Stock Answer 1.0 the Cosmological Argument

This article is a part of a series called Stock Answers which is to designed to be a quick source of rebuttals in my encounters with theists online.

The Cosmological Argument

The theist has proposed that:

• All things have a Creator or a First Cause, or
• All things that "begin to exist" have a Creator or a First Cause, or
• All things that are finite or contingent have a Creator or a First Cause, or
• All things that exhibit the appearance of design (having beauty, purpose, complexity, etc.) have a Designer (a Creator or First Cause)

The second, third and fourth arguments exist because the first one fails on the grounds that, if all things need a creator, then A) since the creator is part of all things, he/she would also need a creator (and the creator's creator would need a creator, and the creator's creator's creator would need a creator, and so on ad infinitum), and B) who's to say that self-creation isn't possible? That is, if a creator can exist without having a creator, why can't we simply say that creation/universe exists without itself having a creator? Logically, there's no reason to say that the latter must have a cause but the former must not. And indeed Occam's razor demands that we not multiply entities beyond necessity, so if we can say that the universe is self-created, this would be preferable to saying that the universe was created by self-created creator.

Thus, the second, third and fourth arguments have been propounded so as to trump up the meaning of creation in such a way that it would be unable create itself. The premises of these arguments have been defined in such a way as to support the theist's foregone conclusion that God must exist.¹ As we shall see, however, these premises are unfounded.

The Problem of Induction

It should also be noted that, all four of these arguments run afoul of the problem of induction (a question regarding inductive reasoning which is often credited to philosopher David Hume). Induction is basically a generalization, a means of drawing a universal conclusion based on a finite number of examples. For instance, all swans that I have ever seen are white, therefore all swans must be white. While the premise may be true, I can't rightly make a statement regarding all swans based on my limited experience of swans (black swans do, indeed, exist). So it is with the cosmological argument; just because all things I have encountered have a creator (or have a beginning, or are contingent, or have been designed if they appear to be complex), it doesn't necessarily follow that all things have a creator (or a beginning, etc.).

Each of the second, third, and fourth arguments have been expounded upon a little bit below. Each of these arguments will eventually receive a more thorough treatment in their own articles, especially the Argument from Design. For now, I have proffered some basic, and perfectly viable rebuttals. 

Kalam's Argument

Kalam's argument is the version of the Cosmological Argument which posits that all things that begin to exist must have a creator or a first cause. But what is in the set of all things that begin to exist? All things. And what is in the set of all things that did not begin to exist. Nothing, just God. So, when one says "all things that begin to exist must have a creator" what she is actually saying is "all things are created by God".  But that is the proposition that we are trying to prove; the premise is the conclusion, and that is begging the question.

Aquinas' Argument

Aquinas's version of the Cosmological Argument is also called the Argument from Contingency, and it states that things that are contingent must have a creator or first cause. Contingent things are things that could conceivably not exist, there was nothing necessary about their existence.  Some examples of contingent things are birds, skyscrapers, planets, oatmeal, etc.  Frankly, it's difficult for me to see how this argument is different from Kalam's (above). Contingent things are things which didn't necessarily have to exist, but do anyway; in other words, they began to exist. Is there anything a theist would claim is contingent but did not begin to exist? It seems to me that the rebuttal for Kalam's argument would also apply here.

Paley's Argument

The Argument from Design is often connected to William Paley due to the Watchmaker Analogy he presented in his book Natural Theology (1802). However, comparing creation to a timepiece is not original to Paley; Cicero in De Natura Deorum made the same analogy using sundials and water clocks. The Argument from Design states a creator is evidenced by a perceived presence of order, purpose, or design. My first objection to this is argument is that we can cite examples of complexity without a designer, such as snowflakes and diamonds.

Furthermore, "perceived presence of order" suggests that there is a subjective element to what we deem as ordered, complex, designed, etc. But the human brain is hardwired to recognize patterns, and it has been shown that we sometimes see patterns where there are none². So, it doesn't necessarily follow that, if we see a design, that a design actually exists.

