Four proofs of the nonexistence of God

[vorlon13]

The 'soul' is conveyed via the breath.

How much does the soul weigh? I am old enough to remember those old Victorian anecdotes.

Your soul is your current brain state, sans brain activity it dies.

If not, I want to meet my old Jack Russell in heaven. He lived a good life and didn't even have to be able to read.

And I want my cats there too, or else there is no divine justice, unless God really loves the local rabbits in the Ashdown Forest?

It's in the Bible.

Bibley folks are required to believe the mechanics of the immortal soul function as described in Scripture.

And sorry, pets don't have immortal souls.  They are not sons of Adam, and do not participate in original sin.  It would be an affront to God Almighty, Creator of the Universe to assert pets have immortal souls.

So don't.

[Jehanne]

It's really no different than saying that "Snorky" created the Universe last week and planted all of your memories, thoughts, dreams, etc., in your head/soul.  If the "supernatural" can preserve memories, why is it that people still get Alzheimer's, dementia, etc.?  Why is it that some people lose their ability to form and retain short-term memories but their long-term memories are still intact?  Or, the other way around?  Why is it that people with Broca's aphasia lose their ability to speak, write and sign?  Why is that some people who are in car crashes have their recent memories (such as an engagement and wedding) wiped clean but yet still retain knowledge of their parents, names, siblings?  Why do some brain-injured persons regress four or five grade levels after an accident, going, say, from high school to fourth or fifth grade after a blow to their head?

The soul is "us".  The memory of the soul is the same memory that is stored in our brain.  The soul is not the mechanism which we use to gather and store memories.

And, so, people who have multiple personality disorder or are schizophrenic or who are bipolar, what is going on with their "souls"?

[SteveII]

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Conclusion: the idea of an actual infinite is logically absurd.

Then I take it you do not believe your god to be infinite or eternal. Because that would be absurd.

I was explaining a math problem on using a infinite number of something that would be analogous to the original post discussing an infinite number of causes and effects. God, as a timeless and changeless being, does not run into the logical absurdity that the math illustrates.

[SteveII]

Physicist Stephen Hawking proved that the Universe created itself

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According to biology, a person is a cousin of a chimpanzee.

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The existence of earlier gods than the biblical gods who created man and created a flood, says that the biblical god is false. But in the early gods no one believes. Since there is no biblical god, for example, the Sumerian gods are no longer believed, it means that the world is godless.

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Laws of logic, 4 basic

Law of contradiction, Law of the excluded third, Law of sufficient grounds
True, either "A" or "not A," the third superfluous, sufficient basis is only for atheism (physics, biology, history of religion, logic)
There are no sufficient grounds to assert that God is the root cause of the world and that the world has a cause. Hence the existence of God is a lie. The law of logic about a sufficient basis is not observed.
How to prove that there is no God?
The world has arisen without cause. God has no reason. Why does the world have no reason as God and other reasons? The universe itself was created when it began to expand. Why? Space is a state of matter characterized by the presence of length and volume. That is, matter has the property of expanding. To shrink has no property. The space between the particles of matter fills the space that separates them. Time passes from the beginning of the creation of particles of matter to their gradual expansion in space. That is, the creation of matter has a beginning in space-time in the past. The universe has no reason because before the beginning of space-time there was no matter, the universe and the possibility of the existence of something and anyone.
They say that God is out of time and that God is eternal. There is a contradiction - was there a time before the creation of the universe. God is contradictory, that means he does not exist. There is no god.
Now about Buddhism and its teachings about the cyclical nature of the universe. The universe is created and destroyed forever. That is, there is no beginning of space-time. But we have already proved that matter and the universe has a beginning in space-time. So Buddhism and the rest of religion is a lie.
1. Theism - God is
2. Atheism - there is no God
3. Agnosticism - I do not know

The law of identity is the law of logic, according to which, in the process of reasoning, every meaningful expression (concept, judgment) must be used in one and the same sense.
The biblical God is the Creator, the god in Buddhism is not the Creator, therefore we can not talk about God and prove his existence, because his concept is contradictory.

