It’s called the Problem of the Rock.
Of course, it only works if you’re talking about an omnipotent God (which this thread appears to hinge around, admittedly). If you were talking about, say, Ahriman (the God of the Zoroastrians, who isn’t all-powerful, if I remember rightly), or Brahma, or Zeus, it doesn’t really prove anything.
I don’t know if my rendition of Descartes’ proof really qualifies as an accurate paraphrasing. Here it is as given by a couple of other sources.
From here:
And from here:
Still seems circular.
As others have said, there is (or should be) no shame in answering “I don’t know.”
One of the most interesting things about human psychology, to me, is how poorly we accept the unanswered question. In this previous thread on atheism, one of the subjects discussed is The Great Unanswerable. It is typical of the human mind to continue asking Why? Why? Why? about anything and everything, digging down to first causes and then looking beyond them. But when we get to something that we can’t answer, we either formulate a working but untestable hypothesis (if we have a scientific bent) or we make some shit up and insist it’s true (if we’re not). Either way, it’s a placeholder, nothing more, because having a big gray box with a question mark in it makes us uneasy for some reason.
(There’s probably a decent metaphor to be found in the behavior of the average four year old kid who drives his parents nuts with ceaseless Why? inquiries. After the parent exhausts the rational explanations, it becomes tempting to shut the kid up either by appealing to authority — “Because I said so” — or by inventing outlandish answers that satisfy the kid’s imagination and teach behavioral lessons without actually explaining anything real. Like religion, basically.)
Really, just because a question can be asked doesn’t mean it can be answered, or that an answer is worth pursuing. We see many of the same questions come up over and over in GQ: What’s outside the universe? What if I go back in time and kill my mother? Or whatever. These are either nonsense questions, like asking why dividing by zero results in “infinity,” or they’re essentially philosophical, playing with the complex interrelationship between reality, knowledge, and comprehensible expressions of same. The fact that these are questions that keep coming up is interesting, from a standpoint of psychology; an attempt to come up with actual answers to these questions are not.
When I’m presented with what I consider an unanswerable question, I sometimes respond with one of my own. My current favorite is, “What’s the opposite of Elvis?” At first blush, it seems kind of silly. Then you start thinking about it; you can’t help it. Your brain tries to come up with a definition of Elvis such that an opposite of it can be determined. Naturally, any such definition will be completely subjective: Is it a musical definition, which points you in the direction of, say, Dokken? Is it a physical definition, suggesting that the opposite of Elvis is a crater on the moon filled with bird shit? But even if you recognize the completely meaningless nature of the question, even if you realize that trying to combine something with a concrete definition like “opposite of” with something to which that definition cannot be applied, like “Elvis,” the simple, straightforward, superficially grammatical, and apparently logical formulation of the question makes it seem like it should have an answer.
It doesn’t. But it feels like it ought to. And that, I believe, tells us a lot about how our brains are wired.
So keep that in mind when believers are peppering you with what are really unanswerable questions. You can try to explain the philosophical basis under which not only is it okay to have unanswered and unanswerable inquiries, it’s preferable to assigning a bunch of bullshit to them to make them go away. Or, you can attempt to enlighten them by making sort of a zen koan out of it.
“What happens after death?”
“The opposite of Elvis, man. The opposite of Elvis.”
Try that one out, and see what they say. 
My mom was an Episcopalian, and my dad was a former Christian Scientist who watched his dad (of the same faith) die very young of easily preventable causes.
So we were a little conflicted.
In high school, I realized that ascribing creation, causality, etc., to God made no more sense than to blame them on fluctuations in the stock market. This was not a popular perspective in rural Kentucky in 1972.
I would say that now, at age 45, being an atheist (a “strong” atheist per the above discussion) has proven to be a path to sadness and frustration regarding my fellow man. An example: Other than the initial horror, my first reaction to 9/11 was to think of it as “another faith-based initiative”. How else to explain it?
