Dr. Craig concludes his First Rebuttal

I'm whizzing through Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?". I happened to have a couple of unpublished posts backed up, so let's flush 'em out of our system!

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

First Question

Now what about my arguments to show that God does exist? Dr. Pigliucci uses a general argument against this to say that God is not explanatory. But notice he fails to understand the structure of my arguments. My arguments are deductive arguments, that is to say, if the premises are true, then by the laws of logic the conclusion follows inescapably. Whether you like the conclusion, whether you think it's explanatory, is irrelevant: as long as the premises are true, it follows by deductive logic that the conclusion is true.

Craig's rebuttal that Dr. P does not understand the structure of Dr. C's arguments is some technical mumbo-jumbo that only debate practitioners, logicians and philosophers will "get" easily. The rest of us will drool.

Via The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "A deductive argument is an argument in which it is thought that the premises provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion." This is as Craig says it is. What Craig is slipping by the unsuspecting audience is that his premisses are not necessarily true. In the next paragraph, Dr. Craig concludes that "A transcendent cause of the universe exists." . He keeps asserting that transcendent cause without an ounce of evidence or rational support. It would be correct to say that if premisses 1 & 2 are true, then "A cause of the universe exists", but he does not say this. I can even quibble over whether either premiss 1 or premiss 2 is true, but that would divert us too much from the structure and style of this debate. You may refer back to my discussion of Uncredible Hallq commenter MNbo's criticisms of my article on Craig's cosmological argument - or see the Wikipedia page on The Big Bang - the section Speculative Physics Beyond the Big Bang to see other ideas related to the Big Bang that make the idea of "a beginning" irrelevant.

More Dr. Craig:

First Argument

So what he is going to deny? In my first argument I argued: (1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Will he deny that? (2) The universe began to exist.According to Steven Hawking in his book The Nature of Space and Time (1996), "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang."{2} Will he deny that, the paradigm held by most cosmologists today? If he will not deny either of those two premises, then he cannot deny the conclusion, that A transcendent cause of the universe exists.

He says, but where did God come from? Very easily I can answer this question. The argument proves that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Therefore, there must be a first cause which never came into being. Whatever begins to exist has to have a cause; but a being which exists timelessly, spacelessly, and necessarily is uncaused. This is what the atheist has always said the universe is. But that is now untenable in light of the philosophical arguments I gave and the cosmological evidence for the beginning of the universe.

In other words, neither of my two premises of my first argument were refuted by Dr. Pigliucci, and therefore I think we have good grounds for thinking a transcendent Creator exists.

Notice that Craig cites Stephen Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." as a warrant for his assertion that the universe began at the Big Bang. At the risk of being really really really repetitive, the Big Bang Model holds that the universe was once in an incredibly small hot dense state - and nothing else. Hawking is saying "(people) believe", and Craig weaves the two together in (probably) his usual authoritative fashion. But Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." is not the same as "It is established that ...". And since the Big Bang does not posit a beginning in the literal sense, then Craig's argument is entirely empty.

Second Argument

My second argument was based on the complex order of the universe. And here he had three objections.

(1) You cannot look for a Creator from what we don't know. I am not arguing on the basis of what we don't know. What I'm suggesting is that we do know that the initial conditions of the universe cannot be explained by law because they are initial conditions. They cannot be explained by chance because it is just too fantastically improbable. And therefore being neither explicable by chance nor by law, design is the only alternative. What is his answer? I would like to know.

(2) He says, "Well, your argument doesn't work because there's only one universe." Let me explain the theory of probability behind this. Imagine a blue dot on a piece of a paper, and let that be our universe. Slightly alter some of these constants and quantities. That makes a new universe. If it's life-permitting, make another blue dot. If it's life- prohibiting, make a red dot. Then do it again, and then again, and again, and again. What you wind up with is a sea of red with only a few pinpoints of blue here and there. That's what I mean when I say that life-permitting universes are incalculably improbable.

(3) He says, "But the probability of all these people being here tonight, these specific people, is highly improbable, and yet we are here!" That's a failure to understand the argument. Any universe you pick is equally probable, yes, but it is highly, highly improbable that the universe you pick will be life-permitting. That's the point. It's like a lottery in which there's a billion, billion, billion black marbles and one white marble. Any marble you pick is equally improbable, but the probability that the marble you do pick will be black is vastly more probable than that it will be white. Similarly, given the improbability of the initial conditions of the universe, the universe ought to be dead; there shouldn't be any life in the universe. The fact that it cannot be explained on the basis of chance or law leaves us with design as the best explanation for why the universe is finely tuned for our existence.

In point (1), Dr. Craig says that the parameters of the universe are too fantastically improbable to believe they are that way by chance. This is 1) a bare assertion, an argument from ignorance, a false choice, and privileging the hypothesis.

In point (2), Dr. Craig constructs a vague probability argument, while ignoring the overwhelming fact that we are here. The a priori probability is now irrelevant because it is now a fact (probability 1) that we are here.

In point (3), he doubles down on the probability chip, continuing to ignore that we are in fact here.

Third Argument

What about objective moral values? He agrees there are no objective moral values, but he says values are things that work or society will collapse. That is not at all true. Look at Nazi Germany. In his book,Morality after Auschwitz, Peter Haas asks how an entire society who have existed in which the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies went on for a decade with hardly a protest being offered. He says the reason is because a new ethic was in place in Germany which did not define the holocaust as evil, but as good. And he points out that that ethic cannot be criticized from within because it was internally consistent. It can only be criticized if you have a transcendent vantage point and anchor for moral values. On Dr. Pigliucci's view rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia are all morally indifferent because there is no objective right and wrong. And I submit that is simply untenable. Objective moral values do exist, from which it follows logically that God exists.

I hoped to get my other arguments on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the rebuttal; but I'm out of time, so I shall quit.

Dr. Craig takes one of his weaker arguments and bolsters it with appeals to emotion. Yes, we all abhor "rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia". What we object to is the warrant that this sense of abhorrence signals Objective Morals, and that this somehow is proof of God. Dr. Craig didn't make his case in his opening statement, and continues to not make the case here.

All in all, this is becoming tiresome. I started out as a grudging admirer of his, and am now convinced that he's an unscrupulous douche hydrant.

Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Continuing Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?".

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig's first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

The Regression Argument

(2) What about the regression argument, that the more we know the less we think God intervenes in the universe? Well, notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. It doesn't even prove that God doesn't often intervene in the universe. All that follows from that argument is the sociological factor that we don't think God often intervenes in the universe. And that conclusion is perfectly compatible with the idea that God often in fact does intervene in the universe. But, moreover, even if it were true that God doesn't often intervene in the universe in miraculous ways, that's not incompatible with Christianity. After all, miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways. So the argument is simply inconclusive.

