How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Tom Fearnley]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

Moderator Notice
link removed for violating 30/30 rule

Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

[Tom Fearnley]

 

What do you guys think? It's my favourite argument to use against God.

[Alan V]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854

Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

I don't think Luke Muehlhauser understood the arguments he was critiquing. "If everything requires a Creator, then so does God" is pointing out an inconsistency, a kind of special pleading or double standard, implicit in theistic argumentation. It is saying that defining a God in such a way as to answer the question really just begs the question of whether such an exception exists. Same for "Anything complex requires an intelligent designer."

As for "Why?" questions, they assume there is a "why" when there may be none. If "Why?" asks for meaning, and instead all we have are descriptions without meanings, then it doesn't help to try to answer. All we can say are that the reasons we offer are both necessary and sufficient, like answering "Who created me?" by saying "My parents."

Further, atheists have any number of arguments, including the one Muehlhauser considers best or "show stopping." This is not to say that some arguments aren't better than others for some people. But that's why atheists have such a wide range of arguments. I'm glad he found the one which was convincing to him.

[Belacqua]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854


Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

From the transcript:

So if in order to offer something as a ‘best explanation’ you had to have an explanation for the explanation, then you could never explain anything, because you’d need an explanation of the explanation, and then you’d need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then you’d need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and so on… into infinity!

Here he's talking about "brute facts," I think. 

Since about the time of Newton, science has given up on explaining a lot of important things. Instead, it occupies itself with describing and measuring those things. We can say how gravity behaves, we can measure and predict how strong it will be in a given case, but nobody can explain what it is. 

So science isn't really in the explanations business, and hasn't been for a while. 

I've even been told that if we continue to wonder about such things, we are asking questions that "aren't valid." I'm not sure what that even means. Not answerable maybe. 

Does this part seem to contradict what came before?

“Poof! Magic” is not an explanation.

But I can’t just say that “Poof! Magic” is not explanation. I have to argue for it.

Scientists and philosophers, when looking for a best explanation, have identified some qualities that are often associated with good explanations. What is it that makes something a best explanation? What is it that makes one thing a good explanation, and another thing a not-so-good explanation?

Well, the first thing is that they are testable. In fact, if a theory wasn’t testable, it wouldn’t make much sense to say it’s the best explanation of something, because there’s no way for you to test whether it’s true or not! These theories render specific predictions, so you can go out in the world and see whether those predictions are true or false.

Nobody says "poof! magic!" Although they might well say "poof! nature!" "That's just how the laws of physics work, chump, and don't ask why!" 

The qualities he gives for good scientific explanations seem good to me, although I think he has already accepted that in some cases they just aren't possible. 

I wonder if the speaker in the video has ever heard of metaphysics? I know some people haven't. I encountered one person on an atheist forum who couldn't believe that a reputable university would even discuss such a subject. Apparently some people think it's about ghosts and UFOs or something. 

But metaphysics is just about all the stuff that science by definition can't address because, very wisely, science limits itself to things that are empirically repeatably testable. 

And when you do that, it becomes immediately clear what’s really going on here. Believers aren’t really offering a ‘best explanation’ for anything, what they’re offering is a good-old argument from ignorance.

“Woah! Lightning! I don’t know how that happens, so… it must be an angry magical being in the sky throwing down lightning bolts!”

This explanation of religion -- that it began as a pre-science explanation for natural phenomena -- seems to be accepted pretty much universally by "New Atheists." But it's completely untestable. These days anthropologists and historians of religion are skeptical about it. (It's good to be skeptical of things that everyone believes without proof.) 

Anyway, there may be people like this at your neighborhood church, but that doesn't exhaust the category of believers. We have to rule out the prejudice that all believers are a priori stupid. 

How do you defeat all religious arguments in one easy step? You pick out the part of the argument that posits God as the best explanation for something, and you ask: “How is God the best explanation for that? How is ‘poof! Magic’ the best explanation?”

He's just making the same dumb mistake that Dawkins and the others made. He's assuming that this is all religious people have to go on. All he can see is a God of the [scientific] gaps. He doesn't know the first thing about metaphysics, or the traditional arguments for why a God (or something like it) is considered necessary.

This is just sad. He thinks he's so smart. He could at least address one or two of the real theological arguments that have been around for centuries, which everyone educated in the subject has heard of.

[no one]

You seem to be forgetting the powers of Muh huly buuk.

[Gwaithmir]

Nothing new here. This is merely one of dozens of arguments I've used against theists for years.

[Acrobat]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854


Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

I’m a theist here.

And I was actually surprised, but that was a pretty well written article, especially for the fact you highlighted some of the failings of some popular new atheists arguments against God.

But the problem with your main argument here, is its confusion of an ontological conclusion, with an epistemological ones.

An analogy would be appropriate

Imagine a drug company creating a drug that cures x disease.

We could take the drug to a lab, and verify all it’s mechanisms of action, how it targets certain elements of our biology, and cures the disease. We could explain exactly how the drugs works.

