Nice try (actually it was extremely lame). I’m not proposing that the Universe is eternal. Let’s go over it again:
Ya see, I didn’t propose that anything is eternal, and I made this clear elsewhere, but you’re safer making straw man arguments than you are explaining your own contradictions.
I and others went over that already. First, you are claiming that nothing we know of is causeless and therefore it is irrational to believe something causeless would exist. Then you go on to say something is causeless but from another realm, when other realms are also “NO THING that we know to be” out of this realm.
Second, and it’s already been brought up but I’ll repeat it since you didn’t respond to it the first time and still are pretending it hasn’t been mentioned, If your Creator God can exist without a cause if it’s from another realm, why not a particle or another universe from another realm that got this one going?
And you’re posting here just for your own benefit?
I can’t answer that since you’re Creator God has not been defined by you since you are now claiming It need not be sentient. Tell me more about your Creator God and I’ll answer you. I make room for an omnipotent, omniscient God in the same way I make room for an invisible dragon in my garage.
Why doesn’t my last sentence sound too believable?
Where did your Creator God come from that could create energy and matter? If “from another realm” is all it takes for you to think that’s an answer for anything, why not “energy and matter” came from another realm?
Show me where I played games with the word “everything.” You said:
I’m using “everything” the same way you did above.
I am interested in actual debate. So explain why your Creator God gets an exception that your definition of “everything” else doesn’t.
Me and several others are pointing out the contradiction and special pleading you’re engaging in and none of us are playing gotcha games. But I again can see why you’d rather knock down straw men then try to rationalize contradictions.
By what definition? You said It need not be sentient, so please define It for us.
If God can operate outside those constraints, why not another particle or another universe that begat this one?
Again, you said this:
If it’s unreasonable for the universe to have always existed because something that has always existed “has ZERO history of existing”, why isn’t unreasonable for a Creator God from another realm existing when other realms have zero history of existing (as do Creator Gods)?
Well, filling in for magellan01, I think he might be hinting at the common “everything but god needs a cause” arguments, like:
Everything with a beginning needs a cause
The Universe had a beginning, and was caused by God
God did not have a beginning
There are plenty of problems with this line of reasoning; even Point 1 is debatable.
What interests me about arguments like these is the assertion that eternal entities do not require a cause. (Note that a point 4 – “Therefore God does not require a cause”, is generally omitted because it makes a logical fallacy. The fallacy is left implicit).
But while eternal entities may not require a prior cause, there has to be some reason for their being, otherwise why don’t an infinity of eternal entities exist (ETA: as Czarcasm pointed out)?
No, we’re not left with that. Because according to you, it being from another realm gets around the necessity of needing to be caused. So using your exception, the universe that could have created ours was simply from another realm. Before you accuse me of claiming this is how our universe got here, I’ll remind you that I’m not doing that. I’m saying “another universe” works just as well as “Creator God” according to your rules and you’re not owning up to claiming it doesn’t.
MAGELLAN is complicating the universe to squeeze a belief in god into the equation. Saying god started the universe makes it more complicated. I accept the universe is here. That is enough for me. But when you claim god started it, you need to prove it. You need to prove god exists. Otherwise you are pulling it out of your sphincter with no proof at all.
Then you have to tell me what god number two is like. That is the god that made your god. Then we need god number 3, 4 ,5 etc. Saying god started the universe solves nothing .
The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
I don’t really agree with that definition, because to me, that minimal description is basically deism, not theism. Theism is the belief that a god or gods exist, and that this god(s) interact with the world today. I do agree with the description in the Wikipedia article that you quoted about this.
I always think of these terms as a Venn diagram, with atheism on one side, pantheism almost exactly overlaps the atheism bubble, then deism is its own bubble but pretty close, and then the various flavors of theism are way over on the other side of the chart.
No, believers in a first cause argument say that. Quantum physicists are fine with uncaused events. There are all sorts of “impossible” things in the quantum world, such as things going from point A to point B without going through the space in the middle. You can’t apply macroworld “laws” to it. And what laws apply in the pre-Big Bang domain are even less understood.
If the universe has a net energy of 0, which is beginning to seem likely, why couldn’t it just appear? A creator god does not have a net energy of 0, so it appearing violates conservation laws. Maybe there is an anti-creator god of negative energy?
Your problem is in premise 2. Premise 2 is based on an intuition on causes that cannot be extrapolated to “causation from nothing” which is what creation could only be. And why is that? Because every instance of causation we know of is one that involves the rearrangement of the configuration of the material universe. We know nothing about “coming from nothing”. Even granting that “there is NO THING that we know to be causeless”, our entire experience of “causeless” does not include “coming from nothing”.
From this, it is then now possible to posit that the universe or the metaverse have existed in one form or another for eternity without contradiction. And this is a more rational position than theism because we know that the universe exists - we don’t know anything of that sort about God.
