Churchwork,
I appreciate your invitation to respond to your post. Some of things that will follow will, without a doubt, be extremely offensive to you. I'm going to be upfront: I have a tendency to come off as extremely elitist and condescending, and I have a tendency to talk down to other people (usually for good reasons).
Let me also state upfront that I've read a lot of proofs for God, and yours, no matter how much effort you put into it, is really the worst one I've ever read. I'm not sure if you already know this or not, but basically you're reiterating a very ancient argument for god called the cosmological argument, a particular variant that most people know as Kalam's Cosmological Argument:
(1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.
(2) The universe has a beginning of its existence.
Therefore:
(3) The universe has a cause of its existence.
(4) If the universe has a cause of its existence then that cause is God.
Therefore:
(5) God exists.
As near as I can tell, you're 4-step proof for God is really just an overly verbose way of stating the following:
1) The Universe is finite, so it has a beginning
2) Anything with a beginning has a cause
3) A first cause follows from an uncaused cause, which is god
4) Therefore god exists
(^^^^ note: please dont mind that this may not be an exact formulation of what you've said. I noticed that you accused me of being tricked by Satan when I made previous comments that "overassumed" (I've never heard of that word in my life) parts of what you were trying to say.)
You probably noticed that the cosmological argument really doesnt specify why god created the universe, what god did before or after he created the universe, or name any of his characteristics; essentially, the cosmological argument proves the existence of a deistic god, without providing any other details (and certainly no details that provide a basis for a religion). For this reason, you provided some reasons for why you think the god who exists just happens to be your conception of god.
Now, while cosmological arguments in all of their flavors are very popular for their simplicity and intuitive reasonableness, but yours is the least persuasive flavor of the cosmological argument I've ever seen in the 15+ years I've been studying the philosophy of religion. Basically, you tried to explain each premise of your four-step proof down to its axioms (or something very near to them), but your explanations were horrifically dubious and presumptuous, just take your Step 1 for example, which you describe as:
Step 1 is vital. It says, if anyone contends for an eternity of the past of cause and effects (and yes many have proposed this), then you would have had an eternity to be perfected (read the rest of the paragraph for why this is necessarily going to happen if there was an eternity of the past). However, since you still sin, you know there has not been an eternity of the past of cause and effects. ... For our purposes all we need see is that sinlessness is at a bare minimum not making damaging mistakes such as mistreating another person or being unhealthy to yourself.
At first, this looks like a great big loop of circular logic (i.e. trying to prove Christianity based on the concept of sin, where the concept of sin is only meaningful if Christianity is true), but you redefined sin to mean any kind of harm you do to another person. At the very least, I can say you're not arguing in a circle...
... however, you are making some extremely unjustified and dubious presumptions:
- you are using the existence of humans as a way to measure the age of the universe when you havent shown that humans have existed since the very beginning of the universe. Your argument from sin, that we progress to a more sinless state over time, and that given an infinite amount of time we should be sinless, might be true (its not, and I'll get to that a little later), but the age of the universe and the existence of humans arent intrinsically connected to each other. Theres no contradiction in saying that the universe stretches back into infinity (perhaps in an endless cycle of bangs and crunches), but things in the universe (such as humans) exist during fleeting moments in time; quite simply, the universe existed before humans, so humans could have a beginning (and hence still be sitting in their sinful state), but the universe could be infinite, no contradiction between the two.
For that reason, your four-step proof for God breaks down at the first level, because you havent actually tied the sinfulness of humans to the age of the universe. By application of your argument (once we've established that its not connected to the age of the universe), the fact I still sin says nothing about the age of the universe, only the age of humans. Humans have not existed for eternity, and that is all we can gather from your argument.
Believe me, there are other problems (such as whether we really are progressing morally, especially in light of the fact that most people are products of their culture and believe that their culture, no matter what it does, is more righteous than all other cultures), but I'm trying to keep my post brief. (You've probably never seen my posts on other forums, but I'm the most verbose person ever, and I can write and write and write for hours :) )
Of course, I want to note that your Step 1 makes a bizarre claim that is never substantiated or explained: that given an infinite amount of time, that humans would become infinitely righteous... the problem being that you havent shown that humans will even exist indefinitely. I think its extremely likely that we will kill each other off long before infinity. So the human species has a start, and it has an end, just like every other species that has ever existed. If the universe were eternal, we would have ceased to exist an eternity ago.
