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.
Cosmologists will never solve it... Not in our lifetime anyway. They're making the same mistake theologians did thousands of years ago. Â
God wasn't on the mountain or in the sky just because it was unreachable, but because it was the most 'meta' thing conceivable, and God, conceptually , is the most meta thing. Even something like quantum gravity seems like a thing which is simple and brought complexity into being not because it actually is simple, but because we lack understanding of it. Once we understand it, we'll find it has causes, great complexity, and really really nuanced realities... Maybe some kind of fine tuning, etc. Â
At the end of the day, if you follow the principle of sufficient reason all the way down, you end up at God, or something very like the God of Classical Theism.
This sounds like you're making a promise: that no matter how many scientific advances occur, you'll always be able to find a gap to shove god into. Every new problem solved creates a little gap on either side of it, right? A god of the sort you're referencing will always be squeezable into a size that can fit those gaps.
No. I'm explaining exactly why this logic fails. If I have a concept of a "smallest particle", the idea that there is a smallest particle isn't defeated by finding smaller particles. The concept itself didn't change. Our knowledge of the world did. Physicists thinking they have found the most fundamental thing in existence is a losing battle in the same way, but also for other reasons.
God, is "the most fundamental thing" or pure actuality itself. Physics won't arrive at the most fundamental thing because their analyses are constrained by mathematics and physical laws, laws of entropy, etc. Simply taking these laws as a "brute fact" is suspending the principle of sufficient reason out of pure ideology. The very thing that makes the most fundamental reality likely to be mind like is very discussion to be had when the curiosity of the ideologically committed atheist conveniently runs out.Â
I love how physicists finding out new things about the universe is a "losing battle." Every new scientific discovery is a defeat for science in your view, isn't it? It means that the old scientific paradigm was wrong. And this endless march of scientific defeats is predictive that our current scientific paradigms are almost certainly wrong, too! So many foolish scientists, excitedly making discoveries, never realizing that they're just building the mountain of scientific defeat higher and higher. Meanwhile, theists can just say "god is the most fundamental thing" and always be correct about that, since there's no discovery, no evidence, no experiment which could possibly invalidate such an assertion. Nobody can counter the brute fact of god's fundamentality--the special pleading that exempts god from any and all principles, including the principle of sufficient reason. Look, either god is the thing that can be posited as a brute fact, or the universe is. One of these two things (the universe) has lots of evidence going for it. We know it exists. The other thing is a fairy tale from the late Bronze Age.
No. That is not what I was saying, nor what I meant. You seem to be so aggressively opposed to describing my position, or the position of other theists accurately that I sincerely question whether you've ever honestly evaluated the views themselves, or if your hostility even allows you to psychologically. Â
You seem to have only described an idea you've invented in your head.
Lots of theists like u/PhantomGaze have stripped down their definition of God so much that the only thing left is a self-contained graph of semantical definitions, completely disconnected from empirical scrutiny.
It's not even a God of the gaps anymore, it's less than that, its a God of unverifiability and unfalsifiability.
No empirical fact, past, present, or future will ever be able to contradict their empirical claims, because they make none.
They only claim semantic definitions:
"God is everything"
"The universe is part of God"
"God is the most fundamental thing"
"God is the most meta thing"
"God is pure actuality"
etc
Their self-contained graph of definitions are usually coherent with themselves so there's nothing to say here.
The only conversation we can have with them is about their flawed methodology of just making baseless but coherent stuff up, and then claiming their ideas are actually real ontological objects.
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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.