Terrible Atheist Argument #1

[MindForgedManacle]

I'm not sure cosmological arguments, assuming there is a non-fallacious version of it, even get you to an agent. All they really do is get to something non-contingent.

[WesOlsen]

Vinny says

Actually, I just cited the first big proponent of the Kalam in the video above.

But my post doesn't touch the Kalam whatsoever. Perhaps the Kalam is the only argument you know of, in which case all that time you spent writing up your post should be spent looking up other arguments from a first cause like Aquinas' argument, Leibniz's argument, Aristotle's argument and the like.

How can you make such confident statements while being so ignorant about other arguments from a first cause?

So basically
A) You can't find a hole in the obvious rebuttal to Kalam because it's demonstratable nonsense that should be confined to bedtime stories along with the christian bible, and
B) The answer is youtube videos and quotes from other religious folk who try to use dated hypothesis or arguments from logic to prove that god exists, despite every argument for causes and effects being completely torn down because they themselves pose more questions than they answer.

Again, you can't rationally define your criteria for things that need causes/don't need causes any more than you can define your criteria for selecting how many deities could potentially coexist, where they could coexist, extra-universal conditions etc. I've scrolled back over your posts and you're essentially content with letting youtube clips of religious fundies do the talking, even though their various logical traps pose more questions than they answer and are not backed up my material or empirical evidence. Please, feel free to redefine whatever the evidence is for god's existence and pose one of your dandy logical traps to me, and by all means i'll rip that one to pieces as I did with Kalam (it's worth noting that many of them bare a striking resemblance to Kalam and rely on the same ASSUMPTIONS, unreasoned CHERRY PICKING criteria and lack of evidence for assumed conditions/plains of existence.)

[WesOlsen]

Actually i've gone back over your posts vincent and i've found very little with which to use, in all honesty. But here's what I've drawn up any way from the questions (and there are many of them) that you pose (and leave unanswered.)

Aquinas' argument - You mean the cosmological argument which ties in strongly with Kalam's assumptions, and uses much the same vague and poorly defined criteria for selecting things that need causes and selecting things that don't need causes. You make use of special pleading and you beg the question. Just because you can say "duh, i'm facepalming because it's obvious that god doesn't need a cause" doesn't mean that some hypothetical deity must therefore exist, JUST because you can think of it as existing in your head. I can conceive a great number of powerful beings in my brain if I want to, and likewise I can use a cosmological argument to "prove" the existence of Allah, Krishna, Thor and any other proposed deity simply by stating that he must be the obvious candidate for the uncaused cause, or the thing that doesn't begin to exist. The same debunking techniques to Kalam can be applied, namely that given that we have no real evidence yet of things that do not begin to exist then we rely purely on theoretical conceptions. These redundant logic loops go round and round and are useful for debating the potential for some sort of greater force, but they can never in themselves be used as proof, just as a theoretical case for dinosaurs could never have been worth a penny if it weren't for physical evidence such as the fossil record etc. Theories rise and fall with the discovery of new material evidence and as I said above, logical claims are only useful for debunking other logical claims or pondering. They do not constitute evidence. Also, given that theists can't even agree on the attributes of a god/gods then how can it be supposed that their excemption from requiring a designer is obvious?

Leibnez and the best possible world - Really? This constitutes your evidence, another redundant appeal for reason that is several centuries out of date? How can we be sure that this is the best possible world in the abscence of comparisons? Within our world we have competing belief and political systems, meaning that there is no universal consensus on how the rules of a perfect world work. This poses so many questions that there just isn't time to yap on about it.

Statle Waldorf said:

I walked into my kitchen the other day, and there was a freshly baked cake setting on the counter, and I asked aloud, “Who baked this cake?”
As I was asking the question I was half expecting an atheist to jump out of the closet shaking his finger, “No no no! You cannot ask that because then we would have to ask who baked the baker!” To think that some people actually think this is a legitimate objection is rather troubling.

