Is the existence of God nothing more than a myth?

Debate Room
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G’day Stevil, in one of his first posts Smr identifies his preferred god thing as “allah”, without further identifying which particular strain, sect, cult of Islam he follows.
In his profile he identified as “agnostic” , but subsequent posts seem to indicate he is confused as to the definition of that term.

If you can bear to read his more verbose posts he describes this being in confused and general terms including being beyond time, beyond matter etc…none of which make much sense if his chosen “allah” interacts with humans as described in his chosen texts.

Have a great day!

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I think the Cosmological Argument doesn’t require an identifying name for a particular god. I don’t really care what his god’s name is, I was just wondering what his definition of a god is, within the context of his argument. A necessary first cause, might not be a being or a god. It might simply be the quantum soup, or something else. I was just wondering why he seems to be presupposing that the necessary uncaused cause is perhaps an “intelligent” thinking and choice making being rather than a natural phenomenon

I’ve often seen people get confused by what agnostic means. Some people are like, I’m not an atheist, I’m agnostic. To me, generally most agnostics are also atheist. I think you can also be an agnostic theist, it just means you lack knowledge but you believe anyway perhaps through Faith rather than evidence.

OK, thanks for pointing that out, I didn’t read all the posts in this thread, I’ll see if I can find it.

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Except there are two flaws I can see, firstly that we don’t currently know this about everything in the universe, because we don’t understand everything about the universe, it is certainly true of everything we currently understand, but in the KCA, the claim is an absolute rather than a qualified claim.

The bigger flaw is that the KCA immediately projects our limited understanding of the physical universe, beyond it’s point of origin, which no one can yet claim to understand.

On this I’d agree, since we cannot know that time (certainly as we understand / observe it) existed prior to the big bang, and the formation of the physical universe we currently observe. So as you say this claim in the KCA that the universe “began” cannot currently be evidenced, even our language might currently be insufficient here, to describe or understand a possible state of the cosmos without time as we currently observe it.

Of course no deity is even argued for in the KCA, theists simply assume this with question begging, and different deities ta that.

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I’m not sure why your definition calls God a “Him” as if it is a person or has a gender. The name of a particular god is unnecessary in the definition of the term “God” unless you are resorting to special pleading and saying this one person/personality is God and no one else is.

But you are saying that “God” means something that is necessary, eternal, self-sufficient, beyond matter/time/space. Independent and in need of nothing and that everything else is dependant on this for their existence. I don’t think the Cosmological argument says that everything is dependant on this, just that it was supposedly the first cause, not that if it ceases to exist now, that everything else will cease to exist also.

Perhaps energy, or energy fields or the quantum soup could be God??

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And the term atheism escapes him apparently, as he is attaching a raft of assumptions to atheists / atheism without actually asking if the atheists here actually hold those beliefs, and when they have pointedly made no such claims.

Well of course the KCA fails without tacking a deity on, but since his core claim here is that the Muslim deity exists, it is worth pointing out that this is an extra unevidenced assumption he is making.

He is likely making this unevidenced assumption, precisely because he holds an a priori religious belief he wants to staple to the KCA.

All the time, do people not know they can get a dictionary definition in a few seconds online?

agnostic

noun

  1. a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God.

For someone who labelled himself an agnostic, he has made an awful lot of claims about a deity, and professed theistic belief. Now while I can see the rational in disbelieving a claim when you don’t know whether it is true or not, I cannot see the rationale in believing a claim under the same ignorance.

People who make this error often also make the mistake of equating disbelief of a claim, with a contrary claim. Usually it’s deliberate of course, in order to pretend atheism must have a burden of proof, as if this makes the claim a deity exists some sort of 50/50 premise, which is absurd.

All without even the pretence of evidence of course. In science an argument is not evidence, and I personally don’t believe you simply argue something into existence, also theists use the same arguments to argue wildly different deities into existence, that alone should demonstrate to them how much such arguments are worth.

A sound argument is not a trump card that negates the need for evidence, it is a bare minimum, if a belief can’t be evidenced in any remotely objective way then I’d disbelieve it, even if a sound argument could be made for the belief, but I have never seen a sound argument for a deity. the close is Gödel’s ontological proof, and this only works if you accept his opening premsises, which of course amount to question begging, as like @Smr’s arguments it attempts to define a deity (a different one to the thread author of course) into existence.

