Your reason is that you don’t believe dragons exist. I don’t believe god exists. So I can just dismiss that hypothesis.
You asked that a while back and there has been deathly silence. I’ve been asking it for over 20 years, and have never heard an answer, no matter how implausible.
It’s taking a lot longer than we thought.
It’s rigorously incorrect to accept any premise without proof. There is no burden to disprove a premise, it’s incumbent one the person asserting it to support it. If you can’t pass that first step, then anything that follows is worthless.
Supposing we stop short of saying “The premises are wrong” and just say “We have no reason to think the premises are right”?
Come on… let’s not go in circles around this very simple point.
Premise 1: Snarky_Kong has a sibling
Premise 2: Snarky_Kong has no sisters
Conclusion: Snarky_Kong has a brother
I honestly have no idea whatsoever as to the truth statuses of those two premises. So why would I let this argument convince me Snarky_Kong has a brother, even if only until some stronger counterargument comes along? Seems to me, the position to take is “That’s a fine argument you have there, but it doesn’t do anything in the way of establishing its conclusion for anyone unless they already have some suspicion that the premises are true. And if you should find someone who doesn’t already have such suspicions, it wouldn’t be laziness on their part; it could just be honest acknowledgement that they have no reason to make a determination about the truth of the premises, either way.”
YES WE HAVE PROGRESSED THROUGH IT!!! Sorry for shouting, but we cannot be at this point in time UNLESS we have gone through the infinite number of causes before this one. Remember that saying that the universe extends infinitely into the past requires that BOTH there is the infinite series AND we have progressed through it to reach now. Saying that there is an infinite future brings with it no assumption that we have, or even that we can reach that infinite future.
Calculon.
And gods don’t interact with the material world? Where he at?
Feeding his dragon, no doubt.
Nah, you can construct an interesting logical system even from incorrect though consistent premises. In a sense, that is what good sf writing is all about. But claiming it has anything to do with the real world is the moral equivalent of expecting Scotty to beam you up any second now.
That the premise isn’t demonstrated to hold is a reason.
True. However it’s perfectly correct to reject premises without proof.
See, there’s a difference between rejecting a premise and proving it false. To prove something false requires work. Rejecting a premise happens when the other guy didn’t do his work.
It’s just lazy to assert a premise without giving people reason to accept it. And it’s just completely ignorant to expect anybody to buy an argument with doubtful premises.
And, where’s that text linking First Cause to God? (No, I’m not going to quit asking.)
By this same logic, God can’t exist infinitely into the past because he would have to wait an infinite amount of time before he could create the universe.
Which all goes to show why elegant logical systems minimize the number of premises.
False. Time is part of the physical world. God creates time. Therefore time has no meaning before creation. There is no infinite set of time. God also requires no cause, and therefore there is no infinite chain of causes that needs to happen before God can dop anything.
If a premise truly is doubtful, it should be trivial to show why that is so. To turn it around, if you can’t form an argument as to why my premise is bad, what reason do I or anyone else have to believe that you are correct in rejecting my argument?
And with the first cause thing, I’ll make you a deal. You show me how atheism can be true if you accept both Aquinas’ premises, then I will show you how to connect the prime mover to God. Stating that Aquinas doesn’t connect the prime mover to God invalidates his argument is only true if you can show that it is possible for God to not exist while his premises are true.
Calculon.
OK, well, ignoring for a moment your disregard for what is commonly called burden of proof (i.e. that it is the one making an assertion who has to justify it, not the one exposed to this assertion who has to try to disqualify it), this I can do. Taking as Aquinas’ premises: (1) Every caused thing is caused by some other thing, and (2) an infinite regress of causation is impossible, it follows that there must be something uncaused that has caused at least one other thing, which is enough to get our chain of causation going. Now, to see how atheism can still be true is to look at what we know about our uncaused cause, which is nothing safe it be uncaused and able to act as a cause. This doesn’t imply supernaturality or godhood, which can be shown by the existence of uncaused things (like radioactive decay) in nature – though even if there were no such example, the assertion that atheism is incompatible with uncaused causes is still an unfounded one, since there is nothing that precludes such things from being perfectly natural; i.e. the set of natural things may well include uncaused causes.
So God hasn’t been here any longer than the universe?
Yes, time is a physical property of the universe. Time has no meaning outside the universe. Therefore there is no “before” the universe, and nothing that needs to be gotten through to get here.
And your God DOES need a cause. You can’t just handwave it away. It’s a contradiction to say that everything needs a cause except the thing I make up that doesn’t need a cause.
