Atheism is unreasonable

[Mister Agenda]

Actually, it is a legitimate definition and I can understand why you wouldn't adopt it, because it will go against your worldview. A quantum vacuum exists in space-time...there has to be space for it to operate in, and there has to be time at which it operates.

No, it isn't, and no, there doesn't. My worldview is that words have to mean something in order for us to have a coherent discussion and that mere assertions can be dismissed as such.

It didn't do anything compared to what I am intellectually doing to you.

What you are 'intellectually doing' is pissing everywhere and calling it rain.

I'd like an answer to my analogy. If you want to talk Zeno's paradox, we can do that after you admit that you are unable to answer the analogy. No ducking and dodging here.

An analogy isn't a question. It's a comparison. Your worldview won't allow you to accept that your analogies are poor.

But we are not here because the past is infinite, and that is the whole freakin' point.

We are here whether the past is infinite or not, we are a brute fact.

No, because no one is claiming that God endured through past infinity.

YOU aren't claiming it, but many Christians do. Thanks for clearing up another point where your version of God differs from the usual Christian understanding. So therefore, God had a beginning, and you've asserted that anything that begins to exist must have a cause, so what caused God? I think avoiding that conundrum is why so many Christians try to make God an exception to the claim that there can't be an infinte past and God has existed forever.

No, because each step you takes represents an event that comes to past...and if you can't reach infinity step by step moving forward, then there couldn't have been an infinite amount of steps which lead to your births moving forward on an infinite time line. It is the same shit, there isn't a bit of difference. There is no way you can ADMIT that you will never reach infinity if you if you take an infinite amount of steps, but yet believe that the event of your birth can come to past if there was an infinite number of events which preceded it.

By definition, if I take an infinite amount of steps I will reach infinity, so I suspect you meant to say something different, although I never claimed I would ever take an infinite amount of steps anyway. I can walk a finite distance on an infinite road. The universe seems to be future infinite, but any point in time I can imagine will eventually come to pass. I don't know whether whatever became the universe is past finite or infinite, and I don't really care, but at least I know what I don't know, which is more than you can say.

This is called the taxi cab fallacy.

Your opinion on what's a fallacy doesn't carry much weight considering what you've been posting.

Then it doesn't have the explanatory value needed to explain life, information, and consciousness.

No, it only explains how the universe originated.

What I am saying is it is logically impossible for time to be infinitely long in the past. Logically impossible.

Yet all you do is repeat it, and never present a properly constructed logical proof. That's because there isn't one. 'It doesn't sound plausible' is not a logical proof. You can't construct a syllogism that concludes a past infinite is impossible without a past infinite being impossible contained in the premises. What we can't prove impossible we must accept as at least a remote possibility.

No matter what you say about cosmology, quantum mechanics..nothing can help you in this regard. A timeless first cause is necessary. No escapes. Now of course, you can continue to deny it all you want, but there should be no reason why you can't answer a simple analogy if it is in fact what actually happened lol.

There's definitely a reason why you can't support your thesis with more than assertions.

It would be their law vs our law, but there is clearly no objective law.

There would be no universal law that applies to both species except where we share the same nature, but we can each have laws objective to our own natures. Have you considered looking up the definitions of 'objective' and 'universal' in a dictionary?

How the hell is it objectively better? In order to even make that statement, you have to already presuppose a standard of what is considered "better", which is begging the question

We don't presuppose the standard, we derive it from experience: no one likes getting raped, raping isn't necessary, and preventing rape greatly improves the odds of our not being raped. The axiom isn't that 'rape is bad', it's that 'needlessly harming other humans is bad', and you can't have an ethical system of any kind without at least one axiom. Isn't the basis of your ethical system the axiom that a supremely just God authored it? Do you consider that assumption begging the question?

I have reasons to believe that it is true, though.

We all have reasons to believe the things we believe are true, that's why we believe them.

No, because God's laws and standards are as necessary as his own existence, and it is impossible to take the wet from the water.

That makes God synonymous with morality, not the author of it, and that position is no barrier to the idea of us being able to discover better moral principles by experience.

[quote='His_Majesty' pid='794859' dateline='1415753702']
Lets save morality for another thread

I won't bring it up again on this thread if you don't.

Then you give birth to the option that a mindless and blind process could have done it, which was my point from the very beginning.

Your point from the beginning was that must be what I believe, because I'm an atheist. It IS what I consider most likely, but not because I'm an atheist. I could be a Buddhist atheist, or a Raellian atheist, or an atheist who never geve it much thought. I happen to be a rational skeptic (aka scientific skeptic), which is my epistemology, how I figure out what I know.

Well, in that case, so is Charles Darwin, but that don't stop you people from damn near worshiping his theories.

First, non sequitur, my observing that time will not suffice to bring about the resurrection of a dead man has nothing to do with Darwin. Second, Darwin's theory has been continuously revised to fit new evidence as it's discovered, the modern theory of evolution has considerable differences to the original theory as Darwin had no inkling of molecular biology, for instance. Revising his theory at will is in no way comparable to treating it as sacred. And if Lamarck had been born out by the facts, it would be Lamarck's theories you'd be accusing us of damn near worshipping. Every new discovery we've made in biology regarding the fossil record and heredity has been an opportunity for nature to prove Darwin's basic thesis wrong, and if something broke the theory tomorrow, we'd go 'huh, didn't see that coming' and go with the new information. Don't project your committment to never change your mind on to us. Most of us got to the positions we now hold by changing our minds.

Well, if God didn't do it, there there is only one other way it could have happened.

Universe gnomes? Computer simulation? Super collider universe generator?

Well, I know that life doesn't just happen spontaneously and certain astronomical conditions have to be met in order to get it. That is enough for me to disregard the entire concept as bullcrap.

Certain astronomical events have to be met in order to get it ONLY if life happens spontaneously. A designer doesn't need ideal conditions, and an omnipotent designer doesn't need any. An omnipotent designer could design us to live in the core of a black hole if it wanted.

The universe as a whole is a closed system, sparky.

And that's why it's destined to become an ever thinning cloud of dispersing photons, chump.

Makes no sense. If our universe started from a singularity point, then how will you get any kind of low entropy from that???

Entropy is a variable. If thermodynamics worked the way you think it does, life would be impossible. In any state short of maximum entropy (the system is as disordered as it can possibly be), significan increases in local order are possible as long as there is energy available to drive it. The universe is trillions of years away from anything that can reasonably be described as maximum entropy.

They are what they are...the question is, how did they get there in the first place? Mindless and blind process, right?

That seems to be the best bet, given what we already know.

What??

If the net energy of a universe must equal zero, which appears to be the case, because that seems to be our universe's energy budget and that lends some support to the quantum vacuum fluctuation origin which predicts a zero energy budget (positive energy being balanced by negative energy), even if there are multiple universes, they will likely have similar constants because of the constraint that positive and negative energy must balance, or at least be so close to perfect balance that the energy budget is extremely close to zero.