Whoever has a high aikju and good mental health will come to the right conclusion that there is no God.

No offense and in spite of the Kudos you got, this post is a mess. None of your conclusion follow from the premises (and most of your premises are either wrong or incomplete). If you are here to discuss your opinions and learn something, then you should take smaller bites and ask more questions. If you are here to make grand statements and persuade us that there is no God with your vast subject knowledge, you have missed the mark.

[Mister Agenda]

Can you provide a mathematical proof for that? If not, all you know is that it violates your intuitions and you can't wrap your head around it. Actual reality is not obliged to be intuitive. No apparent paradox has ever prevented reality from working the way it actually does, no matter how illogical it may seem (see Zeno). If there actually is an infinite past sequence of events, then it only seems paradoxical. I've got no investment in an infinite past, I'm just not aware of a proof that it can't be the case.

My personal opinion is that the most likely case is that there is a first cause (and many first causes for other cosmos), and it happened the instant that time began. But I'm comfortable with the possibility that I could be wrong.

Have you ever read about Hilbert's Hotel?

Imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms. All the rooms are full and a new guest walks in and wants a room. The desk clerk says no rooms are available. The person is turned away. 

Now imagine a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms. All the rooms are filled up so an infinite number of guests. A new guest walks up and wants a room. All the clerk has to to do is to move the guest in room #1 to room #2 and the guest from #2 to #3 and so on so your new guest can have a room #1. You can do this infinite number of times to a hotel that was already full.

Now imagine instead the clerk moves the guest from #1 to #2 and from #2 to #4 and from #3 to #6 (each being moved to a room number twice the original). All the odd number rooms become vacant. You can add an infinite number of new guests to a hotel that was full and end up with it half empty. 

How many people would be in the hotel if the guest in #1 checked out?

If everyone in odd number rooms checks out, how many checked out? How many are left?

Now what if all the guest above room number 3 check out. How many checked out? How many are left?

So from the above we get:
infinity + infinity = infinity
infinity + infinity = infinity/2
infinity - 1 = infinity
infinity / 2 = infinity
infinity - infinity = 3

Conclusion: the idea of an actual infinite is logically absurd.

Yes, I have. 'Logically absurd' is not a synonym for 'intuitively absurd'. Hilbert's Hotel is a thought experiment. Thought experiments are not logical proofs. They aren't even close. But they can rise to the level of being part of an argument, as you're doing here. The argument basically amounts to:

If an actual infinite number of things existed, it would be absurd.
Since it would be absurd, it's impossible.

There are some corollaries necessary. For example, Platonism must be false because in Platonism numbers are 'things' and there is an actual infinite number of them (I imagine you don't have a problem with actual infinites of abstractions). It must be incorrect that the universe contains an actual infinite number of dimensionless points (or one-dimensional lines, or two-dimensional planes), or that there could be an actual infinite set of possible worlds, but those are also abstractions. Hilbert is talking about infinite series of physical objects, and I agree (intuitively) that infinity and objects leads to absurdities.

But are past events 'physical objects'? There are no objects in the past or future, only in the present. Objects once existed in the past, but they no longer exist in the past, now they exist in the present. If you conduct a similar thought experiment based on events, the intuitive absurdity is greatly reduced. Of course you can always stuff more things into an infinite future. Of course you can always discover more about an infinite past. Time travel stories are a form of thought experiment, and it isn't absurd for time travelers to have done an infinite number of things in the past that we don't know about, as long as we wound up with the present that we have, and that's even with a finite past.

Another thought experiment would be of a finite object that experiences an infinite number of changes, because the changes aren't objects, they're events, and our intuition works quite differently regarding events than objects. What Hilbert doesn't address is that temporal events are like physical objects, which wasn't what he was trying to do in the first place; although that's the wagon WLC tries to get him to pull.

