God Or No God?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Religion, Science
MSNBC has a great debate between a Christian and an Atheist. The whole thing is well worth the read, but I wonder if many Christians can agree with this summation…
I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it. When I look at history, I would disagree with Sam: Christianity has done far more good than bad. Altruism comes out of knowing there is more than this life, that there is a sovereign God, that I am not God. We’re both betting. He’s betting his life that he’s right. I’m betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he’s right, I’ve lost nothing. If I’m right, he’s lost everything. I’m not willing to make that gamble.
Yes, the “better safe than sorry” argument. No doubt it’s compelling. Eternal damnation or being wrong for, at most, a hundred years.
But the question I’d like to pose is can faith and reason truly coexist? And furthermore, is altruism really borne from religion as the quote above suggests or has it simply been mandated by religion?
Some heady stuff for later on in the day, but let’s get talking.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 and is filed under Religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:05 pm
hmmm. pascal’s delusion rears its ugly head once again. i hate when it does that.
“better safe than sorry” pretty much contradicts the whole point of faith, the way i see it. if that is your reasoning… so quote another famous mortal… you’ve already lost.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Yes, the “better safe than sorry� argument. No doubt it’s compelling. Eternal damnation or being wrong for, at most, a hundred years.
There’s even a newly coined term for this sort of thinking: “post-normal science”. Evidently both Left and Right are equally comfortable with it; see also GWB’s case for war in Iraq, and the global warming folks.
Getting back to Justin’s question, it seems to me that faith reinforces altruism and morality; it is not the source of those things.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Pascal’s wager isn’t all that compelling an argument. What happens if Zeus turns out to be the “real” deity? - then Christians might find themselves in more trouble than atheists
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:12 am
I remember reading about some studies that suggest that altruism actually has a level survival merit for the species, so those behaviors may very well be caused by genetics and evolution rather than by any religious source. Of course religious beliefs and customs predate Christianity (and even Judaism) by many millenia, so even if altruism’s source is religious in nature, the claim that Christianity somehow brought it about is silly. Of course if our government actually provided the services it should be providing in a consistent and efficient manner, altruism and charitable giving would not be the only means by which homeless people avoid starvation on the streets.
I would agree with Joshua’s point that for many people faith can reinforce altruism and “morality,” though I believe that buzzword is vague enough to have a broad spectrum of meanings for many people. Some believe it is more immoral to drive a Hummer than to get a humjob, others believe that homosexuality is worse than murdering a young girl for “allowing” herself to be raped, and still others believe that dealing with poverty and homelessness is more important than trying to ban gay marriage and abortion. Claiming that some overarching “morality” is an absolute truism is naive at best and ignores both the history and the sociology of the human species. The morality of the bible is spotty at best, what with practically every other page contradicting its own teachings, and commonplace barbaric practices that today would earn you a lifetime prison sentence.
About the only positive social effect I believe religion provides is that it is a means by which the masses are indoctrinated into a somewhat socially acceptable moral behavioral pattern, but it is not the only means by which this can be accomplished, and I would contend that both the method used and the flavor of “morality” which Christianity espouses are socially and societally damaging.
I would also completely disagree with the contention that Christianity has done more good than bad in its history…by several orders of magnitude. The source, or at least a contributing factor to almost every war in Europe for hundreds of years, I would be willing to bet that more deaths have occurred due to Christianity than all other religions combined (note I count Islam as being a Christian faith, though it is more of an unwanted stepchild).
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:25 am
[...] God is under the microscope (so to speak) at both Donklephant and Good Will Hinton. [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:06 am
Justin, I am about to reveal to you the secret of the universe, get ready:
You are the only conscious entity in existence. Thats right, I as well as everyone you have ever known is merely an unthinking, unfeeling automaton in the simulation that is your life. No other human being has thoughts or feelings except you. We are all like video-game characters in a complex software system with no self-awareness, yet we are programmed to trick you into believing that we are just like you. As soon as one of your “friends” or “family members” moves out of your field of vision, he ceases to exist. You can measure “brain waves” on some monitor or whatever, but it proves nothing, you see, because its all part of the program. Its only numerical data for your perception. No one else has thoughts, feelinings or self awareness except you.
You think I’m wrong? … prove it. Prove it to yourself! You simply cannot.
