Top responses to common Christian theistic arguments...

Hello, as another topic of interesting discussion what are your most convincing responses to common Christian theistic arguments such as...
The cosmological argument
The transcendental argument
The ontological argument
The moral argument
The design argument
The fine tuneing argument
Argument from arechological evidence
and...
The resurrection of Christ argument...
In the next post I'll give my top responses to these arguments. Anyway thank you all for your time and responses. Take care.

cosmological response: quantum mechanics or some other unknown undiscovered natural mechanism could easily refute the cosmological argument
ontological response: a god creating machine or a eternal group of gods may be a even greater idea or concept than a single creator God
transcendental response: Logical absolutes simply exist, they are axioms, they are conventions, they are uncaused, they are eternal, and there are different kinds of logic.
moral response: evidence from evolutionary psychology that may show that morals change over time and or products of a changing society (ies) and that there are no objective moral standards
design response: the design is merely an illusion,evidence for macro evolution, co option, and and it begs the question of who created God
fine tuneing response: other earth like planets that may house life, life on other planets like Mars, and evidence for abiogenesis (IE Stanley Miller experiment) show that life and the right conditions are not as fine tuned as one may think
archeological evidence response: Even though many people, places have been confirmed much still has not been confirmed, and no solid evidence for the supernatural events currently exists in archeology.
Resurrection of Christ response: popular alternative theories like the swoon theory, wrong tomb theory, conspiracy theory, and the myth theory.

Oh well, those are mine, what are yours?

[calpurnpiso]

dean09 wrote

cosmological response: quantum mechanics or some other unknown undiscovered natural mechanism could easily refute the cosmological argument
ontological response: a god creating machine or a eternal group of gods may be a even greater idea or concept than a single creator God
transcendental response: Logical absolutes simply exist, they are axioms, they are conventions, they are uncaused, they are eternal, and there are different kinds of logic.
moral response: evidence from evolutionary psychology that may show that morals change over time and or products of a changing society (ies) and that there are no objective moral standards
design response: the design is merely an illusion,evidence for macro evolution, co option, and and it begs the question of who created God
fine tuneing response: other earth like planets that may house life, life on other planets like Mars, and evidence for abiogenesis (IE Stanley Miller experiment) show that life and the right conditions are not as fine tuned as one may think
archeological evidence response: Even though many people, places have been confirmed much still has not been confirmed, and no solid evidence for the supernatural events currently exists in archeology.
Resurrection of Christ response: popular alternative theories like the swoon theory, wrong tomb theory, conspiracy theory, and the myth theory.

Oh well, those are mine, what are yours?

...And all of it created by the BRAIN...ingest some Amanita mushrooms sautee to perfection gather your ideas & then post them. We'll see incredibly difference in perceptions of reality, theories & in conceptual connectivity. This will prove my point. God is an intellect stagnating delusion produced in a malfunctioning brains not unlike those under schizophrenia or TL epilepsy.

[anthonyjfuchs]

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.

You were gone what? 2 years? 3 years? And in all that time you have learned nothing, apparently, since you are writing the same old same old. I am not going to set you straight on all of this. One example will be sufficient.

anthonyjfuchs wrote

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.

Except, of course, the cosmological argument claims no such thing. 5 minutes with Mr. Google would have set you straight. The cosmological argument claims that every thing that *begins* to exist must have a cause. That is hardly a minor difference.

Logically, there must be an uncaused cause at some point. Whatever the first cause was, it must have been something that had no beginning (or else it would have required a cause itself). But this is only possible if it is something that is independent of both time and space, which are both finite, at least in the past.

We know the universe began to exist (ie. that it had a beginning). The universe therefore had a cause outside of itself. The thing that caused the universe does not necessarily fall under this constraint, since this argument alone does not tell us what the cause of the universe was. However, it is consistent with the Christian understanding that the universe being created by a deliberate act of will of an immensely powerful being that we refer to as God.

Infinite regression is always going to be a logical problem in any worldview, whether the atheistic view or the theistic one. The atheistic view has no solution for this problem other than arbitrarily saying “we’ll stop explaining at point X.” With theism there’s nothing arbitrary about it, as the explanations go back to a being which is a necessary being. The existence of a necessary being is actually the only logical way to avoid an infinite regress.

The rest of your rebuttals are equally weak. One of the requirements of learning is that you also read the good arguments made on the other side of your point of view. Anyone can have his ignorance confirmed.

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.

There are, and have been, quite a few, as in hundreds, if not thousands of historians who disagree with you. I wonder why that is? Do you ever intend to read good histories of the era to find out?

[Sternwallow]

no one in particular wrote

Some silly reiteration about causality.
Anything that had a beginning must have had a cause.

