Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

That's not what I said.  And again, you are using a strawman.  You know as well as I do that we have plenty of evidence that the earth is not flat. 

You said that there are people who aren't convinced of the cosmological argument, I replied that this is irrelevant because flat earthers exist. Plenty of evidence that the earth isn't flat didn't prevent them from existing. Disagree?

I simply said that the cosmological argument is not convincing, so that should tell you something about the argument.  

The cosmological argument merely proves that there is a cause of the universe, if you say it's not convincing, you should point out which premise you don't agree with and why. If you say, as you did before, that it doesn't prove the theistic God, then you are simply moving the goalposts, and arbitrarily shooting down arguments to prevent us from making some progress.

 You aren't talking to a bunch of people who don't process information and mostly not people who have no experience with religion.  It takes more than just a good argument.  And anyway, there are certainly non-theists who fully accept the possibility that god does exist and caused our universe to exist.  I'm willing to accept the possibility myself.  But it is just that, a possibility.  What else am I to make of it?  What does god do in our universe that makes its presence felt?  For that you need far more than just an argument, you need evidence.

I am not sure it can be called a possibility. Arguments in favor of God don't merely attempt to prove that God is a possibility, but that it's probable (meaning that its probability being true is > 1/2) you are maybe referring to coherence. Proving that theism is coherent is not trivial, Swinburne devoted an entire book to the matter entitled The Coherence of Theism. Known challenges to coherence are evil and hiddenness, which I tried to address in this thread by applying them to any arbitrary object. I am aware that the arguments presented in the thread aren't serious, but nor are those which are actually presented as objections to theism. It's almost consensual that the problem of evil (in its logical form) isn't a valid objection to theism, Plantinga's free will defense was actually accepted as a valid rebuttal. As of hiddenness, many theologians gave reasons why God wouldn't make his existence common knowledge, as it severely undermines free will and the ability to disbelieve.

Now, a coherent claim like God's existence only hedges it against logical impossibility, it's open to the atheist of course to attempt to prove its impossibility for other reasons, but nobody managed to do that so far.

Also, if you merely call deism a possibility, then you are an agnostic, not a deist. The cosmological argument takes us one step further to deism, the remaining defeater is infinite regress.

Hawking didn't claim the universe came from nothing; that's not precisely what spontaneous means.  His view was that the laws of physics accounted for the big bang, which is precisely how we have eliminated many previous myths about god.  And you certainly have no credibility calling anything Hawking said "stupid" until you demonstrate that your intellect is superior to his.  All I've seen you do is regurgitate arguments I've heard scores of times with nothing new added.  Anyone can do that.

Hawking's intellect doesn't prove his claim. Very smart people believed in God too, after all. And, actually, he did say the universe came from nothing.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03...017609.htm
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/new...s?from=mdr

QUOTE : "One can regard imaginary and real-time beginning at the South Pole ... There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang."

So, am I to accept such an asinine claim simply because Hawking is well-established? 

You say, " the laws of physics accounted for the big bang", which law of physics exactly? although I am no physicist, I thought both QM and GR break down at the initial expansion of the universe, that's why physicists came up with string theory.

Nope, you didn't.

The cosmological argument only accounts for the possibility of a god.  In no way does it describe such god or what it has in mind for humans.  So if one believes there is a god, it remains a study of myth and emotions to determine the nature of this god.  I'm happy for people to spend their lives in search of this ethereal concept but I've spent as much time as I care to on the subject.  Demonstrating that god exists and created the universe would be a change in human existence such that we've never seen before.  Leaving it as a possibility is the best that anyone can do.  If left as a possibility and having no way to absolutely describe the nature of god leaves us precisely where humans have been all of our existence, with differing opinions of god and the afterlife.  It is and will remain a continued source of disagreement and bloodshed and the very fact that people will resort to violence to defend the notion of their god informs my opinion of those people.

I think you are attempting a strawman here. I never said we should rely on emotions to determine God's nature. Theologians also present arguments to prove that this first cause is personal (because causing a universe involves a decision, and a decision entails a personal agent), and attempt to infer other properties from its effect (the observable universe). The transition from deism to theism only requires benevolence. It's possible to argue for benevolence on the grounds of the ability of creation to fulfill good deeds, our inner moral compass, the maternal instinct, etc. All these mundane observations can serve as premises to prove some property that a deity likely has. Something can't give or cause what it doesn't have, if this rule holds (or, at worst, is probable), then a malevolent deity is unlikely to have created mothers who instinctively protect their children. The evolutionary explanation of maternal instinct isn't a valid defeater here, because it is a scientifc explanation, and scientifc explanations can go hand in hand with the personal explanation of a divine agent.

To clarify this distinction between scientific explanations and personal explanations, here is a very mundane example: let's say you shot down a bird. You, as a conscious agent (A), decided to kill the bird (B) using some haunting weapon (H). 

The scientifc explanation of the bird's death: H perforated critical body parts of the bird at high speed and caused his instant death.
The personal explanation of the bird's death: A decided to shoot down B.

We can easily see here why the scientific explanation only gives the mechanical, boring part of the full explanation. The real motive behind the curtain is the agent who decided at some point to execute the sequence of events that led to the bird's death.

Similarly, with the universe, we can explain stuff scientifically all we want, there is still room for a personal explanation of why various phenomena occur, and of why, above all, this universe exists.