Of course this is all nonsense, but the only reason it is so is because all of us have faith that other people exist besides ourselves. We can only reasonably measure everyone elses behavior which compells us to have faith that everyone else must have thoughts and feelings such as ourselves.
Similarly, if one were to look at the majesty that is the natural world, and the grand concept of the human experience, one most certainly can come to a reasonable conclusion that there is a creative force behind it, although no subjective science can be used to prove it.
Thats why athiests are stupid. Much like the solopsist I described above.
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:09 am
Jimmy the Dhimmi, I can see other people; gods, however, are as imaginary as ghosts or leprechauns.
And yes, Pascal’s wager is worthless. For example, if the Jews are right, non-Jews are expected to follow the 7 laws given to Noah — atheists can follow them, but Christians violate the first law (idolatry) by worshipping a man as god.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
calling atheists “stupid” does little to make people want to take you seriously.
if we need only “reasonably” measure… then define “reasonable”.
besides. you misspelled “atheist”. which, one could argue, given all the evidence on how to spell it correctly, makes you stupid.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Pardon me, it appears that Dan is the only conscious entity in the universe.
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
i suppose you knew that. since you cannot prove otherwise.
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
“We’re both betting. He’s betting his life that he’s right. I’m betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he’s right, I’ve lost nothing. If I’m right, he’s lost everything.”
Sounds rather more like Schroedinger’s cat experiment to me, but that is just an aside.
I am an atheist. Yes, I am “betting” that I am right. But I am not wagering my life on it. It is my death that will reveal the truth.
That being the case it really matters not to me which side of the argument is right. The worst that can happen is I am wrong and the damnation of my eternal soul to the pits of fire and brimstone. I am sufficiently secure in my belief of what happens after death that I have no reason to fear that fate.
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:52 pm
dan - Pascal’s wager is not a statement of faith. It is a statement of game theory. The man did do a lot of mathematics in his day.
Joshua - There’s nothing unscientific about game theory nor the fact that faith is the optimal answer if you choose to order your spiritual life by the rules of game theory and you find your options to be christianity or atheism.
Adam - I think that dead religions are pretty much presumed to be in error. The Greek pantheon’s out of the running as a serious candidate for the way things ultimately work.
sleipner - I think that Christians would claim that God, not christianity brought about altruism. To the extent that christianity does anything decent it is when it is functioning properly as a tool to implement God’s plan.
Jimmy the Dhimmi - While entertaining as a theory, I certainly would have a better car, more obedient children, and a more interesting job if I were in charge of it all.
probligo - You’re missing the point because it’s rendered in christian shorthand. It makes much more sense that “life” = eternal life after death which is how christians usually mean the phrase.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Just a quick note to Sleipner:
When I help the homeless, it’s charity by choice. When the government does it, it’s charity by force–considering they’re using my tax dollars. I’m not against government assistance programs, but I do think charity by choice is a lot more admirable than charity by force.
April 4th, 2007 at 3:56 am
The better safe than sorry argument works for most religions. However Atheism has one fundamental flaw in that it’s followers have convinced themselves that Atheism is not a religion. Since atheism is in fact the belief that a universal negative exists (in this case meaning that there is no being that exists anywhere in the entire universe that conforms to the nature of any deity worshiped on this planet, ever).
Since is currently impossible for anyone on this planet to occupy all of space/time individually let alone simultaneously it is impossible to prove that no deity exists or has ever existed.
When it boils down to it agnosticism is the only logical point of view in that one admits that they cannot personally prove or disprove either belief.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:20 am
“You’re missing the point because it’s rendered in christian shorthand. It makes much more sense that “lifeâ€Â? = eternal life after death which is how christians usually mean the phrase.”
Not at all, dear chap. “Eternal life” as such is the product being sold. It is the balm for the fear of death. It is the elixir of the unknown.
I have no fear of death, it is a natural and inescapable consequence of living. There is nothing afterward. Of stardust we are made, to stardust we return.
On the question of altruism, I suspect that it be the remnant of a cooperative strategy that led to the survival (initially) and intellectual evolution of our species. Does “altruism” exist in other species? Yes, most apes have altruistic strategies, most especially the chimpanzee and bonobo. Meerkats cooperate in the raising of the young of the alpha pair, and in the protection of the ‘tribe’. Does that mean that bonobos or meerkats have a religion?
