You’re the one who has twice been banned for trolling, not me and asking someone with your track record of dishonestly evading questions, to answer one is hardly trolling, especially since you asked the poster who asked the question where he would like to start, again it is reasonable to assume he wanted an answer when he asked the question, though I know you struggle with that concept. Try that meme with the ostrich burying its head in the sand, that might help you understand what you’re doing here, without lying that I was trolling?
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Not one word in there asserts or remotely implies @TheMagus is opposed to belief in the existence of a god or gods, which is the definition of antitheist. Though I know from their posts on here some of the atheists are also antitheists, so what?
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Sounds good, let’s narrow our focus to a single item. I hope you would agree that if anybody uses a logical fallacy, then the conclusion they reach is invalid. Note that a syllogism being valid is different than it being true. You can technically have a syllogism that is both valid and false. The specific item here will be the god of the gaps argument which goes something like this:
Major Premise: Matter and energy exist in the universe.
Minor Premise: We have never experienced something coming from nothing.
Conclusion: A god or gods must have created it.
This syllogism is invalid because a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, also known as a assuming the source fallacy, was committed. Therefore, this syllogism cannot help us know truth. This does not disprove that god exists, because, once again, you can’t falsify something that is unfalsifiable. A god existing and creating our universe is among the infinite possibilities. But just assuming something does not help you know truth. If I were to replace the conclusion:
Conclusion: The matter and energy must have always existed.
It would still be the exact same logical fallacy rendering the syllogism invalid. There is nothing we can put there that helps us know. This is the exact problem with unfalsifiable things. All one can do is claim ignorance, because claiming to know is really just guessing. Does this make sense?
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And withhold belief of any claims obviously. Good post, though I would need to see the possibility of a deity existing and creating the universe demonstrated before I’d accept it.
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Yes, I’m aware of the distinction between sound and valid arguments, and the rest seems reasonable to me.
Leaving aside the notion of “truth” we have a difficulty here because the validity of the argument hinges on the definitions of the terms. For example IF we define “God” as “the means by which matter comes into existence” then the argument is valid.
I’m not sure I agree there are infinite possibilities, that could be true but not if we confine ourselves to rational possibilities (this lets us eliminate claims like “a flying spaghetti monster did it”). One could argue how we decide that “God” is a rational possibility while a “spaghetti monster” is not and I’d agree that must be answered but my point is that rational, reasonable, justifiable options are likely very few.
Yes and that’s is true as true of scientific beliefs as for any other and this is a point some atheists here refuse to accept.
I’d like to now ask you, are you aware of any arguments for the existence of God that you regard as valid?
Wait… do you actually think that we can eliminate some claims basen on rationale?
You just said that we can eliminate claims like “flying spaghetti monster did it”, that is exactly the same claim as any other “god/deity did it”
Do you agree that it is not rational to assume that god did it?
God and flying spaghetti monster have equal explanatory power!
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If it was irrational I’d not be here saying what I am.
HAhahha hahaha…fuck, I peed myself on that.
Thank you so much for that. I’m in a lot of pain today and I needed a chuckle…
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But you just said it is irrational!
How do you distinguish between rational and irrational deity?
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Interestingly, redefining god actually makes things worse and the argument is still invalid. As an example:
Major Premise: Bob is an architect.
Minor Premise: Bob has built at least 3 skyscrapers.
Conclusion: Bob built all the skyscrapers in downtown Dallas.
Even if you redefine god in that manner, we still would be assuming that he created this universe.
As to why the redefinition makes things worse; do you agree that circular logic cannot be used to know something? Redefining god in this manner makes the syllogism circular:
Major Premise: “God is the means by which matter comes into existence”
Minor Premise: We have never experienced something coming from nothing.
Conclusion: A god or gods must have created it.
We “know” that god exists because the universe exists and we “know” that the universe exists because god created it. This does not help us know how the universe started or if god exists.
@Sheldon brings up a good point here. Whenever you add attribution to something, there needs to be evidence for that as well. Saying that god exists, can create universes, and created this universe are all separate claims. It is why the major premise above is faulty. There is also a good argument to be made that the minor premise is faulty too considering we are discussing an event that probably does not conform to any known physics. There are, of course, a number of ways of re-wording this, but overall, there is no way of stringing something together to get around this being a fallacy.
You’d be surprised what people come in here with.
What I said from the beginning is that there is no way of logically justifying something that is unfalsifiable without using logical fallacies, which would make them invalid. The vast majority of claims I have seen either fall under the appeal to authority fallacy or the assuming the source fallacy. I’m sure that a valid one may be able to be created purely from definitions, but it wouldn’t be useful for our purposes here. If you have one, post it.
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I don’t, but I do distinguish between rational and irrational postulates. An irrational postulate is often inconsistent with some already established knowledge. The postulate that everything has a cause is rational, the postulate that naturalism cannot account for the presence of naturalism is rational, the postulate that the cause of the universe is not natural is therefore also rational.
None of this proof, but these are rational things to consider, scientific inquiry often involves devising new postulates, things that can serve as a basis for some further explanation.
