Churchwork,
Usually, I like to respond to posts in full, but your 14 lengthy replies are too much (I have a day job and a life outside of the internet). It would take me literally days to compile a thorough reply to everything, so in the interest of time saving, I'm going to reduce down your comments to something more manageable.
On the whole, your 4-step proof is a cosmological argument, and although it really has 4 steps, it can be condensed into two blocks:
1) The cosmological argument, described in steps 1 and 2, to prove that a god exists.
2) The superlative information, described elsewhere on your site, to show that the god is the Christian god.
(Steps 3 and 4 are really just pre-rebuttals to critics, not entirely necessary for your proof.)
Thats all it really is, and from the abstract point of view, that style of argumentation isnt much different from the arguments that apologists have been using for centuries. But from the technical point of view, your arguments in the cosmological block are just bizarre, and from the superlative block they arent academic.
There is at least one comment I want to address upfront:
I was Southern Baptist for 20 years, more or less devout. I used my time at college as a spiritual journey, in the hopes that learning more and more about religion would make me a better Christian, so I learned about my religion, learned philosophy, learned mathematics.Originally Posted by Churchwork
Shortly afterward, I figured out that "Faith" stopped being a rational justification for belief, because every religious person has faith in their own religions, but not all religious beliefs are equally plausible. Without faith, my only two rational avenues of belief were science and philosophy. Looking toward science, I couldnt find any room for god, for miracles, or the supernatural; looking toward philosophy, I couldnt even define the properties of god (well I could, but I couldnt justify them), and stripping away all of the properties of god that I couldnt justify, I was left with nothing. Atheism was just the end of the road of my spiritual journey.
But you're wrong, I dont like living "in sin". If you'd ever seen my posts on other forums, you'd know that I'm extremely principled and morally motivated:
- I became a vegan in '99 out of principle, in the interest of protecting animals' rights, even when theres no legal consequence for murdering them for the most trivial gains. [removed advertising to your own forums].
- [removed advertising to your own forums] even when theres no legal consequence for ignoring others' misery and suffering.
- To the best of my ability, [removed advertising to your own forums] even when its so much more convenient and cheap for me to save a dollar at the expense of others.
I dont think I come off as a person who loves to live in sin, I go far far out of my way and inconvience myself to an extreme, just so I can minimize the harm I cause to feeling beings, because its the right thing to do. God has nothing to do with it.
So to start, I'll address your cosmological argument:
Step 1: The universe has a beginning.
My initial problem with your argument was that you havent connected the existence of humans to the age of the universe, because theres no contradiction in saying that human existence is finite but the universe is infinite. Your reply was bizarre, with two major problems:
How are humans intrinsically connected to the age of the universe?
How is moral progress intrinsically connected to the age of the universe?
I'll explain what I mean in detail below:
While that might sound good to you, its not logically sound. Its a variant of an undistributed middle fallacy that logicians call a composition fallacy, meaning that you deduce facts about a whole object based on its constituent parts. "X is made of Y. Y has property P. Therefore X has property P."
If you arent sure why your argument is wrong, here are some logically equivalent arguments:
- You are made of atoms
- Atoms are unconscious
- Therefore you are unconscious
^^^ the argument above is demonstrably false, because you are indeed a conscious being. You have a different set of properties than your component parts.
Another simple example:
- You are made of cells
- Cells reproduce by folding their membranes into a cleavage until they divide into two identical cells.
- Therefore you reproduce by folding your membranes into a cleaveage until you divide into an identical copy of yourself.
^^^ another mindboggling argument that is demonstrably false, because your sexual reproduction is nothing like asexual cell reproduction, which shows that you do not necessarily possess the properties of your component parts.
Of course, theres something else to take into consideration, and its dives into a little more abstract* realm of philosophy related to being and essence, specifically talking about emergent properties. An emergent property is a property of an object that does not exist in any of its constituent parts, for example all of the pixels on your computer screen are just points of light, but when they are put together in a particular pattern they form a picture; the property "picture" is an emergent property of the pixels. Similarly, something that is musical (any song on the radio) is composed of notes, but the property "musical" isnt a property of any single note...
...with that in mind, you really have to wonder if humans composed of star dust are really "intrinsically connected to the universe". I dont think you could look at star dust and call it a human; the elements that stars create are just elements, and those elements have to be arranged in a certain pattern before it can be called a human. The property "human" emerges from that pattern, and the property "human" never existed in the universe before that time.
