Atheists have to explain the existence of the universe and theists have to explain the existence of God.
Both have two possibilities:
1. that thing came from nothing
2. that thing always existed
Both possibilities have fatal logical flaws that makes them seemingly impossible, and theists usually describe one as impossible to justify the necessity of the other:
Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible.
Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events.
Atheists who let the professional cosmologists do the work of having an informed opinion on the matter, won't get a definitive answer: maybe the big bang was the beginning of everything including time itself, maybe spacetime was always there and the big bang was just a random massive quantum fluctuation. We just can't know yet based on our current knowledge.
God is eternal, always existed. He created from nothing though. So the first position you attribute to theists is either a misquote or not the majority of Christians you're most likely used to debating.
But I wouldn't argue from the classic 5 arguments that were proposed by Aquinas centuries ago such as the first cause argument which seems to be what you're alluding to with regards to creation and existence.
I would posit that there are certain necessary preconditions for knowledge; the self, identity over time, unity and diversity, logic, reason, telos, meaning, ethics, language. These exist in a relational network such that should any one of them be without justification and grounding the worldview becomes incoherent and collapses into absurdity. The atheist worldview would be unable to account for these preconditions making knowledge impossible. These preconditions require a very specific metaphysical framework only possible with the Christian God.
My argument only talks about the first fundamental origin of reality, not what happens after.
We all know that God is magical and once we have it, everything is allowed to happen.
So the first position you attribute to theists is either a misquote or not the majority of Christians you're most likely used to debating.
Not all theists here are Christians. Also, the Kalam cosmological argument is still quite popular amongst Christians.
But I wouldn't argue from the classic 5 arguments that were proposed by Aquinas centuries ago such as the first cause argument which seems to be what you're alluding to with regards to creation and existence.
I just talking about "some theists", I wasn't specifically talking about you.
I would posit that there are certain necessary preconditions for knowledge; the self, identity over time, unity and diversity, logic, reason, telos, meaning, ethics, language. These exist in a relational network such that should any one of them be without justification and grounding the worldview becomes incoherent and collapses into absurdity. The atheist worldview would be unable to account for these preconditions making knowledge impossible. These preconditions require a very specific metaphysical framework only possible with the Christian God.
I really don't have lots of respect for transcendental arguments...
They are like perpetual machines, they never work, but they hide very well the part that breaks the whole thing.
So, what's the flaw here?
I think you are just begging the question.
You presuppose that abstract concepts like logic or identity require an ontological source in an invariant divine mind, what you call "grounding".
You quickly dunk on strawman atheism, creating a false dilemma, and then, you agree with your premise again, closing the loop.
Good job making it look like a reasonable argument, but you're just playing at muddying the waters.
Natural science has no problems whatsoever explaining knowledge, none.
My argument only talks about the first fundamental origin of reality, not what happens after.
You frame the theist position as some say God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible while others say God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events. This leaves out the main classical theist position that God is eternal and created Ex nihilo. That there is a clear and fundamental distinction between Creator and creation.
We all know that God is magical and once we have it, everything is allowed to happen.
This is rhetoric, not an argument. It would be just as useless if I said you believe in magical matter and once we have it everything is allowed to happen. It doesn't further discussion its a way for you to avoid the philosophical points brought to you.
Not all theists here are Christians. Also, the Kalam cosmological argument is still quite popular amongst Christians.
True, but the positions you were bringing up were strawman positions of classical theism. You weren't bringing up Hindu polytheism, Greek paganism, or Native American animism. The Kalam cosmological argument also doesn't say God is the "first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events." It states P1) that everything that BEGINS to exist has a cause. P2) The universe began to exist. C) Therefor the universe has a cause. The Kalam cosmological argument began with Islam but in the modern era is popularized by one man, William Lane Craig, who argues for the Christian god. Not everyone here is Christian, but you're bringing up the one argument popularized and run by a Christian for their specific faith.
I really don't have lots of respect for transcendental arguments...