That makes sense. The Wikipedia article does say that theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists, but you prefer the narrower definition.
Which of the versions of “atheism” in the Wikipedia article do you accept?
Several atheists in this thread have been insisting that atheism is “simply the lack of belief in deities”, even though this is not the only definition for atheism. I am suggesting that, strictly speaking, atheism is simply the lack of belief, but that in practice, it involves several beliefs about the nature of the world, in a way that is similar (not identical) to how theism often leads to religious beliefs.
And, if you substitute “atheism” for “science” and “atheist” for “scientist” you get another truism.
It seems that some atheists believe that somehow they are immune to having beliefs interfere with their logical arguments, and that only theists, somehow, suffer from flawed reasoning because of their beliefs.
And, if an atheist says to me: No, Galileo, you are wrong – all atheists have beliefs that interfere with their logical arguments, I’ll accept that statement as sufficient to withdraw my conjecture.
I’m not sure there are any atheists that would claim that they knew the minds of all other atheists…but if there were, I find it sad that you would accept the word of this “mind-reading” atheist as truth. Is your standard of evidence actually that low?
I’m an atheist and I’ll say to you, you are wrong. All atheists have beliefs that interfere with their logical arguments. No one is immune from biases. However, it would be hard to connect bias with atheism in the same way that it would be easy to connect certain cognitive biases with God belief. Why? Because atheism IS a non-belief that is not committed to any specific thing (except non-belief). Belief in God, however, demonstrably biases one’s perception about a lot of things in the world - particularly for theists.
In the broadest sense it is the best definition of atheism. Yes, those that claim “gods don’t exist” are atheists too, but since that necessitates lacking belief, defining atheism as being without belief in the existence of gods is the simplest and most accurate statement. Those that have a problem with it are usually theists that want to cherry pick definitions from dictionaries and claim that their definition is the correct one so they can make bullshit claims like it takes as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be a theist.
I already told you that many Buddhists that are atheists have much different beliefs about the nature of the world that isn’t anything like most of us atheists here who read and write in English and argue these sorts of things on message boards. You responded with:
It’s not true. I demonstrated that atheism is simply being without belief in the existence of gods. Believing in karma and reincarnation are part of one’s Buddhism, not his atheism. It does not involve “several beliefs about the nature of the world, in a way that is similar (not identical) to how theism often leads to religious beliefs.” For many of us, how we view the world skeptically leads us to break away from our upbringing and drop our belief in any gods, but it usually isn’t atheism that directly leads us to anything regarding beliefs about the nature of the world.
That’s the neat thing about “God”: you can make it fit by whatever definition you choose to come up with. That’s the primary reason I have no use for it. It’s malleability takes it out of the realm of reality and firmly entrenches it in superstition.
All everybody has beliefs that interfere with their logical arguments. It is built in to us. The trick is to arrange to test the outcome of your logical arguments, and, if they are faulty, examine your premises.
It seems to me that today atheists state their premises, and show how the results are tested. When we are accused of faith in science, we never accept it as a real faith, but tell how we test what science tells us, and say we don’t have faith in science the way someone has faith in god, but accept it because it works.
In the early 19th century theists, confident of their faith, did something similar. They went into science in a big way, sure that scientific discoveries would confirm their faith in God and the Bible. When it didn’t, and especially after Darwin, it led to a big crisis. The winning side were those who didn’t want to test their faith in the first place. This was the set that rejected science for the most part. They are the spiritual forefathers of those who say “you can’t test god” or “faith is independent of confirmation.”
Too malleable for even superstition-I pretty much know what jackalopes and leprechauns are supposed to look like and act like. This “Creator/God/Particle” has no characteristics whatsoever-all we supposedly know is that it somehow did something at sometime in the past.
All religious people have accepted the tenets of their religion without evidence. Every single one. If you’re religious you’ve accepted your religion’s claims without evidence.
This means that* every single theist* has accepted an illogical premise into their life.
The only thing we can say about every single atheist is that they don’t believe in God. Some atheists may be illogical and delusional. But every single theist is. At least as far as religion is concerned.
As you may have noticed in debates about theism/atheism, it is fairly common for the atheist to ask the theist for evidence for various claims. It seems to me that’s a reasonable request, as long as it is presented as a request and not some inviolable principle that must be followed for fear of punishment.
Please demonstrate how a belief in God biases one’s perceptions about some specific examples of the “lot of things” that you mentioned, and then please demonstrate how that belief biases one’s perceptions more that those beliefs that atheists have that interfere with their logical arguments.
Thanks.
Hey, I’m not disagreeing that theism biases one’s perceptions, and that it does so in some bad ways. It’s just that I won’t accept your claims when you present them so cavalierly. I find that many of the claims made by atheists in this thread are more a matter of opinion that the “TRUTH” that some atheists think they are.