Dr. Craig serves up a world-class vacuity: "notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist". Ummm ... haven't we established a number of times that the burden of proof is on the claimant, and Dr. Craig - taking the affirmative position on the question "Does God Exist" - has that burden? And aren't we still waiting to hear rational argument that the affirmative position is superior to the negative one? And shouldn't we expect that the negative position won't waste any time on trying to prove a negative? The answers are yes, yes, yes and yes. Dr. Craig is not living up to his responsibility in the debate so far.

Pragmatic Argument for Naturalism

(3) What about the argument that naturalism works? Not at all! What works are scientific hypotheses. But those do not test naturalism because on the hypothesis that there is a Creator God who has designed the universe to operate according to certain natural laws, that could also work. So the fact that scientific theories work is in no sense a proof of naturalism.

What would you call this - a "Me Too" argument? Dr. Craig makes it sound as if naturalism is unproven, except if it is, couldn't it also be that God made it that way, thus proving the existence of God.

If Dr. Craig were interested in proving the existence of God, he would come up with at least one hypothesis that can be tested and whose only explanation would be the existence of God. Throughout human history, such a thing has never been done. It ***could*** be done, but isn't. The universe of possible answers to the question "why hasn't an attempt to prove the existence of God been made" ever been performed has many possible alternatives, including "it can't be done", "there's too much money to be made" and "we need to keep the unwashed masses guessing so that we can retain power". Other answers are possible as well, but these come to mind at the drop of a hat.

By the way, I don't know what tactic Dr. Craig is pursuing in his Me Too argument, but it speaks to believers because they already assume that God is behind it all. Never mind that the point of the debate is "Does God Exist?", and that using God as a term in a premiss is circular, thus invalid. Oh well.

Problem of Evil

(4) He says, "What about the problem of evil?" Well, let me make two responses here.
First, no atheist has ever been able to show a logical inconsistency between the propositions "God exists" and "Evil exists." They tried, but no one has ever been able to show that those two are contradictory. In fact, you can actually show that they are consistent by adding a third proposition, namely, "God has morally sufficient reasons to permit evil." As long as that third proposition is even possibly true, it shows that God's existence and evil's existence are logically compatible. The atheist seems to assume that if God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, we have to be privy to them. But there's absolutely no reason to think that that is true.
In fact, secondly, evil is actually proof that God exists. My argument would go like this:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. (Dr. Pigliucci agrees.)
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, objective values exist. (Some things are really evil.)
4. Therefore, God exists.
And thus evil only calls into question God's existence on a superficial level. On a deeper philosophical level evil actually demonstrates the existence of God because evil as such could not exist without God.

Dr. Craigs first "refutation" of the argument from evil puts him in the position of arguing for a God that permits evil. This is strange, since Christianity makes a big deal about God's goodness. Maybe God can't do anything about it. Maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he's evil. Maybe he doesn't exist. The possibilities are endless. If God exists and evil exists, why worship the fucker?

Notwithstanding my bad attitude about religion, arguing that the coexistence of God and Evil is not inconsistent is no argument for a Christian God. The negative position should press this, as all we get out of this particular argument is a God that humans would be distrustful of.

Noah's Ark

(5) The fifth argument he raised was the problem of Noah's Ark. I would simply just dismiss this by saying: First, it doesn't disprove the existence of God. Secondly, I would take Noah's flood to be a local flood, not a universal flood, in any case.
So all of these arguments, I think, are either invalid or based on false premises and hardly present any good reason to think that atheism is true.

Noah's Ark is a physical impossibility, and Dr. Craig knows it - he squirms his way out of the discussion without providing a rejoinder. A strong point for the non-theist position.

These rebuttals reviewed today are pretty shallow. Both the Problem of Evil and the Noah's Ark interlude raise the question of Bible inerrancy. Obviously Noah's Ark is easy to attack, but so are Yahweh's incompetence, petulance and immoral behavior. Add to that the inconsistencies that abound, and a Christian God becomes an obvious implausibility.

Poke it with a stick - Dr. Craig's Cosmological Argument

This is the second in a number of posts reviewing, line-by-line, the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The initial post covered just the first three paragraphs of Dr. Craig's opening statement. This longer post will address his famous "argument from first cause".

A note that I should have added last time: since the transcript of the debate is from Leadership University, I leave the outline headings from there in place here. For example, you will see that "Second Question" and "First Question" appear as distinct sections.

Another note: I linked previously to Common Sense Atheism's post William Lane Craig on Debating Atheists. There, Dr. Craig claims to have the better arguments, with which Luke (the principle blogger there) agrees. Luke goes on to state:

Dr. Craig is correct. Craig’s dominance in debating technique is not the only reason he wins nearly all his debates.

Dr. Craig also wins his debates because Dr. Craig gives better arguments.

Let me explain what I mean. It might be the case that, for example, none of Craig’s arguments are as ‘good’ as an argument from evil or an argument from reasonable nonbelief, two popular atheistic arguments. However, Dr. Craig’s arguments are almost always stronger than the atheist’s arguments as presented in these debates.

It's important to note that debates are contests in which the opponents are judged on the strength of their arguments. It is not a court of law, and it is not a community of scientists trying to understand how the world works. It is much nearer to a popularity contest in this setting when compared to even the more traditional Lincoln-Douglas debates held scholastically. Dr. Craig uses his formidable knowledge of philosophy and theology, sprinkles in just enough cosmology, mathematics and other current hard sciences, then applies the mix in a predictable and disciplined manner to WIN THE DEBATE. That's what he does. Whether we non-believers like it or not, he wins. That doesn't mean that he has evidence that God exists - he clearly has never presented it. We wouldn't have debates about the existence of God if God could take time out from his busy schedule to put a stop to all this horsing around. So let's keep our eyes open and see what Dr. Craig does to win this debate.

A final note for the day. Dr. Craig uses the term "logic" in his Opening Speech. For the record, there is a distinction between sound and unsound logic that we will point out where ever we see it. I found a succinct explanation at Lander.edu that's worth noting:

1. truth: a property of statements, i.e., that they are the case.
2. validity: a property of arguments, i.e., that they have a good structure.
(The premisses and conclusion are so related that it is absolutely impossible for the premisses to be true unless the conclusion is true also.)
3. soundness: a property of both arguments and the statements in them, i.e., the argument is valid and all the statement are true.

Dr. Craig may have valid arguments (the structure is good), but does he have sound ones (are they structured correctly and the conclusion is true)? I'll be keeping that in mind as we progress.

Let's hear his Second Question:

Second Question

Now with respect to the second question, I'll leave it up to Dr. Pigliucci to present the reasons why he thinks that this hypothesis is false. Atheists have tried for centuries to disprove the existence of God, but no one has ever been able to come up with a successful argument. Dr. Pigliucci, on the other hand, in his article "God as a Falsifiable Hypothesis," says, "My position is that belief in God can be falsified" on the basis of the evidence.{1} So rather than attack straw men at this point, I'll just wait to hear Dr. Pigliucci's answer to the following question: What good evidence is there to show that God does not exist?

