Dishonest Apologetics

[benedictus2]

I disagree. You seem to be a fan of the fine-tuning argument. I laid out some of the problems I see with that argument in an earlier post. I have so many other problems with the fine-tuning argument, but I don’t really feel like writing a four part post on all the other problems.

I have checked your reply post to twb and have posted a reply above.

 

[benedictus2]

I just wanted to clarify. I am not saying I prefer that there is no God. If there was a way of setting up heaven so that there would be eternal happiness, I would definitely prefer that there be a God than no God. I have no particular aversion to the idea of a God.

I think before we get to the Catholic/Christian conception of a God we need establish the proof of God creator before we can move to the God who reveals Himself in the Bible. The God who is Love.

The Catholic God cannot be proved from either Teleological, Philosophical or Metaphysical arguments. All that is possible with these proofs is a Creator God. Creator is just one attribute of God as Christians know Him.

It’s just that I don’t think there’s a significant chance that the Catholic conception of God is correct.

You think. But you do not know that for a fact. You have to know what the Catholic’s believe before you can know whether their conception is correct. At this point I think your understanding of what we truly believe would be closer to nil so it is understandable that you “think” that way.

I guess one way of thinking of it would be that I might like to have a genie that will grant me three wishes, but since the possibility of that seems so remote, it’s not something I actively desire.

We do not believe in a God who is a genie who grants wishes. It is so much more profound than that. Our belief is hard enough to explain to some who have a modicum of faith let alone to one who has no faith.

We take the Bible as a given and until you can take the Bible as a given then you will never understand what we truly believe.

But as I have said before it is a gift. Same gift that was given to Alphonse Ratisbonne who within a span of 12 minutes changed from an atheist to a believer. I believe and have always believed and yet I only learned about the Uncaused cause when I got to college.

The most that we could hope to prove at this stage in the discussion is that there is an Uncaused Cause, an Intelligient Designer which we call God.

 

[benedictus2]

I don’t know how you define “first cause” such that this would follow. By this logic if God existed and would never create anything, he would be the first cause. Similarly, the universe itself never caused anything.

But in the observable universe causality is evident.
If God or say the Uncaused cause never created anything we would not be here engaging in a discussion. We know for sure that we are not the un-caused cause so we know that we as part of the universe was caused into being. The only question with causality is whether the cause is a caused-cause or an uncaused-cause. And as I have already said earlier, an infinite number of caused-causes leads to zero so therefore to no universe, therefore no you or me so us not having this discussion

I agree with you that all theories of what happened before Planck time are speculative (including the theory that there was no natural world at all 14 million years ago). Imagine we knew nothing about cosmology or evolution. We merely had recorded history going back X number of years. It is pure speculation to try to definitively say what happened before this point, but it would be ridiculous to see this as proof that God must have created us at this point.

Regardless, if the only knowable time is is x years, it would still be finite. The beginning of when is immaterial. There still is a beginning.

 

[llblarosa]

I have read and listened to a decent bit from Kreeft. I know there are a lot more than two. I have found problems with all 20 of Kreeft’s arguments. People wanted to hear my disagreements, so I suggested that they pick the one or two arguments of his that they thought were best. I think I’ve given my objections to three of his arguments now.

I believe Kreeft himself talks of the objections to these arguments, be he also talks of the objections to the objections, as well as objections to arguments for atheism. Again, it neither completely proves nor disproves. At best, we will only possess what each of considers to be reasonable certainty.

Pascal’s wager does not traditionally include something about belief making you happier. I would rather believe the truth then a happy lie, but I also do not find atheism more depressing that theism. Furthermore, I could not force myself to believe something I believe to be false even if I wanted to.

This is perhaps so, but I believe it a corrollary idea. The very Christian virtue of self-sacrifice seems to me the most compelling. The saints lives typify this, I believe. Kreeft talks of the saints being the happiest of all, though their lives were often arduous. (I like to look at the lives of the saints, because there are so many of them. I certainly cannot point to groups of atheists en masse that I admire in this way. Can you point to them?)

I agree. We all wager that every other religion on earth is false. Since I do not think the evidence for Christianity is that much different, I don’t see why I should wager on Christianity. By the way, I have so many other problems with Pascal’s wager that I have not included here.

What makes your life better as an atheist? If you are banking on atheism as Truth, how does that serve you well in life. Does it make you a more moral person? Does it make your more self-sacrificial? Does it make you kinder? Because of your atheism, are you aiming to be better in these areas, or are they irrelevant?

Respecfully,

Lisa

 

[benedictus2]

This is the point I was making.

Sorry, I misread your post. I thought you wrote “So it was nothing” instead of “So it was not nothing that is why I wrote causa sui is a contradiction.

