Anthropic Principal Debunks Naturalism (page 2)

Shining One

"Geisler's not a scientist"

Does one have to be a baseball player to know a lot about baseball? Geisler has more intelligence in his ear lobe that many have in their frontal lobes! LOL
Rex

Dawkins you say? That is the stupidest analogy going....

For you and Satanus:
# Uncaused Cause
1. Objection: If something cannot bring itself into existence, then God cannot exist since something had to bring God into existence. Answer: Not so. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes lest an infinity be crossed (which cannot happen). Therefore, there must be a single uncaused, cause.
2. All things that came into existence were caused to exist. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes (otherwise an infinity of time has been crossed which is impossible because an infinity cannot be crossed). Therefore, logically, there must be a single uncaused cause that did not come into existence.
3. Physicists have determined that the universe is finite and had a beginning and is in fact slowing down.

BTW, (off topic) isn't Dawkins the one who said that abortion is justified because the unborn are non-persons? Then he went on to say that logically the parents or woman should be able to end the child's life after it was born up to about a month of age. There's the kind of reasoning you get with cold, hard logic. You can see that logic in the 'final solution' that the Nazis decided on. Atheistic forms of government have resulted in 200 million premature deaths as the result of war, famine and pestilence brought by war. Oh well, so much for the humanist manifesto, eh?
Rex

Satanus

That is the stupidest analogy going....

It's the same reasoning that people like you use about the conditions in the universe. You look at it in a backwards way, from the present to it's origin, the same way that i described the puddle. It shows how stupid creationist's reasonings are. You judge yourself.

# Uncaused Cause

1. Objection: If something cannot bring itself into existence, then God cannot exist since something had to bring God into existence. Answer: Not so. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes lest an infinity be crossed (which cannot happen). Therefore, there must be a single uncaused, cause.
2. All things that came into existence were caused to exist. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes (otherwise an infinity of time has been crossed which is impossible because an infinity cannot be crossed). Therefore, logically, there must be a single uncaused cause that did not come into existence.

Copying and pasting again, i see. This is an old arguement, the style of which goes at least as far back as aquinus. It has also been well dealt w. And so, a little copying and pasting of my own, along w sources, which you did not not include for yours.

http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/unmovedmover#cosmological

The Classic Cosmological Argument: Thomas Aquinas

"We see in the world around us that there is an order of efficient causes. Nor is it ever found (in fact it is impossible) that something is its own efficient cause. If it were, it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Nevertheless, the order of efficient causes cannot proceed to infinity, for in any such order the first is cause of the middle (whether one or many) and the middle of the last. Without the cause, the effect does not follow. Thus, if the first cause did not exist, neither would the middle and last causes in the sequence. If, however, there were an infinite regression of efficient causes, there would be no first efficient cause and therefore no middle causes or final effects, which is obviously not the case. Thus it is necessary to posit some first efficient cause, which everyone calls 'God.'"
--Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c.1260 CE

Dating back to Aristotle, the cosmological argument is very probably the oldest argument offered in support of the existence of God, and probably the most frequently used by lay apologists as well. As formulated above by Thomas Aquinas, the cosmological argument states that every event has a cause; but every cause is itself caused by something else. To avoid an infinite regression, the argument concludes, we must postulate a first cause that is itself uncaused and eternal, and it identifies this first cause as God.

If the flaw of the ontological argument is circularity, the fallacy of the cosmological argument is special pleading. Namely, it asserts without good reason that everything except God needs a cause. But why should this be? If anything can exist without a cause, we could just as well conclude that it is the universe itself that is uncaused, existing eternally and giving rise to all other cause and effect. This hypothesis has just as much explanatory power as the hypothesis that God created the universe, and it is more parsimonious, requiring fewer additional assumptions. Therefore, all other things being equal, it is to be preferred.

Aquinas' objection to the possibility of an infinite regress is also poorly founded. He claims that an infinite regression of causes could not exist because there would be no first cause, but this shows a failure to understand the notion of an infinite series. In such a series, every individual event would have a perfectly good cause: the event preceding it. Alternatively, if we accept Aquinas' logic on this point, we can then ask, how many thoughts did God have before creating the universe? Every thought God had must have been caused by another thought preceding it, since Aquinas claims nothing can be its own cause. But since by Aquinas' argument an infinite beginningless series is impossible, God must have had a single thought preceding all others - i.e., there must have been a point at which God came into existence. We can then ask the cause of this initial thought, and so on ad infinitum.