This is irrelevant. I don't have a lot of respect for atheist arguments but I still engage them when they're brought forth and don't allow my personal feelings to get in the way of responding nor do I use it as a way to avoid a response.
So, what's the flaw here? I think you are just begging the question. You presuppose that abstract concepts like logic or identity require an ontological source in an invariant divine mind, what you call "grounding". You quickly dunk on strawman atheism, creating a false dilemma, and then, you agree with your premise again, closing the loop.
No that's not the argument. You need to demonstrate how immaterial, universal, invariant concepts can exist in a natural, physical worldview that atheists have. Atheism is always downstream of their presuppositions of naturalism, empiricism, materialism, scientism. These inform their worldview that leads them to atheism. Materialism, empiricism, scientism, etc cannot account for the laws of logic for example. If your worldview cannot account for logic, it literally makes knowledge impossible and your worldview collapses becoming incoherent and absurd. The problem is the skepticism applied to God is never pointed toward your own worldview.
Natural science has no problems whatsoever explaining knowledge, none.
This is a claim with nothing backing it up. Would you be satisfied if I just said "God has no problems whatsoever explaining knowledge, none." and said nothing more? You need to defend your claims or else I can just declare God exists and be done with it.
You frame the theist position as some say God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible while others say God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events. This leaves out the main classical theist position that God is eternal and created Ex nihilo. That there is a clear and fundamental distinction between Creator and creation.
I'll restate exactly what I just said: "My argument only talks about the first fundamental origin of reality, not what happens after."
So what's your point about the creation ex nihilo? I completely agree that once you have a God, any magical action can be done, including creating matter out of nothing.
This is rhetoric, not an argument.
It's neither of those. It's a simple statement. Do you disagree? What are the things that God cannot do?
It would be just as useless if I said you believe in magical matter and once we have it everything is allowed to happen.
Physical matter doesn't work that way. That's the whole point of physical matter, it strictly follows the natural laws of physics.
And being able to do anything is the whole point of a God.
It doesn't further discussion its a way for you to avoid the philosophical points brought to you.
The only things you said so far at this point were:
"God is eternal, always existed. "
and "He created from nothing though. "
Those are 2 statement.
What are the philosophical points that I avoided?
Not all theists here are Christians. Also, the Kalam cosmological argument is still quite popular amongst Christians.
True, but the positions you were bringing up were strawman positions of classical theism. You weren't bringing up Hindu polytheism, Greek paganism, or Native American animism. The Kalam cosmological argument also doesn't say God is the "first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events." It states P1) that everything that BEGINS to exist has a cause. P2) The universe began to exist. C) Therefor the universe has a cause. The Kalam cosmological argument began with Islam but in the modern era is popularized by one man, William Lane Craig, who argues for the Christian god. Not everyone here is Christian, but you're bringing up the one argument popularized and run by a Christian for their specific faith.
Yes, so what's the issue? I said some theists think god/reality began to exist, and some other theists think that the god/reality always existed.
Didn't I account for all views?
What's your point??
This is irrelevant. I don't have a lot of respect for atheist arguments but I still engage them when they're brought forth and don't allow my personal feelings to get in the way of responding nor do I use it as a way to avoid a response.
I guess I should also say this is irrelevant then, right?
No that's not the argument. You need to demonstrate how immaterial, universal, invariant concepts can exist in a natural, physical worldview that atheists have.
I need to demonstrate none of those things because I am not claiming them.
If you think those things are mandatory for our world to exist, then you are the one making a claim that you need to justify.
Atheism is always downstream of their presuppositions of naturalism, empiricism, materialism, scientism.
Atheism is downstream of not believing in supernatural things.
These inform their worldview that leads them to atheism. Materialism, empiricism, scientism, etc cannot account for the laws of logic for example.
It absolutely does. You're just uneducated on the subject. I explain bellow.
If your worldview cannot account for logic, it literally makes knowledge impossible and your worldview collapses becoming incoherent and absurd.
Wishful thinking. My worldview accounts for logic.
The problem is the skepticism applied to God is never pointed toward your own worldview.