But I’m no more able to abandon atheism than I am to be voluntarily lobotomized. If the OP is searching for intelligent writings, I would recommend some of Sagan’s later works… especially Pale Blue Dot, Billions and Billions, and The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Wind.
I was raised catholic but never really took to religion. I did the altar boy thing and went throught confirmation, but it was basically just for my parents’ benefit. I really never cared one way or the other.
I did, though, take it as given that there was a god, for a long time. But then I started questioning what people believe and I really started to wonder. I first came to the conclusion that if there was a god it didn’t matter what exactly any person believed, what mattered was if they were good people or not. But then, I started to wonder if that even mattered. I got a bit mystical/spiritual in college and it occurred to me that maybe there wasn’t even a hell, because maybe after death, no matter how badly a person had behaved while alive, understanding and wisdom would cause that person/soul to achieve a state of peace, and self forgiveness. (I had already come to the conclusion that we made our own hells)
Over time though, I started to wonder about the whole thing. I came to the conclusion that “God” is a human construct. If god is truly infinite, then how could it have human characteristics like mercy or vengeance, love or wrath? Wouldn’t a truly infinite being be beyond those things? Would it really have any describable characteristics? (I’d read the T’ao and found some wisdom there) Wouldn’t it be so far beyond anything human that it wouldn’t really “care?” Caring is also a human characteristic. So I started to think in terms of a god that started the universe but wasn’t involved. It couldn’t be, because involvement would imply attention and concern and a “personal agenda.” Again, human traits. Would it even be aware in any way we can conceive? Would it be a thinking being or just an essence of life, or even of existence. Finally I came to the conclusion that there is no god in the religious sense. I don’t claim to know for a fact, but I believe that if there’s anything at all, it’s just some sort of existence. It’s not a need to exist, it just is existence.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that death is simply that. We die, and we’re gone. We live on in people’s memories and whatever else we leave behind, but there is no “afterlife.”
photopat, this is far less …polite… than something you touched on… but once, someone I knew said that you shouldn’t take god’s name in vain or something along those lines and I said “If you were some all-powerful being, would you really give a shit?”
Anyway, I’m guessing no one here wants to tackle the logic problem, so I’m considering starting a thread in GQ…something like “Where’s the flaw in this logic?” Before I did that, I wanted to get a second opinion on whether or not that was too similar to this thread…thoughts, anyone?
I once read an “Anti-Tract” in which God angrily confronted christian tract-writer Jack Chick, upon the latter’s death…
Chick: “But I’m forgiven! You died on the cross for the world’s sins! I believe in you! Jesus SAVES!”
God: “That’s absurd! Why would I need to sacrifice Myself to Myself to allow Me to change a rule I made myself!?”
That, or that South Park episode…
Which, one admits, would answer a whooole lot of nagging questions. :eek:
I concluded “Hell is other people,” though I blame that on an early exposure to Sartre.
It is not circular, it is one of those a priori arguments. Think of it as an argument by definition.
To ask that question implies there’s a “before.” According to cosmology, regardless you adhere to Big Bang or a constant universe, there’s no before.
In Big Bang, time starts at the bang, and there’s no before.
Therefore, asking such a question is meaningless.
I’m not athiest or agonostic, sorry, (I think there’s about a 55% chance that there’s a god, so I’m a poor excuse for a believer too) but this is something that confuses me about the big bang vs creationism. Why do people get so self-righteous that their position is the “right” one? People asking where one thing came from seldom step back enough to see that there’s an equal inconsistency in their own position.
Neither thing is possible! Dust that gathered to form the universe can’t have come from no where, and God can’t have sprung up from nothingness, so how is one opinion more valid than the other, given neither is logically possible? Why not argue the color of invisible unicorns while you’re at it… You pick one or the other as the “reason” we’re here, but really, it’s not because it’s more logical, it’s because it’s more comfortable to choose it as being the basis for accepting that we can’t really know what truly caused us to exist. It seems strange to me that so many people’s faith or lack there of hinges on a question that cannot be fully explained without pretending that there isn’t a “where” that needs to be considered equally in both theories.