But the main flaw with Hilbert's Hotel is just that it's an appeal to our intuitions rather than a sound logical argument. And a sound logical argument is what I asked for.

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Your own religion teaches that you are mindless robots in heaven, devoid of free will, never sinning and always worshiping. Do you want to be a without volition for eternity?

Where do you get these ideas from?  It doesn't say any such thing.  According to scripture we're going to be living on a new earth in physical bodies.  Everything we do will be an act of worship of God.  If you want to make statements about what the bible says, why don't you read it first.

I've read the whole thing cover-to-cover twice, many parts more times that I can put a number to. Why will humans with free will never sin in heaven? A third of the angels rebelled, if angels can't be 100% on board the God train in heaven with free will, how are humans supposed to manage it?

An eternity in heaven seems to be guaranteed if and only if you never use your free will to sin once you're there. Clearly it's possible to use your free will to sin once you get there. And it seems pretty clear that if you do, you'll be kicked out. The Bible is not nearly as clear on this matter as you make it out to be.

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If there is a spiritual "us" that is supernatural, then it can preserve the memories.  If I can accept a soul, then I can easily accept that it would contain the memories of my life as well.  What it really comes down to is whether or not there is a supernatural existence that doesn't follow natural laws.  If you're not open to a supernatural existence and only can think according to natural laws, then you really can't come to an understanding of something that is beyond nature.

Which leaves the Alzheimer's question unanswered. If there is a part of us that remembers things after we're dead, why can't it remember things when we're alive?

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well, we can carve out an exception for infinite torment in an infinite Hell that torments the damned for an infinite amount of time.

no problems with that

I guess the question is contingent on the difference between the past and the future. There can be an infinite set of things that will happen in the future (and there probably is), but that set will never be actualized, you'll never 'reach' infinity. The past on the other hand, if finite, is still definitely always growing. In that sense, there's always room in the past for more 'stuff'.

Of course, one of the entertaining things about an actual infinite being impossible is that it makes a God with an infinite past impossible as well, which should make a lot of theists uncomfortable. Without an actual past infinite being possible, God must have had a beginning.

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The soul is "us".  The memory of the soul is the same memory that is stored in our brain.  The soul is not the mechanism which we use to gather and store memories.

So if I can't remember it, my soul won't remember it either, because my soul is me. And apparently the soul won't be able to learn anything after we're dead, because it won't be able to gather and store memories without a brain.

I consider that a less-than-optimal situation.

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I was explaining a math problem on using a infinite number of something that would be analogous to the original post discussing an infinite number of causes and effects. God, as a timeless and changeless being, does not run into the logical absurdity that the math illustrates.

Well, timeless beings are changeless by definition. Change is something that happens in time. A timeless being can't take an action or have a thought, because those are events, and events require time. Although it also seems clear that 'timeless beings' can't actually be 'beings' in the sense of 'something that exists'.

That is, a 'timeless being' is an absurdity. How long can a timeless being exist? No time at all.

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No offense and in spite of the Kudos you got, this post is a mess. None of your conclusion follow from the premises (and most of your premises are either wrong or incomplete). If you are here to discuss your opinions and learn something, then you should take smaller bites and ask more questions. If you are here to make grand statements and persuade us that there is no God with your vast subject knowledge, you have missed the mark.

My kudo was for the effort he put in as a newcomer. I try to be nice to newcomers. You'll notice no one actually agreed that he had succeeded in proving that God does not exist. I give you kudos when you seem to be putting in a sincere effort or make a good point. It doesn't mean that I agree with your position.

[Lek]

I've read the whole thing cover-to-cover twice, many parts more times that I can put a number to. Why will humans with free will never sin in heaven? A third of the angels rebelled, if angels can't be 100% on board the God train in heaven with free will, how are humans supposed to manage it?