Basically, there are better ways to prove the finititude of the universe, you dont have to rely on the incredibly esoteric "sin" argument you have. I'll prove that universe is finite for you, using a more contemporary and well-accepted explanation:
- If you've taken even a high school level science class, you should know the laws of thermodynamics, you should know how they're applied, you should know the difference between an open and closed system.
- In laymens terms, you can never get out all of energy you put into a system, because some of it always becomes useless heat. Thats why, even in a vacuum, if you drop a ball on the ground and just let it bounce on its own, each successive bounce will be less intense than the last, until gradually the ball comes to a stop; where did all the energy go? With each bounce, the ball compresses slightly, which causes friction between the material inside the ball and converts a small amount of that energy into heat. Eventually, all of the kinetic energy is used up until it just stops.
-- The same principle explains why perpetual motion machines are impossible. You've probably seen a hand-cranked generator that turns on a lightbulb (or if you go to the gym, some eletronic machines like a stationary bike are powered by our own peddling), then you're familiar with an electric generator. You've also probably seen an electric motor, like a vacuum cleaner, which needs a constant stream of electricity going through it to power the motor. Some people have thought they could create perpetual motion machines by hooking up a series of generators and motors in a circle, where each motor turns the generator crank and each turn of the crank supplies the motor with energy, so that essentially the machine could be self-powered and run forever. That sounds intuitively correct, and some people have certainly tried to make it work, but it just doesnt. The friction from internal mechanisms of the machines turns a small amount of each crank of the engine into useless heat, and the machine will begin to slow down more and more until it just stops. Unless you supply that machine with some outside source of energy, it will just grind to a halt.
- The principle above is the second law of thermodynamics, where the amount of heat or entropy in closed systems tends to increase and their wont be any available energy left for movement. Because the universe encompasses everything, it is a closed system, so given enough time the universe will eventually use up all its available energy, and all movement will stop as a result of the same rules that ceased the movement of the bouncing ball. You might have heard of this scenario called heat death, which is projected to occur in 10^900 to 10^1000 years time.
- If the universe is infinitely old, it should evidently be older than 10^1000 years, and so heat death should have already occurred. It hasnt, so the universe cannot be infinitely old, so it is finite.
The heat death argument isnt exactly bulletproof for at least two reasons:
- You've probably heard of the Big Crunch, where the mass in the universe will eventually slow the expansion of the universe and cause it collapse in on itself. It is concievable that the universe is born and dies through an endless cycle of bangs and crunches, so that concievably the universe could be infinitely old and gone through an infinite number of heat deaths through each bang-crunch cycle. (Its worth nothing that theres just not very good evidence that there really is a bang-crunch cycle, and we have no way of knowing whether this universe we live in is the first and only universe, or whether its just another aspect of the universe that has existed for eternity.)
- Ironically, if God exists, then his continued existence negates the heat death, because his continued interference in the universe is constantly adding energy (that presumes that God isnt subject to the laws of thermodynamics himself), and the universe could concievably infinitely old if God is constantly supplying the universe with more energy.
In short, Step 1 mangles the cosmological argument because your reasoning doesnt sufficiently show that the universe really does have a beginning, you're just using a very dubious calculation of the universe. The problem with Step 2 is the amount of question begging:
Second step: someone says, ok fine, but what if the universe started all by itself at some point? Look at the cosmos and know it is very complicated. Since nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect. Therefore, since nothing, in more than a trillion examples, ever proves something happens without a cause, we can with the greatest of probabilities conclude everything has a cause. Since everything has a cause that is in known existence, then logic states that which is uncreated must have created. This is step 2 in the proof.
There are 2 primary objections to this statement, the first is a theological objection, the second is a scientific objection:
- Theological objection:
This has probably never occurred to you, but if Step 2 is true, then your religion is false, even if God exists or not, because the statement "nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect" is a fundamental denial of free will, on the basis that the cause of all of their actions must come from a prior effect, which in turn must come from a prior cause, ad infinitum until the first cause which you believe to be God. If God is the ultimate cause of everything, he is the ultimate cause of all the evil in the universe, and people never actually made a free choice to believe or disbelieve in God, because all events were set in motion and determined from the very beginning. (Some people have no problem with predestination, but I think that view of God is extremely offensive to religion, because a god who predestines people to go to hell is a monster and not worthy of worship.)
On the contrary, if people do have free will, then we have at least one example of something in nature happening outside of the laws of cause and effect, which serves to falsify Step 2.