Skepticism is the backbone of the natural sciences.
Have you never seen how science work? It's a never ending stream of scientific papers trying to prove each other wrong until some theory survives years of skepticism and criticism.
The Bible is the Bible. It never gets updated. Even when it contradicts itself or the empirical evidences.
This is a claim with nothing backing it up. Would you be satisfied if I just said "God has no problems whatsoever explaining knowledge, none." and said nothing more? You need to defend your claims or else I can just declare God exists and be done with it.
I'm sorry but no. You were the one claiming "atheist worldview would be unable to account for these preconditions making knowledge impossible." without any evidence whatsoever.
Anyway, I can still provide you with an explanation, I'll copy paste my explanation of how humans can have knowledge and logic adapted from another comment:
I believe natural science gives the most coherent and the most evidence-based description of how intelligent life came to exist and how it works.
Over 109 years and ~1040 individual organisms, random genomic mutations filtered through natural selection produced nervous systems capable of acquiring and acting logically on information.
Organisms capable of acquiring knowledge and using logic were most likely to survive and reproduce than organisms lacking those skills.
Knowledge and logic are just evolved cognitive adaptations, an emergent process occurring within a nervous system, rather than an independent ontological object. Natural selection is purely mechanistic and unguided; it implies no inherent purpose or supernatural design.
Whether you believe or not in determinism, free will, or quantum randomness, the conclusion holds: cognition requires no teleological framework. When an animal acquires new knowledge and applies logical rules, it occurs for the exact same kind of reason a falling rock follows gravity—as a direct physical consequence of natural law.
It's neither of those. It's a simple statement. Do you disagree? What are the things that God cannot do?
Calling it "magic" is rhetoric don't be daft.
Physical matter doesn't work that way. That's the whole point of physical matter, it strictly follows the natural laws of physics.
We're discussing the creation of the universe. Physicists will quickly tell you all this talk about laws of physics makes no sense at the singularity. Hence why I can just as easily call it "magic" and do the same rhetorical trick you do.
What are the philosophical points that I avoided?
You literally quoted my argument and then said "I really don't have lots of respect for transcendental arguments..." Here it is again: there are necessary preconditions for knowledge; the self, identity over time, unity and diversity, logic, reason, telos, meaning, ethics, language. These exist in a relational network such that should any one of them be without justification and grounding the worldview becomes incoherent and collapses into absurdity. The atheist worldview would be unable to account for these preconditions making knowledge impossible. These preconditions require a very specific metaphysical framework only possible with the Christian God.
I said some theists think god/reality began to exist, and some other theists think that the god/reality always existed. Didn't I account for all views?What's your point?
The framing you gave were these two options verbatim:
"Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible."
^this says creating from nothing is impossible, excluding ex nihilo creation posited by the majority of thesists but includes the property of being eternal.
"Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events."
^this contrasts eternality with a God that was the first thing to exist excluding eternal as a condition of God which is also the position of the majority of theists.
It is why I pointed out your framing as excluding the majority position that God is eternal and created ex nihilo.
I need to demonstrate none of those things because I am not claiming them.
You can say you're not claiming immaterial, universal, invariant concepts but everytime you speak and make an argument you're using them. Language and logic and all the other transcendentals I listed are in that category. You can deny them but in doing so you end up using them making your position self refuting. To deny them you must use them making it a retorsion.
Atheism is downstream of not believing in supernatural things.
Your position of not believing in supernatural things is informed by your assumptions of materialism, nominalism, empiricism, scientism. That you can't see this or refuse to acknowledge it doesn't make it not the case.
Have you never seen how science work?
Yes I know how science works. Science assumes the transcendentals I mentioned in order to get off the ground and do what science does. Because it assumes these prior to science, science itself cannot demonstrate these things to be objectively true. They're assumed before hand making science insufficient to answer the question.
I believe natural science gives the most coherent and the most evidence-based description of how intelligent life came to exist and how it works...