An eternity in heaven seems to be guaranteed if and only if you never use your free will to sin once you're there. Clearly it's possible to use your free will to sin once you get there. And it seems pretty clear that if you do, you'll be kicked out. The Bible is not nearly as clear on this matter as you make it out to be.

I don't know. For one thing, we'll be on the new earth and not in heaven. I tend to think that it is the absence of evil choices. I think God purposely allowed Satan to sin.

Which leaves the Alzheimer's question unanswered. If there is a part of us that remembers things after we're dead, why can't it remember things when we're alive?

The soul will live in a physical body.

[Jehanne]

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Then I take it you do not believe your god to be infinite or eternal. Because that would be absurd.

I was explaining a math problem on using a infinite number of something that would be analogous to the original post discussing an infinite number of causes and effects. God, as a timeless and changeless being, does not run into the logical absurdity that the math illustrates.

You (and Dr. Craig) need to stop thinking of infinite sets as being a one-sized-fits-all (or, equinumerous); that's a 19th-century view.  Of course, mathematicians know better:









Remember Craig's quote from Vilenkin, "A proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man..."

Cosmological models are countable infinities.  Just as space may be without beginning or end, so, too, time may be without beginning or end.  As Professor Wes Morriston has conclusively shown (and, Craig has hardly responded to Morriston), actual infinities exist in the realm of theism, and so, the existence of an "actual infinite" is not a logical impossibility:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/selected-papers.html

Craig loves to equivocate; it's his favorite logical fallacy, however, no one within the Academy is buying it:

http://www.skepticink.com/reasonablyfait...-infinity/

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I've read the whole thing cover-to-cover twice, many parts more times that I can put a number to. Why will humans with free will never sin in heaven? A third of the angels rebelled, if angels can't be 100% on board the God train in heaven with free will, how are humans supposed to manage it?

An eternity in heaven seems to be guaranteed if and only if you never use your free will to sin once you're there. Clearly it's possible to use your free will to sin once you get there. And it seems pretty clear that if you do, you'll be kicked out. The Bible is not nearly as clear on this matter as you make it out to be.

I don't know.  For one thing, we'll be on the new earth and not in heaven.  I tend to think that it is the absence of evil choices.  I think God purposely allowed Satan to sin.

Which leaves the Alzheimer's question unanswered. If there is a part of us that remembers things after we're dead, why can't it remember things when we're alive?

The soul will live in a physical body.

In a person with Alzheimer's who has forgotten the names of their grandchildren (or, that they even have grandchildren), does the "soul" remember the names of those kiddos?

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From Wes Morriston's site ("Doubts about the Kalām Cosmological Argument", emphasis mine):

A favorite verse of a much loved hymn comes to mind:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we first begun.
Of course, we shall never arrive at a time at which we have already said infinitely many heavenly praises. At each stage in the imagined future series of praises, we’ll have said only finitely many. But that makes no difference to the point I am about to make. If you ask, "How many distinct praises will be said?" the only sensible answer is, infinitely many.

[Mister Agenda]

I've read the whole thing cover-to-cover twice, many parts more times that I can put a number to. Why will humans with free will never sin in heaven? A third of the angels rebelled, if angels can't be 100% on board the God train in heaven with free will, how are humans supposed to manage it?

An eternity in heaven seems to be guaranteed if and only if you never use your free will to sin once you're there. Clearly it's possible to use your free will to sin once you get there. And it seems pretty clear that if you do, you'll be kicked out. The Bible is not nearly as clear on this matter as you make it out to be.

I don't know.  For one thing, we'll be on the new earth and not in heaven.  I tend to think that it is the absence of evil choices.  I think God purposely allowed Satan to sin.

Which leaves the Alzheimer's question unanswered. If there is a part of us that remembers things after we're dead, why can't it remember things when we're alive?

The soul will live in a physical body.

Ah, I take it that you're a JW then. We'll be completely unconscious of any time spent as a bodiless soul, then? And what about the people who DO go to heaven?

Poor Satan, it sounds like God really screwed him over.