If the supporting argument for a deity makes unevidenced claims about that deity, it is fallacious, any claims it makes meet the same evidentiary standard as the core claim a deity exists.

Claims…are not evidence, so you cannot prop up an unevidenced claim with more unevidenced claims.

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I am going to contend that the first premise also is problematic.

We have yet to observe anything beginning to exist. How do we know that things that begin to exist have causes if we’ve never observed such an event?

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How can anything begin in the absence of time?

Is begin even the right word here?

This is the problem with making assumptions prior to the big bang, as theists do with arguments like the KCA, it has left science and logic behind, and is in the realm of philosophy.

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Hmmm… let me see if I can reply to Sheldon and CapriMark1 about the KCA.

Both have taken issue with my acceptance of the first premise.

I suppose I was approaching the KCA from this angle, you guys. For an argument such as this it isn’t necessary to refute all of it to demolish it. The argument consists of two premises and a conclusion. So, all that is needed for the wrecking ball to knock it down was for one of the premises to fail. Smr and I were already in disagreement over the whether the universe had a beginning, as he claimed. So that’s where I focused my efforts.

About the first premise, I think I may be wrong. Since I was talking about things coming into existence within the universe I was working on the following principle. Because everything we see in the universe happens in the past we only see events as they were and not as they are. Therefore astronomers and cosmologists are obliged to infer that the laws of causality that appear to hold good here of Earth also hold good everywhere else in the universe. They cannot check this in real time. They can only observe causality appearing to happen long ago.

On that basis I was happy to let the first premise pass. But now I think I’m mistaken in doing so.

If the first premise is an absolute, then as a truth claim, it fails. It fails because we cannot absolutely know that everything within the universe that begins to exist has a cause. For that to be an absolute truth claim we would have to possess absolute knowledge of its truth. But as I’ve already pointed out above, we don’t and can’t know that. We can only infer it.

So, the first premise might fail if it makes an absolute truth claim about everything having a cause.

I think I was mistaken earlier because I was treating the first premise as a tentative truth claim, based only on human experience and human reason. On those grounds it might be allowed to pass because reason tells us that it is reasonable to infer that causality in the entire universe is the same as causality on Earth. That is, after all, the basis of table top experiments on the nature of photons, like the famous double-slit experiment. That which is observed here is assumed or inferred to hold good everywhere else in the universe.

So I suppose the question I would like answered is about the status of the the first premise. Is it an absolute truth claim or is it a tentative one?

Your thoughts?

Walter.

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For what its worth I’m hoping that Smr returns.

I would have liked to have seen him make good on his claim that he could successfully argue for the existence of a specific god (Allah) and not just argue for a god with the same qualities as the three gods of the Abrahamic monotheisms. Or the god of the Sikhs or the Zoroastrians.

For a long time now I’ve held to the position that apologetic arguments like the Fine Tuned Universe and others cannot specifically identify who the creator god is. But there seemed to be the promise that Smr could have done this and I would have been interested to see his line of argument.

Also, I think that I can make a fair apologetic argument for the existence of Allah as the creator, so it would have be interesting to put that under the scrutiny of a devout and believing Muslim.

Thank you,

Walter.

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This tension doesn’t seem much discussed but it’s one of those tangled webs monotheists weave for themselves when first they begin to deceive. They say God is outside of spacetime, yet somehow interacts with it without being part of it. They say that his ways are past finding out, yet claim to know his demands and needs in great detail. They claim this god yearns to relate to us (and pines for – nay, needs our adoration) and yet he’s supposed to be entirely self sufficient and non-dependent. Indeed, this god, despite being busy holding existence together, is depicted as primarily obsessed with humanity and humanity alone.

This one logical inconsistency is the source of countless mutually exclusive issues like this. You can’t place your god “outside time and space”, conveniently invisible and undetectable and inaccessible (and most importantly, unfalsifiable), and yet have him need / love you (or hate you if you don’t reciprocate), place demands on you, and have a whole cosmology structured around your rewards and punishments.

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"I respect your opinion.

In all respects, we are going astray into fallacies. First, we must examine the arguments for these theories."