Through this point in the debate, Dr. Craig has only spoken for a minute or so of his 20 minute allotment, and throws down a challenge that can't be met - to falsify the hypothesis that God exists. It's a winner for Dr Craig two ways - 1) the non-believer must address it and expend valuable time explaining to the audience how science works and how "God" is not a testable hypothesis. Addressing this steals time from either making a positive case for non-belief, or rebutting claims that are weak. 2) the non-believer can ignore the challenge, but Craig can then claim that they "dropped" it, and impress on the audience that he wins this point by default because the non-believer can't or won't answer the challenge. He doesn't have to lie, cheat or steal, he just wins by default. Honestly, this is brilliant! Now, Pigliucci says "belief in God can be falsified", so it will indeed be interesting to see how he delivers that argument in a reasonable time, and how WLC attacks (or drops) it.

The "you can't disprove that God exists" gambit above is a common tactic you may have encountered if you've ever discussed theology. I mentioned last time that "falsifiability" is an intended characteristic of any hypothesis that seeks to be accepted as an explanation for a phenomenon. Dr. Craig surely knows this, and even more surely knows that most people don't know that this is the case, so it will sound to the audience as if the non-believer has failed to make the case for non-belief if they fail to address this.

Dr. Craig continues:

First Question

Let's look, then, at the first question: What evidence is there that serves to verify God's existence? Tonight I'm going to present five reasons in support of the specific hypothesis that a personal Creator and Designer of the universe exists, who is the locus of absolute value and who has revealed Himself in Christ. Whole books have been written on each one of these, so all I can present here is a brief sketch of each argument and then go into more detail as Dr. Pigliucci responds to them.

What impresses me here is just how specifically he describes God. It's been said many times, an argument for an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent creator is not an argument for a specific religion's favored representation of that, so I expect that he'll have trouble justifying the claim.

He get's to the real meat:

First Argument

1. The origin of the universe. Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal and uncaused. But surely this is unreasonable. Just think about it a minute. If the universe is eternal and never had a beginning, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the idea of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of this century, states, "The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea."{2} But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can't go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

In this introductory paragraph to Dr. Craig's Argument from First Cause, we observe a number of maneuvers that further frame the debate in his favor. He says "Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal and uncaused." This straw man is an oversimplification in at least three ways: 1) atheists, while a convenient "other" that serves to focus the argument in the eyes of believers on an adversary that they already despise, distrust and/or fear, are not the only people that don't agree with the Christian God that Dr. Craig's specifically arguing for. Seventy percent of the world doesn't believe in Yahweh; 2) the generalization that "the universe is just eternal and uncaused" is a bit of detail that Dr. Craig doesn't provide evidence for. It may be that non-believers hold that the Big Bang Theory ("BBT") really implies that space-time began at that moment. It may be that they believe there is a cyclic universe (still uncaused, but naturally generated as "everything" cycles between matter and antimatter over quadrillions of years. It could be some "many worlds" conception. It may be one of Buddha's belches that brought the world into existence. It may be any other supreme non-yahweh figure. All he's doing is clarifying the battle lines and preparing for a "first cause' argument through the use of a false dilemma.

Dr. Craig moves on to argue that an actual infinite is impossible - but he uses citations out of context. David Hilbert would have been correct in saying that an "actual infinite" is never found in nature, but that just speaks to the limits on what we can observe and the amount of space, matter and energy that we can detect within the observable universe. S0 far, we can only estimate a finite amount of space, matter and energy. Dr. Craig is on solid ground with the average lay audience, because we instinctively say "yes, no matter how big the numbers get, they're still not truly infinite". The more scientifically inclined may say "it's too early to tell", but I'll bet that they're in the minority in most theology debates. See the discussion on "Craig's mistakes re infinite hotels". It's too much to refute in a twenty minute debate segment, but points out why Dr. Craig's argument misses the mark.

Let's move on to his next paragraph before winter returns:

This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. The astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the "Big Bang" 15 billion years ago. Physical space and time were created in that event, as well as all the matter and energy in the universe. Therefore, as Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out, the Big Bang theory requires the creation of the universe from nothing. This is because, as you go back in time, you reach a point at which, in Hoyle's words, the universe was "shrunk down to nothing at all."{3} Thus, what the Big Bang model requires is that the universe began to exist and was created out of nothing.

I love - LOVE - Dr. Craig's use of current science - regardless of whether he's portraying it accurately. It gives a sense that this is a man that's done his homework! The use of BBT to "confirm" that the universe had a definite beginning from nothing is one of his most effective pieces of rhetoric.

Before I cut into it further, it must be said that this debate is 16 or 17 years old, and the research has advanced somewhat, so I won't get into Hawking's and Krauss's explanations on how "from nothing" is possible. Instead, given that state of knowledge in 1995, Dr. Craig still misused what BBT did actually say. It says that the universe once existed in a smaller, dense, hotter state approximately 13.7 billions years ago. It most specifically did not say that the universe arose from nothing. In fact, in the small hot dense state that scientists can measure (and/or calculate) the laws of quantum physics break down, and given the limitation at present, nothing further can be known. Dr. Craig is smart to use the lay persons natural inclination to assume that this small hot dense mass, when extrapolated back further, would be a single point, and would further be infinitesimal or nothing if extrapolated to it's extreme. Science does not make that claim. It couldn't be considered a "law" until there was sufficient evidence and testing down to rule out other competing theories. We are tens, hundreds, even thousands of years away from that day.

More Dr. Craig:

Now this tends to be very awkward for the atheist. For as Anthony Kenny of Oxford University urges, "A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the . . . universe came from nothing and by nothing."{4} But surely that doesn't make sense! Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

Here Dr. Craig doubles down on the "universe from nothing" gambit by citing Dr. Kenny saying that "...an atheist, must believe that the . . . universe came from nothing and by nothing". Now, why do we give a rat's patootie what Anthony Kenny of Oxford University says? First, I had to Google him to see that he's a philosopher and not a dishwasher. Second, is Dr. Kenny reliable? We have no way of knowing. Third, is Dr. Kenny espousing the consensus view? We have now way of knowing. We can be sure that Dr. Craig chose the citation to bolster the argument that believing something came from nothing is absurd, but he hasn't yet given us that valid and true argument that closes the deal.

He summarizes:

We can summarize our argument thus far as follows:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This is the traditional formulation of the argument from first cause, and is uncontroversial as stated, in spite of having presented no evidence that the universe didn't previously exist in some way. Notice that this formulation of the argument says nothing about the nature of the first cause.

He fills in the blanks next:

Now from the very nature of the case, as the cause of space and time, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe. Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to atemporal effect like the universe? If the cause were an impersonal set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. If the cause were timelessly present, then the effect would be timelessly present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

Here's where WLC goes off the rails completely.