April 4th, 2007 at 7:57 am
TM - i’m very much aware that it is a statement of math and not faith. but the very nature of faith precludes it. faith requires that you truly believe. but if you go with one idea simply because it’s got a better shot at winning… and not because you believe wholeheartedly in the reasons… and as far as my experience with christianity has told me, not out of love… then you’ve already subverted the point of “faith”.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Frankly, Dyre, most “atheists” that I have talked to are generally far more convinced that the world’s religions are full of crap than they are worried about the existence or non-existence of a “supreme being,” I personally consider myself an agnostic bordering on atheism specifically because of that point, but “atheist” rolls off the tongue quicker and gets the point across faster.
That having been said, postulating that an omnipotent, omnipresent being of some sort is out there, watching and manipulating everything everyone does and yet is completely undetectable in either action or communication does fall to the cutting room floor pretty quickly when Occam’s razor is applied. If any sort of “superior being” exists to humanity (granted that’s not too difficult), I would be far more likely to believe its origin was a highly advanced alien civilization than a “creator of the universe.” However, I try to remain open to the idea that, unlikely as it seems, the chanting mysics might be right and I just am too dense to detect the bits-o-god that are floating all around me all the time.
Alan - charity by choice is wonderful, and I’m sure it gives you the warm fuzzies inside (especially when it comes around to tax deduction time). However, when times are hard and charitable giving is down everywhere, are poor people supposed to just starve for a while til you can afford to give those checks to your church again? What happened to the idea that it is society’s responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves? Isn’t that a christian ideal? I remember Jesus spent a lot more time talking about that sort of thing than he did about homosexuality or abortion (i.e. not at all)
April 4th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
“However Atheism has one fundamental flaw in that it’s followers have convinced themselves that Atheism is not a religion. Since atheism is in fact the belief that a universal negative exists (in this case meaning that there is no being that exists anywhere in the entire universe that conforms to the nature of any deity worshiped on this planet, ever). “
- Dyre42
Taking the widest general application the first sentence is probably right. I do not agree that atheism is a belief in “a universal negative” in the way that you express it. It would be far more appropriate to make the comparison with the value of “zero” in mathematics and the consternation that proposition caused in the fields of formal mathematics when it was first introduced. If I pull that idea a little harder, agnosticism becomes comparable to the square root of -1. It has a “value” but no one really can express what it might be.
“…most “atheistsâ€Â? that I have talked to are generally far more convinced that the world’s religions are full of crap than they are worried about the existence or non-existence of a “supreme being,â€Â?
- Sleipner
I have to admit that was pretty much where I started from, Sleipner. After several years (perhaps some 25 or 30) of fretting about “religious validity” I began developing the impression that in fact the dogma and systems of any religion (including atheism) were no more than the “illusion” the Bhuddists attach to the universe.
To that extent “religion” could perhaps be defined as the formal collection of people holding similar faith and belief in the nature of the world and universe. That would solve Dyre’s desire to categorise atheists as another “religion”.
For myself, the very biggest attraction of atheism is that no one else can tell me what to believe or not to believe”. I can reduce my life to a small series of certainties of which the two most important and most certain are my birth and my death. I thank my parents for the first. I can only hope that someone will remember me after the second.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Sleipner,
Hey, I said I wasn’t against government assistance programs. My whole point was that, in a perfect world, personal charity is preferable to government charity. The closer we get to those we’re helping, the more we understand their plight and the more earnestly we can help. It’s easy to say “let the government take care of it, I’m enjoying my champagne.” The government has a role but, as a society, we should be pushing people to give personally and not just let the government handle it.
Jesus never said Caesar should take care of the poor. He said we should.
April 5th, 2007 at 6:31 am
Atheism is not a religion: we do not assert that there is no God, we assert that we know of no evidence of a God. It is absurd to describe this as a form of faith since it is mnifestly a form of skepticism.
Pascal’s wager was undoubtedly clever for it’s era, but is nonsense today. If you hold that we are better off believing than not, you open a door you can not only drive a Zeus through, but a leprechaun and a unicorn as well. In effect Pascal says, “what the hell, believe whatever you want,” which would be death to science, but also, interestingly, death to Christianity and Judaism and Islam.