There is one final attack on the classic cosmological argument. Say for the sake of argument that we ignore the above difficulty and grant this argument everything it asks - then it still does nothing to establish the existence of God. Even if we accept this argument's logic, all it proves is that there was a first cause. It does not prove that this first cause still exists today; it does not prove that this first cause has any interest in or awareness of human beings; it does not prove that this first cause is omnipotent or omniscient or benevolent. It does not even prove that the first cause is conscious or a person. An atheist could accept this entire chain of logic and then posit that the first cause was a purely natural phenomenon.

The Modern Cosmological Argument: William Lane Craig

"Now from the very nature of the case, as the cause of space and time, this supernatural cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncaused because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless - at least without the universe - because it created time. Because it also created space, it must transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical."
--William Lane Craig, in God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, p.5; Oxford University Press, 2004.

The modern version of Aquinas' argument is known as the kalam cosmological argument. More sophisticated than the classic cosmological argument, the kalam argument, as originally developed by Muslim theologians and today employed by Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig, seeks to avoid the charge of special pleading that dogged its predecessor. It most often takes the following form:

An actual infinite cannot exist in reality.
Therefore, an infinite number of events cannot have occurred before the present.
Therefore, the universe began to exist.
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Craig takes this argument further by claiming that space and time came into being along with the universe, and therefore the cause of the universe must transcend both space and time. Finally, and most audaciously, he claims that the cause cannot be an impersonal natural phenomenon, because if the necessary conditions for the universe to exist had existed from eternity, the universe itself would have existed from eternity, and this is not the case; science has discovered that the universe has a finite age, beginning at the Big Bang. Therefore, Craig asserts that only a personal agent could freely will to create an effect in time.

There are several important problems with this argument. The first one lies with Craig's claimed proof that an actual infinite cannot exist, a claim which he uses to argue that the universe must have had a finite history and therefore a beginning. Craig's argument for this point relies on alleged self-contradictions that arise when considering the idea of an actually existing infinity. For example, the set of all numbers is infinite in size, as is the set of even numbers, but if we subtract the latter from the former the resulting set is still infinite. More importantly, Craig claims it is impossible to form an infinite set by successive addition - no matter how many times we add 1 + 1 + 1 + 1..., the sum will always be a finite number, never infinity. Therefore, no matter how many past events have occurred, there can only be a finite number of them and there still must have been a first event, a beginning to the universe. While Craig argues that a potential infinite, defined as a value that increases indefinitely without bound, can exist, he denies that an actual infinite can ever exist in reality.

It is true that an actual infinite, if such a thing existed, would possess some very strange and counterintuitive properties; for one thing, such a set could be the same size as one of its proper subsets, which is the source of most of the "absurdities" Craig claims to have pointed out. But this does not prove that such a thing is impossible, merely that the human mind cannot adequately conceive of it. There is no law that requires reality to conform to our expectations. Most people would also find the idea that light can behave both as a particle and as a wave to be counterintuitive or absurd, but nevertheless, quantum mechanics has taught us that it is so.

Regarding the supposed impossibility of forming an infinite by successive addition, Craig's argument makes a key faulty assumption. Of course an actual infinite cannot be formed by successive addition if one only has a finite number of steps to do it in. But an actual infinite can be formed by an infinite number of successive additions. In other words, there could have been an infinite number of events before now as long as there was also an infinite amount of time before now, which is exactly as we should expect. One might object that this proves that it is necessary to start with an infinite in order to get an infinite. This is true, and it is not a problem if one postulates a universe that has always existed as a brute fact requiring no further explanation, just as theists postulate a God that has always existed as a brute fact.

Finally, there is a problem with this premise that Craig does not seem to have considered, and one that shows why the kalam cosmological argument, despite its greater sophistication, is still built on special pleading. How many things does God know? An omniscient deity, obviously, would know an infinite number of things. How many things can God do? Equally obviously, an omnipotent deity would be able to do an infinite number of things. But these are not potential infinites; they are actual infinites. The number of things God knows or can do, according to traditional theism, is not increasing indefinitely without bound; it is already as great as it will ever be. Therefore, since Craig argues that an actual infinite cannot exist in reality, then he has proven by his own argument that God does not exist - at least, not an infinite god of the type conceived of by so many theists.

We next consider premise 3, which states that the universe began to exist. As Craig puts it, "The astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the 'Big Bang' around 15 billion years ago. Physical space and time were created in that event, as well as all the matter and energy in the universe" (p.4). Craig has far overreached himself here. Nothing about Big Bang theory implies or requires that space, time, matter or energy began to exist at that point after previously not existing. Simply stated, the Big Bang was a point at which the universe as we currently observe it was extremely hot and dense. Our current formulations of the laws of physics break down under these conditions, and so we do not know what came before that. But this does not entail that the universe itself came into existence at that point. It might well have existed in another form prior to the Big Bang. It might even have always existed, so that the Big Bang would not be its beginning but merely the least recent event in its history that we can observe. In this case, the kalam argument's premise 3 fails and therefore the entire argument fails.

