Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

How could a God that exists out of time do anything?  

Incredulity. Just because you can't imagine some action taking place independently of time doesn't mean it's impossible.

 How could a God who experiences no time ever decide to change his/her/its mind and do anything? 

A deity doesn't change its mind. If it did, it wouldn't be a deity.

By the way, no physicist from over the last century has had any intrinsic issues with the Cosmos being an actual infinite, either in space or time.

Can you cite some sources supporting what's above? 

This line flgrantly ignores the fact that if your god exists and does what you say he does, there can be no "natural laws".  For your god is allegedly all powerful and all knowing (how both of these are impossible in the same reality is another problem), and natural laws are constraints which make both properties impossible for a being to hold.

This is ridiculous. Natural laws don't apply to a god who is purportedly outside of the universe. Also, this old retarded claim (omnipotence and omniscient being logically incompatible) has been debunked repeatedly. If god knows what he's about to do, he will never change it -a deity doesn't change its mind, because it "gets everything right" without the need of trial and error. Changing one's mind and second-guessing are purely human mental operations, extrapolating them to God is not very clever.

Time is already defined in Hawking-Hartle.  If you add another definition then you are guilty of equivocation and your argument is invalid.  Don't be stupid.

I am sorry if adding another definition is too much for your brain to handle. If this helps, you can substitute for the word time anything you like to be able to speak coherently about things happening prior to the universe, just don't keep invalidating arguments for no reason. The word "prior" here is, as explained before, in a causal sense. If causality holds outside of spacetime, then something (X) caused the spacetime. A new definition of a "time" or, even better, a sequence of events, is simply the sequences of all causes and effects that ever happened, and we assign to each element of this causal chain a rank i. If A causes B, and B causes C, then A would "happen" at rank i=0, B at rank i=1, etc. This is really simple and there is nothing incoherent about it. 

Again, you can replace time/rank/sequence with anything you like, arguing about semantics won't help you here.

What a joke...

So now, those that find no evidence, or need, for a god to be involved in the evolutionary process, are the biased ones. Evolution is explained without the need of a deity anywhere in the process. You, and other theists, are the biased ones, trying to insert your god, where it is not needed, nor does it add any explanatory power.

How do you know that evolution doesn't need God? What if God sustains the laws of physics/chemistry? Surely, evolution wouldn't have occured if chemistry laws didn't hold or if the universe didn't fullfil many life-permitting conditions...

So lets say Dawkins does not argue against the philosophical arguments very well.

Then he should shut up, never half-ass a subject as deep as religion, and apologize humbly to philosophers who actually understand these arguments. How many people do you think were misguided by his writings?

 There are many other atheist scholars that do argue against them, and provide very powerful rebuttals. Just because atheist A is week on one subject/argument, does not mean that atheism itself has been defeated on that subject.

Evolution is irrelevant to the question of God's existence to begin with, because it's open to the theist to say that it was God's intention all along. This subject is not exactly a threat to theism. You say we don't need God during the process of evolution, sure, we don't need computer engineers either when our computers are already up and running. If you think God either systematically intervenes in the creation to keep some process going, or doesn't exist, then you have a really narrow imagination. You would agree that an all-powerful God is capable of creating some self-sustaining universe that works wonderfully and never intervene again (deism), or intervene rarely through exceptionally occuring miracles(theism), neither scenario is in conflict with evolution.

How is it vastly more likely? Seriously, why would it be any more likely in the case of a designer (who has to obey their own rules of behavior---in other words, other physical laws).

I think it's time to introduce formal notations here, I am going to assume you are familiar with the notation of conditional probaility .

Let's call T the proposition "A personal creator exists", . U the proposition : "there is a universe ",  C the proposition "There are personal agents who exist because of life-permitting conditions, fine -tuning, etc.".

Then we have P(T|U&C)>P(T|U). That is, taking into account our own existence and life-permitting conditions supports the proposition T. The fact that our existence is contingent upon many vastly unlikely outcomes does warrant an explanation, and the most straightforward explanation for a universe bringing about personal agents is a personal creator who intended for this to happen. All theories that describe the workings of the universe are by definition within the universe and therefore have zero explanatory power when it comes to explaining the universe itself.

Saying that a universe like ours doesn't require an explanation is the inverse gambler's fallacy, any unlikely outcome deserves careful consideration. If you shoot at someone 1000000 bullets at point-blank range and still miss the person, there is a serious need for an explanation, you can't just say: we're asking for an explanation just because the person survived the experience. Well guess what, the universe's occurence is vastly more impressive than the latter example.

The difference, of course, is that we know that kitchen plates don't move around by themselves. There physical properties do not allow for that. This means that there has to be something else that moves them.

In the case of the universe and its components, we know that they *do* move around by themselves because they have properties and thereby obey natural laws. For example, gravity naturally and without intelligent intervention, allows for the formation of stars and planets. In spite of their having structure and being orderly, not designer is required for their formation. The natural laws are sufficient.

Natural laws are neither sufficient nor insufficient in this context, they are completely irrelevant. We are already in agreement that these laws are descriptive. If they are, then they simply help us describe better what happens in our universe, you should simply step back a bit and ask yourself: why do we have this universe with such laws in the first place? 
Computer engineers design computers too and "leave" them to users, and there you go: you have a computer that magically works without intelligent intervention.....

No, I never included a starting point. In fact, that was the whole argument: there need not be a starting point.

Yes, a consistent model can be wrong. But you were claiming an infinite regress is a self-contradiction. If you admit that an infinite regress is *internally consistent*, that is quite enough to show that the Kalam argument fails.

Your model is not a model for an infinite regress of causes. It's a model in which infinite regress already happened, and where we're free to choose a finite interval of time along this infinity. But this infinity is, as I argued, logically impossible in itself. Incorporating a logically impossible proposition in your model will yield to anything. What you should do, instead, is suggest a model of this very regress of causes that doesn't lead to contradiction.

I disagree. Time is part of the universe. It is *within* the universe. The universe is a four dimensional spacetime manifold.

But that means that the universe as a whole is timeless. it simply exists. All causality is *within* it.

Causality doesn't depend on time. Again, if you assume causality breaks down outside the spacetime, then you allow for things to pop in and out of existence without any causation. This is literally the end of any possible discussion about anything.