By claiming "this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe. Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal." - he is making a specific claim as to the characteristics and behavior that he hasn't lifted a finger to justify. A non-technical term for this is called "pulling it out of your ass". There is not a shred of supporting argument or evidence that will bolster this claim. Depending on what direction you look at this, one or all of these fallacies are committed in this brief paragraph:

• a bare assertion - making a claim without supporting argument or evidence
  
• a false dilemma - asserting that if not A, the only answer is B.
  
• argument from ignorance - "I can't think of a conclusion, therefore my preferred (unsupported) conclusion is the only possible answer"

Breathtaking!

Dr. Craig concludes his argument from first cause:

Isn't it incredible that the Big Bang theory thus fits in with what the Christian theist has always believed: that in the beginning God created the universe? Now I put it to you: which makes more sense: that the theist is right or that the universe popped into being uncaused out of nothing? I, at least, have no trouble assessing these alternatives!

To a theist audience, this probably sounds like "game, set, match" - but it's clearly not. That final paragraph introduces what - to the critically minded - should be an unnecessary complication in Dr. Craig's argument. The appearance of the universe out of nothing - still unproven by science - would still be infinitely simpler that a universe that appears as an effect from a cause by another unexplained entity. He's ignored that the believer believes the same thing as the non-believer, except has to insert the eternal all-powerful being to make it all happen, and then claims that this eternal all-powerful being needs no explanation. This is also known as "special pleading". The non-believer would be right to counter with "if God is eternal, then that proves something can be eternal, thus the universe could be eternal, eliminating the necessity for God. Occam's Razor tells us this is the simpler and more likely answer". Game. Set. Match.

My impression so far, after having read the transcript a few times, and having written out this analysis, is that the argument from first cause to prove the existence of Yahweh flat doesn't work. You can argue that there is an uncaused cause effectively, but that's all. It doesn't have to have a specific set of characteristics as Dr. Craig claims, and his argument was not good in this regard. The volume or argument and evidence required to make Dr. Craig's scheme work make this line of "reasoning" fall way short of conjectural ... it's really just making stuff up.

What you miss when you read a transcript as opposed to viewing the video is the even, calm pace with which Dr. Craig delivers his arguments - he's professorial, good natured, and reasonably likeable. He also speaks clearly and almost completely without affectation - no "ummm" nor "uhhh" - no hesitation nor backtracking. I've not watched all his debates, but I'd venture to say that his demeanor and fluidity are always better than his opponent.

Next time - Dr. Craig's second argument - the complex order in the universe.

Boiling it down

Religion.

It boils down to a question of whether there is something non-natural going on in the world, and whether non-natural "planes of existence", any entities that inhabit them, and super powerful or a single supremely powerful entity can exist and are somehow able to make changes to the natural world that we inhabit. A corollary to this conjectural "supernatural" is the existence of a soul, which is the fulcrum around which many religions hold sway over their human adherents - what with eternal reward and punishment as the carrot and stick.

The discussion of tangential issues - the basis of "objective" morality, for example, are red herrings that distract from the foundational claims that underpin any religion based on the supernatural. Similarly, the "divinity" of characters such as Jesus or Mohammed are subordinate subjects that have to wait in line while questions regarding the supernatural are answered.

Has anyone come forward with evidence or arguments for the supernatural today?

Presuppositionalism

My weekend reading and podcasting revolved around

• Episode 97: Presuppositional Apologetics (part 1) at Reasonable Doubts
• Terry Gross's interview with C. P. Wagner at Fresh Air. Wagner is a leading apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation , which employs a presuppositionalist, and frankly, delightfully demon-infested, supernatural world view.

Presuppositionalism is

a school of apologetics that presumes Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought

Now, I'll be go-to-heck ... I thought that this was just a presumption that most literal believers have, not a specific strain of literal believer and apologist.

Into the fray...

Starting at the beginning, we must presuppose that the individual thinking the thoughts that you (or I) am having at least exists. Absent any sense experience, this individual is like a newborn infant ... possessing no sense or recollection of the world, and as yet having made no attempts to interact with the world. Certainly, communication is not yet on the table ... until that first primal scream.

I'm not qualified to say whether a newborn, without any sense experience or interaction with the world, is capable of reasoning about itself ... but I presume that, absent interaction with the world, it cannot know the world exists ... so only it only knows that its self exists.

Consequently, to discuss things about the world, we must presuppose that 1) we exist as an individual, and 2) the world exists. From there, we gather sense experience, initially interpreting it through the physical and emotional filters that we have at birth, and soon thereafter, adding additional filters that we ourselves build based on our previous experiences and interpretations of these experiences, combined with changes to our physical and emotional underpinnings. This sounds like it could become a pretty complicated business, so I'll stop there.

I must ask ... what would cause an adult to presuppose that "Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought"? I'll purposely overuse the word "presuppose" - and say that I must presuppose (without any prior sense experience of the presuppositionalist world view) that a presuppositionalist is capable of and in fact, does accept a world view that does not correspond with the sense experience that the vast majority of sentient Earth beings have. That is to say ... events and concepts in the Bible do not appear to exist in the real world. Presuppositionalists may think they do, but the existence of the supernatural has never been credibly recorded. God - presumably the epitome of a supernatural being - is thus less likely to exist than the simpler conception of just dimensions, forces, matter or beings outside of nature.

Cutting to the chase, I understand presuppositionalists dispense with, or ignore, other arguments for the existence of God, and simply employ the Transcendental Argument for God ... to wit:

1. If there is no god, knowledge is not possible.
2. Knowledge is possible (or some other statement pertaining to logic or morality).

Therefore God exists.

The counter apologetics segment at Reasonable Doubt - incomplete as of this blog post - assumes that some counter apologetics strategy is effective (or maybe they're just steering the uninitiated away from bad strategies - only completion of the series can tell me). I will take a stab at it, however.

It seems that TAG fails in these ways:

• It asserts without evidence that knowledge is only accessible through the god which the argument attempts to conclude
• It asserts the existence of god - which then fulfills the knowledge-enabling capability.

We have both a false dilemma in the first premise, and a bare assertion in the second premise. In fact, you can say the first premise is 1) a false dilemma, 2) circular, 3) affirms the consequent.

There is no reason to think other ways of achieving knowledge do not exist and aren't more simple, elegant and probable.

There is no reason to accept the assertion that god exists under any circumstances ... especially in the absence of 1) valid and true arguments for god's existence; and 2) credible physical evidence. The availability of other, better, more credible explanations for natural entities and phenomena eliminates the necessity of God or any other unnatural agent.

Oh ... and did I mention "Presuppositionalism"? ;-D

Logical Gaps

There are some huge logical gaps in arguments for the existence of God.

My prior post about God perhaps being dumb as a rock was intended to be tongue-in-cheek ... but illustrates one of the fundamental flaws in the Ontological, Cosmological and Teleological arguments. That is, if we can't explain it, God did it.