It is worth noting that Craig quotes Dr. Stephen Hawking in support of his claim that time itself began at the Big Bang, but takes him out of context in so doing. As Hawking himself has said, even if there were events before the Big Bang, they would make no difference to us. "As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang" (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.49; Bantam Books, 1996). In other words, Hawking believes we should say that, as far as we are concerned, the Big Bang is when time began. That does not mean that other events could not have happened before that, merely that it is pointless to speculate because we could never know anything about them. This is not equivalent to Craig's claim that time did not exist before the Big Bang occurred. Craig is correct to claim that it is the overwhelming scientific consensus that the Big Bang did happen, while alternatives such as the steady-state model are poorly supported by the evidence (p.8); but this does not support his particular interpretation of what the Big Bang may mean for the beginning of the universe. (Craig also erroneously cites cosmological theories such as the oscillating universe or chaotic eternal inflation as if they were alternatives to the Big Bang, when in fact they are attempts to explain what may have happened beforehand. Many of these theories, in opposition to Hawking, do postulate that events prior to the Big Bang may have had observational consequences for the universe).

Next, premise 4 holds that anything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. But we already know that this is not true. Strange as it seems, science has discovered some natural objects that come into being uncaused. One such class of object is called virtual particles. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the product of energy and time must always be greater than a certain constant; therefore, as we examine apparently empty space over shorter and shorter time scales, we discover increasingly violent, and increasingly brief, fluctuations of energy. Since energy is equivalent to matter by E = mc 2 , on time scales that are sufficiently short these fluctuations can be so violent as to create actual particles that exist for only a fleeting instant before returning to nothingness. These particles are not merely a hypothetical construct: they produce detectable effects that can be, and have been, experimentally measured. However, there is literally no specific cause of their existence. Nor is this phenomenon merely an inconsequential anomaly. Some physicists have proposed hypotheses in which a similar phenomenon, under the right circumstances, could have given rise to our universe.

In attempting to refute this point, Craig commits several fallacies. First, he claims that some physicists disagree that quantum fluctuations are uncaused and therefore this is not a "proven exception" (p.6) to this premise. This misses the point. To refute the kalam argument, it is not necessary to prove beyond any doubt that there are exceptions to its premises; such an unrealistically high standard of proof is impossible to meet anyway. It is only necessary to show that such an exception can exist. This would mean that there are alternative explanations for the origin of the universe, and there would therefore be no need to postulate a supernatural creator. In any case, if Craig invokes the support of a solid majority of the scientific community in support of theories such as the Big Bang, he cannot then disregard the weight of scientific opinion when it clashes with another point he wishes to make. Craig cites only one scientist (David Bohm) who believed that quantum fluctuations might be deterministic, and Bohm's views have not been widely accepted by the physics community.

Secondly, Craig claims that "even on the traditional, indeterministic interpretation, particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise as spontaneous fluctuations of the energy contained in the sub-atomic vacuum; they do not come from nothing.... Popular magazine articles touting such theories as getting 'something from nothing' simply do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing, but is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws" (p.6). This, again, misses the point. Craig seems to have forgotten that the objection he is addressing is not whether something can come into being from nothing; it is whether something can come into being uncaused. The two are not the same thing. If I left a pile of lumber and boards in my yard and later returned to find a dining room table sitting there, it would not make the table any less uncaused to say that it was formed from the pre-existing lumber. It is arguably correct to say that virtual particles arise from the quantum vacuum, which is not "nothing"; but in this case one would also have to then say that "nothingness" as traditionally conceived does not exist. In this case, the vacuum would have always existed, and the universe would have come into being from it, quite possibly uncaused.

Finally, even if we overlook the failure of its other premises and assume that Craig's argument is correct so far - that the universe was caused and an actual infinite cannot exist - this still would not verify the kalam cosmological argument. It still falls victim to the same problem as the classic cosmological argument: even if we grant that the universe had a cause, how do we know the cause is anything at all like the theistic conception of God? How do we know, for example, that the universe was not caused by a timeless, impersonal natural force?

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S

DannyBloem

Shiny,

Some of the arguments given in your first post are true,

many of the so called facts are just not true,

some are true, but follow logically from each other. a=b, b=c, what a coincidence that a=c ....

But you are probably not willing to discuss this, and just run away, so what use would it have to explain all those points to you....

