Actually, I think you’re simply misunderstanding the argument – it works just fine without the assumption that god must have a beginning. If one, in wondering why the universe is, posits god as explanation, without also giving an explanation why god is, one simply has not explained anything; and furthermore, if there is some way for god to be, then one must explain why this could not apply to the universe’s being – that’s all the argument is saying. No need for any beginning at all, just a question about what is or isn’t. If, for instance, the explanation that god is eternal were sufficient for god’s being, then the explanation that the universe is eternal is sufficient for the universe’s being.
Only if there is no alternative explanation for the universe’s existence despite it having a beginning. That’s the very crux of the argument: claiming that god’s existence is necessary for the universe’s existence is to imbue god with a special property without establishing that the universe can’t have this property in god’s absence – it’s saying that god can just be without explaining why, then, the universe can’t just be, too. Worse, it’s observing the universe’s being, claiming that this is mysterious, then proposing the existence of an entity responsible for the universe’s being without addressing the mystery of that entity’s being in turn!
Just in short: the universe’s existence is perceived as mysterious. God is posited to explain this mystery. Either this means that god’s existence is not mysterious, or it means that nothing has been explained. But if god’s existence is not mysterious, then why is the universe’s? So god as an explanatory entity is either unnecessary or ineffective.
Oh, come on now, don’t you know that all of his threads are proven right every time? All of his intellectually honest opponents admit as much!
I am sure the Lord exists. I’ve been juggling theological issues ever since the beginning of this week. I finally concluded that if God really does exist, He would wish to make himself known. I searched painstakingly, looking to the sky, other people, nature, kiosks, etc., but my efforts were futile. Dejected, I crawled into an IHOP, hoping to drown my sorrow in a mass of syrup and gluten. I was met with great shock when my buttermilk pancakes arrived; the Lord appeared to me in my food! I mistook Him for Osama Bin Laden at first, but before I could claim my cash reward, I realized my error and repented! Lo, such is the mysterious wisdom of the Lord!
And I replied to this argument in this post, with a sympathetic reconstruction of Dawkins’ argument that doesn’t rely on the problematic premise that God had a beginning. I don’t think it is necessary to attribute this premise to Dawkins. His argument works without it.
ITR, thanks for your responses. I admire your willingness to engage with so many opponents here, so I’ll try my best to talk about what you want to talk about.
In that case, I’d suggest you’re not the person Dawkins is arguing against. Dawkins is presenting a consequence of the argument that the universe does require a designer: that said designer would themselves require an explanation of why they exist rather than not. If you’re not positing God as an explanation for the universe, Dawkins would say, great, I’ve no need to waste time reductioing your absurdum.
Here, yet again, I feel you are deliberately misreading plain quotes in order to construct an argument you can argue with. Like I’ve already said, “God” - a Heavenly Father who loves us and can affect the universe, is a heck of a thing to exist at all whether or not He had a beginning moment. And even eternal things need some kind of explanation for their characteristics – why are they like that rather than like this. Cosmology provides candidate explanations even for the characteristics of eternal universes. I would hope you’d agree that theology does not explain God’s characteristics in anything like so transparent a way. This is Dawkins’ rather simple and obvious point, not the strawman you’re aiming at here.
His main argument being the same as mine: God is unnecessary in an Ockham’s Razor sense. That is what the chapter attempts to convince you of. If it fails, and you think certain phenomena still require supernatural explanation, that’s fine. We can discuss why you think that is so. You clearly think that’s true about religious experiences, so let’s continue with that.
Ah, but I’m not necessarily talking about these “obvious” cases. I’m talking about what you call religious experiences – the longer, clearer, more specific, better-remembered kind – and whether there are non-impossible candidate explanations for these, too. In the past you’ve suggested that some aspect of introspection is impossible to explain without invoking divine intervention. Is this still your position?
Agreed. Like I say there, misattribution may be a more accurate, less perjorative term.
OK, but I’d need you to specify precisely what the miraculous, inexplicable-by-other-means aspects of these experiences are.
I don’t see how this is relevant. A useful fiction is still a fiction, if such it is.
Ah, here we are – this is what I’m really talking about: Actual testable phenomena which would not have an easy natural explanation – obvious gaps. Note, however, that positing these phenomena as already being clear indicators of such gaps puts you way out on a limb with some highly dubious company given the extremely sketchy and anecdotal nature of such ‘evidence’. EEGs (which have terrible resolution, BTW) and MRIs might show that visionaries had some unusual brain function, but not that their visions came from an external source.
Actually, yes, that’s rather neat. We could examine the phenomena for which “your mother” was posited as an explanation: her appearance before the very eyes of you and, crucially, others around you, her ability to make objects move around a room, the effect her atomic nuclei had on those of the hand of anyone who touched her. After assessing all of this evidence, we would indeed posit that the most obvious explanation for all of these phenomena is that your mother really does exist. There is a gap, and you mother fills it nicely.
The difference with your God, of course, is that it is extremely questionable whether there is a gap at all, and still more questionable whether God is the most appropriate means of filling it. You mother is detected empirically, your God is not.