The only things that are known to have a beginning are the universe (in a stage smaller than a subatomic particle) and some subatomic particles that have begun since the universe began.
The particles are specifically known not to have had a cause, and especially not an intentional causal agent. That leaves the universe as the only item whose nature, caused or not, is in question. Since we know in QM that particles begin to exist where there was nothing before and that the first dimensions of the universe were smaller than those particles, we therefore have examples of things comparable with the early universe, which did not require a causative agent. There is no basis I have seen yet to imagine a necessity for a causative agent to intentionally bring the universe into existence. It just is not necessary.

There is no uncaused cause at work within the currently existing universe and we have no reason to believe that an uncaused cause was instrumental in the existence of the universe. The stars, remember, were not created since they did not begin to exist, being made from pre-existing material behaving under natural law.

Since the universe has both a theoretical and calculated energy/mass of zero, there does not need to be any cause to bring it into existence, any more than it takes to bring any other bit of nothing into existence.

Somethingness is the natural state rather than nothingness; when you try to make a volume that contains nothing at all, it is still pervaded by the Quantum Foam and so, even though there is nothing there, the empty volume has mass.

Is Quantum Mechanics just a mathematical convenience that people choose to believe in, as they might any other functional or useful fiction? No, it is not. Its predictions have been confirmed to ten decimal places and reliance on its correctness has enabled the entirety of modern technology. You are reading this and seeing little glowing LEDs only because QM works (despite being highly counter-intuitive). QM deals a decisive deadly demolition to the universality of cause and effect.

Infinite regress is only a problem for the beginning of the universe if there is a time stretching back before the universe began and time stretching along with it. Therefore, no such problem. There is no "before time" for a creative agent to exist in or to cause anything because cause and effect are bound to a time sequence. If cause and effect are not bound to a time sequence then an agent existing after the BB could have caused the BB.

As to the historicity of Jesus, some historians do agree that such a person, an itinerant preacher who had legal problems, might have existed around the early third of the first century CE. However, I do not believe that a single historian claims that any miracles attributed to this hypothetical Jesus have a scrap of evidence that they actually took place. That includes raising the dead, walking on water, physically withering innocent fig trees and resurrecting. It is indeed surprising that the historians do not credit the miracles attributed to the hypothetical Jesus, since they are all also attributed to many holy men in our time by many living witnesses.

The resurrection, in particular, and to the fatal detriment to the whole of Christianity, has so many entirely plausible natural explanations that belief in it is a leap into absurdity.

[Choobus]

Sternwallow wrote

Since we know in QM that particles begin to exist where there was nothing before......

not really, there has to be energy. The "quantum foam" cannot exist without the vacuum, which has energy associated with it (perhaps giving rise to dark energy).

[Sternwallow]

Choobus wrote

not really, there has to be energy. The "quantum foam" cannot exist without the vacuum, which has energy associated with it (perhaps giving rise to dark energy).

Didn't Lawrence Krauss say that the Quantum Foam produced mass in the volume of a proton between the quarks? What energy is there in that volume and why would it stay there?

Please don't make Jerry right that something must pre-exist in the volume that becomes occupied by QF byproducts.

[Philboid Studge]

Sternwallow wrote

The only things that are known to have a beginning are the universe (in a stage smaller than a subatomic particle) and some subatomic particles that have begun since the universe began....

This (among other things) turns the Cosmo Gulper argument on its head. When theologians like Billy Craig and his howler monkey acolytes say that things which begin to exist have a cause, we are asked to swallow that bald assertion--that things 'begin to exist' at all--like Linda Lovelace swallowed ... pride. But our demarcations for beginnings are arbitrary. All we really have are transformations*, not discrete beginnings. Except for those things that pop into existence from the foamy solace of quantum -- those do seem to begin to exist -- and those are probably uncaused.


*On top of that, the transformations--from energy to matter, e.g. or from an acorn into toilet paper--are the things that are counted by the God Wallopers as "causes". There are so many things wrong with this "proof" one wonders how it began to exist in the first place.

[Choobus]

Lily wrote

You were gone what? 2 years? 3 years? And in all that time you have learned nothing, apparently, since you are writing the same old same old.

But you have been here all that time and also learned nothing, so it seems he made the better choice....

[Choobus]

Lily wrote

We know the universe began to exist (ie. that it had a beginning).

do we?

[inkadu]

The moral argument is, depending on its phraseing, irrelevant. There's one variant that states, "We must believe in God else there would be social chaos." Well, there might be. But that doesn't mean that God exists (h/t Dawkins).

If you want to put this together in a FAQ, or see if someone else has done it, that would be nice, too. I already know all these arguments, actually, but it would be nice to have them all in one place to sharpen my skills. And you can always take a page from Christopher Hitchens and add a second part to all your responses: the Catholic church rapes children. It's good for everything.

[psychodiva]

is he still here? *yawn*

[psychodiva]

mind you- the pooferdoodle concept woke me up a bit - thanks

Hey I'm still here, I can't be around this thing 24/7 you know.