Aquinas’s ramblings were nonsense and your logic here (as well as Aquinas’s) is faulty. You take as one assumption that everything must have a mover or cause, or whatever, and conclude that there must something without a mover or cause. Also, your discomfort with the idea of infinite time is not the same as having rejected it on logical grounds. Furthermore, you haven’t shown that “nothing can come from nothing” nor that if there IS a first mover/cause, it has any attributes whatsoever, Godlike or not.
I will say this: ANY so-called logic or reason used to ascertain the existence or characteristics of a God are faulty and misguided. Without assuming the existence of God, explicitly or implicitly, you get nowhere. So I suggest we all stop claiming there is logic behind the God concept. There isn’t.
Quantum physics appears to be against you on this one, being acausal.
Possibly, or possibly not. Assertion not fact.
Why is infinite regression more illogical than God? Or why does the complication of God make more sense than an origin without God?
Again quantum physics would be against you. It’s entirely possible to speculate on the origin of the Big Bang without invoking God; chaotic inflation or brane cosmology for example.
Let’s not because you have no evidence or logic to suggest as much.
God is a human construct.
God gets a free pass being infinite, no questions asked, but not the rest of space and time?
Human beings are finite, why should existence be however?
I decide it makes more sense not to invoke something complex into existence, which would raise more questions than it would answer.
So we exist outside of him, being external? But he exists outside of time and space. How can he be said to exist anywhere, or even at all?
Your ramblings aren’t much clearer than Aquinas’ I’m afraid.
You need to work on reading comprehension. Nowhere in that quote does Dawkins even allude to promoting “actively preventing parents from raising their children in their own religion.” He merely stated that society has accepted religious labels on children, that it’s preposterous, and we don’t do that in other regards, such as slapping political labels on them.
True. But the reason why The God Delusion increases my faith in the correctness of Christian doctrine is fairly simple. Dawkins is number one among atheists. Number one in copies sold, number one in adoring fans, number one in threads devoted to him on the Straight dope Message Board. Moreover, Dawkins himself clearly thinks that he’s put together an overwhelming argument against religion. In his words, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
The point is that this book, according to its author and many others, contains the most powerful arguments against religion. So I read the book, and what did I find? Lies, urban legends, pseudoscience, and a glaring shortage of citations. Is this really the best that he can do? If so, then clearly the best he can do is not very good.
There are many areas where I left the book with a stronger belief in the exact opposite of what Dawkins said. For instance, before reading it I knew very little about religious visions, locutions, and other personal religious experiences. Hence I was eager to see what evidence he would present in the section “The Argument from Personal Experience”. Imagine my surprise when he presented no evidence at all. I’d always assumed that there was at least some scientific evidence backing up his claims. It’s only thanks to Dawkins that I know otherwise. Since that time, I’ve read other books by people who actually know what they’re talking about, and hence I know much more about the reliability of religious experience, but in a a way he opened the door. I just walked through the opposite way from how he expected.
In any case, if Dawkins truly believed that his book was the one and only chance to save huge numbers of people from religious tyranny, he probably should have done a better job catching mistakes that an average 12-year-old will spot easily.
Out of interest, might I have a look at the cites you’re taking your book stats from? I’d be interested to know how the various atheist book authors stack up. I’m not sure how you know he is the atheist with the greatest number of fans. And as far as threads on these boards - that really just makes him well-known, not necessarily most agreed with of all atheists. A couple of those threads were started by you, for one thing. Your points here mean he’s well-known - and, I would quite likely agree, certainly among the top most famous atheists-for-being-atheist in that regard - but i’m not sure how they prove him to be the most agreed with.
Honestly, the entire argument here seems a bit odd. You’re essentially relying on the judgement of atheists as to his excellence - that is to say, your argument is basically that lots of people agree with him, ergo his arguments must be the best. But all of these people are, for the most part, atheists - and I would tend to say that it seems as though your opinion is that atheism represents a lack of good judgement (if i’m wrong, I apologise). It seems odd to me that you are basically willing to treat a large group of people whom you think have poorer judgement in general as though they have excellent judgement, on the very same point. How is it they have bad judgement when it comes to the efficacy of religious arguments over atheistic ones, an inability to recognise that those atheistic arguments are worse than they believe, yet, a complete and very accurate ability to recognise the efficacy of atheist arguments? It doesn’t make any sense.
And hey, pretty much every book on this subject, from whoever and whatever side, claims to have excellent arguments or some notable ideas. I would imagine there wouldn’t be a book if they didn’t.
Can you demonstrate this? “Easily”, as you say (or even not so easily)? You have not done so in your post.
A belief in the existence of a FSM is absolutely no different than belief in the existence of the Abrahamic god, Zeus, etc. insofar as there is exactly the same amount of evidence that any of those entities exist. Exactly the same amount.
What deeply rooted logic is this? AFAIK, there is absolutely no logic or reasoning that enters into any belief in a God*.