God - as conceived in various arguments, is outside time and space and requires no cause. Special pleading at its finest. This almost always invokes the response that "if God requires no cause, why does our universe?".

Secondly, why does a "first cause" or "designer" have to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent or omni-anything-else? If the creator of this explanatory scheme (a human, by the way) was trying to establish that this God was to be feared and obeyed, then the omni-gomnia is to be expected. How else will you revere me as a link between you peons and the omnipotent creator of all things? Otherwise, it does not explain a thing.

The Serenity Meditation

I will find serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

One of the things that we must admit to ourselves - the unbeliever and believer alike - is that we humans can draw inspiration from secular and religious sources. It does not mean that the motivation for the words (religious or not) confirms or disconfirms the reader's world view. It just confirms that the words and acts of others can touch us, regardless of the motivation that the other has in performing them.

I like the Serenity Prayer - it is simple and direct, and speaks to a need that reoccurs in my life - I need serenity, courage and wisdom all the time.

In keeping with my disbelief in the supernatural in general, gods more specifically, and the specific god referred to in the Bible, I believe it's consistent to remove the word "God" from that prayer, while continuing to use the words as a meditation to achieve the same result. Thus - The Serenity Meditation.

Assessing believers in the supernatural

You can sometimes tell something about people by the way they act. If you're in the local Kwik-E-Mart, and you walked into an aisle where there's a person furtively looking around while stuffing something into a pocket, you have some reason to assume that the person has just shoplifted. You may be wrong, but the person's behavior indicates that they are attempting to obscure the act that they're committing - whatever it may be.

You can also sometimes tell something about people by the way they look. A guy may rate a 4 out of ten on the classic-movie-star-good-looks-scale, but if he's clean and neatly dressed, walks upright and purposefully, you might think he's well brought-up, well-educated, confident, or some combination of these and other positive characteristics. Alternatively, that same 4-out-of-10 guy, when unclean, unshaven, disheveled, disoriented may look homeless, possibly ill or slightly incapacitated.

You can tell where this is going, of course ... You can sometimes tell something about people by the things they say. The guy downtown at the corner of State Street and Broadway railing about the government cover up of UFOs may not be your next choice for CEO of your bank - assuming of course, that the government cover up of the existence of UFOs has not been exposed between the time I write this and the time that you read it.

The way people look and act may give us an indication of how the person perceives and interacts with the world, but gives us little insight into what their intentions might be over a period of time. A person's words, however, may provide those additional insights we need to fully appreciate the persons viewpoint and possible future behavior.

Normally, I don't care what a person's world view is, provided they're a good neighbor. I assume that a good neighbor also has the characteristics of being a good family member, reasonably caring and charitable of those nearest to him, reasonably tolerant of those less close to him, and generally a benefit to the community. I can be completely, tragically wrong, but using this as an operating assumption has served me well so far, and doesn't burden me with the small, but still plausible, worry that my neighbor might be an axe murderer.

When people start talking about things that are not there, I assess that the person asserting these things has a world view that maps differently, or not at all, to the world that I map mine. Since I believe that I am of sound mind, and since I believe that I am not subject to belief in implausible things for which there is no physical evidence, makes it difficult for me to confidently predict that person's behavior. I might even have reason to believe that the person might be a danger to himself or others, depending on other signals that I pick up.

This is where I have problems with people asserting belief in the unexplained, and more specifically the supernatural. If the person expressing the belief, say, in UFOs, does so in a manner that indicates a casual interest, then I am less concerned than if they structure their life around this belief, and manifest it in ways that are weird and even disruptive. A UFO landing pad in the backyard might be a cause for worry.

As I continue my journey through life, I find the whole god conjecture, and most specifically the assertion that Jesus is the conjectural being's representative to whom we owe our fealty, rely on for a supposedly requisite redemption, and around whose teachings and the teachings of millennia of his followers we must structure our lives - I find this bizarre in the extreme.

It makes no sense to believe in something that is never directly evident and for which there is no indirect evidence, nor rational justification. The hypothetical universe that can only exist through the simultaneous existence of god and his delegate(s) has never been rationally described. There appears to be no necessity in any system for such a thing. The attempts at reasoning why such a scheme might be the most plausible conception of the universe are always subject to huge gaps in empirical support and reasoning.

If a person believes that god is real, and that he sent a delegate to redeem the believer, then okay. I do not care if the person truly sees things this way about the world. It would be nice if the believer didn't feel the need for this belief, because it would indicate to me that the person is mature, reasonable, and possesses a sound world view that maps to the objects and events that constitute the world that I perceive.

Fervent, even fevered belief in the supernatural leaves me to consider the belief-holder to be untrustworthy, imbalanced, and potentially even dangerous. There is no reason to try to out-shout people who do not believe things you believe in, yet this often happens when addressing people that have no other alternative. If your favored beliefs do not have the power of physical evidence and sound rational justification behind them, then the average mature, stable, reasonable adult has every right to reject the assertions you make as unfounded. This is the way rational discourse progresses.

When you assert belief in the unseen, and your audience assents, you may have strengthened the emotional bond between you and they, but you are literally preaching to the choir - reinforcing a set of conceptions that otherwise erode the moment you step outside and continue with mundane everyday experience.

Spending a whole lifetime trying to resist thinking and ignoring the world around you in favor of the comfort of imaginary supervision and redemption is a tragic waste of the human spirit.

My (imaginary) Debate with Dr. William Lane Craig

Thank you for being here tonight, and thank you for allowing me to spend the next couple of hours with you. Let me especially extend my thanks to Dr. William Lane Craig, who, wholly unbeknownst to him, will serve as my imaginary opponent in this most improbable of imaginary debates.

The question before us here tonight is "Is there a God?" This question has been debated by such legends as Plato and Aristotle, St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Dr. William Lane Craig, and by such obscure laymen as yours truly.

Is there a God? The question itself evokes awe and wonder about the immensity of the universe - eternity and infinity, time, space, mass, energy and the way they appear and are arranged and behave. The question "Is there a God?" is almost invariably linked to, and preceded by life's most basic and deepest questions such as "Where did I come from?", "How did life arise?", "How did the universe come into existence?" and "Why is there something instead of nothing?".

Our intuitions - the almost-unconscious feelings and attitudes we have about things, tell us that there is something greater than we are. As an example, if we didn't know better, we might imagine that the cause of the rain was something not unlike ourselves - an animate force endowed with the ability to cause rain to fall. We know what and how we humans think and act (to an extent) so projecting characteristics that we ourselves have onto the invisible cause of the rain is as good a guess as any we can make in the absence of more information. We certainly do this as children, we certainly did this as a species early in our history, and we certainly do that even today.