I’m not sure precisely what kind of evidence you would find convincing (if any, given your past opinions on academic research), so I suggest we compare our own experiences. I have had ‘epiphanic’ religious experiences as a teenager, along with the longer, ‘deeper’ experiences that you and William James consider more important. Since becoming an atheist, I still have ‘deep’ experiences (deeper still, if anything), yet I attribute them to simple meditation, which is a major focus of study in neuroscience. Put simply, is there anything you believe you experience which is fundamentally “less explainable” than what I experience?
The quote below, to someone else, suggests that you think there is:
Do you have any evidence that other religions produce a much less rich experience? My atheistic experiences are every bit as rich as those which occurred when I was a theist (and they were pretty impressive too – if yours are better still, you must be getting some real good shit, epiphanically speaking.) Do you believe me when I say this? Would you believe a Buddhist, or a Fang trance singer, if they told you that their experiences were very profound, long-lasting, clear, specific, and well-remembered?
Also, mental health is nothing absolute, but very much a question of normativity – and since belief in general is very much the norm, especially in the US, one should not be surprised that those who conform to this norm are found to be of greater mental health, i.e. on average better conform to the set of norms of mentality shared by the majority of the public.
If our society were such that a belief in alien abduction was predominant, persons with a high propensity to report such episodes might similarly be judged more mentally healthy; if it were such that a belief in gods or the supernatural were a deviation from the norm, those professing such may conversely be regarded as less so.
Interesting, HMHW. I wonder if ITR’s claim is true in the Czech Republic. (Actually, I wonder whether it’s true at all, but in any case it’s a non sequitur here.)
Experience doesn’t necessarily veto theoretical considerations. Our experiential judgments embed theoretical concepts, and can stand and fall on the strength of the theories standing behind these concepts.
Example: suppose Smith and Jones each observe the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire during a thunderstorm. Let us further suppose that Smith is well-read in science, is familiar with this type of atmospheric disturbance, and without hesitation judges the observed phenomenon to be St. Elmo’s fire. Jones’ world view, on the other hand, is a poorly-supported pastiche of superstition and the paranormal, and he without hesitation judges the phenomenon to be a ghost. It is clear, in this case, that Smith’s observation is justified, and I think it is equally clear that it is justified because Smith’s theory of the world that generates this particular belief in response to this visual stimulus is itself justified. Jones’ perceptual belief, on the other hand, is clearly not justified, and it is not justified because it is generated by a theory that is itself not justified. Thus, the observational predicates we employ stand and fall with the theories that stand behind them.
Thus, if you have a mental experience, and you apply the predicate ‘God’ to this experience, your justification in doing so is not entirely independent of the plausibility of God as a theoretical entity. Nor can your justification for believing in God cannot rest entirely on your experience, any more than Jones’ justification in believing in ghosts can rest entirely on his visual experiences.
I don’t think Lewis tackles this topic as well as you might hope, at least if your quote is to go by; i’m not “completely inexperienced” in speaking about religious and mystical topics, ergo, at least in my case, you can’t blame my lack of knowledge about terminology or concepts to be at fault for finding some of these notions vague. Unless perhaps you consider me to be unexperienced in these areas? We’ve debated them pretty often by now, and I certainly wouldn’t consider you entirely inexperienced either in Christian concepts or atheist ones.
The problem with God being defined less vaguely on a personal level is that that’s true of everything. A person may have a very certain idea of what something is and what it is not, but find it difficult to get that idea across to other people (and I don’t mean just in religious terms). It seems, at least, tricky to transform feelings and personal experience on what you would call a spiritual or mystical level into words. And that’s where the vagueness comes in; mix it with the point that, even within a religion, believers are going to have different ideas of what is so, and essentially what is ended up with is those negative points - though I would say the point that makes them vague is not so much their negativity as their generality. An surfeit of generalities and lack of specifics, in other words.
I would very much agree that an explanation of the nature of a photon in non-technical terms would be quite vague. The problem seems to be that, even with the “technical” words, or words appropriate for the subject, the nature of gods often tends towards the vague. If you’ve been holding back on the more “technical” religious words, i’d like to give it a try at understanding.
No, it isn’t. It’s a mighty jump from saying it “can be flawed” to saying that it isn’t in this particular case. Pick a religious belief, and I can guarantee you that there are millions if not billions of people who disagree with you on it. Pick any belief, any moral issue, and you’ll find untold numbers of people who disagree with you. From the most petty issue to the very fundamentals of reality, there is no majority position, or anything even close to it. Logically speaking, it is fair to say that you (and I) are far more likely to be wrong on such a subject than we are to be right. We shouldn’t start from the idea that we are right, and attempt to prove ourselves wrong - we should be starting from the idea we are wrong and attempting to prove ourselves right.
But that argument depends on your particular viewpoint being correct as to what a rich experience is. You can’t assume your own viewpoint is correct in order to back up the idea that your own viewpoint is correct - it’s the same argument as saying “Christianity is true, because the Bible say it is”. You’re assuming you are correct, and basing your argument that you are correct on that.