Now, that doesn’t mean that many people who are or were theists are not logical or reasonable people by-and-large. And it doesn’t mean that no one has ever logically concluded that it would be best if they professed a belief in a god (e.g. they would otherwise be killed).
*I consider believing in a god to include a belief in that god’s actual existence (otherwise you only have a belief in the *concept *of a god–something that all reasonable people agree exists). And again–there is no logical or reasonable way to believe that any god exists. If there is such a way, I would like to hear about it.
Is it possible to give a brief explanation of quantum mechanics, or does it require long hours of study to comprehend? This is interesting.
As for the other replies, yes, I suppose I don’t understand Aquinas very well. I tried. But the question still remains: How can such a structured and magnificent universe exist without inherent intelligence or direction? This question proves nothing, but cannot be dismissed lightly.
Are you implying infinite regression ISN’T illogical? I can’t tell.
If you are, then I’ll try to state my idea. Infinite regression means that in order for a forward progression of time to take place, an infinite amount of time must have already passed, or else this point would never be reached. If I said, “I will give you a chocolate bar in an infinite amount of time,” you would have to buy your own chocolate bar.
As for God, it just offers an explanation that we can leave unexplored, as it presents a very simple solution, even if it opens an infinite can of worms. An origin without God? I’m waiting for an answer on quantum, which I know very little about.
It can’t be explained in a sentence or two, no, but suffice it to say that physics behave very differently on a subatomic level, and trust me, physicists are not stumped into paralysis by the question of “first cause.”
This one is called the teleological argument (Aquinas again, huh?).
What does “magnificent” mean, and why does it require a designer?
What do you mean by “structured?” What structure do you see in the unverse which precludes a natural explanation?
Most importantly, this argument leads to an infinite regress. If something so “structured and magnificent” requires a designer, then isn’t the designer even more structured and magnificent? Who designed the designer?
That’s not what infinite regression means, but your objection also applies to God. If God has existed for an infinite amount of time, then he can’t have ever created the universe.
I see structure in the polarity and interconnection of life on Earth. Every living thing functions on some level for the welfare of other life, and all have masculine and feminine qualities. This expands out from just an atom, with the electron revolving around the nucleus, up to the molecule, element, functional being, simple conjugal relationship, with man and woman as subject and object partners, moving up to flora and fauna, the subject and object relationship with the moon and the planet, the planets and the sun, and so on. You get what I mean, right?
I can’t answer who designed the designer. I see God as an energy, where intelligence and human knowledge or scrutiny is irrelevant. There is only a truth and a law. Maybe different from the normal idea of God. Maybe even more convoluted.
Not really. Not without acid. Frankly, I think you’re seeing what you want to see. That’s actually pretty normal. The human brain is designed to impose artifical order onto complex or chaotic stimuli.
From an scientific standpoint, though, I was asking you to name something in the universe which cannot be explained by natural processes.
This is an answer with virtually no semantic substance. “Energy” has a specific scientific meaning. What kind of energy are you talking about?
If human knowledge and scrutiny cannot discern “God,” then how can you say that “God exists?”
Okay, for one thing, it is entirely possible for time to be finite and yet still have an infinite chain of causes. And I still don’t see what is wrong with time going to negative infinity anyway. For another thing, what does the entire rest of the universe have to do with sexual reproduction in general and the cultural roles we’ve projected on to men and women in particular?
And if God is an energy where intelligence and human scrutiny are irrelevant… how does that differ not having any god at all? And the moon and the planet and the flora and fauna… WTF man?
Everything can be explained by natural processes, but then again you may have to define “natural”. Either way, does that mean I can’t ask “why”? Or am I forced to logically conclude that existence is inherently meaningless and vain?
Human knowledge cannot scrutinize God himself, but if we assume for a second there is a God, then surely the universe would be an external reflection of His nature? We can observe and appreciate our surroundings. That’s it, and really that’s all that concerns us as we live now.
Doesn’t an infinite chain of causation mean there would either have to be an initial cause or an infinite number of causes? The latter kind of throws time out the window. Although, time is said to have come into order at the Big Bang, so are you talking about before that?
Explain the infinite chain of causes in a finite universe, please. It’s new to me.
Sexual reproduction is only a basic level of subject and object relationships. As you step further and further back, the same give and take relationships take place on higher realms, e.g., the Earth revolving around the sun (although it can’t be proven the Earth rotates around the sun! Are you going to get me for that one, too?). As Diogenes said, it may be a human misconception.
Time is not traveling backwards (unless I’m seriously missing something), but forward. Thus, there would have to be a point from which it could proceed forward. In order for that little asymptote of time to keep skimming closer and closer to zero while we progress, time would have to be moving in two directions. Is that a valid theory? I’ve never heard it.
But I still don’t understand the idea that we can even reach 1 when we have to keep breaking it down until so infinitesimally small it might as well be zero. I just don’t get it. I understand it going in ONE direction, that is backwards. Otherwise, I feel like I’m trying to grasp what a square triangle is.
