RE: Terrible Atheist Argument #1
November 7, 2013 at 3:02 pm
(This post was last modified: November 7, 2013 at 3:08 pm by WesOlsen.)
Quote: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".
Typically, the sort of person who says this is a 32 year old bible-humping cretin with the mental age of a 12 year old.
Quote: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.
So, we're back to Kalam's argument. Don't rush to pat yourself on the back too quickly, this is a muslim modification of one of Aristotle's arguments, which seems to have witnessed a resurgence amongst christian plonkers. It was picked apart yonks ago, but i'll do it for you any way, just so we can do the face palming because your causal chain is neither new nor useful.
Your argument is phrased in such a way that it assumes that god is the only thing that does not need a cause, or rather, he (god) is the only thing that can be allowed to "not begin to exist". We have no real experience with things that do not begin to exist nor can we promote anything hypothetical that does not begin to exist. Your argument simply begs the question. We know of nothing that transcends time at the moment, so there is nothing that can "not" begin to exist. If you wish to discuss the hypothetics of a realm that transcends the natural universe, then you leave many more questions than you have answered (attributes of this dimension, possibility for multiple deities etc). Basically, what criteria have you used to remove all other candidates for things that do not need a cause, or rather things that do not begin to exist? If god is an infinite being, but infinity can't be part of reality (as christians sometimes like to declare), then we have conflicting attributes; god can't exist.
If you describe god in temporal terms then he is within our universe. If he is outside of the universe then your use of terms such as "god created the universe" or "god chose X or Y" are not only assuming temporal human characteristics, they are also making wild assumptions about the nature of extra-universal conditions, which are purely hypothetical. They also suggest that god "chose" to create the universe, meaning he may have needs or desires, which an omnipitent being wouldn't necessarily have, were he already complete and perfect. Again, hypothetics though.
Basically, causality requires temporality. If the creator chose to create a universe, then the universe must have been created after the decision was made, so it was both causally and temporarily following the decision to create. This sets a precedent for temporal conditions in god's "world" (Let's just call it his chill-out pad) as well as our world. If god is not temporal and is outside of time, then could time be outside of god? And what mechanisms does he use to influence our universe? If god's world is temporal, then at what point did he and it begin to exist? Things that exist occupy space and time, and are measurable. We DO end up back at square one; where did god come from?
You may want to modify the question so that you claim that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Even then we usually end up with the same claim: "Everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause". This confuses "Every thing" and "universe" as if universe is just another thing. The universe is the sum-total of all things. Things can only be identified by being measured and distinguished from other things. If you and I wish to talk about the cup, we can say that it measures such and such, holds a volume, and is present here rather than in that cupboard over there. It can be distinguished from anything else in the universe providing we're both on the same wave-length. To say that the universe is just a thing means it would need something else to contrast it with, else we can't limit and define it. Since we don't know anything else, the universe isn't a thing, it's the sum-total of all things.
Kalam begs the question, and so do you.
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