Where did “not natural” (in your claim) came from?
You just said that it is not rationale to postulate deity as creator of all things.
I’m not sure how much more plainly I could have demonstrated your arguments to be irrational? You started with an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy and a false dichotomy fallacy, and nothing has changed.
I agree, by definition we can make no assertions about unfalsifiable claims, beyond I don’t know, and of course withhold belief from any assertions made. As I said, his claim that a deity “might be possible” is epistemologically and rationally no different to saying a deity might be impossible, the statements mean the same thing, that we don’t now if it possible or not, can’t know in fact, at least as long as the concept remains unfalsifiable.
Indeed, but more importantly for me, the assumption that any belief is true based on the assertion we don’t have an alternative, for example the claim that no natural or scientific explanation is possible, is the very definition of an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, how this is still being posited as rational is baffling?
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Well, I would argue that a more correct form would be that the statement " we have no verifiable evidence of an un-caused thing" is rational, and frankly more honest.
Since “rational” is based on available information, what information supports this?
I think not. This is merely your interpretation, based on an absence of information, whereas “rational” is based on currently available information.
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Not if you apply it to a state prior to the big bang, and not if you are positing a supernatural cause, you can’t create a rule of causation based on evidence, then ignore that evidence which has only ever been demonstrated within the temporal condition of the physical universe we currently observe, and only natural causes are ever evidenced, this is the very definition of a special pleading fallacy.
Really it looks like circular reasoning to me. What caused your deity btw, if everything needs a cause? Special pleading fallacy ahoy! 
Only if one accepts the circular reasoning in that premise, and as has been explained exhaustively we don’t know what was and was not possible prior to the big bang.
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I didn’t redefine God, there was no definition of God at all in your original argument, it was left undefined. Without a definition there’s no way to connect the conclusion about God to any of the premises.
Again why do you say “redefinition” you provided no definition earlier, I think adding a definition for something where we had none before can’t be described as a redefinition.
I don’t know if I’d call that a circular argument, nor is it similar to any argument I have made.
The definition of God in arguments I have made is inherent within the argument, the argument for God’s existence is, constitutes, the definition. Note also that there’s no alternative argument about the existence of the universe without God, that is any better than one with.
So then you are not aware of any argument for the existence of God that is valid, very well. Anyway, you say “there is no way of logically justifying something that is unfalsifiable without using logical fallacies”.
Consider the “laws of physics operating billions of light years from us are the same laws of physics we’ve noticed locally”. Is that falsifiable? We use it as the foundation stone for cosmology. It is not falsifiable because a) We can’t visit the place and perform experiments and b) We can’t perform local experiments and presume they are what we would get remotely without doing what you are pointing out.
We can’t reason the laws must be the same because our theories based on local laws are borne out by remote observations. We cannot prove that different laws operating remotely cannot produce identical results to local laws.
This is part of my overall thesis, that the perceived weakness in philosophical arguments for God are also present in arguments that underpin science.
There’s also no evidence that the laws of physics remotely are the same as they are locally. Much of what you say can also be levelled at science. This is why many theists today use the term “scientism” it is a blinkered idealized view of science that misleads its devotees into thinking science is somehow free from the very things they object to in theism.
It’s a postulate, used in science all the time, cause and effect. If you created a theory that said:
X = X
I doubt you’d win a Nobel prize.
Not at all, that the cause of the universe is not natural follows from the postulate naturalism cannot be the cause of naturalism.
If we have naturalism - (we do) and naturalism didn’t cause itself - (it didn’t), the there must exist something else besides naturalism.
I think you mean also perceived, not also present, why is it perceived for a deity but present for science? Also science has had a few hundred years, and is a fallible human methodology, and if this turns out to be wrong science will adjust it’s knowledge accordingly, also the understanding of reality that science produces has real world applications that work, can you demonstrate anything comparable for the deity you imagine to be real? Specific to your deity by the way, if believing in entirely different deities produces the same or similar results then that might suggest the belief itself has effects without the requirement for an extant deity.
This is called whataboutism.
“the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.”
You can’t ignore weak reasoning in your arguments and claims, by deflecting to something else.
Nope, it is rhetoric that uses straw men in my experience. If science did not exist we’d know a lot less about reality, but I’d still be an atheist, since the claims not objectively evidenced, and the arguments irrational.
I have never seen an atheist here claim that science is anything but a fallible human methodology. The term scientism is just a massive straw man for theists to use whataboutism every time I’ve encountered it.
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How many of the examples we have evidenced and explained occurred outside of the physical universe?
How many of the examples we have evidenced and explained are not natural?
We don’t know what was possible prior to the big bang.
What causes your deity btw? If naturalism can’t have caused naturalism, then it follows that a deity cannot have cause itself, if it didn’t need a cause then your claim about causation for a universe is a contradiction, if a deity can always have existed simply on your say so, why not a universe, why not natural phenomena come to that.
Again you don’t know what was and was not possible prior to the big bang.
Were this true, it would not evidence a deity or anything supernatural. You are back to a false dichotomy and an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
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