Carrying the analogy a step further - when the rain floods the river until it overruns its banks and threatens our homes, we may seek to win favor from this animate rain-causing being by acting in a certain way that we think it might approve of, or offering it certain things that we think would please it, or bargaining with it. When the rain either falls - or subsides - in accordance with our wishes, we are filled with good feelings about the force behind the rain, and we sing its praises. When the rain - or lack or it - does not accord with our wishes and requirements, we may feel anger or fear, and seek to ameliorate these feelings with bargaining and offerings and sincere beseechments. So when these beseechments and offerings are coincident with a positive change in the weather, we say that the rain force has answered our prayers. When the weather fails to turn in our favor, we don't understand, but we can save face by saying that the rain force works in mysterious ways, and we re-double our prayers and offerings. Sooner or later, we either get rain, or we parch to death, after which our particular form of belief in the rain god passes away with us.

Taken to the extreme, this minor deity may accumulate other powers, merge with other minor deities and morph over time into God, almighty God, God the great and powerful. That's what Dr. Craig and I will argue tonight, he in the affirmative, I in the negative.

Defining God

Let me define God as I perceive it to be intended in this debate. When we say "God" tonight, I believe we are speaking of the monotheistic God "Yahweh" as described in the Hebrew Bible. This God is usually believed to have created Heaven and Earth, Adam and Eve, and is most commonly perceived to supervise and judge our lives and the world around us, and take action upon us and our surroundings both during our lives, and for eternity after we pass away. We can petition this God to receive benefits, and occasionally to smite our enemies. This conception of a deity is unimaginably powerful, this thing that can create an entire universe and interact with every thinking being on this tiny planet, then supervise us all for eternity after our physical lives are over. Unimaginably powerful indeed. And acts in mysterious ways.

Common arguments for God

Dr. Craig will argue that God exists. Dr. Craig will not present physical evidence of God, because, up until the very moment we walked into this building, there has never been any credible evidence that God exists. That we expect physical evidence which others can verify independently is a hallmark of an intelligent society that seeks to understand how the universe works. We want to know - to a reasonably high degree of certainty - that the things we can discern are explained as well as possible, while leaving it open to new and better explanations when new data, tools and techniques warrant. We even design experiments to falsify our hypotheses - to show that the data and models and methods that we propose as representing reality are instead false or unrepeatable - in order to prove to ourselves that our models reliably and repeatably explain things. So keep in mind that Dr. Craig will not present any of that.

Dr. Craig will argue some or all of the following: that God exists because 1) he is necessary for being; 2) the universe requires a cause, and that cause must be God; 3) the appearance of design in the universe indicates that there must be a designer, and that designer must be God; 4) the existence of human morals requires a higher authority to instill them in us, and that authority must be God. Dr. Craig's fifth common argument may be that the resurrection of Jesus as described in the New Testament is evidence of grace and power and love that are signs that God exists.

Finally, you may hear Dr. Craig tell us (and I will paraphrase here) "I believe in God because he personally revealed himself to me" - and that revelation is evidence that God exists. Although it is the least warranted, least supported by verifiable physical evidence and rational justification, it is the one argument that I am most sympathetic to. You see, I was once born-again. I once had what I would describe as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and I once - or twice - had what I interpreted as personal revelations that convinced me that God exists, and that he was speaking to me directly, not through an intermediary. This is powerful, powerful stuff. I no longer believe it - not a bit of it - but I'm very, very sympathetic to personal revelation because I've experienced it. So I stipulate that I am sympathetic to some arguments for the existence of God - but let me make it clear that I, in no way, accept any of them as demonstrations of, or evidence for God. I reject this God hypothesis completely, and in the course of this debate, I will show that the arguments for God that I've listed just now, are devoid of evidence, faulty in structure, and in no way present the slightest indication that anything supernatural does or could exist, let alone that ultimate supernatural conjecture we call God. They are just arrangements of words.

Tricks and traps

In the course of tonight's debate - Dr. Craig arguing that God exists and I arguing that God does not exist - I want to warn you of some of the tactics that will be employed in arguing for the resolution that God does exist. First, you will hear some assertions that are not agreed to.

For instance, you may hear that eternity - literally a universe with an infinite past and an infinite future, is logically impossible. Well, this is irrelevant. It makes no difference whether there is an infinite past or not. We are talking about whether something - God - exists. We are not arranging three and four-syllable words in order to impress our friends and exercise our lips. The only thing this assertion is good for is to set the stage for the argument from first cause - that the universe requires a cause, thus the cause is God, thereby proving that God exists (which incidentally omits how God could exist in the first place to perform this function). When you hear an argument against the existence of an eternal universe, you're just being softened up to accept a finite beginning, to which a hypothetical being - God - can be prepended as the cause. This is the only way that an argument from first cause can ever be made. Don't be misled. Arguing the existence of God ... a conjecture that has never been proven anywhere, and certainly the point of contention in this debate ... based on a premise so conditional as whether or not the universe has a beginning, does not make a worthy argument. It still ignores how God is necessary to the process. You might as well say "if, hypothetically, the universe has a finite beginning, then if, hypothetically, anything with a beginning has to have a cause, then if, hypothetically, the supernatural exists, then if, hypothetically God could exist, then if, hypothetically, God did exist, then if, hypothetically God could cause the universe to exist, then actually God did cause the universe to exist, therefore God exists." Did you notice how many times we have to interject that this is hypothetical? This type of reasoning is not something you'd ever consider worthwhile if you were trying to determine if the 200 foot high bridge in front of you is safe to cross - there are too many conditions to be met, most of which are clearly not certain, and may in fact be wildly improbable. To top it off, it's just another fine example of a circular argument - if he could exist and if he did exist and if he could create the universe and if he did create the universe then he exists. Huh?

If something exists, it can be detected. Rearranging words like we just did, on the other hand, doesn't help us detect anything. When my opponent rearranges words without a valid logical structure, without providing warrants for the intermediate inferences, without supplying adequate evidential support, it may simply confuse you or dissuade you from consciously recognizing that the conjecture being proposed - God - has no base of evidence or reasoning from which its existence can be affirmed.

The fact is, considering concepts such as eternity and infinity don't help you except to give you a metaphorical place to stand here and now. If, from this vantage point here and now, the human race cannot detect anything supernatural in the universe, then the best argument for the existence of God is only its negation - that "you can't prove God doesn't exist". Because you can't prove the non-existence of something is not logically followed by the statement "thus that 'something' is proven". It only puts the subject being not disproved into limbo - a limbo that says "we can think and say the words that describe it, but we have never observed it in any fashion". This is not an argument for God.

Also in the course of this debate, I urge you to count how many times your hear my opponent appeal to your emotion, to your ego. You will hear "don't you think?" and "it just stands to reason..." and "it's just common sense" - and similar constructions - more than once tonight. If you're like me, (and I'm blatantly appealing to your emotions and your intellects here) you are flattered when folks appeal to your predispositions, your emotions, your egos. But look for evidence - cold, hard, verifiable, unequivocal evidence. There will be none. Invoking things like "common sense" means nothing if, at its core, the sense that we're claiming to be common has no basis in fact. It's just opinion. Questions of existence aren't decided by opinion polls, they're decided by observation and measurement.