But you put thought into your answer, and I appreciate that.

[SteveII]

Have you ever read about Hilbert's Hotel?

Yes, I have. 'Logically absurd' is not a synonym for 'intuitively absurd'. Hilbert's Hotel is a thought experiment. Thought experiments are not logical proofs. They aren't even close. But they can rise to the level of being part of an argument, as you're doing here. The argument basically amounts to:

If an actual infinite number of things existed, it would be absurd.
Since it would be absurd, it's impossible.

There are some corollaries necessary. For example, Platonism must be false because in Platonism numbers are 'things' and there is an actual infinite number of them (I imagine you don't have a problem with actual infinites of abstractions). It must be incorrect that the universe contains an actual infinite number of dimensionless points (or one-dimensional lines, or two-dimensional planes), or that there could be an actual infinite set of possible worlds, but those are also abstractions. Hilbert is talking about infinite series of physical objects, and I agree (intuitively) that infinity and objects leads to absurdities.

But are past events 'physical objects'? There are no objects in the past or future, only in the present. Objects once existed in the past, but they no longer exist in the past, now they exist in the present. If you conduct a similar thought experiment based on events, the intuitive absurdity is greatly reduced. Of course you can always stuff more things into an infinite future. Of course you can always discover more about an infinite past. Time travel stories are a form of thought experiment, and it isn't absurd for time travelers to have done an infinite number of things in the past that we don't know about, as long as we wound up with the present that we have, and that's even with a finite past. [1]

Another thought experiment would be of a finite object that experiences an infinite number of changes, because the changes aren't objects, they're events, and our intuition works quite differently regarding events than objects. What Hilbert doesn't address is that temporal events are like physical objects, which wasn't what he was trying to do in the first place; although that's the wagon WLC tries to get him to pull. [2]

But the main flaw with Hilbert's Hotel is just that it's an appeal to our intuitions rather than a sound logical argument. And a sound logical argument is what I asked for.[3]

1. Why wouldn't past events by physical objects? With sufficient knowledge, you can count the causes of each effect all the way back. And that's the problem. If there were an infinite number of causes/effects, the current causes/effects would not have happened yet--because there would have always been one more to consider at the other end of the whole causal chain. There would never be a '3...2...1...now'.
2. An infinite number of changes means the same thing as existing an infinite amount of time. What Hilbert's Hotel illustrates is there is no such thing as an actual infinite quantity of anything. Sequential events can certainly be counted so qualify as as quantity. 
3. Here is your sound logical argument:
IF
infinity + infinity = infinity
infinity + infinity = infinity/2
infinity - 1 = infinity
infinity / 2 = infinity
infinity - infinity = 3
CONCLUSION: An actual infinity is not a rational thing.
In addition, you do not have a defeater for the above. To deny it with no reasons is special pleading for your infinite physical reality for which it's sole purpose is to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion there had to be an uncaused first cause.

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I was explaining a math problem on using a infinite number of something that would be analogous to the original post discussing an infinite number of causes and effects. God, as a timeless and changeless being, does not run into the logical absurdity that the math illustrates.

Well, timeless beings are changeless by definition. Change is something that happens in time. A timeless being can't take an action or have a thought, because those are events, and events require time. Although it also seems clear that 'timeless beings' can't actually be 'beings' in the sense of 'something that exists'.

That is, a 'timeless being' is an absurdity. How long can a timeless being exist? No time at all.

The only thing that could be timeless is an omniscient immaterial mind. God's decision to create was a timeless one in that there was no period of indecision preceding it. God could not have created the universe sooner. It simply is that God was timeless and changeless sans the universe and temporal and changing with the universe.

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I was explaining a math problem on using a infinite number of something that would be analogous to the original post discussing an infinite number of causes and effects. God, as a timeless and changeless being, does not run into the logical absurdity that the math illustrates.