And in the end, it all boils down to definitions. 
One of them happened. Is something impossible if it’s already taken place? You’re wrong about ‘dust’ and I don’t even know where to begin explaining it. Suffice to say that just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s impossible or inexplicable. Read up on it. We haven’t solved exactly how the universe came into being, but there’s also no reason to think it’s unknowable.
I stand corrected…and yet there’s no emoticon for my disgrace 
I am an athiest, in that I believe there is no god, but belief is not proof, and I’m human, which means I’m fallable, which means I could be wrong.
After hearing the Problem of the Rock, I came up with my own little proof. Hope ya’ll like it.
A supreme being has 3 defining characteristics; omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
I am aware of everything that I know. Beyond my perception, I cannot prove that anything exists, therefore it must not. Since I know everything that I know, which is apparently all there is to know, I am omniscient.
Everywhere I have ever been, I’ve always been aware of my presence there. I have never been someplace where I was not, and I have always been wherever I was, therefore, I am onmipresent.
In all my life, I have always had power over my fate. I have never been without power to affect the world around me. The extent of my life is the extent of the universe (see omniscience and omnipresence). Since I have always had power over the universe, and will (up to the extent of my awareness) always will have power over the universe, I am omnipotent.
Since I fullfil all three characteristics of a supreme being, I must be God.
Go me.
Another approach to take when someone asks you about creation is to inquire whether the God of the person who asked got the story right. Even if you acknowledge that the universe was created, we have very good evidence that it was not created in the way described by the Bible or in any other human religion. Maybe some other world has a deity who got the story exactly right.
I’ve often asked religious people making this argument to show me a logical thread from Bible stories to real cosmology - they’ve always failed. As far as correspondence to reality goes, one creation myth is about the same as any other, except that some Eastern religions at least say it happened a long time ago.
One of my favorites is that I ask them to explain why the bible makes no mention of dinosaurs or anything else before mankind.
I am one of Frank’s “faithful friends” as he stated in his OP, and I must say, he is the reason I am no longer a Christian. Don’t underestimate this guy… Now I would not say that I am an athiest, I sit more in the agnostic section of the spectrum. I know that there must be something bigger than us, but I do also know that it is not the christian or Jewish or Muslim or anyother religion’s idea of “God”. Because, after all, as was already stated, they can’t all be right. At the same time I think to myself, “A tree grows, then lives, and ultimately dies. Nothing happens to that tree when it dies, it just becomes a dead tree, and eventually becomes part (on a molecular or some other scientific level) of another tree, or even a squirrel for all I know.” Same thing with animals, and grass, etc. So why are human’s any different? I cannot answer that question, and that is precisely why I am agnostic.
As far as I can tell, nobody has given the specific reason that Descartes’ proof doesn’t work. All we have come up with is that it is circular logic. Well here it is. I can’t really use Ringo’s proof in my explanation because it’s a bit different from what I have in front of me. In mine, Descartes states that the cause of his idea of God must be adequate to account for its existence in my mind, then the cause must be a being who has no limitations (because his idea of God is one of no limitations). He reasons that God must be the cause of his idea, but causal principals do not apply in his deductive argument. His idea of God could have been caused by anything, from flipping on Sunday morning television to reading a book to finding a weird pattern in his Alpha-Bits. He assumed that GOD was caused, not his IDEA of God. Therefore every statement in his argument that relies logically on that statement is also false, and his entire argument breaks down into one big heap of humiliation. And he was alive to see this happen, too. Poor fellow. He didn’t get anything right.
My final thought on the matter: If it’s good enough for DNA, it’s good enough for me.
Yeah, real faitful. He stole my girlfriend and took my dog.
Not quite true. If there is a god, then we’ll all find out. If there is no god, then we won’t find out… anything.