Interlude - my potential for belief in God

Now ... what would it take for me to believe in God? I once jokingly told a fellow blogger that my standards were low - just have her meet me at a restaurant that I'm thinking about, and at a time and date that I'm thinking about, and buy me the meal that I'm thinking about. If all this comes to pass, I'll even pick up the tip. It's that simple. It will not happen of course, but I hope this makes my point. If a super powerful being that people could communicate with and influence via the power of prayer cared one bit about the people of the world, she'd start making appearances so that the locals would know that it's not just nature that brought us here, but a real, verifiable cosmic force that is capable of finding its way around Little Italy in San Diego and ordering a meal for two. Simple.

Introducing my arguments

Finally, before I get into the meat of my thesis, I want to stress again that you will not hear me attempt to prove, logically or by physical evidence, that God does *NOT* exist. That, I'm sure Dr. Craig will agree with me, is a fool's errand. Here's a trivial analogy: You may able to measure the water in a glass and come to a reasonable conclusion that all of the water in the glass is H2O and only H2O - that only real water exists in the glass - but if I assert that there is arsenic in that glass, the only way you can disprove it to an absolute certainty is to observe each molecule individually. Barring that, you can never be 100% sure. You may be 99.999999% sure, but getting that last millionth, or billionth, or gazillionth of a percent will take more time, effort and money than the question is worth.

The same difficulty prevails when considering a disproof of the existence of God. If I can't disprove the existence of a molecule of arsenic in a glass - I'm darned sure incapable of disproving God's existence. I just don't have the time or inclination to go through each atom and photon and neutrino in the universe, nor each and every one of them in combination as they move and rearrange throughout eternity. Getting to that last billionth or gazillionth of a percent certainty is astronomically more difficult than my simple glass of water. So I won't even start down that road - not during football season, anyway.

Why the expected Arguments for God don't work

Let's have a brief look at why the most common arguments for the existence of God don't work.

The ontological argument

Ontological arguments take many forms, but tend to be marked by a focus on categories of being - such that extending the idea of higher powers to its "ultimate" leads you to arrive at the concept of God.

Dr. Craig normally relies on a variation of the Ontological argument first proposed by St. Anselm, and refined by Alvin Plantinga. I understand this to be:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

First problem - none of that indicates there's a god required anywhere - but we are then told that the maximally great be is god. It's not necessary that a god is the maximally great being that the argument concludes - so we could stop there.

But we won't - second problem: If and when Dr. Craig argues that this proves god ... does it prove Yahweh as well? You won't hear him make the mental twists and turns to do this - case closed again.

Third problem - did anyone count the "ifs"? That's a whole lot of "ifs" there, isn't it? Four of them. We can summarize the problems with this argument in one sentence: literally "It is possible that a maximally great being exists - therefore, a maximally great being exists". We can see that this chain of conditional premises can be used to "prove" - in a scare-quotey kind of way - that anything that you wish to assert is the maximally great being proved - and thereby prove that anything you wish to assert is God. By this logic - I can argue that it's possible for the universe to consist entirely of white mocha frappacino with a dash of cinnamon. You get my point that this argument does nothing for the theist when we take it seriously.

The argument from first cause

The argument from first cause - the Cosmological Argument - states that something caused the Universe to exist, and this First Cause must be God.

There are some problems with that: 1) it assumes that the term "cause" can be meaningfully applied to the universe. We may assign cause to human beings and their actions and products because we really do cause trivial things to be built and destroyed, and we really do cause events to occur. But it is early, barely at the dawn of man's ability to make meaningful observations and interpretations of the universe. There might not be a "cause" of the universe... it may just exist. 2) If "cause" is relevant, then we presumably must assign it to something external to the thing being caused. That implies that the thing doing the causing has an existence of its own, which, following the same pattern of thought, requires a cause, and so on. That's called an infinite regress. You can never stop asking the question of what caused the next higher causative agent. As a wise lady once was reported to say "it's turtles all the way down".

The variant of this argument that Dr. Craig appears to prefer is called the Kalam Cosmological argument. It is more elaborate that the basic formulation we just described. It says:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
   
2. The universe began to exist.
   
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
   
4. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
   
5. Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
   

Dr. Craig - when he chooses to make this argument - will throw lots of sciency sounding phrases around in an attempt to make it sound plausible, but here's all you need to know. Premise 4 - that "if the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful" - is not concluded. There is, just as with the ontological argument before it, no evidence and no warrant that justifies making the leap from (it has a cause" to "the cause was some all-powerful magical being". It could be, as before, that white mocha frappacino is working its mysterious wonders again here, as well.

The argument from design

The argument from design - known as the teleological argument, mainly because philosophers love big words - asserts that the existence of order and direction in nature - its apparent design - is attributable to some kind of designer, thereby essentially proving the existence of God. You're guaranteed to hear proponents of this - Dr. Lane of course - use the words design and designer as if the apparently ordered arrangement that we observe is the product of a design, thus implying a designer. In fact, what we perceive as order is just our human propensity to mentally arrange things in meaningful and memorable patterns. The "design" as it were - is just the result of nature. There is no active moving around of parts in this universe that are not just action and reaction cascading down from what we perceive as the Big Bang. The stars are just accumulations of gas caused by gravity, and lit up by fusion when the gravitational forces sufficiently compress the hydrogen and helium in the star. Planets, asteroids and comets are all subsequent by-products of heavier elements blown off by early supernovae, and coalesced around stars, again via the force of gravity. Up until this very moment, there has never been any supernatural force or entity required for anything that we've ever observed.

The argument from morality

The argument from morality - that the existence of morals could only be instilled in humanity by a divine presence - is an attractive but flawed explanation for why we feel a sense of right and wrong. Man is a social animal. Social animals develop behaviors that nurture one's offspring, relatives, and social group, and protect against those not in those groups. Some of the things that humans and other higher primates do, are wholly expected - altruism for instance. The fact that we feel repugnance at senseless murder within the social group, but extol it as a warrior's bravery when committed against out-group members, is just a further indication of how such behaviors evolve to perpetuate the social group, possibly to the detriment of those outside.