This makes very little sense. By using an evidence based approach to the world we can show that cakes are typically baked by baker; we have numerous examples of the activity in action, we are familiar with the techniques as they are accessible to all, the actions can be REPLICATED by almost anyone and the results tested. In fact in cellular pathology many techniques are comparable to recipes that we'd cook at home. Every time we use an antibody or a special stain to highlight something at the cellular level we use a tried and tested technique that can be tested, re-tested and married up with a consistent mechanism of effect and thus a wider scientific theory/context.

No atheist would say that you cannot infer that a cake must have been baked by a human because there is no known evidence demonstrating a cake coming into existence by any other means (other than by a machine). We can also demonstrate that the baker came from either his mother or a surrogate, because from a scientific and rational perspective this is how humans reproduce and is the only means by which humans can be consistently shown to reproduce. Again this can be tested, re-tested and replicated by the majority of the adult population. If you have evidence from the real world showing humans popping in to existence without navals (presumably by the glory of the christian god) then by all means show us your evidence (and when I ask for evidence, I mean something that would satisfy contemporary scientific standards; if you're going to make scientific claims then please provide scientific evidence).

Presumably you believe, as Vinny does, that it is somehow painfully obvious that someone put the universe here because you've managed to limit and define it, just as with the cake, the baker or anything else that quite obviously must have been designed. Please see my first post on page 1 with regards to the trouble of limiting and defining 'the universe'.

This thread has presented nothing new or challenging in the debate for first cause. It's recycled redundant assumptions, most of which were crapped out centuries ago and have already been debunked. 99% of the material in this topic has been spoken countless times, with the same tired and exhausted theist claims being met with the same valid non-theist retorts. There is nothing here that even begins to constitute evidence, otherwise theists would have picked up their nobel prizes by now. Old hat.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

Now we both agree that in order for the argument to succeed, P1 must hold true. But about P1,
a) We can concede that it is epistemically possible,
b) We don't know that it is metaphysically possible.

Exactly.

But you also seem to be saying regarding MN (or God, in the MOA), that until MN (God) is shown to be incoherent, the proposition that it could be true (or the conception of God being coherent is true) is defensible, even though this only takes us to epistemic possibility.

So at best the MOA would say "So far as I'm aware, God exists" or the MN would say "So far as I'm aware, MN is true".

But in order to demonstrate metaphysical possibility, normally the appeal is to conceivability IIRC. I've seen some people frame the issue such that "Unless you can show some metaphysical incoherency, it is reasonable to believe it's possible."

But you seem to be saying something different. You're saying that the proponent has to bear a positive burden to show metaphysical possibility.

What exactly is the burden here? How can it be met, whether for God, or MN, or anything else?

Sorry, I've been a bit sloppy, but I think I can clear it up.

What I'm doing when I make the modal argument for atheism is showing that what theists are trying to do is fundamentally flawed. I'm not saying that they have to meet a burden of proof that metaphysical naturalists don't, I'm showing that if - like proponents of the MOA for God's existence - I treat P1) as metaphysically possibility rather than epistemic possibility (which is what both P1s only are), then the arguments stalemate.

So the point is neither side can use this kind of argument unless they've demonstrated beforehand that God's existence is metaphysically possible. But if they could or had done that, why would they need this MOA? The whole point of ontological arguments - from what I understand - is to essentially turn God's existence into an analytic judgement, i.e to make God's existence entailed by the very definition of God. If they had already coherently defined God into such, they wouldn't need the MO argument to show it because he would have to exist. I'd say Kant sort of ruined that kind of argument.

So, the main thing to get is that theists have to realize their are viable atheistic modal arguments as well that call into question this approach via stalemate (and if it doesn't, they can actually can go against religious theisms). Unfortunately, most Christian/Muslim apologists aren't usually told this by the bigger name apologists who wave around this argument as having established God's existence (William Lane Craig, as always; though he sometimes flip-flops on this). Funnily enough, there's this fairly popular YouTube theist called "InspiringPhilosophy" who claims the argument is irrefutable and that this particular objection is just philosophers "biting the epistemic bullet". What a crock.

---

In other words, these arguments don't establish metaphysical possibility, they have to be supplemented with further powerful arguments. Theists in the know will sometimes supplement it with Robert Madoyle's argument about "great-making" properties. I don't think his argument works either, partly because it's entirely subjective. A being with "great-making" properties cannot have "lesser-making" properties and such. -sigh-

I was away for a while, so when I came back I had to look over your arguments again to remind myself where we were.