The idea that we will “find out the truth” when we die, is wrong. When we die - assuming death is as we atheists believe — we will learn nothing. We’ll be dead. And dead people are not known for their profound observational abilities.
April 5th, 2007 at 8:57 am
The question is whether reason and faith are incompatible. Ultimately, they are. Faith is the assertion of the truth of a proposition in the absence of supporting evidence. Reason is the application of logic to evidence in order to ascertain the truth. Faith begins with truth and then disregards evidence. Reason begins with evidence and determines truth afterwards.
If the proposition is the existence of the supernatural, what we have is an absence of evidence. Granted, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — but in the absence of evidence, reason cannot lead us to any kind of conclusion and a hypothesis must be downgraded to a mere guess.
The proponent of a proposition is the one who bears the burden of proving its truth. It is not generally possible to prove a negative, so if an atheist offers the proposition, “God does not exist,” that results in a logical parlor game with no end — because God might be infinitely subtle, powerful, and knowledgeable, and therefore able to create and govern the universe in ways that defy the laws of physics (God being able to alter them at will) and therefore escape proof. Just as the “brain in the bottle” proposition is incapable of being disproven, so too is the existence of God. An intellectually honest atheist must admit that he cannot disprove God’s existence.
However, a failure to disprove is not the same thing as proof. An atheist’s failure to disprove the existence of God is no more meaningful than a phenomenologist’s failure to disprove Jimmy’s “brain in a bottle” theory. (By the way, if Dan *is* the only conscious entity in existence, that means Dan is God, and God is delusional. Not a very happy ending to that story, is it?) So it does no good to the debate to say that an atheist can’t disprove God’s existence. That merely means that God *might* exist; it says nothing about the likelihood of God’s existence. The proposition of God’s existence must be advanced by the theist or the debate ends there inconclusively.
So when the theist says, “God exists,” the atheist’s response should not be, “No, he doesn’t,” it should be, “What’s your proof?” If the theist’s desire is to convince the atheist, the response to that challenge should be a citation of some fact that is objectively verifiable.
If that is the response, the theist will either succeed or fail. If the theist fails to offer an objectively verifiable fact, the atheist’s response will be that there is no evidence to support the belief.
In theory, if the theist could identify objectively verifiable facts that do demonstrate the existence of God, the theist has reasoned himself out of the realm of faith entirely. I do not need faith to know that my car is painted green or that my dog has once again eaten the toilet paper. I have evidence of these facts. The problem with doing this is that it renders God subject to objectively verifiable facts and evidence, and transforms God from a supernatural to a natural entity — and thereby eliminating his divinity. So in proving God’s existence, the theist destroys God. Again, not a happy ending to the theist’s struggle.
Conversely, if the theist’s desire is to assert the true nature of religion, the theist avoids that debate entirely and replies to the atheist’s demand for proof with a statement like, “God’s existence is incapable of being proven. You just have to take it on faith.” This the atheist will refuse to do and thus ends the debate. Neither the atheist nor the theist have changed their minds because neither has offered any reason for the other to do so.
The existence of God is simply not provable by use of reason. It can only be supported by faith. Faith and reason, although they can be partially reconciled through the use of sophistry, are ultimately incompatible. Accepting the existence of God is by definition not an act of reason. One’s choice is whether to subliminate one’s reason to one’s emotional desire for God to exist, or not.
I choose “not.”
April 5th, 2007 at 9:17 am
The question is whether reason and faith are incompatible. Ultimately, they are. These are different things. One requires exclusive reliance upon evidence and logic to prove or disprove a proposition. The other requires eschewing evidence and logic.
God’s existence is incapable of being proven by objectively verifiable evidence. Doing so would render God to be another natural entity, like a human being or a beetle or an asteroid. The whole point of God is that God is supernatural, not bound by or located within the natural universe. So attempting to prove God’s existence and failing demonstrates nothing meaningful. Attempting to prove God’s existence and succeeding destroys God.
For that reason, proposing the existence of God cannot be justified through reliance on reason. It is an inherently irrational act to propose the existence of God. You might think that it’s a nice thing to do anyway. But by definition, it’s also an unreasonable thing to do.
As Takhallaus says, skepticism is not religion. It is a refusal to put faith in that which cannot be proven.