The argument from miracles (Jesus' resurrection)

The Resurrection of Jesus is also used as evidence that God exists. It is the argument from miracles. The problem with miracles is that they can be claimed, but you never have direct evidence of them. Find a single example of an occurrence in human history that couldn't be explained by natural forces, and you'd have a shocking headline. The resurrection of Jesus is not one of those cases. It is not independently attested to beyond the Bible ... the authors of the New Testament themselves were unclear if Jesus was resurrected by God to fulfill a divine purpose, as later authors claimed, or simply was no longer in the tomb, as the author of Mark reports. Since Mark is the first Gospel to be written, and upon whom both Matthew and Luke base most of their material, it is more plausible to say that the resurrection story was added later. Let's be clear, if Jesus was truly dead, and was truly raised from the dead after three days, and we could not explain it in natural terms, then it would be a miracle. But we can't ever make that claim, because there's no way of verifying that. The author of Mark doesn't make that claim. We are left to conjure up scenarios of what might have happened: possibly he never truly died and he escaped before three days was up; possibly he died and his body was stolen, possibly he died but his body was hidden and the tomb was presented as misdirection; possibly people were just mistaken about what happened; or more simply the story was just added long after his passing to impress on the faithful the importance of Jesus' entire ministry. This probably sounds if I'm being dismissive or disrespectful of the New Testament or of the faithful, but simpler conjectures are more likely, given the absence of any physical evidence.

The meat of my thesis

Finally - we get to the meat of my argument that God does not exist. Remember that I am not attempting to prove his non-existence, because we've already shown that any endeavor to prove the non-existence of something becomes astronomically more difficult as the subject increases in complexity. If, by definition, God is perceived of as that maximally great being that we mentioned before, then examining every particle in every atom everywhere in the universe, and every bit of energy everywhere in the universe, is laughable. My argument against the existence of God is simple: First, where is she? Tens of billions of humans have walked the earth since man first arrived on the scene. We might make a broad assumption that they've each lived an average of ten thousand days or so - less than thirty years each up until recently. Not once in history has a single human made a single credible claim of a God sighting that could verify her existence. The staggering silence of this hypothetical being speaks more to her non-existence than all of the preaching from all of the pulpits and street corners in all of history. One hundred trillion person-days, and nary a peep. Second, when is attempting to explain a complicated and remote concept such as the creation of the universe or the emergence of life, ever ... EVER ... aided by presupposing something astronomically more complex as an essential predecessor, as God is presumed to be? It defies logic and physics to postulate this. It is unnecessary, and it leads to an infinite regress. This astronomically more complex being would then require an explanation as to what brought IT into existence. And what brought THAT into existence? And so on. We don't now what brought the universe into existence, but laid bare, we are either faced with an infinite regress that presupposes an infinite number of succeedingly greater worlds that require beings to cause them, or we just admit our ignorance and continue to look deeper into this mystery with the goal of broadening our understanding. It most certainly isn't turtles all the way down.

Summation

In summary:

• imagining that a being as great as God is required to bring the universe into existence ignores that the arguments for it don't work;
• we don't need external forces to explain what we take to be design;
• the existence of what we consider morals are just good social sense that tend to help us propagate our kin;
• the resurrection of Jesus, or any purported miracle, has yet to be independently reported on, not to mention verified;
• and the idea that God revealed himself to you personally has no bearing on how the world is, it just tells you how you respond to internal sensations.

None of these things indicate in the least that the supernatural, or that ultimate supernatural concept - God - exists. The fact that tens of billions of people have never reported a God sighting that could be confirmed, much less repeated, speaks volumes. The fact that an entity that could cause the world needs a base from which to effect that causation just makes the thing being caused unnecessarily complex. If God exists, I invite her to appear immediately, otherwise, we will remain prudent in assuming that she does not exist. Thank you for inviting me here. I look forward to Dr. Craig's opening statement.

---

[The preceding was an imaginary opening statement for an even more imaginary debate that I hallucinated, starring William Lane Craig as my opponent - but it could have been any apologist capable of making the common arguments that I preempt here. See? Imaginary friends *CAN* be fun!] Because I was trying to fashion this as a transcript of an opening argument (imaginary though it was), I didn't provide hyperlinks in the text like you'd usually expect in a blog post. Here are some relevant links to make up for that: The Cosmological Argument The Teleological Argument The Existence of God (lists lots of arguments for and against) And ... the two debates starring Dr. Craig that I'm most familiar with: Dr. Craig and Christopher Hitchens Dr. Craig and Sam Harris

---

I modifed this in April and May to correct some errors that I made ... somehow in my prior version I interleaved info on the Kalam COsmological and the Ontological argument. How could I have been so careless?

Dying

I had the most trivial of exchanges with a fellow blogger in which he described what would happen to me at the rapture ... including something about my "bug-eaten corpse". Since death doesn't seem that frightening, and the rapture is howlingly preposterous idea, I thought I'd summarize what a quick scan through the interwebs can tell me about my impending corporeal demise.

When I die ...

---

I'll stop breathing ... my heart will stop ... brain activity will stop ... blood will recede from my skin and will settle in the lower portions of my body ... my corpse's temperature drops ... my limbs stiffen ... eventually I decompose.

Immediately after the heart stops, nutrients are no longer delivered to the cells, the pH level changes, and the cells own digestive enzymes begin to consume the cells themselves. Blisters may appear on the skin.

At the same time, oxygen that remains is consumed by aerobic organisms - paving the way for anaerobic organisms to flourish, and basically make a mess of things. The body starts to putrefy - and external organisms (flies and other carrion insects) arrive to join in the fun.

Once putrefaction has released enough gas into the corpse, it begins to bloat. forcing fluids out through the natural orifices, plus any blisters that may have emerged during earlier decomposition. If things get out of hand, the skin may rupture.

It's all downhill from here ... decay accelerates ... the corpse loses mass ... maggots are extremely active ... fluids are consumed or evaporate ... eventually there's not enough left for the cadaver to sustain pests and anaerobic organisms, so it is now essentially just dry skin, ligaments and bones.

How I'll Feel About It

---

A personal note - once I stop breathing, my heart stops, the chemical and electrical processes in my brain stop, and my cells have been deprived of oxygen long enough to prevent successful resuscitation and resumption of normal life, I will have ceased to exist. The ethereal entity I refer to as "me" or "my spirit" or "my soul" will have vanished from this existence, never to interact with it again. All that will remain of me will be the now-meaningless possessions I had, the loved ones I left behind, the memories they have of me, and the few kindnesses and good works that I was able to share with my fellow travelers on my way to non-existence.

I hope I made life more liveable for my loved ones and my fellow travelers while we were in this world together.

Postscript

---

As for resurrection ... it appears that as recently as the late 1800's, hundreds-to-thousands of people were buried alive by accident every year. What are the chances that bronze age goat herders also encountered this? Do you think that this might be the source of resurrection stories?

From Wikipedia:

Writing in 1895, the physician J.C. Ouseley claimed that as many as 2,700 people were buried prematurely each year in England and Wales, although others estimated the figure to be closer to 800.

The Argument from WTF?

Seen on Twitter this morning:

i3eaconlight

Explaining my faith to an atheist, is like trying to describe how I got out of the box, to someone still stuck inside it.

This is so weird in so many ways.

Who's in the box?

Why don't you try to explain anyway?

What do I assume you have "faith" in?

Why does your faith need explaining?

Seriously, all those who are of average intelligence, with average reasoning skills, and with average information would find it fascinating and fun to hear your explanations.

Maybe I should get back on twitter and engage him!