A simple challenge for atheists

[Davka]

Hello, Bob96!

I'm an ex-christian. I used to come onto boards like this and argue with the silly atheists. Thing is, they kept answering my questions. Learning can be dangerous, especially when you start to realize how much nonsense has been preached in churches by pastors who honestly don't know what they're talking about, they're just repeating what they heard somewhere.

Anyhow, here are some puzzlers for you:

You say God is immaterial. I assume that you mean God exists apart from the universe, "outside" of the Universe, if you will. This presents some real problems.

Let's say that there is something-or-other outside the Universe. It's immaterial, or supernatural, or whatever. If this is true, there are two possibilities:

1) That 'something' does not interact in any way with the physical Universe. If this is the case, then it may as well not exist, for all the difference it makes.

2) That 'something' does interact with the physical Universe. If this is the case, then we will be able to measure that interaction. By so doing, we would be able to determine, over time, the exact nature of this thing.

We have no such measurements. None. Zip, zero, zilch. All we have are stories, and the stories we have conflict depending on who told them, when, and where.

The history of science is one of discovering how things work. Long ago, before people knew much of anything about the world, they mad up stories to explain things that they did not understand. Things like lighting, which they said were silver bolts thrown by the gods. Later we learned what lightning really is, and nobody believes those stories any more.

Over the centuries, science has discovered the answers to more and more things that once were mysterious. And over and over again, the things that we used to think were the doings of the gods turned out to have natural explanations. In fact, in all the centuries of human scientific explanation, not once has the answer turned out to be "goddidit."

So many questions have been answered - and the answer turned out to be "nature" rather than "God" - that theists are running out of questions. So they turn to the toughest questions of all, like "where did everything come from?"

We don't know. But pretending that "it came from God" somehow answers the question is foolishness. because it raises the obvious question "where did God come from"? And you've only got two possible answers: God always was, or We Don't Know.

Those two answers apply just as well to the Universe itself. By adding "God" to the equation, you are violating Occam's razor, which says that the simplest explanation is the most likely - and also says "do not multiply entities unnecessarily." We have an entity, the Universe. We don't need any more than that.

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1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This has a serious flaw. #2 is no longer assumed to be correct. Physics now seems to indicate that the Universe always existed in one form or another. There was never 'nothing,' there was merely something beyond our current comprehension, which expanded into the something we see today.