God Exists

[brokenreflector]

What is there to defend?

Atheism.

Atheists don't believe in a god or gods.

I know and you apparently don't have any good reasons for this belief. Also, your atheism renders the second explanation in my original post logically incoherent. This leaves you with two logically incoherent explanations for the origin of all things. In other words, if you want to remain a rational person, then you should abandon atheism.

Pretty elementary stuff there.  And why would we feel the need to defend anything to you?

Then don't.

What's wrong with WLC again?

---

Atheism doesn't need to be defended, asshat.

Calm down man. No need to get emotional and insulting. If you're unable to provide rational reasons for atheism, then that's OK. Just stop posting.

[Belacqua]

New guy - BrokenRecord - leads with William Lane Craig.

Surely many will be converted.

What's wrong with William Lane Craig? And why hasn't anyone in this thread been able to cogently defend atheism?

I've never read anything by Craig, so I can't say from personal knowledge. The reason I haven't been motivated to read him, though, is because he uses the Kalam argument, which so far has never appealed to me. 

I don't think that a First Cause argument that uses a temporal procession is going to persuade anybody. I don't find it persuasive, from what I know of it.

You probably know, both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas specifically rejected a temporal First Cause. Aristotle thought the world had no beginning, and Thomas thought that it was a matter of faith, from scripture, that there was a beginning, but that this couldn't be demonstrated. 

Their First Cause argument is much more persuasive to me, and I have yet to find any scientific argument that knocks it down. 

As you know, this is an essential chain rather than a temporal one. 

I wouldn't be mean and say that Lawrence Krauss was dishonest, exactly, when he wrote his book in total ignorance of this argument. But if anybody is going to claim he's defeated an argument he probably ought to know what he's talking about.

[brokenreflector]

What's wrong with William Lane Craig? And why hasn't anyone in this thread been able to cogently defend atheism?

Nothing?

 He has a very 'Classical' nose?
Where in any of your opening posts did you posit anything about Atheism?

Cheers.

Not at work.  

I'm starting to think this a troll website where the same person is posting under multiple accounts.

[arewethereyet]

What's wrong with William Lane Craig? And why hasn't anyone in this thread been able to cogently defend atheism?

Nothing?

 He has a very 'Classical' nose?
Where in any of your opening posts did you posit anything about Atheism?

Cheers.

Not at work.  

I'm starting to think this a troll website where the same person is posting under multiple accounts.

Thinking the same....who are you a sock of?

[no one]

He's a lying piece of shit, for starters.
He preys on those that are even more mentally inept than himself.

[Peebothuhlu]

What's wrong with William Lane Craig? And why hasn't anyone in this thread been able to cogently defend atheism?

Nothing?

 He has a very 'Classical' nose?

Where in any of your opening posts did you posit anything about Atheism?

Cheers.

I'm starting to think this a troll website where the same person is posting under multiple accounts.

Uhm.. okay?

This thread has taken a turn for the strange. Though my time of giving creedence to Brokenreflector is certainly comming to a middle.

Cheers.

Not at work.

[purplepurpose]

Jesus didn't argue for the most part. He endured hell and died for his ideals instead of sitting on his ass arguing. Go earn some money, help the poor and show atheists what's Jesus is about. Just like Jesus did, suffer for great ideals.

[brokenreflector]

He's a lying piece of shit, for starters.
He preys on those that are even more mentally inept than himself.

What did WLC lie about?

What's with the anger btw?

---

Jesus didn't argue for the most part. He endured hell and died for his ideals instead of sitting on his ass arguing. Go earn some money, help the poor and show atheists what's Jesus is about. Just like Jesus did, suffer for great ideals. But who needs that when you can masturbate here on whatever God exists.

Jesus didn't argue? That's wrong.

And you don't know who I've helped.

[Fake Messiah]

Also, your atheism renders the second explanation in my original post logically incoherent. This leaves you with two logically incoherent explanations for the origin of all things.

Actually it is you who has failed to prove that your God exists. Even at the best outcome for you that God created the universe, it tells us nothing in particular about this alleged god-being. There is certainly nothing about Christian theology in the argument; this god could exist but yet be the Muslim god or one of the Hindu gods or a Greek or Norse or Native American or any other god, or it could be an impersonal energy or the devil. In fact, it does not even insist that this god exists now but that it existed at the beginning. It does not prove there is a god today, and nor can it prove there is a god like the Theists, let alone the Christians, envision.

To make matters even worse for you are advances in our scientific understanding of the world have thrown the very notion of cause into question. Particularly the discovery of the quantum nature of subatomic reality has substituted a statistical probability view of events for the old familiar deterministic or 'causal' one. ln other words, where it has been traditionally argued that some prior condition A is necessary and sufficient for (the 'cause' of) event B, quantum physics shows us, with great predictive accuracy, that no particular prior condition is either necessary or sufficient for some physical events such as radioactive decay, the behavior of electrons and photons, and potentially for the appearance of the physical universe itself out of a background of quantum fluctuations. As physicist Victor Stenger has stated, "In the quantum world ... things can simply happen ... I have shown that directional causality, or causal precedence, is in fact a classical, macroscopic concept that does not apply at the fundamental level of elementary particle interactions, where fundamental interactions make no distinction between cause and effect". In such a view of reality, a 'cause' is neither always adequate to explain an event — even the big event.

[GrandizerII]

By God I mean a necessary, non-physical, and personal being who created all things: seen, unseen, discovered, and undiscovered. Being a Christian, I believe God is more than that, but this post is about the general concept of God.

Do you believe in the god that is triune in nature and who, through the Son, is incarnate in Jesus? If so, I have to wonder what kind of logical bridge gets you from a logically plausible first cause to what is a patently absurd idea of a god? If not, then what do you mean then by "more than that"?

But the idea that the universe is eternal is logically incoherent and not to mention against what contemporary scientific evidence suggests. For the latter, I refer you to a certain point of a debate between philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig and physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss (https://youtu.be/mj4nbL53I-E?t=5408). Despite being a staunch and vocal atheist, Dr. Krauss begrudgingly admits in this YouTube clip that contemporary scientific evidence points to the universe being past-finite.

The issue here with your argument from scientific evidence is that Krauss is not the contemporary scientific evidence on whether the universe had a finite past or not. For that, we need a conclusive body of research in cosmology/astrophysics that points to the conclusion that the universe did indeed have a finite past.

Going back to the logical problem with the second explanation, the incoherence stems from the implications of an eternal universe. If the universe is indeed eternal, then that means our universe has already been through an actually infinite number of changes or processes, all leading up to the present. Otherwise, the present wouldn't be occurring. But how did an infinite amount of changes already transpire? The fact that these changes were traversed seems to suggest that they're finite rather than infinite. This seems to be a big problem for the atheist.

One plausible answer to this is that time is not how we intuit it. Under the B-theory of time, for example, there is no flow of time. Which means there are no traversion of infinite amount of changes to worry about. And therefore, if the B-theory of time is true, then the Kalam argument fails. Even William Lane Craig has had to admit this, and this may be partly why he advocates for the not-so-scientific A-theory of time

I argue that in order for the second explanation to work, God must be the eternal cause. This is because God doesn't go through changes. He's not made up of parts or processes. He's non-physical or immaterial. Therefore, God being past-eternal doesn't lead to the same implausible implication that an actually infinite number of changes has already transpired.

You are arguing for some eternal cause which you have been conditioned to label "God". That is fine, except then it's a case of you making an argument for something that ultimately is not what you're aiming to convince atheists of.