But given you reductio ad absurdum:
P1) If metaphysical naturalism is possibly true, it is true and God does not exist.
P2) Metaphysical naturalism is possibly true.
C) Therefore, metaphysical naturalism is true and God does not exist.

I'm led to question whether this works because given S5, the key feature of the ontological argument is possible necessity. So your argument would need to be:

P1) If metaphysical naturalism is possibly necessary, it is true and God does not exist

From which the rest would follow.

After all, doesn't the mere possibility of a maximally great being entail non-contingency, therefore necessity?

---

Okay, so there are smart atheists and there are dumb atheists.

Some dumb atheists make some piss poor arguments. Here I'll deal with one that comes up a lot.

1) "If God created everything then who created God?"

This is one facepalmtastic objection. Typically the atheist is some 12 year old who thinks he's "refuted religion". If he is, it's no use trying to reason. But if there are smart atheists, they ought to know why this is a terrible argument:

a) There are various beings that are called "God", and they all have different features. But philosophically, the most rigorous concept of God is called the "Maximally Great Being", or a being that possesses all the categories of greatness to such a degree that nothing greater can be conceived. Such a being is almost always thought to be personal rather than impersonal.

b) One of the features of this maximally great being is it's role as the "First cause" or "uncaused cause". To understand what this is, you have to look at everything in the world in terms of cause-effect relations. Everything contingent has a cause that leads backwards in a causal chain. Does the causal chain go on infinitely, or is it finite? Theists argue that the causal chain is finite, and it begins at an uncaused cause, or first cause which was not itself caused by anything. This is God.

If you disagree with this idea, you can either:
i) Challenge the claim that the causal chain is finite, arguing that it is infinite in the past.
ii) Challenge the claim that the first cause must be God.

What you cannot do is imply that God needs to be caused by something.

Special pleading.

"God created everything!"

"How do you know?"

"Nothing exists without a cause!"

"What caused God?"

"Nothing caused God!"

"So God has no cause?"

"Of course!"

"So God doesn't exist?"

"..."

Try again.

Mitch, you cannot have discussions like this if you are not able to find the problem in your post.

Actually i've gone back over your posts vincent and i've found very little with which to use, in all honesty. But here's what I've drawn up any way from the questions (and there are many of them) that you pose (and leave unanswered.)

Aquinas' argument - You mean the cosmological argument which ties in strongly with Kalam's assumptions, and uses much the same vague and poorly defined criteria for selecting things that need causes and selecting things that don't need causes. You make use of special pleading and you beg the question. Just because you can say "duh, i'm facepalming because it's obvious that god doesn't need a cause" doesn't mean that some hypothetical deity must therefore exist, JUST because you can think of it as existing in your head. I can conceive a great number of powerful beings in my brain if I want to, and likewise I can use a cosmological argument to "prove" the existence of Allah, Krishna, Thor and any other proposed deity simply by stating that he must be the obvious candidate for the uncaused cause, or the thing that doesn't begin to exist. The same debunking techniques to Kalam can be applied, namely that given that we have no real evidence yet of things that do not begin to exist then we rely purely on theoretical conceptions. These redundant logic loops go round and round and are useful for debating the potential for some sort of greater force, but they can never in themselves be used as proof, just as a theoretical case for dinosaurs could never have been worth a penny if it weren't for physical evidence such as the fossil record etc. Theories rise and fall with the discovery of new material evidence and as I said above, logical claims are only useful for debunking other logical claims or pondering. They do not constitute evidence. Also, given that theists can't even agree on the attributes of a god/gods then how can it be supposed that their excemption from requiring a designer is obvious?

Leibnez and the best possible world - Really? This constitutes your evidence, another redundant appeal for reason that is several centuries out of date? How can we be sure that this is the best possible world in the abscence of comparisons? Within our world we have competing belief and political systems, meaning that there is no universal consensus on how the rules of a perfect world work. This poses so many questions that there just isn't time to yap on about it.