You (and Dr. Craig) need to stop thinking of infinite sets as being a one-sized-fits-all (or, equinumerous); that's a 19th-century view.  Of course, mathematicians know better:



Remember Craig's quote from Vilenkin, "A proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man..."

Cosmological models are countable infinities.  Just as space may be without beginning or end, so, too, time may be without beginning or end.  As Professor Wes Morriston has conclusively shown (and, Craig has hardly responded to Morriston), actual infinities exist in the realm of theism, and so, the existence of an "actual infinite" is not a logical impossibility:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/selected-papers.html

Craig loves to equivocate; it's his favorite logical fallacy, however, no one within the Academy is buying it:

http://www.skepticink.com/reasonablyfait...-infinity/

How about you put each of those arguments in a few sentences and I will rebut them? I am not going to debate via Youtube/link proxy.

[Jehanne]

1. Why wouldn't past events by physical objects? With sufficient knowledge, you can count the causes of each effect all the way back. And that's the problem. If there were an infinite number of causes/effects, the current causes/effects would not have happened yet--because there would have always been one more to consider at the other end of the whole causal chain. There would never be a '3...2...1...now'.
2. An infinite number of changes means the same thing as existing an infinite amount of time. What Hilbert's Hotel illustrates is there is no such thing as an actual infinite quantity of anything. Sequential events can certainly be counted so qualify as as quantity. 
3. Here is your sound logical argument:
IF
infinity + infinity = infinity
infinity + infinity = infinity/2
infinity - 1 = infinity
infinity / 2 = infinity
infinity - infinity = 3
CONCLUSION: An actual infinity is not a rational thing.
In addition, you do not have a defeater for the above. To deny it with no reasons is special pleading for your infinite physical reality for which it's sole purpose is to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion there had to be an uncaused first cause.

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Well, timeless beings are changeless by definition. Change is something that happens in time. A timeless being can't take an action or have a thought, because those are events, and events require time. Although it also seems clear that 'timeless beings' can't actually be 'beings' in the sense of 'something that exists'.

That is, a 'timeless being' is an absurdity. How long can a timeless being exist? No time at all.

The only thing that could be timeless is an omniscient immaterial mind. God's decision to create was a timeless one in that there was no period of indecision preceding it. God could not have created the universe sooner. It simply is that God was timeless and changeless sans the universe and temporal and changing with the universe.

Steven,

It is known from modern quantum field theory that there are uncaused events.  It is simply unnecessary to postulate an infinite series of causes.  I suggest that you read Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick and Walker (I bought my 5th edition copy for under $5, shipping included):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Physics

In there, they will tell you that it is a meaningless question to ask what came "before" the Big Bang; there was simply "nothing" prior to it.  That's the best that modern physics can say at this time; as Professor Sean Carroll pointed out to Craig in his 2014 debate, it is just better to say that there was a "first moment" of time and leave things at that.  Of course, one of the eternal models of cosmology out there may be correct; as Morriston has pointed out to Craig, an infinite future is symmetric to an infinite past, and as both are fully describable by modern mathematical physics, there is no difficulty beyond our ability to conceptualize that which is simply not conceptual.  A quantum oscillator is no different and neither is quantum tunneling, and yet, all of these ideas are universally accepted, and indeed, the electron microscope exists because of that!  Go backward in time or forward and things look the same.  Just as space may be infinite (in which, there would be, per Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, an absolute infinite set of events), so, too, time may also be infinite.  If you are going to claim that the Universe has an "edge", you might as well say that it has a beginning, also, and simply leave things at that; such does not require a "god" and per Occam's Razor, we out to exclude such, just as Craig dismisses polytheism.  On the other hand, if the Universe is infinite in spatial extent (the best explanation so far in a flat Universe), then it stands to reason that the Universe is infinite in time, also.  In either case, no "god" need apply.

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Steve: How about you put each of those arguments in a few sentences and I will rebut them? I am not going to debate via Youtube/link proxy.

You are an answer in search of a question with that attitude.

Some things take longer than a few sentences.