Lastly, if there was a designer, he was not very good at his job. Take, for example, vestigial organs. Why would a designer include unnecessary parts in his creation? But the theory of evolution by natural selection provides a tidy explanation, not only of why vestigial organs exist, but also of how complexity can arise from simpler beginnings (and, for that matter, why we see patterns where none exist). And if we have a better explanation for why things are as they are, why should we favor a worse explanation?

The reason the theist favors a worse explanation to a better one is that she believes it provides a reason to believe in her particular god. But even if these arguments proved a creator existed, that knowledge is of little help when one is trying to defend a belief in a specific god, as I will discuss in the next section.

Even if a Creator Existed...

Finally, and not least importantly, even if any of these iterations of the Cosmological Argument were valid (and hopefully I've shown how they are not), that would not be sufficient evidence to support that the theist's particular God is the Creator. For example, if a Christian theist proves that the universe displays evidence of complexity and purpose that could only be accounted for by a Designer, she has not even come close to proving that Jesus is God; take for example the Marcionites, who believed that the Creator God of the Old Testament was distinct from the father-god about which Jesus preached. Such a conclusion is just as possible as the Christian belief.

Nor even has the theist proved that Yahweh is the Designer; maybe the Creator is the demiurge, or Ptah, or Marduk, or Mbombo, or one of dozens of other Creator-gods that have been believed in by human religions, mythologies and philosophies. Maybe several gods took part in Creation. Maybe the impersonal creator god of the deists is the Creator. There might even have been a Designer that's not a god at all, a demon perhaps, or a mortal inhabitant of another universe. Maybe the creator god or demon or mortal has slipped out of existence since the moment of creation. Why not? Any of these possibilities are an equally logical conclusion we could draw about a Creator, if the theist had proved that a Creator necessarily existed.

But, again, the cosmological argument, in all its variations, fails to prove that the existence of a creator.

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¹ My suspicion is that most people who propound such arguments were not brought to a belief in God by these arguments, but instead use these arguments to support their already-existing (and likely unfounded) belief in their particular God. Admittedly, this is conjecture on my part.
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Stock Answers: An Introduction and Table of Contents

Introduction

Often enough I find myself debating religion on Twitter. However, it's difficult to do this without the argument devolving into an exchange of insults, and I think this is largely due to the space constraint of 140 characters.

Now, I enjoy a good insult as much as the next guy, but I do have actual reasons for agnosticism/atheism. Good ones too. These arguments deserve to be heard, especially by the believers with whom I'm debating. It would be quite handy for me (and perhaps for other atheist readers as well) if I had a single place to which I could link references pertinent to the topic at hand. That's why I'm starting the "Stock Answers" series here on my blog.

The "Stock Answers" will likely range in topic from philosophy, to theology, apologetics, science, biblical hermeneutics, and to whatever other field of study my discussions take me. Thus, if the person I'm debating begs the question, I can simply put a link in my Tweet to an article about why petitio principii is a fallacious argument.

Granted, no information here will be original (most of the theological and philosophical issues are much older than people realize). But it's important to me that this info should be A) easily accessible, and B) in my own words. Quite often I have had debates online where the opponent simply linked to an article that she felt was definitive, yet she herself ill understood it. That's an appeal to authority (a fallacy which I'll certainly write about in this series eventually), and that's something I'd like to avoid. Yes, I will try to cite sources when appropriate, but it should be known from the outset that I'm not simply regurgitating information that I've learned by rote; I've actually reflected on both sides of a given argument and have chosen the position that I feel is the most reasonable.

Why should we care what the most reasonable argument is? What other considerations are there by which we could judge the validity of an argument? Beauty? Impact on our feelings? Popular assent? Such considerations can change from person to person and from culture to culture. That is to say, they are subjective or culturally relative. Reason is universal; it is the same from person to person and culture to culture, and so it will be my guiding light for each post in this series.