Danny

Shining One

Hey Pink,
Who is running away? Does that mean if I stay here six weeks then leave for a spell, then I am running away? How about six days or six hours? Who are you to judge that? I have been on here (and the previous version) for various time periods for the last several years. The agnostic set here is famous for simply outlasting the rest of us.........I have a life to lead away from here. It would be refreshing to see some of the mini-Alans here come up with something original.

Rex

Satanus

It would be refreshing to see some of the mini-Alans here come up with something original.

Er, this from the copy & paste king.? S

DannyBloem

Hey Pink,

Who is running away? Does that mean if I stay here six weeks then leave for a spell, then I am running away? How about six days or six hours? Who are you to judge that? I have been on here (and the previous version) for various time periods for the last several years. The agnostic set here is famous for simply outlasting the rest of us.........I have a life to lead away from here. It would be refreshing to see some of the mini-Alans here come up with something original.

he he he, I think you mean me.

by the way I am not an agnostic.

first of all, I was not talking in general and not only you.

I see here a lot of people copy and pasting articles, without willing to defend them. This is strange, if you think this are good articles you must be willing to defend those articles. But many times when I make points against some of the things mentioned they are ignored, so I wonder what use it is to make them.

If you are willing, I am more then happy to discuss some of the statements. But discussion is only usefull when people are willing to listen to eachother, and validate there arguments.

Therefor it would be better not to just copy and paste and article and that is it.

Just start a thread and give your arguments in your own words, with links if you like.

To many people are of the "drag, drop and run class".

Danny

Abaddon

Shining

1. Objection: If something cannot bring itself into existence, then God cannot exist since something had to bring God into existence. Answer: Not so. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes lest an infinity be crossed (which cannot happen). Therefore, there must be a single uncaused, cause.

2. All things that came into existence were caused to exist. You cannot have an infinite regression of causes (otherwise an infinity of time has been crossed which is impossible because an infinity cannot be crossed). Therefore, logically, there must be a single uncaused cause that did not come into existence.

In additon to the mathematical error that has been pointed out, you don;t actually deal with the prime contradiction in your claims. You claim it impossible for things to come about without a designer, even if you phrase it differently. Yet you refuse to accept that that claim also applies to the designer, for no reason other than assertion. This is why you are a presuppositonalist; you assume there was a god, and base all of your assumptions on that.

3. Physicists have determined that the universe is finite and had a beginning and is in fact slowing down.

This has nothing to do with what happened before the Universe as we see it (i.e. that which was produced by the 'Big Bang' or whatever) existed. No physicist would claim nothing existed before the begibning of the Universe as defined above. Thus you are either ignorant of what physicists claim or false characterise their arguments.

As far as abortion goes, please show me the scriptures which specifically address abortion, as in deliberate termination of a pregnancy. There are laws on bestiality, which one presumes happens less than abortion, and abortion was known and practised in antiquity. Thus if there is a specific law about an occasionally occuring sin, there should be a SPECIFIC AND CLEAR law about a more regulary occuring sin, just as there is a specific and clear one regarding bestiality.

If you are unable to show such a specific and clear law, then any objection by yourself to abortion is all to do with your opinion and nothing to do with the Bible. As with most presuppositoionalists, I am guessing this is all to do about you elevating your opinion to the state of personal god, even if it flies in the face of the obvious, reasonable and provable, and having you prove this to everyone when you fail to prove there is any specific law against abortion in the Bible will be kind of fun.

As with most bigots (Merriam Webster: "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices" - this is a description of your attitude not an insult, and by definiton a presuppositionalist is a bigot), there is little point in hoping that any discussion will change your opinion, but your character and the hypocracy and utter vanity of your beliefs are nicely displayed to anyone with a passing interest who might read this thread by what you say (and don;t say).

Shining One

Abaddon,
God is transcendant and needs no cause to exist. Whether you are a deist or agnostic there is no logical progression: logic stops here and cannot address eternity.
On the topic of abortion, I don't care who practiced it, when or where. That is irrelevant. YOUR modern science has determined that the fetus is human life, period. If you are in favor of it, then you are in favor of killing the most defensless members of our society. You don't need any more law than "thou shalt not murder". Are you also going to justify pedeophiles because this has been done for ages?
Where does your logic take you when you actually play it out all the way instead of halting at your own level of morality? How much can you stomach?
Rex

funkyderek

Shining One:

BTW, (off topic) isn't Dawkins the one who said that abortion is justified because the unborn are non-persons? Then he went on to say that logically the parents or woman should be able to end the child's life after it was born up to about a month of age.

I don't believe so. Steven Pinker made claims along this lines, although nothing as horrific as your out-of-context reference suggests. It's a complicated issue. See Pinker's article at http://www.rightgrrl.com/carolyn/pinker.html

Anthropic Principal Debunks Naturalism

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