So by now, you should understand why that rebuttal is no good, you havent shown that sinfulness of humans is connected to the beginning of the universe, its only connected to the beginning of the human species.
* Emergence is "abstract" because its defined mostly in semantics, and that makes distinctions between emergent properties and their constituent parts very blurry sometimes. See the Sorites paradox for a little more detailed explanation.
The second problem has to do with how exactly you deduced that moral progress really actually inherits from form to form. You said this:
The question begging is glaring, gaping, and almost taunting ;) Theres no explanation for why a being inherits all of the moral virtues from its previous incarnations (<--- oh my, that sounds a lot like hindu reincarnation!), as opposed to each incarnation being created completely new without inheriting any of its predecessors moral characteristics.
If I understand your argument correct, it should imply the following: given that humans are made from parts of the universe, then their moral characteristics are intrinsically connected to the universe. That means, when a human dies, decomposes, and their nutrients nourish other plants and animals, those plants and animals inherit all of the moral progress from the human, and animals would clearly exhibit the properties of a moral human...
... but, that is nonsense. The moral characteristics a human has are not etched into the fabric of the universe, at least not in an eternal sense; the moral characteristics of humans exist in the structures of their brains, and when their brains are destroyed, so are those moral characteristics, so those characteristics have no possible way of transferring to another being simply by recreating that being from a humans remains. This probably explains why a person cannot "become keen like the crow" just by eating crow, or other stereotypical native america beliefs.
In this case, your whole proof rests on a very bizarre explanation of how we progress morally, it apparently states that the moral characteristics of people are preserved across forms just by recreating new forms from old ones, which we already know is false.
Of course, there are three more related problems in Step 1:
How do you calculate moral progress?
How do you prove all progress is upward?
How do you prove all progress is really progressive rather than regressive
Another issue that you've never addressed is exactly how you deduced that human beings would progress to a sinless state given an infinite amount of time. You used the concept of a limit, however your comments that "humans would have been created approximates eternity itself (as calculus teaches)" tell me that you really dont have a good understanding of even high school level pre-calculus. Why? Because not all limits tend to infinity.
The main problem with you argument that "we would have had an eternity to be perfected" is that you dont state how you calculated anything. Whats the equation for measuring moral progress?
As far as I'm concerned, you're stating that whatever calculation you're using tends toward infinity, but you havent shown you're work. For all I know, the calculation could be a convergent series, or it may not exist.
A very simple example, if we imagine the moral progress as the sum of all previous moral progression, and we can state that each year we progress morally by a factor of (1/3)^n (where n is the year), then we have something like this:
The example above should be self-explanatory if you actually have more than high school introduction to calculus, in that even having an eternity to perfect a being at an exponential rate doesnt imply being sinless. So, I'd just like to see whatever math you performed to arrive at your conclusion. Until then, you havent shown that morality actually drifts unward toward infinity rather than converging on some real number.Code:Final term in series: limit (1/3)^n = 0 n = infinity Moral progression: infinity __ 1 \ (1/3)^n = ------- = 1.5 /_ 1-(1/3) n = 0
Another problem I've noticed is the fact that you havent shown that all moral progress is upward. Its not obvious that all progress is an upward direction, I'd heavily argue that most progress is random walk. Our progress could be completely aimless for eternity, always oscillating between varying degrees of righteousness and abomination. We might then imagine that moral progress is a different kind of exponential growth:
(The function above looks something like this, which to me looks like a stock chart.)Code:infinity __ f(x) = \ ( (a^n) * cos( (b^n) * (pi * x) ) ) /_ n = 0
The function above is defined at every point and continous, where -infinity < f(x) < infinity for each point on f(x), but it doesnt have a limit (it doesnt even have a first derivative ;) ). You havent really provided a reason why moral progress drifts in an upward direction toward infinity, and I dont think you've explained why it drifts upward at all, rather than drifting aimlessly (<--- note: the function above does not drift "aimless", but I'm using the term loosely.)
You havent provided an explanation for why we are being perfected, rather than just modified in trivial and apparently random ways.
While you say that there are definite strides in moral progress, I dont think you've actually questioned that they really are progressive. For example, in 1850, women and non-whites had a diminished percieved value, and certainly there are a number of people from 1850 who would argue that women in the workplace and equality between the races is actually indicative of moral decline where you would call it progress. Similarly, we can take the acceptance of homosexuality in the mainstream as both moral progress or moral decline, depending on who we ask (if you ask me, its progress, but if you ask James Dobson then its decline).