Table of Contents

This section will be updated as new posts are made.
Part I - The Cosmological Argument






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Bible-thumping atheists

A couple of recent tweets got me to thinking about atheists' attitude toward the bible compared to the attitudes of theists. Your average American non-Catholic Christian seems to think that the bible supports his/her beliefs simply because they are able to cherry-pick verses that support their forgone conclusions. For instance, they love Leviticus 20:13 "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination" because they have already decided for themselves that homosexuality is a sin. But there is a myriad of other laws in the Old Testament about which they are completely ignorant and/or unobservant, such as Leviticus 19:19 which admonishes against cross-breeding cattle or wearing blended fabrics.

Granted, for an observant Jew, homosexuality is a more serious offense than cross-bred cattle. But since when does a Christian care about how Jews interpret their own scriptures? One of the very premises of Christianity, it seems, is the unwarranted presumption that Jews misread their own bible. Take Exodus 35:2-3 (which my friend Peter expounds upon quite well on his blog). Any Christian would agree that it is a highly important moral imperative that we remember the sabbath, but what about not kindling any fires? That would include driving, cooking, and heating one's home, and I'd hazard to guess that most Christians do all of these. So, the point remains, Christians insist on the literal observance of the bible when it suits their forgone conclusions, and they simply gloss over anything inconvenient.

Tweet #1:

MissRaissa God's Daughter

You just gotta love how the #Atheists use the scripture to make a point, my goodness I think we getting somewhere, praise the Lord.

19 Dec

in reply to ↑

@FizlowskiEric Fridrich

@MissRaissa Now, if we could only get Christians to use logic to make a point, that would truly be a miracle.

19 Dec via Twitter for Android Favorite Reply Delete

No, I didn't change the names to protect the innocent. Of course, the topics that @MissRaissa and others had been tweeting about was god, religion, and the bible. So, it comes as a surprise to no one that atheists were quoting the bible

Far from being consistent and inerrant, the bible shows itself to be a very human and flawed piece of work. It contains contradictions: for instance, Jairus daughter was dead in Matthew 9:18, but only at the point of death in Mark 5:23. Or, as another example, David was the great grandson of Ruth (a Moabite woman), but Deuteronomy 23:3 states that no Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord even up to the 10th generation.

The bible also contains inaccuracies: 1 Kings 7:23 tells us that Solomon built a "sea" 10 cubits from brim to brim and 30 cubits around. Now we could let this inaccuracy slide if the biblical "inerrantists" weren't so keen on insisting that the bible is always right. But even if the author of 1 Kings was simply rounding off the value of pi (as he would have had to, since I don't believe Hebrew numbering allowed for fractions), these numbers are found in the context of a chapter all about the measurements and sizes of Solomon's Palace, so we should expect a better rounding off of the circumference to be no less than 31.

Not inaccurate enough, for you? Try this one. In Genesis 30:25-43 Jacob fleeces Laban out of his livestock. Laban agrees that, as payment for tending his flocks, Jacob may separate any speckled or striped sheep. Jacob then goes about breeding Laban's flocks for speckled and striped phenotypes. How does he do this? He places stakes of striped wood near their feeding troughs. Huh? So, if sheep mate near striped sticks, their offspring will be striped. Well, if it's in the bible, it must be true. Take that, Darwin!

Why shouldn't an atheist familiarize herself with and quote from the bible? The more Christians insist on its inerrancy, the more foolish they look.

Tweet #2:

pastelprincess1 Sheree

@pcsander why would you want to follow an anti bible girl?

20 Dec

in reply to ↑

@pcsanderPeter Sander

@pastelprincess1 can't a "non-believer" still be a "Bible geek?"

20 Dec via Twitter for Android Favorite Retweet Reply

I mean no offense here to @pastelprincess1 (unlike the offense that I do intend towards @MissRaissa above). It's just that this tweet stands as a good example of an attitude that I observe often enough among atheists: the anti-bible attitude.