Statle Waldorf said:

I walked into my kitchen the other day, and there was a freshly baked cake setting on the counter, and I asked aloud, “Who baked this cake?”
As I was asking the question I was half expecting an atheist to jump out of the closet shaking his finger, “No no no! You cannot ask that because then we would have to ask who baked the baker!” To think that some people actually think this is a legitimate objection is rather troubling.

This makes very little sense. By using an evidence based approach to the world we can show that cakes are typically baked by baker; we have numerous examples of the activity in action, we are familiar with the techniques as they are accessible to all, the actions can be REPLICATED by almost anyone and the results tested. In fact in cellular pathology many techniques are comparable to recipes that we'd cook at home. Every time we use an antibody or a special stain to highlight something at the cellular level we use a tried and tested technique that can be tested, re-tested and married up with a consistent mechanism of effect and thus a wider scientific theory/context.

No atheist would say that you cannot infer that a cake must have been baked by a human because there is no known evidence demonstrating a cake coming into existence by any other means (other than by a machine). We can also demonstrate that the baker came from either his mother or a surrogate, because from a scientific and rational perspective this is how humans reproduce and is the only means by which humans can be consistently shown to reproduce. Again this can be tested, re-tested and replicated by the majority of the adult population. If you have evidence from the real world showing humans popping in to existence without navals (presumably by the glory of the christian god) then by all means show us your evidence (and when I ask for evidence, I mean something that would satisfy contemporary scientific standards; if you're going to make scientific claims then please provide scientific evidence).

Presumably you believe, as Vinny does, that it is somehow painfully obvious that someone put the universe here because you've managed to limit and define it, just as with the cake, the baker or anything else that quite obviously must have been designed. Please see my first post on page 1 with regards to the trouble of limiting and defining 'the universe'.

This thread has presented nothing new or challenging in the debate for first cause. It's recycled redundant assumptions, most of which were crapped out centuries ago and have already been debunked. 99% of the material in this topic has been spoken countless times, with the same tired and exhausted theist claims being met with the same valid non-theist retorts. There is nothing here that even begins to constitute evidence, otherwise theists would have picked up their nobel prizes by now. Old hat.

It's been a while since I touched on that. What was your amazing irrefutable objection to the Kalam again?

[WesOlsen]

Page 1 of this thread

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

Page 1 of this thread

It was on page two for me.

Started off with typical butthurt, which looks like a combination of anger, resentment and hate.

Misunderstood the post as a reference to the kalam, as opposed to a more general first cause argument. By the way there is no such thing as "kalam's argument."

Tried to hide the lack of substance with words like "plonkers", "yonks", "boink" and other sounds you associate with circus clowns.

Your first objection was "We have no real (as opposed to fake? -V) experience with..." I don't even need to finish the sentence to call it false as we reasonably accept things that we don't have experience of all the time, from quantum mechanics to the big bang.

You then say "We know of nothing that..." doesn't matter what comes after it, if the argument is "We don't know of something that is like P, therefore P cannot exist." the argument is invalid as possibility is not dependent on scientific knowledge.

In fact we can say that if at the speed of light time stops, then something that moves at the speed of light throughout its lifetime transcends time, although this is just an interesting thought, not a proper counterexample.

There's no word such as hypothetics.

And at this point I think I want to take a break, my brain can only handle so much.

[houseofcantor]

I don't see what the difficulty here is. Vinnie says "who created God" is a dumb argument. I would say it's more of a softball argument as sometimes it gets theists to think. But we can just agree it's dumb and move on to option ii, singularity as First Cause. That's what the evidence suggests, what the math suggests; and it is a model rather than an event that requires a cause.

In this sense, god, too, is a model; but there's one feature of the singularity that is totally opposite from god, i.e. minimal entropy. The Maximal Supertastic Being is also maximally entropic. Yet if we're to extrapolate from these nebulous god-concepts, God, who is said to be evidenced everywhere; we find that nature operates in complete contrast. Old men do not grow into embryos, nor do oaks mature into acorns. So it seems the First Cause can only be singularity.

[WesOlsen]

Started off with typical butthurt, which looks like a combination of anger, resentment and hate.