I am not arguing for subjectivism, however its just not clear to me how you define progress. Theres no real indication that our society is more progressive than any previous generation.
Of course, theres something else you've overlooked: when you say that we'll become morally perfected over the course of eternity, how is that even possible? In principle, it sounds ok, but in practice is limited by quirks in psychology:
Human minds cannot store an infinite amount of data.
The limit of moral progress to infinity is measurably less than infinity.
Human beings are very diverse, not a homogenous whole. Some people are just very ignorant or just very uncaring, and their moral choices will reflect their ignorant and uncaring minds. Theres no obvious argument that, given an infinite amount of time, because quite simply, people are born as blank slates, and it is impossible to accumulate the total sum of all the moral values stretching back to eternity. There is and will always be room for ignorance, and we can never purge that out of society, it may not even be possible to achieve moral perfection by your definition in the first place, even if we make the presumption that moral progress tends upwards. We may be constrained by a ceiling, where over time we get closer and closer to perfection, where we are 99% perfect, then 99.99% perfect, then 99.999999% perfect and so on.
At the very least, you might be thinking that you show that 99.999(repeating)% = 100% using a simple geometric series, but that would make the presumption that ignorance can be partitioned into infinitely tiny parts, but that would also make the dubious presumption that minds can hold an infinite amount of data. But more importantly, some forms of ignorance, such as the mind of a newborn child who has no moral knowledge at all, cannot be partitioned at all; their ignorance is discrete, and the most morally perfect society can only achieve (100 - ignorance of one child)% perfection.
The aforementioned reasons provide a good explanation of why your principle that people will tend toward perfection given an infinite amount of time are, at best, an idealistic fantasy, but not obtainable in the real world due to some practical limitations of mind and psychology. It would only be achievable in a hypothetical world where all beings are born with an infinite amount of data already in their heads, which I hope you would agree is impossible.
At the very least, your method of proving that the universe has a beginning, based on the methods you outlined, need serious reconsideration. I was generous enough in my last post to provide an explanation of how the universe is finite, based on the fact that heat death is inevitable, but you replied that its not known whether the universe is a closed system. I admit that we really cant know with a great amount of certainty, because there are other models of the universe, such as multiverse and string theories, that do not imply a heat death, but at the moment we dont have a lot of evidence for those theories, we dont know if they are true or not. The best model of the universe, General Relativity, is observed directly, so at the very least its justified to be more partial to GR than the other theories, and justified to be more partial to the implications of GR such as the eventual heat death. However, if you reject GR and other sciences as a method for proving its finititude, and substituting your own "limit of moral progress to eternity" method, then you cant prove that the universe is finite for the reasons I've already explained above.
So, I have to reiterate: your Step 1, that attempts to show that universe has a beginning, is not wrong per se, but just your way of showing that the universe has a beginning doesnt work. There are too many unaddressed issues in Step 1, such as how you calculate moral progress, how you define moral progress, how you determine that progress is an an upward direction, how you determine that the upward direction tends towards infinity, how you respond to the people who believe that we are actually on a moral decline, and finally you need to explain how moral characteristics are transferred and conserved between forms rather than recreated anew. You have only proven that humans have sinned for a finite amount of time, and nothing more.
Step 2: "The universe has a cause."
At the very least, I think the claim that the universe has a cause might be the strongest argument for theism, however that argument would have had a lot more persuasive force 500 years ago than it does today, simply because of the leaps and bounds in scientific progress we've made. The claim "everything has a cause" isnt as obviously true as it used to be. I provided two reasons, a theological reason (namely that free will is not bound by the rules of determinism), and a scientific reason (namely the fact that scientific determinism breaks down at the quantum level).
Unfortunately, you didnt reply to my argument at all. My argument was that the process of free will is not bound by determinism, which falsifies Step 2; my argument said nothing about the origin of free will. So essentially, you changed the subject and replied to something I never said, then preceded to say that my original argument was false.Because all things have a prior cause including free-will, this poses no problem for the fact that God created. The free-will cause is that God made us in His image and since God is uncreated, this is acceptable. The finding is that the uncreated is the only thing that does not need to be caused since all things in creation are caused.
God did not create evil, but those beings that existed chose to be evil. God did not force them to be that way, they chose it. Similarly, in God foreseeing all events does not infringe on our free-will. We still choose. To set in motion events is not to pre-program robots, but to allow the free-will to choose freely to receive God or not. God predestinates by foreknowing (Rom. 8.29) our free-choice (John 3.16, see Abel's free-will offering).