- Scientific objection:
My biggest problem with your argument is that you havent actually shown Step 2 to be true, you only stated it categorically. At best, you're statement is just an intuitional statement, but it is ignorant and arrogant to an extreme to think you can refute science with your own intuitional preconceptions, and its ignorant to think you can define science with your intuitions.
Intuition is one of the first, but least accurate tools for gaining knowledge of the universe. As is frequently the case, its just wrong, and there are many apparently "paradoxes" that have been developed with exploit our usually fallible intuitional beliefs:
- The classic example, the Birthday Paradox: lets say started gathering random people into a room. How many people do you think we need to grab before we can say, with 50% probability, that two people in that room share the same birthday? How many people do we need before we have 99% probability that two people will share the same birthday? You only need 23 for 50% probability, and about 100 people for 99% probability. This completely contradicts our intuitional expectations that you need at least 365/2 people, but just look at the page I linked and you can play with the mathematics yourself.
- Another classic example, the Drug Test: lets say we have developed a new drug test that can detect the presence of a narcotic with 99.95% accuracy. What are the odds that a randomly selected person who tests positive is a drug user? Intuitionally, we say that the person is 99.95% likely to be a drug user, but in reality, the person is only 50% likely, and here's why:
Imagine you have a population of 1000 people, where 30 of them are drug users. Assuming that your drug test is 99.95% accuate, you can construct a chart to show the number of true negatives, true positives, false negatives, and false positives, like this:
Code:
TN - true negative, correctly identifies a non-drug user
TP - true positive, correctly identifies a drug user
FN - false negative, incorrectly identifies drug user
FP - false positive, incorrectly identifies a non-drug user
Population is 10000. 9500 are non-drug users, 500 are drug users
TN = accuracy * number_of_non-drug-users
TP = accuracy * number_of_drug-users
FN = number_of_drug-users - TP
FP = number_of_non-drug-users - TN
TN = 95% * 9500 = 9025
TP = 95% * 500 = 475
FN = 500 - 475 = 25
FP = 9500 - 9025 = 475
No matter the population or accuracy of the drug, number of False Positives will equal the number of False Positives, so the likelihood of a person being a drug user if they test positive is only 50%, which completely contradictions intuition.
Martin Gardner and Marilyn vos Savant are very famous for constructing other scenarios like the one above, that show how statistics frequently contradicts our intuitions.
- The most obvious scientific example: you are used to the world of motion, where if you are on a platform moving at 60 mph and your friend throws a ball in the same direction of the train at 40 mph, an external observe would expect see the ball moving at 60+40 mph or 100 mph (relative to the ground). And if platform were moving in the opposite direction, then the ball would be only be traveling at -60+40 mph or -20 mph (where negative means opposite direction).
So, how fast do you expect a beam of light to travel relative to the ground if your friend is riding on a train at 60 mph? Intuitively, you expect it to travel at c + 60 mph (where c is the speed of light, about 671 000 000 mph), but the beam moves at c. And if the train were travelling at 1000 mph, the beam of light still travels relative to the ground at c. No matter how fast the train travels, and no matter what direction, the light travels relative to the ground at a constant speed, which completely contradicts our intuitional expectations. Yet, its completely sound when you understand the math behind it.
With that out of the way, it should tell you something about your intuitional beliefs: they dont define the rules of the universe. The statement "everything needs a cause" seems very intuitional, you havent actually shown that such a principle is actually true for the universe. In fact, its not true at all, at least not on the very tiny scale, and in fact very few of the rules which hold true above the atomic scale are true below it -- if you are familiar with science, this problem is extremely fundamental, because havent quite unified macro and quantum physics (which is to say that we have two seperate scientific models, the first being einstein physics which explains the movement of objects larger than single protons, and the second model being quantum physics explains the movement of objects smaller than protons).
In the very tiny scale, the rules of "identify cause -> identical effect" is false, but rather "identify cause -> 40% probability of effect1, 30% probability of effect2, 25% probability of effect3, 5% probability of effect4". You stop dealing with causality and start dealing with probability distributions. In particular, when you stop dealing with causality, you get effects that really are completely acausal, specifically get these little things called virtual particles, which flash into an out of existence spotaneously and they appear to violate the laws of conservation of energy:
Virtual Particles
In many decays and annihilations, a particle decays into a very high-energy force-carrier particle, which almost immediately decays into low-energy particle. These high-energy, short-lived particles are virtual particles.