My pleasure

Misunderstood the post as a reference to the kalam, as opposed to a more general first cause argument. By the way there is no such thing as "kalam's argument."

It is referred to variously as the Kalam argument, Kalam's argument, the Kalam hypothesis............we can call it Chad Mcrisps ladyboy whip cheng hypothesis if we like, the important thing is that we're referring to the same thing. And the first cause ties in HUGELY with Kalam, because they both deal with many crossover concepts (things that are created and things that are caused).

Tried to hide the lack of substance with words like "plonkers", "yonks", "boink" and other sounds you associate with circus clowns.

Actually the bulk of it was ripped straight out of critical thinking texts, which are pretty substance heavy. One wonders whether you're trying to distract from the content of the arguments here.

Your first objection was "We have no real (as opposed to fake? -V) experience with..." I don't even need to finish the sentence to call it false as we reasonably accept things that we don't have experience of all the time, from quantum mechanics to the big bang.

You then say "We know of nothing that..." doesn't matter what comes after it, if the argument is "We don't know of something that is like P, therefore P cannot exist." the argument is invalid as possibility is not dependent on scientific knowledge.

Your nitpicking is quite ludicrous. Let's ignore the adjective before evidence and sit with "We have no evidence of things that do not begin to exist". This is fundamentally true, and you confuse things we don't have experience of with things that do not begin to exist (that we coincidentally have no experience of). Whilst we have not witnessed the big bag first hand, there is a wealth of evidence from the world of physics that fits in to a wider theory of physics. Likewise with quantum mechanics there are examples too numerous to mention. I'll give you the Higgs Boson as a good example though. It fit in to a probable model of particle physics, was theorised as being likely to exist but as with most things scientific a test was conducted to confirm its existence or at least discount alternatives. You're right in that we do accept things that we have not personally witnessed. For example i've never held a chunk of dark matter however it fits in to the existing framework, dark matter is also not claimed to have never begun to have existed. What you can't get your head around is that we have no experience of things that don't begin to exist, which is entirely true.

Also I did not say that because we have no knowledge of P, therefore P CANNOT exist. I've just used the example of the higgs boson as something that was theorised but not initially proven, and was then subsequently proven (although it is very much work in progress at the moment, granted). What I said was that if we have no knowledge of P, we can't theorise P and say that because I theorised it that it must exist, especially when I haven't defined any of P's properties (scientifically, mathematically etc) or the conditions in the vague realm that it apparently occupies. Please re-read my post or better still read it from a book in the library, it's all been debunked long ago.

There's no word such as hypothetics.

Again your more content here with resorting to nitpicking re: spelling and grammar errors, because you haven't really understood the fallacies of cosmological or first cause arguments, which were documented a long time ago.

And at this point I think I want to take a break, my brain can only handle so much.

When you've recovered from the mental anguish of reading the rebuttals to kalam and causality etc, you can come back and address the core problems with what you propose, namely that there is no rational basis for your criteria for things that do not begin to exist, that there is no rational basis for the assumption (or lack) of conditions in extra-universal plains, and rub out the special pleading whilst you're at it. Then you can explain the more theology orientated questions posed by your initial post, such as why, if god is perfect, does he have needs etc. Either counter my original rebuttal rationally or get a friend to do it for you. Better still, read a variety of sources, including the OPPOSING case for these flimsy arguments and it might help you to understand why we're all saying "we've heard it all before, it was beaten, battered and bruised a long time ago".

[MindForgedManacle]

@Vinny

You forgot that I updated my argument to improve it. The updated one does use axiom S5, it just doesn't try to make the truth of metaphysical naturalism trans-possible worlds true. My updated argument only banks on having to be in at least one possible world in other words.

As for whether its maximal greatness entails necessary existence, I'd say that's not ascertainable. Remember, in this argument using axiom S5, it only deals with epistemic possibility. Once you're working in axiom S5, it's crazy to think you can assume metaphysical possibility because then ANYTHING can become true. And that's all ignoring that not all philosophers and logicians accept axiom S5 as an uncontroversial axiom.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

MFM, can you reproduce the argument here please? I'm trying to find it but I have conversations with like 8 people at a time and I can't find it, sadly.