Atheism is not an assertion that can have a truth value. It’s an absence of assertion. Your question is irrelevant since Aquinas’ premises have not been shown to be true, but what you’re asking is how can an uncaused cause not be God? Random fluxuation in the quantum field. Your turn. Connect those dots.
Hop to it.
His premises are not true, but just to humor you a little more – how can you prove it wasn’t Wotan?
Now connect the dots to Jesus.
This, I think, is where the true differences between the theistic and atheistic worldviews come to light.
If there is no reason for me to accept your premise, there is no reason for me to accept your argument!
This is the case no matter how inviting I find your conclusion, nor how simple and easy-to-swallow I find your premises. Nor, indeed, how beautifully constructed your argument is. The whole thing stands on the premises.
It’s also apparent in your comment about showing atheism to be true. “Atheism” is the null hypothesis. We believe nothing until there is a reason to do so. That’s all.
Have you ever proven that unicorns and fairies don’t exist? There is no proof in the world that could do so. Nevertheless, you, I, and every adult more intelligent than a dust mop are atheists about unicorns. Well, can you prove it? Or is it up to unicorn proponents to make their case, based on mutually accepted premises, supplemented by evidence and logic?
eh, whatever, why bother?
Indeed, if one is not operating under this stance, there is no need to even make an argument, since the conclusion could just be presented for a priori acceptance, as well as any premise! The whole process of argumentation entails the need of substantiation to accept propositions – to argue that propositions need to be accepted if they have not been proven false is to argue that there is no need for argumentation!
Though it will quickly lead to problems… I haven’t proven false that Snarky_Kong has a brother, nor have I proven false that Snarky_Kong does not have a brother. I suppose I must accept, for the time being, both that Snarky_Kong has a brother and that Snarky_Kong does not have a brother; at least, it follows immediately from those premises, and I can’t prove either of those premises wrong in themselves.
It should come as no surprise that he did this by using premises derived from biblical revelation and applying the logic and reasoning described in Aristotle. Yes, it sounds ridiculous from a purely scientific perspective, but this was exactly the point of Medieval Scholasticism. The logic behind much of Aquinas is sound, but the premises are (to a scientific mind) impossible to accept. The master explains it better than I ever could.
The argument is “You haven’t given me or any rational sane person one speck of evidence or the tiniest reason to believe your crazy premise, so why on earth should I take your word that it’s true?”
This isn’t any different from anything else; if you want people to believe you, you have to convince them. Sometimes, your bald unadorned word is enough; in other cases, it isn’t. For example, were you to tell me you were a theist, I’d probably accept that premise. If you were to tell me you were a millionaire, I’d be doubtful but could be convinced. (Especially if we met in person.) If you were to tell me that you were a talking dog with excellent typing ability for a canine, I wouldn’t buy it without definitive evidence.
What do you do if somebody tells you they’re a talking dog? You say “prove it.” But if they say to you, “No prove I’m not a talking dog!”, well, perhaps you run out and try to disprove it the minute they suggest it, but most of the rest of us will just say, “Yeah, right”, presume they were lying or mistaken or deranged about it, and not give it another thought. Which is the same thing we do when you claim that god exists, and then when we ask for the proof, challenge us to prove you wrong.
See, it’s called “burden of proof”. You’re the guy who wants to prove something. So you’re the guy who has to back up his claims. If you can’t convince us, it’s not our problem; we just assume that you were making wild claims that you pulled out of your butt, dismiss your argument, and carry along just fine.
Oh, that’s easy. All I have to do is posit something else, that isn’t God, as being the First Cause. The big bang, for example. Or Odin.
And actually, if you want to get particular about it, Aquinas doesn’t even demonstrate that there’s only one first cause! He only establishes that, for any given causal chain, that there is a first cause. So for some causal chains, the first cause could have been last thursday; perhaps some quark did something perfectly random, which butterfly effected up to causing a tornado to happen yesterday. The arguement allows for it; there are no conditions whatsoever on the first cause, other than it being the earliest cause in some chain of causes.
And actually his argument doesn’t exclude the possibility of there being multiple ‘First Causes’, each of a separate chain of causation that merge together. For example, there are several reasons that I buy the list of items I do when I go shopping for groceries, and each of those reasons is likely the result of a melange of other reasons, each with their own causal chain, each with their on first causes, some of which are the ‘original’ first cause (that is, the Big Bang or Odin), and some others of which could be quark events the world over. That’s all allowed under his argument for First Causes.
Now, where’s that connection between First Causes and God?