The conservation of energy seems to be violated by the apparent existence of these very energetic particles for a very short time. However, according to the above principle, if the time of a process is exceedingly short, then the uncertainty in energy can be very large. Thus, due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, these high-energy force-carrier particles may exist if they are short lived. In a sense, they escape reality's notice.
The bottom line is that energy is conserved. The energy of the initial decaying particle and the final decay products is equal. The virtual particles exist for such a short time that they can never be observed.
These little virtual particles are flashing into an out of existence all the time, and they do so without any cause at all and even when there isnt enough energy to create them. Even in a perfect vacuum, there is a sea of these things popping into and out of existence.
This is just my speculation on the subject, but I think it provides a good explanation where the energy that gave rise to the big bang came from:
- if you imagine the universe at the very beginning, where it had no space, no length, no width, and no depth, its is just a 0-d "point" for all intents and purpose.
- imagine that one those virtual particles spontaneous pops into existence, just like the tend to do, what happens when one of those things pops into existence of that universe? In laymens terms, its what happens when you fill 2 gallon water balloon with 20 gallons of water, you get a boom! :)
- given the particle, if there is no space, it has infinite density, and with infinite density it has infinite energy. And so the universe is born, but fortunately now that we have space, those little virtual particles dont mean so much now, but we are still thankful they are around.
At least that is my own private speculation on the creation of the universe, and its compliant with the laws of physics without requiring the existence of any gods to assist the process.
The problem with Step 3 is its unnecessary constraint that has no purpose and does not constitute a formal premise for a proof:
Step 3, which is misrepresented, does not say what Juliet says it said. Since the person, who can not overturn step 1 or 2, then tries to argue for something else, they try to argue against the attributes of some god, which is not the attributes of God of the Bible. Do you see how this is disingenuous? As the minimal facts approach is concerned, this proof does not care about other gods, but is merely proving God of the Bible, so if you want to put forth an argument, address it against God of the Bible and not trying to dispute some god.
So far, the argument for god looks like this:
Step 1) The universe is finite
Step 2) Everything which has a beginning has a cause
Step 3) Please dont talk about any other gods apart from the Christian God
Step 4) Therefore god exists
Your constraint in Step 3 is meaningless, because its perfectly conceivable that god exists, but the very specific and particular Christian God does not exist. Steps 1 and 2 could be true and prove the existence of God, but they even constraining all discussion of your proof to the Christian God doesnt actually make the Christian God more plausible than all the others; the constraint is irrelevant. A deistic conception of God could be correct, where the deistic god (for some reason or another) creates the universe and abandons it to move along at its own devices, where the existence of humans is merely an unintended consequence of creation. God could create the universe without making human beings into a special creation, or even caring about humans or knowing about them at all, and it would be completely consistent with your first two steps in your proof.
The constraint that we should only talk about the Christian God is artificial, and if you were trying to prove any other god, you could use the exact same arguments to prove the truth of every religion, so long as you changed Step 3 ever-so-slightly so that a critic is only permitted to talk about whatever god another wants.
Finally, Step 4 is just another example of irrelevance:
Once the person appreciates step 3, they provide their one last stand at the ok corral-Step 4. They say, well why can't there be gods created gods for an eternity of the past so that your God is created also? This is just an offshoot of step 1, but instead of dealing with things in nature, it proposes gods created gods in the supernatural to explain our existence. This violates the principle proven in step 1 which say if there was an eternity of the past of cause and effects, whomever the constituents are, you still would have had an eternity to be perfected due to our observation today of the exponential progression cited. Try yourself to think of some more examples of exponential progression of our conscience in the saved. Note the unsaved do not want to change so that is why hell is created. In eternity hell takes care of them, and Juliet.
You havent actually connected the creation of the universe or any other gods with the creation of humans; there is no contradiction between there is an infinite regress of gods who have created each other, but humans were only created recently in history rather than created an infinitely long time ago.
What seems like a perfect proof to you is actually an extremely poor, non-academic proof that could easily be mistaken for a parody. You need to seriously address the problems in Steps 1, 2, 3, and 4, because it fails to stand under its own weight, otherwise you will have taken the almost elegantly written Kalam argument and mangled it beyond theological repair. You do not have a proof of god, and definitely not a proof of the Christian god.