April 5th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I have faith that it is going to rain sometime in the next couple of days, because the crops need rain and God won’t let my children starve. The weatherman also says it is going to rain in the next couple of days. Faith and scientific evidence are not exclusive and often work in tandum. Millions of Christians get into cars everyday having faith that God will protect them and they put on their seat belts. Sorry, you are wrong & Thomas Aquina is right.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Transplanted Lawyer - even if you weren’t named that I’d have guessed you were a lawyer. The defense rests ;)
Dos…lots of people in history have had faith that God would send rain, or troops, or whatever, and yet ended up dying despite that. The level of belief, religious fervor, “godliness”, whatever that means other than showering regularly, or whatever measure you care to name had nothing to do with whether help arrived - it either happened or it didn’t, based on natural physical laws and chance.
And thousands of Christans get into their cars every day and end up dying because some crazy driver pulled out in front of them - they die in pretty much the same proportions as any other religion…so if the Christian God is watching out for them, he’s doing a pretty crappy job of it.
So what exactly is God doing in this picture, other than giving them a false sense of security? Absolutely nothing.
Probligo - by saying you pretty much discard the world’s religions until and unless someone provides proof makes it so no one can really tell you what to believe. Merely by applying scientific principles (which incidentally brought us from the dark ages of absolute Catholic Church control into the modern world) to everything people try to get you to believe, you can effectively make sure you are deciding for yourself what to believe, and what not to believe.
And yes, I believe science itself should always be subject to scrutiny…and it is usually…because scientists can make mistakes, and because new evidence becomes available frequently which can alter or even (rarely in well developed fields) refute existing theories. However, unlike the Intelligent Design nuts I don’t believe one or two pieces of evidence we can’t explain refutes a theory that has tens of thousands of other types of evidence that support it. Similarly, Exxon and Bush climatologists weighing in on global warming have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:35 am
DosPeros, you confuse result with method — an error that even Thomas Aquinas would be quick to point out.
Your first proposition is: “It will rain in the next few days because a benevolent God will make it rain in response to my need for it.” Here, the result (rain) comes first, and then the way you get there (faith in God) is invoked to justify the result.
Your proposition assumes the existence of a benevolent God susceptible to your pleas for intercession. But rain will not come simply because you have a subjective desire for it. The proof that a benevolent God will not make it rain on the basis of necessity is found in the existence of droughts. Tell me, if it doesn’t rain, will you doubt God’s existence (or benevolence)? If the answer is “no,” then evidence has nothing to do with your belief.
Your second proposition is something like: “It is likely to rain in the next few days because a cold air front appears likely to meet with a low barometric pressure zone within a few hundred miles of my location.” Here, objective evidence can be found and a forecast can be made based on that evidence. Note that the evidence comes first, the result second. Note also that a weatherman, unlike a prophet, makes no claim to inerrancy, and speaks instead only of probabilities.
As for the millions of Christians who rely on God to protect them from accidents, if God will protect them from harm, why do they use the seat belts at all?
April 6th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Transplanted Lawyer -
Chapter 8 of the Summa Contra Gentiles, I would of course encourage you to read the entire book as I believe it will help you sleep better at night. http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/scgbk1chap1-9.htm
Faith and reason are very much compatible. Faith takes off were reason can go no further and reason supplements and is in fact the fount of some people’s faith. Now you might have Pentecostals argue the point, but for guiltridden Thomist Catholics myself there is no chasm or imcompatability between between faith and reason, only mystery.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:58 am
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April 6th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
You’ve not responded to my point, DP.
Why do you characterize yourself as “guiltridden”? Is it because in your heart of hearts, you wear that seat belt because a part of you fears that God’s benevolent, protective hand will not save you from grievous bodily harm in the event of a vehicular collision despite your faith in him?
And while I’m at it, isn’t it the case that whether God provides or withholds a benefit (like the rain), your faith in God will remain constant? The answer is either “yes,” or it is “no.” If the answer to my question is “yes,” then you confirm that evidence of God’s benevolence (or the absence of such evidence) has nothing to do with your faith in that benevolence. If the answer is “no,” then you have demonstrated that your relationship with God is contractual in nature — and that despite whatever words you may say, you do not believe that the God with whom you have contracted is either benevolent or trustworthy.
In the section of Summa Contra Gentiles that you quote, Aquinas argues that reason alone is insufficient to prove the existence of God. On this, although not on other points, I agree with him. But note that Aquinas shrinks away from concluding that a reasoned proof of the existence of God eliminates the necessity of faith altogether.