You keep trying to make a rhetorical case for the argument, but without presenting substantive reasons why my position is invalid.

I really don’t care to get into a long rhetorical debate over this, but if you have any good evidence for your position, I’d appreciate it if you could present it in your next post. I’m sorry, I’m sure this probably seems rude; I just don’t like arguments that go nowhere. I hope you’ll understand

But my replies were not rhetorical. I think I have addressed the points you raised directly.

In your post relating to this post, you said” First of all, I’m not sure we can assume that everything has a cause when you consider quantum physics. However, setting that aside, we would only know that everything has a proximate cause. If there has always been something, then a lack of a first cause does not prevent there from being something."

And I said that if there has always been something, then that something is the first cause. So I don’t know how you can regard that as rhetorical considering that what we are discussing is causality.

I think you have to differentiate this side of the discussion to that of scientific proofs because the Uncaused-cause is a philosophical proof and though there may be some points of convergence, they are separate proofs.

And then you said “. There could simply be a universe that has constantly been expanding and contracting for eternity. So it was not “nothing before it casued itself into being”. It was always something; it merely changed states. “.

And I said that it could not have been in eternity because we know that the universe is finite. It has a beginning and is expanding.

Since the universe changing state is not a verifiable fact then I don’t think we can factor that into the discussion. That again is in the realm of speculation.

Furthermore, we know that causality exists. As you said before "everything has a proximate cause." But if the only cause is the proximate cause, for us to be here you will have to posit an infinite number of caused-causes. And as I have already stated before, an infinite number of caused-causes will lead to zero.

So I am not sure why you think that is all rhetoric. I would appreciate it if you can explain why you think this is so.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

But then again you are moving out of the knowable. Isn’t it that this discussion is about the knowable? We can’t postulate other universes because that is speculation. I thought this proofs (at least in the scientific realm) are about what is quantifiable and observable.

Well pretty much nothing is knowable with 100% certainty epistemologically speaking. Even some basic laws of physics were based on a series of experiments which were themselves based on assumptions. Physics is about coming up with theories and discarding those that don’t work once more data comes in. By the way, I am not ‘postulat[ing] other universes’. What I am saying is that our universe may have been expanding and contracting eternally. I don’t know what happened before Planck time, and I don’t claim to. You are making a really odd claim when you say that proofs are about what is observable. We cannot observe if the universe began, and yet you assume this. We cannot know what happened before Planck time and it is a little silly to infer from this that God must have done it. Before the theory of evolution, we had no idea how humans could possibly have come about if not from God. This did not prove that God exists, merely that our knowledge was limited. We are actually in a much better situation with the universe. We have a number of theories that show how things could be the way they are without God; we just don’t have enough data to determine which of these explanations is correct or whether the correct explanation is still undiscovered.

But since we are dealing with science, could be’s are inadmissible as evidence.

Here is a quote from Paul Davies as a follow up to TWB’S post:
“ If the initial state were chosen at random it seems exceedingly probable that the Big Bang would have caused out blackholes rather than dispersed gasses. The present arrangement of matter and energy with matter spread thinly at relatively low density in the form of stars and gas clouds would apparently only result from a very special choice of initial conditions. Roger Penrose has computed the odds again the observed universe appearing by accident, given that a blackhole cosmos is so much more likely on a priori ground, he estimate the figure of 10 to the 10 to 30 to 1”
So here he is saying that the odds in favour of the universe being a blackhole is an exponent of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillioin, trillion. If the size of the zeroes were 1 micrometre in diameter, the universe would not be able to hold this number.

I don’t think you understand what I was getting at. My point was that all those estimations of probabilities are based on guesses about the likelihood of the universe having certain characteristics. Maybe the probability that a certain constant would be about like it is in our universe is 1/1,000,000,000, or maybe it’s 1/10, or maybe even 1/1. The probability of a constant being a certain way could be incredibly high or incredibly low. We just don’t know. But since we are dealing with science, could be’s are inadmissible as evidence, so there is no evidence that our universe is especially unlikely.

The direction of discoveries it seems is towards intelligient design rather than chance.

I disagree. What discoveries do you think provide evidence of intelligent design?

 

[anEvilAtheist]

And as I have already said earlier, an infinite number of caused-causes leads to zero so therefore to no universe,

You have said this before. But you have not given any good reasons why it is true. You keep claiming that an infinite universe is impossible, but do not give evidence that it is.

Regardless, if the only knowable time is is x years, it would still be finite. The beginning of when is immaterial. There still is a beginning.

Right, but just because we only know what happened in the last X years doesn’t provide evidence that the number of years has been finite.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

What makes your life better as an atheist? If you are banking on atheism as Truth, how does that serve you well in life. Does it make you a more moral person? Does it make your more self-sacrificial? Does it make you kinder? Because of your atheism, are you aiming to be better in these areas, or are they irrelevant?