However, after you restated your proof, you wrote the following:
Such God would necessitate His mercy and that mercy is revealed when Jesus entered into creation to die on the cross for your sins to give you eternal life if you were willing to receive it. None compare to the love of Christ, He said He is God and proved it, fulfilling 62 prophecies (probabilities less than 1 in a trillion for any mortal man to get lucky), surrounding 40 writers over 1500 years, in a historical-religio context, showing God's redemptive design, and the apostles died for testifying to His resurrection and ascension. The resurrection of Christ is unique and best testified. No person is more well documented in antiquity. There are 42 writers, both Christian and non-Christian speaking of Jesus in the first 150 years of his death. This far outweighs the number of writers about the Emperor of Rome who died 11 years after Jesus died by a margin of 4 to 1. Skeptics have no considerable valid explanation against Jesus being God.
If it means anything to you at all, I wanted to get my degree in New Testament history (however many odd things lead to others, and I earned degrees in Business/Finance instead), so I know about the history of the bible, when it was written, and so on, and I'm 100% positive I know more about the bible than you do. Long story story short, here are some facts to digest:
- Israelites did not exist anytime before 1000 BC, and didnt begin to write down their stories until 900 BC.
- We dont know how any of the apostles died, apart from Judas. The martyrdom of the apostles is something of an extra-biblical addition that isnt actually recorded in the bible or history, so much as it circulated by word of mouth until it became "accepted" as a fact.
- We dont know anything about the life of Christ. We are fairly certain he existed, but his life is completely lost in myth and legend. Was he a good person who preached that people should humble themselves to God? Probably. Did he feed 5000 people with a few fish and two loaves of bread? Probably not. Was he crucified as a political criminal? Probably. Did he reanimate from the dead and begin preaching to people in the streets? Probably not.
The supernatural elements of Jesus' life make it so difficult to believe. 2000 years ago, people were very superstitious, and they lived in a world where the supernatural was readily observable and obvious. You think that, with all the technology we have now, if the supernatural used to be so plainly evident to people without the aid of scientific instruments, then surely we could detect the supernatural even more readily with instruments!...
... but we dont. Precisely the opposite: the more we study the universe, and the more sensitive our scientific instruments become, we see the universe is really a system of interacting mathematical equations. Billions of experiments are performed every year, some with the expressed purpose of uncovering psychic and supernatural powers, but not even once have we reliably observed any instance of the supernatural. From the point of view of skeptic, its very difficult to believe that the records of Jesus's miracles and displays of the supernatural are actually genuine or even happened at all, simply because the growing implausibility of supernatural powers.
- The most respected, mainstream scholars believe that Jesus existed, but that his life is exaggerated by a few zealous followers. If you want to know more about the historical Jesus, and certainly learn a lot more than you would learn reading second-rate apologetics all day, go to your library and pick up A Marginal Jew by John P Meier, The Historical Jesus by Gerd Theissen, The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan, and for a little more background on the development of the bible its worth the time to read Truth and Fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox.
I honestly dont expect you pick up any of those, but I would really appreciate it if you knew a little more about your religion. Believe me, I've seen the pattern of belief a million times, and you are just a textbook example of someone who believed the bible was true long before you even had the faintest idea of why you thought it was true or even knew about it from an academic point of view.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but you're just a garden-variety fundamentalist who believes first and tries to prove later, essentially no different from the fundamentalists of every other religion who do the exact same thing, and you're beliefs are no better off than theirs. Jesus fulfilled just as many prophecies as Mohammed, and there is no argument that you can provide to disprove that claim. Why? Because you're making categorical statements without qualifying them, and there is fundamentally no reason to prefer your categorical statements above a Muslims unqualified categorical statements about his own religion.
Of course, if you're like me, then it should be fairly evident that all the gods of religion are false. They are made in the image of man, put man in the center of the universe, and give man an special place above any other animal; these kinds of gods are so obviously manmade fictions that they just cannot be believed. Even worse, the moral prescriptions these gods make are so completely naive (I could give a long long long list of naive morals if you like) that they just cannot come from a being who presumably has all the knowledge, all the wisdom, and the most perfect morals of any being in the universe; but it makes perfect sense if those naive moral commands come from egocentric, superstitious humans. A god might exist, but he certainly doesnt look like the gods of any religion.
Alright, I think I've said all I've felt like saying. Also, I'm an admin/mod at [removed forum], feel free to stop by and talk to me some more if you feel like it :)
Best wishes!
Juliet
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Originally Posted by Juliet
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