Your argument is like asking, what does the drug company who made the drug, have to do with how the drug works?

The answer is, that they don’t have anything to do with how the drugs works.

But they have everything to do with how the drug came into being.

The equivalent ontological Theistic conclusions revolve around intentionality, seeing our reality as created for some underlying purpose endowed with a meaning of some sort. The antithesis for such a view isn’t found in some scientific explanation of how the world works, but in an opposing ontological view, such as nihilism, that it’s all a product of a some cosmic accident, a fluke. That it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. A competing atheistic view would be along those lines.

Now one might ask what does such meaning and purpose have to do with God? But that would be like asking what does an author have to do with a novel.

[Acrobat]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854


Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

I’m a theist here.

And I was actually surprised, but that was a pretty well written article, especially for the fact you highlighted some of the failings of some popular new atheists arguments against God.

But the problem with your main argument here, is its confusion of an ontological conclusion, with an epistemological ones.

An analogy would be appropriate

Imagine a drug company creating a drug that cures x disease.

We could take the drug to a lab, and verify all it’s mechanisms of action, how it targets certain elements of our biology, and cures the disease. We could explain exactly how the drugs works.

Your argument is like asking, what does the drug company who made the drug, have to do with how the drug works?

The answer is, that they don’t have anything to do with how the drugs works.

But they have everything to do with how the drug came into being.

The equivalent ontological Theistic conclusions revolve around intentionality, seeing our reality as created for some underlying purpose endowed with a meaning of some sort. The antithesis for such a view isn’t found in some scientific explanation of how the world works, but in an opposing ontological view, such as nihilism, that it’s all a product of a some cosmic accident, a fluke. That it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. A competing atheistic view would be along those lines.

Now one might ask what does such meaning and purpose have to do with God? But that would be like asking what does an author have to do with a novel.

---

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854

Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

I don't think Luke Muehlhauser understood the arguments he was critiquing.  "If everything requires a Creator, then so does God" is pointing out an inconsistency, a kind of special pleading or double standard, implicit in theistic argumentation.  It is saying that defining a God in such a way as to answer the question really just begs the question of whether such an exception exists.  Same for "Anything complex requires an intelligent designer."

As for "Why?" questions, they assume there is a "why" when there may be none.  If "Why?" asks for meaning, and instead all we have are descriptions without meanings, then it doesn't help to try to answer.  All we can say are that the reasons we offer are both necessary and sufficient, like answering "Who created me?" by saying "My parents."

Further, atheists have any number of arguments, including the one Muehlhauser considers best or "show stopping."  This is not to say that some arguments aren't better than others for some people.  But that's why atheists have such a wide range of arguments.  I'm glad he found the one which was convincing to him.

The first cause argument you're referring to, isn't everything requires a creator. That's an atheist straw man of the argument. 

It's everything that is contingent has a cause. Something that exists by necessity, that is uncaused. Or else you'd have an infinite regress.

[Alan V]

The equivalent ontological Theistic conclusions revolve around intentionality, seeing our reality as created for some underlying purpose endowed with a meaning of some sort. The antithesis for such a view isn’t found in some scientific explanation of how the world works,  but in an opposing ontological view, such as nihilism, that it’s all a product of a some cosmic accident, a fluke. That it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. A competing atheistic view would be along those lines.

I don't think you are talking about nihilism here, the belief that life is meaningless. It doesn't follow from the universe itself having no essential absolute meaning because people create their own relative meanings, both from their human nature and by their specific interests.

The first cause argument you're referring to, isn't everything requires a creator. That's an atheist straw man of the argument. 

It's everything that is contingent has a cause. Something that exists by necessity, that is uncaused. Or else you'd have an infinite regress.

Yes, I have heard that variation of the theistic argument as well, and as you say it deals with the problems of the more simply stated argument.

However, in that case one of the atheistic answers is that there are certain things which are known to be uncaused, like ratioactive decay and quantum fluctuations. It is thought that the big bang could have started from a quantum fluctuation, as an alternative theory.

Further, there are other problems with the argument as you have stated it, like how theists arrive at their very specific God concept. Why should we assume a First Cause which is said to have created the universe is conscious and willful, as a God is assumed to be, or even good and moral for that matter?

So as I mentioned, atheists have a wide range of arguments to answer various theistic arguments.

[Mister Agenda]

It's not always simple, but the way to defeat any argument for God is to find the flaw in the premises and/or fallacy in the reasoning. In theory there could be a perfect argument for God that has premises almost anyone would accept as reasonable and no fallacious reasoning, I just haven't seen one. If one existed, it would not suffice to prove the existence of God, any more than a perfect argument for talking goats would prove the existence of talking goats if no examples could be produced; but having a perfect argument on your side isn't nothing.

Each argument for God must be defeated on its own merits or lack thereof. There's no 'one size fits all' logical refutation.