There are two kinds of predestination. One is false, one is true. The one that is false is the kind you describe which is under calvinism. Calvinism is not Christianity. God's way of salvation is to predestinate us by foreknowing our free-choice: a conditional election, unlimited atonement, resistible grace, for preservation of the saints. This is called OSAS Arminian.
So as we see here your argument failed you.
As I was never talking about the origin of free will or where it comes from, but rather the process of actually making free choices, your rebuttal amounts to nothing.
So, I must reiterate, you stated, "nothing in nature happens all by itself, there is always a cause and an effect", and if you believe that people make genuinely free choices (which are not explicable by the rules of determinism), then free will choices are obviously the exception to the rule that all events have a cause and effect, so your statement is false. In fact, you conceded this fact yourself, in your very own words, you said, "Similarly, in God foreseeing all events does not infringe on our free-will. We still choose.", so are free will choices actually determined or not? If not, then Step 2 is false, just as I said it was in the beginning.
Your reply to my scientific argument was weak, because you insisted that the trillions of events that have a cause and effect implies that everything has a cause and effect. However, that statement isnt true in a technical sense, simply because we have two seperate theories in physics that describe movement in the universe: general relativity referring to the movement of matter and bodies of matter, and quantum mechanics referring to the movement of particles smaller than matter. The first one is what we see everyday, and its deterministic; the second one may not be deterministic.
You spend all your time focusing on the trillions of cause and effects on the macroscopic world, but you completely ignore all of the trillions of acausal events in the quantum world. In fact, we have a whole branch of science called quantum mechanics which studies these acausal phenomena, formally called quantum indeterminancy. You come across this phenomenon everytime you come in contact with any substance that goes through radioactive decay (on the long-term scale, this would be C-14 decaying into its daughter elements, on the short-term scale this would be phosphorescent paint where the light emitted is a byproduct of decay). For a long time, the process of radioactive decay was very confusing for scientists, because it didnt appear to be a deterministic process, refer to this article on the subject; the decay of atoms isnt correlated to anything, the radiation is more or less the same no matter what the temperature of the substance or its interactions with other substances. In all conditions, and in all tests, a substance will decay with the same rate; however, interestingly, it is not possible to point to any single atom and state that it will decay or not over a half life with more than a 50% certainty (which indistinguishable from chance). And famously, the movement of electrons whizzing around a nucleous appears indeterministic, because as we all know from the uncertainty principle, there is no way to determine the exact position and momentum of an electron simultaneously.
At the very least, its worth mentioning that quantum physics need not be necessarily indeterministic, see the wikipedia article on the subject:
Of course, the above statement has an interesting consequence with respect to the first cause problem:Even before the laws of quantum mechanics were fully developed, the phenomenon of radioactivity posed a challenge to determinism. A gram of uranium-238, a commonly occurring radioactive substance, contains some 2.5 x 1021 atoms. By all tests known to science these atoms are identical and indistinguishable. Yet about 12600 times a second one of the atoms in that gram will decay, giving off an alpha particle. This decay does not depend on external stimulus and no extant theory of physics predicts when any given atom will decay, with realistically obtainable knowledge. The uranium found on earth is thought to have been synthesized during a supernova explosion that occurred roughly 5 billion years ago. For determinism to hold, every uranium atom must contain some internal "clock" that specifies the exact time it will decay. And somehow the laws of physics must specify exactly how those clocks were set as each uranium atom was formed during the supernova collapse.
Exposure to alpha radiation can cause cancer. For this to happen, at some point a specific alpha particle must alter some chemical reaction in a cell in a way that results in a mutation. Since molecules are in constant thermal motion, the exact timing of the radioactive decay that produced the fatal alpha particle matters. If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events, such as whether a person who could have been historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time.
The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time.
[image here]
So quantum mechanics is deterministic, provided that one accepts the wave function itself as reality (rather than as probability of classical coordinates). Since we have no practical way of knowing the exact magnitudes, and especially the phases, in a full quantum mechanical description of the causes of an observable event, this turns out to be philosophically similar to the "hidden variable" doctrine. [...]
Asserting that quantum mechanics is deterministic by treating the wave function itself as reality implies a single wave function for the entire universe, starting at the big bang.
- The first being, that if quantum physics is indeterminstic, then at the very least, the beginning of the universe is acausal but also compliant with the laws of physics. I explained this in a little more detail in my last post.