Might I ask you to cite the parts in mind you consider to support you on this, or at least those you think illustrate it the best?
Too, the problem of commonality is that it needs to exist on all levels, not just some. I imagine were we to ask the question, “Does a spirit exist?” to all people we would find, on the whole, a positive answer. On the other hand, were we to somehow define a single person’s entire concept of the religious, and ask if it is true to all people, I suspect you would get only that single person’s answer in positive. We can’t just have simple commonality, which flaws at specifics.
And, I would wager, you are taking commonality to mean that all those people are having flawed, yet still accurate in parts, experiences of *your *God?
How exactly is the existence of my mother “independently verifiable” to any greater extent than the existence of God? Is it because more people have met my mother than have seen God? Obviously not, because many more people have had experience communicating with God than with my mother. Is it because more people have positively identified my mother than have positively identified God? Obviously not, because most people who have seen my mother have never known that she was my mother. Is it because those who have encountered my mother in certain special circumstances have positively identified her as my mother? People in a much wider range of circumstances have positively identified God. Is it because of my birth certificate or other documents? That’s a classic case of argument from authority. Is it because of photographs of her holding me as a baby? The baby in those photographs looks suspiciously similar to every other baby; how is anyone supposed to believe that it’s actually me?
The bottom line is that to have knowledge of my mother or anything else, I must be willing to trust my perceptions and reason at some point. I’ve no interest in becoming a David Hume-style, total skeptic.
In our last thread, I already quoted the relevant passages from Dr. Beauregard’s book. (Of course I remember that you responded by lobbing insults at Dr. Beauregard and his co-author, but that has no effect on the accuracy of his research.)
Either cite specific, verifiable examples of “prophecies” and “miraculous healings” or drop the assertion. Quoting from some crackpot’s non-peer-reviewed book is not going to cut it.
Do you seriously think that the existence of God is as well-verified as the existence of your mother? In evaluating which hypothesis is better-justified (mother vs. God), we have to look at the sheer volume of evidence, the degree to which the posited entity explains the evidence, the plausibility of competing hypotheses, the degree to which competing hypotheses explain the evidence equally well, etc. There are not any real competitors to the mother hypothesis in terms of explanatory power and simplicity. The God hypothesis, on the other hand, is significantly more problematic (it is riddled with unsolved problems like the problem of evil), there are significant competitor hypotheses which explain the available data equally well, and so forth.
Let’s start with the last paragraph. Yes you do have to trust your perceptions, but you can test the accuracy of that trust by making predictions and doing experiments. You see a swimming pool, see water, and you can test that you see correctly by dipping your hand in. You’re in the desert and see water, and you can tell that your perceptions are fooling you by going to it and finding nothing but sand. Thus, the hypotheses in both cases are falsifiable.
Now, let’s get to your mother. First, we have strong evidence for the existence of mothers as a class. I hope I don’t have to argue that with you. Then, we have no evidence that any person does not have a mother. Even Jesus. Now, there is a person you claim is your mother, and who is alive. If you offer that hypothesis, we can test it by setting up an experiment - a visit, say. Your mother showing gives strong support to the hypothesis. Your mother not showing decreases our confidence. 10 missed dates decreases it even more. Claims that your mother exists are not proof that she does - see that well known maternal researcher, Norman Bates.
A birth certificate is evidence, not an appeal to authority. I’m not sure what one would be in this case - your father is not an authority, but a witness. Birth certificates have an evidence trail, and are pretty reliable, assuming they are not from Kenya. They can falsify a hypothesis also, such as getting a copy of yours and finding that the name on it is not of the person you thought of as your mother. Maybe a baby picture by itself is not evidence but a trail of pictures of your mother and someone who becomes more and more like you is.
Now, for God, he never shows up to dates, the historical evidence is pretty spotty, and even those who claim to have contacted him contradict each other. If you have 5 uncles, and each one describes your mother in a totally different way - different weight, different hair color, different accent, you’d wonder what the hell is going on, wouldn’t you? And that is even with the knowledge that mothers exist, which we don’t have of any variety of god.
The scientific method does work wonders. The theological method, not so much.
As usual, you throwing a fit about the quality of my cites while not providing any cites at all to back up your assertions. I’ve asked you before for a cite for this claim and you didn’t provide any. I know from past experience that asking you for cites is a waste of time, but I’m doing it anyway. Please provide a cite.
Break out your copy of The God Delusion and read chapter 4. (If that’s too time-consuming, just read the title of that chapter.) You’re wrong.
The universe is not eternal because all the evidence that we have says that the universe is not eternal. Everything, from receding galaxies to cosmic background radiation, points to the universe emerging from a singularity. Further, physical laws confirm it. If we accept that entropy of the universe always increases, then the universe can’t be eternal, or else there would have been a time in the past when its entropy was negative.
Of course you can posit a multiverse to avoid this an other difficulties, but then you’d need to argue that a being capable of creating one universe is more improbable than a multiverse of infinite or near-infinite size, and no one seems willing to do that.