I think this attitude stems from outrage at the the things that happen in the bible. For instance, God floods the world, killing all but Noah's family and the selected animals inside the ark.* That means that God murdered babies and children and elderly and infirmed along with all the evil people on the planet. Even if they were evil, does that justify killing them? But, as we already know, it's just a story. Our anger should not be directed at the bible, but at the people who think that this is literal truth. Not just believe it's literal truth, but think it exemplifies God's justice and love.

Nobody reads Vergil's Aeneid and cries out in outrage at all the Trojans who died at the hands of the Greeks. It's just a story, but it's a story that nobody is insisting is historical fact. Nobody is trying to get it taught as science in public schools or is trying to have Zeus's name printed on U.S. currency.

So, anger at the bible is misplaced. The bible is a hodge-podge anthology of myth, and law and literature written over the course of hundreds of years from a variety of sources who held different beliefs about God and morality. We do not have a single original text in its entirety of any of the books of the bible. It didn't descend from heaven complete in its current form, but has been rewritten, edited, argued over, edited some more, and it wasn't compiled into a canon of scripture until the Synod of Hippo in 393CE. And even since then it has gone through many changes.

Why shouldn't an atheist familiarize herself with and quote from the bible? The more Christians insist on its inerrancy, the more foolish they look.

*As a side note, I'd like to point out that Noah's ark was supposedly a wooden ship 150 meters in length. Modern engineers are unable to build wooden ships 2/3 of this size without metal reinforcement, and even then they are leaky.

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Even if God Did Exist....

"What would it take to make you believe in God?" a friend asked.

"Evidence," I said.

But indeed it's difficult to say what evidence would qualify as genuine proof. More importantly, if such evidence existed, does that obligate us to follow that God?

Let's say that, to prove God's existence to me, one of the faithful prayed over an amputee and, without any plausible scientific explanation, the amputee's lost limb grew back before my very eyes. Should my knee bend and tongue now confess that Jesus Christ is lord? If anything, proof of God's existence leaves us with as many unanswered questions as we had before.

Like why does God allow evil?

Did you know that Haiti is still not rebuilt? It's been almost a year and the earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people and left over a million homeless has all but vanished from mainstream news. But Haiti is not rebuilt, and Haitians are still in desperate need of even the most basic supplies, like clean water.

The death of so many innocent people should bring the most stolid and stoic among us to tears. It should have us questioning God's goodness. Yet televangelist Pat Robertson had claimed that the Haitian earthquake was the consequence of the Haitian people's pact with the devil. Another Christian told me that the Haitians who died were not innocent because it is a country given to voodoo and idolatry.

So, the Haitians had it coming for their infidelity? Is this the work of a loving God? Kowtowing to the vain and arbitrary whims of a petty tyrant is not my idea of morality, even if such a God had the power to punish me eternally for my apostacy. Or perhaps God is benevolent, but he simply does not have the power to intervene in human affairs. In either case, atheism is justified. The loving God would not allow harm to befall us if he can prevent it, which apparently he can't, and the vengeful God does not deserve the groveling he demands of us.

So, by all means, show me the proof that God exists. What does that prove?

The Intellectual Attribution Bias doesn't apply to you if you can define it *

A friend of mine, in his Facebook status (yes, I get too much of my material from FB), asked his friends to opine whether or not there is a standard by which God can be judged good or evil. One of the replies he received was from a Christian friend who wrote:

I feel we are turning a corner. We are transitioning from ideas to your personal experiences and story. I will address ideas here, since my other reads may find them interesting. But for discussing your personal experiences and story, I want to turn to a private forum, where I, too, will share my personal experiences and story. Ideas have consequences - "Who sets values for God? Can humans judge God or apply logic to God?" ---> In short: no one, and, no. The question implies that since created being have Higher Reference for values, so too should an Uncreated Being. In logic, this is the fallacy of comparing non-comparable categories. The same principle is why the Christian Tradition has always said that God, in God's Essence, is utterly unknowable by humans, and thus it is absurd to subject God to created logical categories. "Adding God [to] the question of morals and ethics (or origins for that matter) just places the question one step further...we are still up against nihilism." ---> Analogical fallacy of comparing non-comparable categories. The shifting of the ground to God makes all the difference, because it is a shift from that which is created to that which is Uncreated. [This] eliminates nihilism entirely. The meaning of that which is created is found in its Uncreated Creator. To where the meaning of that which is Uncreated comes from is absurd, because that which is Uncreated does not "come from" anything. (I want to talk about the experiences you mention in a private venue.) [sic]

First of all, I love the Christian's implied (and arrogant) assumption that, since my friend was questioning God, he must be going through some personal problems. How Christian of him to offer to discuss those personal experiences in private. There is also an implied assumption that the Christian's beliefs were perfectly in line with reason (hence all the talk of logic and fallacies). This is a fine example of what is called the intellectual attribution bias: my beliefs are well-reasoned and intelligent, and your beliefs are based on rank emotions.

Secondly, the name of the fallacy that our Christian friend was groping for is the Fallacy of Faulty Comparisons, and it doesn't apply here. It doesn't apply because he has arbitrarily defined God as uncreated for the sake of his argument. The idea that God is uncreated remains a thing to be proved. One can't claim a faulty comparison based on an attribute that one imagines or hopes for; you have to know for certain that it's there. What if I were to say that it's a faulty comparison to judge God by human standards because God has a halo and humans don't. It makes about as much sense.

And, indeed, by the Christian's own admission, God is unknowable. What are some of the things we do not know about God? We don't know that God exists, we don't know if he's created or uncreated, we don't know if he has a halo or if he gives a fig about values in the first place. So, we can make comparisons to our hearts' content because it's all hypothetical anyway. Hey, here's a thought: maybe certain humans created the idea of God so that they could put their "created" values into the mouth of a supreme authority figure. Then, when other people said, "I don't think your values are fair or just" they could answer "They aren't our values, they're God's values, and you can't compare God's values with your own, that's a logical fallacy!"

But, of course, that's just speculation on my part.

Another false assumption the Christian makes is that, if something leads to nihilism, it must be false. If, as I speculate, we invented God to give authoritative weight to our own created values, then simply calling those values "uncreated" wouldn't make them any less nihilistic. Of course, the creation of human values emphatically does not lead to nihilism. But even if it did, it would not prove that the values of an allegedly uncreated God are any better, or that they don't also lead to nihilism, or that they even exist in the first place.

Finally, even if one believes that an uncreated God imparts the standard of values by which we should live, it is a logical absurdity to say that we don't judge that standard. Either we follow these allegedly uncreated values or we do not. Which is to say, either we regard them as worthy of observance or we do not. Which is to say, either we judge them as a good thing or a bad thing. Either way we have passed judgment. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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*So titled because clearly my beliefs are based on reason :)

A Leap of Faith

For some reason I don't completely understand, a non-theist friend of mine likes to listens to Moody Radio (a conservative Christian broadcast sponsored by Moody Bible Institute). I think he likes it because what he hears on Moody Radio angers him, and I guess he likes to be angry. I know that, when he tells me what he hears on Moody, it angers me.

Today he told me that they said that atheism is just another religion. And yes, I got angry. I got angry even though I've heard this accusation a time and again from theists. The fundies just can't accept that an epistemology can be anything but faith-based, and nothing I or anyone else can say will make them budge on that.

And, indeed, why should they budge? Learning to think critically is hard work. Trying to understand science takes effort. Why put all that time and effort into something when you can simply take a leap of faith?

A leap of faith requires no discipline, it requires no work, and it'll never require you to admit when you are wrong.