- The second being, that if quantum physics is really deterministic, and that it is described by the Schrodinger equation, then the universe doesnt need a cause at all, at least not in the explicit sense. The fabric of the universe is a consequence of mathematics, and the energies which fluctuate, including the energies that give rise to those virtual particles, are just a consequence of mathematics; the universe would be no more "caused" than any of the other rules of mathematics. In every possible universe, it is true that pi =
The rules of math are necessarily true, they dont need a creator. The universe then, starting from the beginning where it had no space or time, basically a 0-D point, came to exist because the principles of mathematics are necessarily true. God cannot create necessary states of affairs; If you'd like a partial explanation for why this is relevance, there is a short blurb in this article which discusses omnipotence and necessary objects:Code:pi = 4 - 3/4 + 5/4 - 7/4 + ... infinity __ (n*2 + 1)^(-1^n) pi = 4 + \ ---------------- /_ 4 n = 1
The rules of mathematics obtain whether or not God exists or not, and that includes the mathematics that gave rise to the universe in the first place.One sense of ‘omnipotence’ is, literally, that of having the power to bring about any state of affairs whatsoever, including necessary and impossible states of affairs. Descartes seems to have had such a notion (Meditations, Section 1). Yet, Aquinas and Maimonides held the view that this sense of ‘omnipotence’ is incoherent. Their view can be defended as follows. It is not possible for an agent to bring about an impossible state of affairs (e.g., that there is a shapeless cube), since if it were, it would be possible for an impossible state of affairs to obtain, which is a contradiction (see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, 25, 3; and Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part I, Ch. 15). Nor is it possible for an agent to bring about a necessary state of affairs (e.g., that all cubes are shaped). It is possible for an agent, a, to bring about a necessary state of affairs, s, only if possibly, (1) a brings about s, and (2) if a had not acted, then s would have failed to obtain. Because a necessary state of affairs obtains whether or not anyone acts, (2) is false. As a consequence, it is impossible for an agent to bring about either a necessary or an impossible state of affairs.
Just as I said originally, the statement "everything has a cause" is very intuitional, but you still havent shown that its true. You merely state that its true without going through the rigors of proving it scientifically, you dont show any of the math you used to arrive at your position (in fact, given that you dont even have a good understanding of calculus, I dont think you even could). This is a profound weakness in your argument, something you never address any further than your own intuitional introspection.
Of course, all of this is on top of the initial issue I brought up regarding virtual particles. If we accept that the Schrodinger equation is true, then the origin of virtual particles becomes obvious: they are pertubations in the fabric of space, described by mathematics. The rules of mathemathics need no creator, and as the whole quantum universe is just a sea of mathematical equations, then the origin of the universe is unspectacular, its just math. The univese was no more "created" than the rules of math.
If the Schroding equation is true, then the existence of the universe is necessary, not contingent, so the existence of the universe would obtain whether God exists or not.
So, this ends my rebuttal to the cosmological block of your proof. By no means is my reply comprehensive, but I simply dont have the time or endurance to write out 14 lengthy posts. I think it should be evident that your cosmological argument isnt persuasive because you're just a laymen, with an extremely limited math background and extremely limited scientific knowledge, and you make a seemingly endless number of presumptuous remarks that undermine the entire proof process; you need to seriously reconsider your argument from the ground up.
Of course, we both know that even if the cosmological argument is true, stating that the universe has a cause does not prove that Jesus walked on water, so a further reply about the veracity of Christianity is necessary on top of the rebuttal against the cosmological argument.
However, out of all that I've written above, I want you to specifically notice at least one sentence I've written:"the existence of the universe is necessary, not contingent, so the existence of the universe would obtain whether God exists or not."That statement does not rule out the existence of God. The universe can exist necessarily, but God can exist and Christianity can be true as well. For this reason, I've only disproved your cosmological argument (that is, if you accept my arguments as valid), but I've not disproved the rest of your proof that Christianity is true.
For that reason, I will write an additional reply in my next post, and I will respond to your specific claims about the historical accuracy of the Bible. Please do not reply to this post until I have completed my second post. I will continue my rebuttal tomorrow.
(Oh, and by the way, I searched for Habermas's book that you've recommended, and I was unable to find it at my library. Instead I found a book called Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality, which I looked through briefly, but it didnt look like it had any relevant information that you mentioned, so I didnt bother to pick it up. I will try another library tomorrow.)
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks