A simple challenge for atheists

[goodwithoutgod]

Imagine an alternate universe which contains a single hydrogen atom. (Lets not include dark matter or other forces in the discussion for the purpose of simplicity.) You could replace the atom with a proton, a neutron, a sub-atomic particle, or a string. The point is, it's real. It can be measured.

Now where did this hydrogen atom come from?
Was it just always there?
Did it spontaneously appear, ie. magically?
Did someone create it?

How did it come into being?

There are many questions about the world, and universe we exist in that we don't have the answers to...and perhaps, we may never know the answers, but there is no reason to fabricate make believe philosophical assertions as an answer simply because we don't like not knowing.

Funny the things people believe isn't it? The most popular fairy tale at the moment is an invisible super genie floating in nothingness decides to create 400+ billion planets (that is how many the Hubble telescope can see) until it got one juuuuust right, then gathered up a handful of dirt and blew into it, creating man!...and this makes sense to who? Then he decided to sponsor one specific group (who conveniently wrote the fictional book called the bible asserting this) in a remote armpit of middle east, and bestow his gift upon the uneducated goat herders who were busy slaughtering each other.....not the Egyptians who were powerful and advanced, not the Chinese who were way past these flea bitten turds of humanity...no, he hovered around the middle east...the butt crack of the world….or so the story goes....any of this sound made up to anyone else? because it is.

Perhaps you are implying first causal... ad nauseam.

The latest spin on this position by christian philosophers like William Lane Craig is that:

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This may be seductive to those who already believe in a god. To me, it seems awfully suspicious. The clause "Everything that begins to exist" sounds artificial. It is not a phrase we hear outside the context of theistic philosophy. It appears to be an Ad Hoc construction designed to smooth over earlier apologetic efforts.

[Davka]

Hello, Bob96!

I'm an ex-christian. I used to come onto boards like this and argue with the silly atheists. Thing is, they kept answering my questions. Learning can be dangerous, especially when you start to realize how much nonsense has been preached in churches by pastors who honestly don't know what they're talking about, they're just repeating what they heard somewhere.

Anyhow, here are some puzzlers for you:

You say God is immaterial. I assume that you mean God exists apart from the universe, "outside" of the Universe, if you will. This presents some real problems.

Let's say that there is something-or-other outside the Universe. It's immaterial, or supernatural, or whatever. If this is true, there are two possibilities:

1) That 'something' does not interact in any way with the physical Universe. If this is the case, then it may as well not exist, for all the difference it makes.

2) That 'something' does interact with the physical Universe. If this is the case, then we will be able to measure that interaction. By so doing, we would be able to determine, over time, the exact nature of this thing.

We have no such measurements. None. Zip, zero, zilch. All we have are stories, and the stories we have conflict depending on who told them, when, and where.

The history of science is one of discovering how things work. Long ago, before people knew much of anything about the world, they mad up stories to explain things that they did not understand. Things like lighting, which they said were silver bolts thrown by the gods. Later we learned what lightning really is, and nobody believes those stories any more.

Over the centuries, science has discovered the answers to more and more things that once were mysterious. And over and over again, the things that we used to think were the doings of the gods turned out to have natural explanations. In fact, in all the centuries of human scientific explanation, not once has the answer turned out to be "goddidit."

So many questions have been answered - and the answer turned out to be "nature" rather than "God" - that theists are running out of questions. So they turn to the toughest questions of all, like "where did everything come from?"

We don't know. But pretending that "it came from God" somehow answers the question is foolishness. because it raises the obvious question "where did God come from"? And you've only got two possible answers: God always was, or We Don't Know.

Those two answers apply just as well to the Universe itself. By adding "God" to the equation, you are violating Occam's razor, which says that the simplest explanation is the most likely - and also says "do not multiply entities unnecessarily." We have an entity, the Universe. We don't need any more than that.

---

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This has a serious flaw. #2 is no longer assumed to be correct. Physics now seems to indicate that the Universe always existed in one form or another. There was never 'nothing,' there was merely something beyond our current comprehension, which expanded into the something we see today.