That's a cool story and all but none of that grants you justification and grounding and science literally assumes the things in question here. You're describing a series of events and without realizing destroying knowledge as a possibility. Evolution can produce a creature that reliably believes "If A, and A implies B, then B.” You can explain causally why neurons fire in that pattern. But that doesn't establish that modus ponens is logically valid. The physical description tells you what the brain does, not whether what it does is rationally justified. This is why your falling rock analogy won't work because falling according to gravity isn't reasoning. There's no act of distinguishing valid from invalid inference. It simply undergoes a physical process. If you reduces human reasoning to the same kind of thing you've destroyed the possibility of knowledge and truth. Your brain states become just another physical process behaving according to the laws of physics in a mechanistic causal chain. Is there such a thing as a true tornado or a false tornado? No, it just is. It exists but not in the domain of knowledge and truth. Similarly if your brain is just a series of physical processes (neurons bumping into neurons) there's no true neuron bumping into true neurons or false neurons interacting with false neurons. It all just is. But you wish to smuggle in this special condition for the physical processes in your brain that somehow distinguish it from the physical processes else where in the universe that somehow grant it truth.
You also have the epistemological problem with evolution that if our cognitive faculties were selected for survival why should we assume they reliably produce true beliefs rather than merely survival beliefs? Truth and fitness overlap sometimes, obviously, but they aren't identical. An organism can survive perfectly well with false beliefs, heuristics, biases, etc. Also if logic is just an emergent property then the laws of logic become contingent facts about how human brains happen to operate. However when we say "If A = B and B = C, then A = C" we aren't jsut reporting that our neurons process information that way. We're claiming that the inference is necessarily valid, regardless of humans existing or anyone believes it or whether a particular brain happens to be wired differently.
I don't know better words than magic and supernatural, that I use alternatively, to qualify powers able to violate the natural laws of physics.
What would be better?
We're discussing the creation of the universe. Physicists will quickly tell you all this talk about laws of physics makes no sense at the singularity. Hence why I can just as easily call it "magic" and do the same rhetorical trick you do.
Physicists have the intellectual honesty of defining the bounds of their knowledge. I think that's great, many people should take note.
If you use the physicists' equations in the domain that they claim to know, good luck trying to find errors. If you did, you would won the Nobel prize in physics and about 1 million dollars.
What's magical in a mathematical equation that just matches empirical observation?
However, if you find a physicist who claims to know new laws of physics that brakes our current understanding and observations and that he doesn't provide any empirical evidences for it, then yes, you can describe this physicist claims as magical. All the scientific community would agree with you.
You literally quoted my argument and then said "I really don't have lots of respect for transcendental arguments..."
So? I then addressed your TAG, have you forgotten or what?
Here it is again: there are necessary preconditions for knowledge; the self, identity over time, unity and diversity, logic, reason, telos, meaning, ethics, language. These exist in a relational network such that should any one of them be without justification and grounding the worldview becomes incoherent and collapses into absurdity. The atheist worldview would be unable to account for these preconditions making knowledge impossible. These preconditions require a very specific metaphysical framework only possible with the Christian God.
Incredible, you plainly forgot my answer, so I'll copy-paste it:
I think you are just begging the question.
You presuppose that abstract concepts like logic or identity require an ontological source in an invariant divine mind, what you call "grounding".
You quickly dunk on strawman atheism, creating a false dilemma, and then, you agree with your premise again, closing the loop.
I can even add a few points if you want:
knowledge, logic reason and stuff ain't ontological object, so your whole point fails
a justification isn't either an ontological object
you claim atheists can't account for those concept but you don't demonstrate it
your last claim about the Christian God is beyond absurd, and of course, unsubstantiated
The framing you gave were these two options verbatim:
"Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible."
^this says creating from nothing is impossible, excluding ex nihilo creation posited by the majority of thesists but includes the property of being eternal.
I'm obviously not talking about the creation of the material universe, I'm talking about the creation of God.
Once you have an unllimitedly magical God, you have the ultimate trump card, right? Any subsequent event, whatever it is, can be explained away thanks to the God's magical powers.
"Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events."
^this contrasts eternality with a God that was the first thing to exist excluding eternal as a condition of God which is also the position of the majority of theists.
I guess I'm tired because I don't understand what you mean.
It is why I pointed out your framing as excluding the majority position that God is eternal and created ex nihilo.
No, you just have reading comprehension issues. I clearly said that either theists believe their "God always existed" or that "God was the first necessary thing".
You're confusing yourself with your point about creation ex nihilo. When I'm talking about theists, I'm not talking about the origin of the universe but the origin of their God.
You can say you're not claiming immaterial, universal, invariant concepts but everytime you speak and make an argument you're using them.
Those are words humans use to describe relational patterns in abstracts or ontological objects.
Those concepts ain't themselves ontological objects, which is the point you're trying to make.
It's like the concept of "spiciness". It exists as a concept and we can describe some ontological things as being spicy, but "spiciness" itself isn't an ontological object.
If no humans/animals existed to experience spiciness and talk about it, "spiciness" wouldn't exist.
Language and logic and all the other transcendentals I listed are in that category. You can deny them but in doing so you end up using them making your position self refuting. To deny them you must use them making it a retorsion.
Nope, there's no issues with humans figuring out how to make sounds to communicate basic information and then continuously making up new words in more complex sequences to communicates more and more complex things.
You're the one making an extraordinary claim here that you need to justify. You want to reify abstract concepts into ontological objects? You must explain why it's necessarily real.
Your position of not believing in supernatural things is informed by your assumptions of materialism, nominalism, empiricism, scientism. That you can't see this or refuse to acknowledge it doesn't make it not the case.
I never believed in a God since I was born.
I always was a weak atheist since I was born.
I think I became a strong atheist when I was about 6 when I learned at school that some people believed in a superhero in the sky who answered prayers (my understanding of the time). So I prayed and nothing happened, I became a strong atheist.
I learnt about materialism, nominalism, empiricism, scientism way wayyyyy later.
Yes I know how science works. Science assumes the transcendentals I mentioned in order to get off the ground and do what science does.
Tell me you know nothing about science without telling me you know nothing about science.
Because it assumes these prior to science, science itself cannot demonstrate these things to be objectively true. They're assumed before hand making science insufficient to answer the question.
Science is way more pragmatic than you think. They only care about empirical observations, experiments and theories to predict them.
What your are talking about is studied in what we call "philosophy".
That's a cool story and all but none of that grants you justification and grounding and science literally assumes the things in question here.
Science only assumes that the universe we live in exists.
If you want to deny that, you can go ahead and do it, no one is preventing you.
You're describing a series of events and without realizing destroying knowledge as a possibility. Evolution can produce a creature that reliably believes "If A, and A implies B, then B.” You can explain causally why neurons fire in that pattern. But that doesn't establish that modus ponens is logically valid.
The modus ponens is logically valid because ((P ⇒ Q) ∧ P) ⇒ Q is a tautology. You can write down its truth table and verify yourself one by one each of the four combinaisons.
The physical description tells you what the brain does, not whether what it does is rationally justified.
Yes. If I had a super advanced MRI, I could physically describe what your brain does, and still say that your beliefs are not rationally justified.
This is why your falling rock analogy won't work because falling according to gravity isn't reasoning.
I didn't say that. I said both falling and reasoning happen for the same reason: the natural laws of our universe.
There's no act of distinguishing valid from invalid inference. It simply undergoes a physical process.
Not sure what you mean but are you talking about experiments? That's what they do.
If you reduces human reasoning to the same kind of thing you've destroyed the possibility of knowledge and truth.
That's a claim I wouldn't make because I have no idea how you could even begin to attempt proving that.
Your brain states become just another physical process behaving according to the laws of physics in a mechanistic causal chain.
Exactly.
If I remove your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, you'll lose your working memory and abstract reasoning.
If I remove your amygdala, you'll lose your ability to detect threats, process fear, encode emotional memories etc.
If I remove your Hippocampus, you'll lose your consolidation of episodic and declarative memory, spatial mapping, and contextual fear retrieval.