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"I respect your opinion.

In all respects, we are going astray into fallacies. First, we must examine the arguments for these theories.

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That’s perfectly true of course, but from painful experience I am always careful to make it clear to apologists when I am accepting something for the sake of argument, simply for brevity. To be absolutely clear an argument even a sound one would not be sufficient for me to invest credulity, without any objective evidence to support a claim something was real / existed, since existence is defined as being alive or part of objective reality.

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Any questions and objections / refutations being addressed / answered anytime soon? You came to a debate forum with a god claim after all, are you wasting our time just to preach?

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Since first cause arguments like the KCA are philosophical in nature, it’s not hard to imagine that the cosmos existed in some other form prior to the big bang, and since time as we observe it is a consequence or characteristic of the physical universe, we could as easily assume that this cosmos existed outside of time and space.

If one can imagine a deity and define it into existence, then one can do this for pretty much anything, the only hole left for apologists to bolt to then, would be special pleading.

Yet has zero interest in the other species of great ape that we are taxonomically grouped with and share the vast majority of our DNA with, and of course who have existed for longer than humans have. This does not suggest we are the “main show” depicted in the creation myths in both the bible and the Koran.

Intentionally so, if I was being cynical.

Not one word of that addresses @mordant’s post you linked, it is nothing more than a cryptic piece of handwaving.

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I assumed you accepted the first premise in order to show that the argument still fails due to the second premise. I find it easier to argue one item at a time and that was what you were doing!

I spent the night mulling over how many ways the first premise fails. So many it spilled over into the second premise! I had not even considered that time didn’t start until the initiation of the Big Bing (Boy, I hate that label!!)

What I concentrated on was how much we do not know about what happened - and further, how much we don’t know about the basic premise - that everything had a beginning. I know of nothing that had a beginning where there was nothing before!

For example, it is common for folks to point to a painting as something created. But a painting started off as paint that was creatively and selectively applied to canvas. Both the paint and the canvas existed before the “creation event”. When we talk about the beginning of the universe, we have a basic problem. Theists talk about something from nothing, and scientists talk about something from something else.

And in both cases, we just plain don’t know how that works. We have no evidence to help us.

But to me the biggest problem with the KCA is the need for the existence of an outside agency. Where did that agency come from? Don’t the “rules” about everything having a beginning apply there as well? And shouldn’t there be some other evidence to support the existence of that outside agency!

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Is start the right word?

start

verb
1.begin or be reckoned from a particular point in time or space.

Maybe: Time (as we observe / understand it) may not have existed prior to the big bang?

NB This would broadly deal with claims for cause and effect of course, which have only ever been observed inside a temporal physical universe, and we could easily imagine anything that might have existed might have done so outside of time and space, thus negating arguments against infinite regress. I think what we have then in the KCA when used as a theistic argument is a clear false dichotomy that we have all seen apologists use, namely: “either goddidit, or a universe from nothing”…

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It’s arguing from a perspective of necessity.
For example if you found an egg, you would know there must have been something that laid that egg, without ever having seen anything lay that egg.

Of course with the egg analogy we have seen eggs being laid by birds before. We know that happens. But we haven’t seen a universe get created by a creator before, so we don’t know that happens.

I think the Cosmological argument instantly irks people because in the conclusion, they say, "and that necessary thing that kicks it all off, we call that god. The term “God” is such a loaded term with lots of unnecessary baggage. It shouldn’t be used in the conclusion at all.
They should just stop at, well, just saying, there must be something outside space and time that caused the universe and Space and Time to begin.
That would be much less of a loaded conclusion.

It is also difficult to say The Universe had a beginning, because what is specifically mean by The Universe? I think the BBT suggests that the expansion of the universe had a beginning which was around 14 billion years ago. But that doesn’t mean that all the energy began to exist at that moment and it doesn’t mean that nothing was there prior to the beginning of the expansion. There are so many unknowns and the 1st premise just uses simple words to explain something really complex.