Aquinas stops because this demonstrates the ultimate divergence of faith and reason. The two can only walk hand in hand for so long, and then as you nicely put it, “Faith takes off were reason can go no further.” So you see, even you admit that even if they can be dovetailed together for a while, faith and reason must necessarily part ways at some point.
By the way, if you’re going to admit that your faith in God is based on something other than reason, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I love my wife, but I have no way to objectively prove it to you; love is an irrational, unreasonable emotion, incapable of measurement or objective verification. Nevertheless, I know that my love for her is very real, and very god, despite its irrationality and subjectivity. You might say that your faith in God’s existence (and his benevolence) is like that. If so, the argument ends there (and I win, because in so doing, you demonstrate that faith and reason diverge) with God’s existence being a matter of your subjective emotion rather than one susceptible of objective proof.
So keep on wearing that seat belt, dude. In an auto collision, it’s much more reasonable to rely upon the products of reason and science than to rely on the intercessory power of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God whose existence (as Aquinas eloquently pointed out, lo these many years ago) cannot be proven by logic, reason, or evidence.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Nicholi Jr.’s The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life would be quite the interesting read for this discussion. Also Lewis’, Mere Christianity reasons out the proof for the existence of God based on good and evil.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
i believe in Christianity. i dont believe in evoulution because it makes no sense. it shows that things go from chaotic to order. take a string for example. if the string is used or gets older does it
A. become cleaner and stronger
-or-
B. does it become whetered and weaker
choose for yourself
if you look at the world now, was the air cleaner or did it have more smog and o zone problems than now. the natural order of stuff goes in a downward spiral, it doesnt get better and better
also there is malot of proof of God and Jesus and that stuff.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
oh and as for those atheist guys, why wouldnt you rather “bet” that there is a God and maybe go to heaven than not think there is a a God and maybe go to hell. o.k. maybe i didnt make that clear enough but still, think about it. GO JESUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 9th, 2007 at 9:33 am
All this talk of logic, reason, evidence!!! I have two questions for the atheists on the blog. 1) Do you aceept the scientific findings that demonstrate the fact that the universe had a beginning (more famously known as the big bang. 2) Steven Hawkings and Roger Penrose (if you have not read their work, then you are wholly unqualified to be talking on this topic, period) demonstrated conclusively that not only all physical matter in the universe and the universe itself but also time itself began with the big bang. 3) if modern cosmological physics is correct as concisely cited above, then by the rules of logical reasoning…..we must “infer” that something that exists outside of physical space and physical time must have been the cause of the universe to begin to exist i.e. something super-natural or extra-natural. [inference is a valid way to draw logical conclusions from things that are not immediately obvious or directly proven. if dont understand this, then you need to pick a introduction logic textbook or an LSAT reasoning prep book or something because you are a novice in the the baics of logic much less formal logic]
Thus, by logic and physics (the king of the sciences) then we have a proof for the existence of a supernatural entity that was the cause of the entire universe existence. you can call it God, Divine Mind, Cosmic Intelligence etc…it does not matter. What matters is non-material entity is the only valid inferential explanation of the existence of the universe.
If you dont accept that proof then you must respond by telling me how the universe began and what caused it with you evidence from modern cosmological physics. NOW, please dont dodge this or go off onto some red herring tangent because it will be obvious that you are conceding the point. Deal with it head on. Now after you have given your evidence for an alternative view for the universe’ beginning, then you must also attack and undermine the foundations of big bang theory, singularity theory, and the like. If you dont, then you will have resorted to violating your own rules of logic and intellectual honesty.
NB: By the way, in classic epistemology, sensory phenomena is NOT the only way to provide evidence. The use of pure theoretical reason (i.e. inference) is also a valid epistemological category –just ask any mathematician or trained philosopher worth their salt. I would suggest all you guys read up more on epistemology and modern cosmology before you wax eloquent about logic, science and evidence as applied to the big metaphysical questions of life, God existence etc
May 10th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
the problem with that last statement, quantam guy, is that some of those cosmlogy books are written by scientists who believe in evouluton or other stuff and they include their ideas in their books, making the books biased and the information is therefore not credible.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
oh and you asked 3 questons not 2