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Old 02-27-2010, 07:57 PM   #3
anthonyjfuchs
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: North Carolina
Posts: 4,765
I'll just shoot down a few:

The cosmological argument falls apart when it claims that everything requires a cause, but then claims that an infinite causal regress is impossible. If everything requires a cause, then an infinite causal regress is required. Of course, the argument really falls apart once we get back to the Big Bang, because time didn't begin until after that expansion, meaning that the pre-universe singularity was, by definition, eternal. And if the notion of an eternal god can be acceptable, then the notion of an eternal universe must be as well.

I'd never heard the transcendental argument before, but it falls apart as soon as it makes the claim that knowledge, logic, morals, and science are not possible without a god, because it does not support that claim. Why are knowledge, logic, morality, or science not possible with a deity?

The ontological argument almost always falls apart in its first claim because it never supports that claim. The claim that "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived," for example, is both unsubstantiated, and not necessarily true (I can claim, for example, that I have conceived of a pooferdoodle, which is greater than God). Further, a being cannot be defined into existence, which becomes clear when one replaces the word "god" in the ontological argument with another word, such as pooferdoodle.

The design argument is particularly offensive. Let us imagine, say, a pothole in a road, and let us imagine that a storm hits and the pothole fills with rainwater. The drops of rainwater in the puddle fit into the crags and crevices of the pothole perfectly. Is it reasonable to claim, then, that the pothole was designed by a creator specifically to hold exactly those drops of water? Of course not: the rainwater molded to the contours of the pothole. By analogy, life is the rainwater, and the Earth is the pothole. Life evolved to exist in the environments that existed on the Earth, which is why we are so well-suited to our environments. If we weren't suited them, we simply would have survived.

The resurrection argument is absurd, of course, because it supposes that a myth is historically true. The story of the resurrection is no more historical than the trials of Hercules. There is no evidence that an actual resurrection actually happened.

atheist (n): one who remains unconvinced.
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