means to reduce subjectivity; but science can't tell us what we should value, it can only help us figure out how to best achieve the values we have. Those values nearly all humans have in common are based on our innate moral sentiments. The world is objective (and even that is an axiom), but our perception of it is necessarily somewhat subjective. Our reality as we perceive it is a messy mix of subjective and objective.

So who decides what is best for human beings in the first place?? Individuals? Societies? Civilizations? Governments? Who?

We don't decide what's best for humans. We discover it, gradually, together.

Where does moral values come from, and who decides of all of the moral values, what is right, and what is wrong?

No one person decides that stuff for everyone. The world is a laboratory of competing ideas of how best to live our lives. We can compare them and actually see what arrangements are better to live in. The best ideas tend to gradually catch on. The worst ideas tend to gradually die out. It's similar to evolution in that regard, with societies instead of species. The Nazi experiment was a spectacular failure, the democracy experiment has at least be less bad that all the other alternatives. An animal with thick fur is objectively better adapted to the cold than a less well-insulated animal. A democracy objectively delivers more prosperity and security for its citizens than a dictatorship.

Where does these functions come from?

The environment the organism must adapt to in order to survive.

And how come nature was able to create life from nonlife despite being mindless and blind, when intelligent human beings cannot do it?

You might regret pinning your strategy to the assertion we cannot do it, and you'll ikely regret it in your lifetime.

If you haven't noticed, I keep going back to the question of origins...and also if you haven't noticed, the questions of origins are the most difficult questions for you people to answer...and that isn't a coincidence.

If you find made-up answers adequate, I can see why you would think we're handicapped by not finding them acceptable.

A selection is not a creation. It selects from stuff that is already there.

No kidding.

How did the stuff get there in the first place? It can't select from anything if the stuff that it is selecting didn't come from somewhere else.

There are several possibilities, as you're aware by now. I'm on the team that thinks not making up answers is a virtue, so I don't have a problem with 'I don't know' as the only honest current answer.

Right, given enough time, Jesus can/will return.

He's dead, Jim. Time can't fix that, it just makes it worse. The event you're proposing doesn't require time, it requires a miracle.

Oh, I believe it, I just don't believe that this is the case. You would need wayyyy more time (in my opinion), than the 13.7 billion years since the universe began. That isn't enough time.

Opinion doesn't carry much weight in these matters.

I am a Christian theist.

I am no kind of theist, so kindly stop trying to press gods on me.

Admittedly, the notion of free will stumps me. But then again, on naturalism, there is no free will, because all of my decisions are based on the flow of electrons and neutrons in my brain...but I can't control them but they control me...so my actions are not "free actions", so I am not responsible for anything that I do.

It's kind of a stumper for everyone. Your thoughts don't control you, they ARE you. And though I think there's good science that suggests we aren't nearly as free-willed as we perceive ourselves to be, I don't think it's been extinguished entirely. I suppose I'm a compatibilist, which is perfectly compatible with naturalism, though I'm only a methodological naturalist, not a metaphysical one.

But yet if God doesn't exist then it had to have happened that way, right?

You've switched from 'all the time' to 'at all'. I don't pretend to be able to imagine all the possible ways it could have happened if there's no God, especially if we don't rule out other supernatural causes. I don't rule out ANY causes a priori, but I strongly lean towards the most scientifically plausible ones. If a creator God started the unverse and life off, it clearly didn't want to make it obvious from studying nature.

All of that is irrelevant if you can't go in the lab and start biting, instead of being on internet forms every day barking. In other words, all bark and no bite. Everything that you just said sounds good. It sounds great. It sounds technical. Ok, take all of that information, go in the lab, and get some results that is on your side of things. Until then, keep on barking.

You've got no sense of irony or hypocrisy at all, do you?

You are right, it wouldn't. Wanna know why?

Because you're a hypocrite?

Because that would still prove that for life to exist, you need INTELLIGENT DESIGN to orchestrate the process.

No it would not prove that. It would prove that no supernatural intervention is required for life to exist, though.

The entire process would take some intelligent engineering, wouldn't it?

Synthetic, designed life would. A self-replicating molecule produced by mimicking conditions that held in the Hadean era, on the other hand, would prove a self-replicating molecule can arise spontaneously under the right circumstances, AND it would prove it wasn't even that rare, else even the right conditions wouldn't succeed on a human scale of time.

But you don't get that many chances.

You don't know what the actual odds were, because no one does, and you don't know how many chances there were, because no one does...but it was a LOT of chances.

See, now we are talking about entropy, which is another problem for the naturalist.

Only if you so badly understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics that you think the earth ibeing an open system receiving enormous energy from the sun doesn't allow local decreases in entropy.

The entropy had to be low from the very moment of the big bang, and there was only one shot...one try...and it hit the jackpot.

Entropy in the universe is relative. The entropy at the time of the BB bang could have been maximal, and the entropy after more than before, and spontaneous order would still appear if maximum entropy increased faster than actual entropy. For instance.

The constants that govern natural are all precise...all geared to be suited for intelligent life...all made with mathematical precision...and you don't get that kind of precision from a mindless and blind process which was derived from a spontaneous big bang with no intelligent hand guiding the process.

If they were different, they would still be precise. No one has ever proven they CAN be different, it's just a thought experiment. A good case can be made that the constants are what they are beause the universe's energy budget is zero, and a universe's energy budget MUST be zero. In that case, even if there are multiple universes, none of them will be very different from this one, except for being in different stages of development.

Genetic fallacy, and I could say the same thing. I can say that Richard Dawkins goes in the lab and perform experiments that confirms his atheism. How about that?

There's no genetic fallacy to make since they don't actually produce original research. And if you said that, you'd be making it up, whereas the Discovery Institute's position is a fact.

So a dumb, sloppy process created something more complex than a Boeing 757? Wow. Seems pretty smart to me.

Your standards are odd. I'd consider anyone who takes a hundred milllion years to get there an under-achiever if they were as smart as a person.

Yeah, hundreds of millions of years for a mindless and blind process. That time should be reduced drastically since you now have intelligent human beings at the wheel.

Yes it should, and we're already knocking at the door. You know we can synthesize an entire bacteria genome from scratch and insert it in a denucleated cell, and the cell will 'come to life' and reproduce? It took nature millions of times longer to get that far.