[Cyberman]

The Kalam argument has many flaws, not least of which is that even if you accept it as incontrovertible truth, all it gets you is the Universe had a cause. Craig has to staple massive illogical leaps onto the end of it to shoehorn it into his bible story. The sheer number of cards he has to palm would get him banned from Vegas for life. And all that simply to prop up a stupid argument that runs out of steam before it goes anywhere.

[Esquilax]

The Kalam argument has many flaws, not least of which is that even if you accept it as incontrovertible truth, all it gets you is the Universe had a cause. Craig has to staple massive illogical leaps onto the end of it to shoehorn it into his bible story. The sheer number of cards he has to palm would get him banned from Vegas for life. And all that simply to prop up a stupid argument that runs out of steam before it goes anywhere.

All of WLC's arguments run out of steam immediately, once you bear in mind his "self authenticating witness of the holy spirit," and the way it leads him to reject all evidence that doesn't lead him to the christian god conclusion. Kinda hard to take any argument seriously that was only concocted in the first place to lead to the conclusion the interlocutor had already come to.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Quite frankly, the fact that an argument comes from WLC deprecates its validity. He has a nose for bullshit -- but also, an unwholesome attraction to it.

[bob96]

Argument from Authority.

Fail.

Yes, but they are *your* authorities! The most brilliant minds in science believe in God. For many, it was science that changed their minds.

“Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them. Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join ‘the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.’”

–Astrophysicist Hugh Ross, former post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and author of The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God.

[Esquilax]

Yes, but they are *your* authorities! The most brilliant minds in science believe in God.

So, you don't actually know what the argument from authority is, do you? Even after I explained it on the previous page?

For many, it was science that changed their minds.

Bullshit: it was the conclusion they had already come to, and twisted their own ignorance of the mysteries of the universe to fit what they already believed. The quotes you provided contained no indication that evidence or science influenced their decisions in any way.

[bob96]

Tell me this. Which is more complex: the infrastructure, processes and functions operating within New York City, or a single celled bacteria?

The former, though I've no doubt you'll go on to tell me it's the latter, based solely on the fact that you don't understand biology so well.

Either point of which would be entirely moot, given that "it's so complex, and I can't see how that would have happened naturally!" is still only evidence for your ignorance of how it could have happened naturally and not evidence for god.

Why would you say that all of the man-made things in New York city are more complex? We know precisely how everything works. Our understanding of the bacteria is very much incomplete. Dawkin's himself has acknowledged that there is not enough time in the Universe for it to have self assembled, blind mutation after blind mutation.

[robvalue]

1) Rule 2 does not apply to anything I label "God", but to everything else.
2) Everything that exists has a cause.
3) The universe exists.
4) Therefor, the universe has a cause. Let's call that cause God. God does not need a cause (see rule 1).
5) I have a story book that my mummy and daddy read to me as a child, told me it was true, and has a character called God in it.
6) Mummy and daddy can't lie to me.
7) Therefor, the christian God exists and created the universe, and wrote my story book, and everything that happened in the story book is true. If reality contradicts my story book, reality is false.
8) If it is not convenient for something in the bible to be true for a given argument, then it is a mistranslation, or needs interpreting to mean the opposite, just for as long as the argument is being made. Then it goes back to being true again.

[Davka]

Argument from Authority.

Fail.

Yes, but they are *your* authorities! The most brilliant minds in science believe in God. For many, it was science that changed their minds.

This is a misreading of all those cherry-picked quotes. For example, Einstein was (for all intents and purposes) an atheist, or at best an agnostic. When he spoke of "God," it was for the consumption of the masses, not because he was a theist.

There are shit-tons of websites out there which have carefully snipped quotes from their context in order to make it appear that various famous scientists believe(d) in god. But when you read the quote in its original context, you discover that they were deliberately misrepresented.

I began to seriously study the Bible, Judaism and Christianity when I got saved in 1987. At first, I swallowed all the stuff you have written here. But when I began to do the research for myself (instead of swallowing the pre-digested pablum), I discovered how many lies had been told to me by happy deluded Christians who never bothered to check their sources.

Whatever you do, if you want to remain a Christian, do NOT study to show thyself approved. Stay in preschool, on a milk-only diet, like a good sheep.