Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

If there were no physical laws, there would be no causality at all.

This only means that causality is a necessary condition of physical laws. It doesn't mean it is a physical law per se.
I will again ask you to provide some reference citing causality itself as a physical law.

For there to *be* a designer takes enough structure and orderliness that some sort of physical laws (or laws governing the behavior of the designer) are required. So the most fundamental laws *cannot* be designed, but must be uncaused.

As I said earlier, all physical laws are descriptive, they merely describe the inner workings of a universe. They have ZERO explanatory power of the universe's existence.

So, your conclusion that laws are uncaused is simply ridiculous. Think about the game of chess, the fact that chess pieces can only move according to very precise rules doesn't mean they are uncaused, someone created the game. The rules of chess simply describe how the game should be played and have no independent existence.

Now, if we picture the universe as some giant chessboard where the laws of physics are analogous to the rules of chess, our scientific theories are merely the formulation of these rules, they still warrant an originator of the chess game....

In other words, laws point to a lawgiver, it's that simple.

No, it does NOT follow that the universe is eternal, just that the physical laws, time, space, matter, and energy are co-existent. It is *possible* that all are of limited duration. of course, it is also *possible* that they are all eternal (infinite in duration). We just don't know.

Aquinas gave the trivial reason for why there can't be a universe with an infinite duration hundreds of years ago: We are here, which means that there can't be an eternal past.

Your god proposition is neither self-evident

I am going to ask you again once:

Do you think the following proposition : There are infinitely many prime numbers.

1) Is falsifiable ?
2) Is experimentally verifiable ?
3) Requires empirical evidence ?

These are Y/N questions.

In order for a deductive argument to be sound, it needs to be valid and have true premises.

Why do you dismiss inductive and analogical arguments? Besides, the cosmological argument -as an example of a deductive argument- is completely valid, and does prove there is a cause to this universe. If you attempt to object to it, you have to bear the cost of either rejecting causality or dismissing modern cosmology, pick your poison.

The only way to demonstrate the truth of your premises is with evidence; ya know, that thing you said we were mistaken in asking you for.

No, you got it backwards, premises can be some facts or evidence within the universe, that's what an a posteriori argument means. What I was pointing to is the simple fact that we can't apply the scientific method which, above all, investigates repeatable phenomena, to a being who purportedly interacts with the world by rarely occuring miracles.

So, scientific experiments demand repeatable, maybe even reproducible phenomena.
A divine miracle by definition is neither repeatable nor reproducible.

Therefore, it is a category mistake to apply the scientific method to such a metaphysical being. I think this can't be clearer.

I haven't rejected the principle of causality.  Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.  Because we know nothing about any predecessor universe, we cannot say that such a universe began to exist and therefore the assumption stated in premise one of the cosmological argument does not apply to that universe.  I haven't rejected causality.

Well, you don't get to assert that the cause of our universe is a universe in the first place. If we assume that this is the case, then, for the same reason mentioned above, it can't be eternal. An infinite duration must have elapsed within this universe before it suddenly, somehow, caused our own, which is clearly impossible.

 Theists suggest that a supervenient reason can explain why a good god allows evil, but when the same is applied to a malevolent god,

The word "evil" itself is meaningless outside theism, I am not sure what you're driving at here. The observable state of affairs is that we have, on average, a moral compass and a sense of justice, that's how we managed to form societies, and we are endowed with things like maternal instincts, empathy, altruism, etc. The instances of evil or malevolence are exceptions of these rules, and exceptions don't invalidate a rule, they confirm it.

You haven't shown that there is anything especially marvelous about the order of the universe.  

Well, look around, I guess? They say the sky at night is really awe-inspiring, did you ever bother to go out and take a look?

  First, the universe is not in any significant way like a machine, and so your analogy is as close to being useless as it can be. 

You're right, the universe is not like a machine, it's far better than it, so much so that we design insect-inspired helicopters. And if you really insist on this disingenuous nonsense, here's a challenge for you: replace your natural body parts with their artificial equivalents. I'll wait for visual confirmation.

Until you do that, this analogy is as strong and useful as it can be.

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In any case, models of infinite cosmologies (both of time and space) exist, and have found their way into The Physical Review Letters, a peer-reviewed journal of the APS.

All kinds of models exist. Until they have experimental confirmation, they are nothing more than thought experiments, and so they can't be used in an actual argument.