But anyway, if rather than taking the 1st premise as a given fact, if we entertain an “IF” and see where that leads us. it would really be quite remarkable to consider, IF everything, including energy and low entropy began at that moment, instantly from a starting point of either nothing or complete entropy (heat death) then what could have been the cause?
The cause would have had to be something that wasn’t part of the new universe, and if the new universe was the start of time and space then that initial cause must have been before time and space began.
It’s interesting to think about this dilemma. Either the universe always existed. or something outside the universe somehow kicked it all off. Was it a quantum fluctuation, does the universe bounce, are we wrong about the BBT, does the universe just forever continue to expand everywhere, with no starting point? Is there a multiverse? yadda, yadda…

BTW not everything has a cause, there are many random (probabilistic) events that happen for no known reason, other than this is just the way reality is.

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First of all, I respect everyone’s views, and I appreciate the thoughtful contributions from all participants.

Some members have said that I do not fully understand the meaning of atheism or the arguments commonly presented by atheists. With sincere humility, I would appreciate it if one of the brothers could explain these matters—either briefly or in detail. I would be genuinely grateful.

The argument I am presenting for my claim that the universe is contingent in time (i.e., it had a beginning) is based on observation.

1. The universe is in a constant state of change.

Everything in the universe is subject to change, and there is no rational or scientific objection to this observation. Every change involves a transition from one state to another, and such a transition cannot occur without time. Therefore, every genuine change presupposes temporal succession.

A simple example illustrates this. Suppose a person is angry at one moment and later becomes happy because of a different circumstance. The person’s condition has changed. Anger belonged to an earlier state, while happiness belongs to a later state. This demonstrates that a new state has come into existence, and the concepts of “before” and “after” necessarily imply the existence of time.

Science provides many examples of this relationship between change and temporal succession:

Radioactive decay: A radioactive atom gradually decays into another element. For example, uranium eventually decays into lead. This process occurs over time and clearly involves a “before” and an “after.”

Phase transitions: Ice absorbs heat and becomes liquid water. It was previously in a solid state and later exists in a liquid state.

Stellar evolution: Stars form from clouds of gas, enter the main sequence, and later evolve into red giants or other stages. These are successive stages that occur through time.

Mitosis: A single cell divides into two cells through a process that unfolds over time.

Wherever change exists, temporal succession also exists. Scientific observation shows that the universe is constantly changing. Every change indicates that one state has ended and another has begun.

If the universe is genuinely changing, then it must have had previous states. However, I argue that the past cannot be actually infinite. If the past were infinite, the present moment could never have been reached. The fact that we exist in the present suggests that the temporal past is finite and therefore had a beginning.

For this reason, since the universe is continually changing, and every real change requires temporal succession, I conclude that the universe is not eternal but had a beginning.

2. Concerning worship

From the atheist perspective, acts of worship performed by believers have no objective supernatural benefit or consequence because, according to atheism, God does not exist. Although some atheists acknowledge that religious practices may provide psychological or social benefits, they generally regard worship itself as unnecessary from an objective standpoint.

However, if a Creator truly exists and has imposed obligations and responsibilities upon humanity, then failing to fulfill those obligations would be a serious error. In that case, atheism would not merely be an intellectual mistake; it would also mean failing to fulfill one’s duties toward the Creator.

As far as I understand, these arguments support the conclusion that the universe had a beginning.

Some members have responded by saying that we can only observe the universe as it exists now and have no direct observation of its past. :blush:

My response is that once we accept the reality of the present universe through observation, we also accept that it has undergone previous states. The present state necessarily implies a history of earlier states through which it arrived at its current condition.

Others have pointed out that we do not possess complete knowledge of the entire universe. I agree with that observation. :blush:

However, another question naturally arises. We do know many things about the universe, and indeed a great deal of it. If my argument is accepted—that the universe is subject to change and therefore had a beginning—then the same principle should apply to those parts of the universe that we have not yet observed, because they are still part of the same universe, not something existing outside of it.

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BTW not everything has a cause, there are many random (probabilistic) events that happen for no known reason, other than this is just the way reality is.

One theistic argument I read long ago Stevil, tried to get around the probabilistic nature of the quantum realm. It did this by asserting that all such probability-based events happen within the universe. Therefore, since the universe was caused by God all such events and probabilities were ultimately caused by God.

So, none of them could be accorded the status of being truly random or probabilistic. They all came under the umbrella of God’s knowledge, power and plan.

Your thoughts?