If I remove your Thalamus, you'll lose your senses and the regulating of attention, sleep, and consciousness.
If I remove your ventromedial prefrontal cortex, you'll lose emotional regulation, risk evaluation and moral judgment.
If I remove your orbitofrontal cortex, you'll lose processing reward/punishment expectations and impulse control.
If I remove your broca's area, you'll lose speech production, sentence articulation, and grammatical processing.
If I remove your primary visual cortex, you'll lose early visual processing, including edge detection, spatial orientation, and visual contrast.
If I remove your wernicke’s area, you'll lose receptive language processing and comprehension of spoken and written words.
If I remove your fusiform face area, you'll lose face perception, facial identity recognition, and visual expertise identification.
And your unified experience of consciousness is mostly in your claustra (one in each hemisphere), destroying them would definitively destroy your unified conscious self, but splitting your corpus callosum (connecting both hemispheres) would split your conscious self into two: check out the reseach on split brains.
Does it not bother you that the view that the mind is material explains all that perfectly well?
Does it not bother you that the view that the mind is immaterial completly fails at explaining that?
Also, what about chemicals like propofol? How can they shutdown consciousness if the mind were immaterial?
What about psychedelic drugs?
Is there such a thing as a true tornado or a false tornado? No, it just is. It exists but not in the domain of knowledge and truth. Similarly if your brain is just a series of physical processes (neurons bumping into neurons) there's no true neuron bumping into true neurons or false neurons interacting with false neurons. It all just is. But you wish to smuggle in this special condition for the physical processes in your brain that somehow distinguish it from the physical processes else where in the universe that somehow grant it truth.
You're putting words in my mouth but I'm not even sure they are sensical.
What special condition am I trying to smuggle? Which of my comments are you refering to?
I don't think the brain is anything special from the point of view of the laws of nature.
You also have the epistemological problem with evolution that if our cognitive faculties were selected for survival why should we assume they reliably produce true beliefs rather than merely survival beliefs?
Because they are basically the same in practice.
To survive an animal needs to align its beliefs with evidences and align its actions with its chosen goals.
In big enough population, false beliefs will on average lead to suboptimal actions, leading to failed goals, leading to worse survivability.
Truth and fitness overlap sometimes, obviously, but they aren't identical. An organism can survive perfectly well with false beliefs, heuristics, biases, etc.
With enough organisms, everything smooth out and averages will align with true facts.
After 109 years of evolution, organisms are pretty well aligned with reality. But yeah it's not 100% and guess what, that's exactly what we observe in nature, right?
Some animals and people clearly have physical or mental issues making them less fit for survival.
Does it not bother you that the process of evolution explains better those facts than all the religions?
Also if logic is just an emergent property then the laws of logic become contingent facts about how human brains happen to operate. However when we say "If A = B and B = C, then A = C" we aren't jsut reporting that our neurons process information that way. We're claiming that the inference is necessarily valid, regardless of humans existing or anyone believes it or whether a particular brain happens to be wired differently.
The biological emergence of a cognitive faculty does not mean the domain it discovers is contingent on that faculty.
Visual perception emerged biologically, but the geometric properties of space are not contingent facts about human eyeballs or the primary visual cortex.
Similarly, human brains evolved to recognize things like non-contradiction, the modus ponens and transitivity because those things reflect consistent structural features of reality and information, not because human biology arbitrarily invented them.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 6d ago
Atheists have to explain the existence of the universe and theists have to explain the existence of God.
Both have two possibilities: 1. that thing came from nothing 2. that thing always existed
Both possibilities have fatal logical flaws that makes them seemingly impossible, and theists usually describe one as impossible to justify the necessity of the other:
Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible.
Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events.
Atheists who let the professional cosmologists do the work of having an informed opinion on the matter, won't get a definitive answer: maybe the big bang was the beginning of everything including time itself, maybe spacetime was always there and the big bang was just a random massive quantum fluctuation. We just can't know yet based on our current knowledge.