Respecfully,

Lisa

Atheism is not a self-help book. I am not an atheist to make my life better; I am an atheist because I think there is no God. I think my disbelief in God does make me kinder though. I realize that if I hurt someone, I really hurt them. I cannot merely make it right by apologizing to God. I realize that we are all really in the same boat, going through life as best as we can and based on what we know. I think people are not as different as they seem and I bear no hatred towards anyone. But even if atheism was worse, I think it is better to embrace the truth. Have you seen ‘The Truman Show’? No matter how happy I was in that dome, I would want to get out and embrace life for what it truly is.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

And I said that if there has always been something, then that something is the first cause. So I don’t know how you can regard that as rhetorical considering that what we are discussing is causality.

Because you do not explain what you mean by first cause and why something that has eternally existed must be the first cause. If you want to make a philosophical argument, you have to do a very good job of defining your terms or we will get nowhere.

And I said that it could not have been in eternity because we know that the universe is finite. It has a beginning and is expanding.

No, we do not know that the universe (i.e. the natural world) had a beginning. There are a lot of scientists who would disagree with you, and if you want me to accept this claim, you will need to provide some pretty good evidence. Otherwise this is no better than saying, on an isolated island, that because our history books only go back 200 years, God must have created us at that point.

So I am not sure why you think that is all rhetoric. I would appreciate it if you can explain why you think this is so.

I say it is merely rhetoric because you are trying to make a philosophical argument without supporting your claims with more than mere assertions.

 

[jpusateri]

Look, I understand why this logic makes sense to you, but I think it is deeply flawed. For example, for a long time we assumed that Newtonian physics was correct. If we then found some data that was inconsistent with Newtonian physics, what should we have done? We could have said that it is more reasonable to assume that Newtonian physics is correct and this must have been a sign of divine intervention. However, it makes a lot more sense to say that there may be some other physical law at play but we don’t yet know enough or have enough data to say for sure exactly what that law is. Although Newtonian physics gave near perfect answers in most circumstances, Einstein’s general relativity later showed that there were situations in which it was unreliable. So I definitely don’t think that imperfect current knowledge is a good reason to believe in God.

Right, so the approach you describe is to believe in an unseen, unknown, omni-answering scientific worldview that will provide you the deus-ex-machina answers if we just search hard enough and wait for them. Sounds quasi-religious.

Now I say this tongue-in-cheek, knowing full well that’s not how you’d think about this. But non-spiritual, physical-world-is-all-there-is types do indeed look like fanatics. Not for, but against spiritual realities. I think it’s ironic.

The truth is someplace in the middle. IMHO

 

[Cinette]

I researched it a little bit and I couldn’t find any evidence that an atheist had scrutinized his stigmata and determined that there was no natural explanation. However, even if the diagnosis was correct, spontaneous remissions are not all that rare. There is a lot we still don’t know about the human body, and we should not assume that all medical mysteries are miracles.
No, you misunderstand. When I spoke of a team of Doctors - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Atheist - I was referring to Lourdes. The team changes over the years of course because Lourdes has been going on for 150 years. I wanted to illustrate to you how very careful the Church is in researching these matters. I also mentioned Medjugorje which has been taking place for many years and the Church has not endorsed it. You can say that the Church is stubborn. So when it comes to Padre Pio you can be sure that the Church has done its homework. Don’t forget the Church “sent him to Coventry” for a number of years and he accepted this graciously.

Say Honest Atheist, have you done your homework on Jesus? Have you researched? There were people who didn’t believe in Him and they even put Him to death after much torture.:yup:
I researched him a little bit more and am pretty unimpressed. The real evidence seems to be pretty thin. Most of the claims about him are unsubstantiated and there were definitely a lot of people during his lifetime who thought he was fraudulent. So it seems like either a lot of the other people in the church were acting dishonestly, or he was.Wherever you find human beings you find controversy, dishonesty and they will disappoint. But you must cast your gaze at those who are honest, good and self-giving and loving.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

Right, so the approach you describe is to believe in an unseen, unknown, omni-answering scientific worldview that will provide you the deus-ex-machina answers if we just search hard enough and wait for them. Sounds quasi-religious.

At least we know science exists. And I’m actually pretty sure that science will never have all the answers. I apologize if my response made it seem like I did. There may be some things, such as what our universe was like 14 billion years ago, where we may never have enough information to know what happened.

Now I say this tongue-in-cheek, knowing full well that’s not how you’d think about this. But non-spiritual, physical-world-is-all-there-is types do indeed look like fanatics. Not for, but against spiritual realities. I think it’s ironic.

I actually don’t completely discount the possibility that there is something outside the known physical world. I just don’t there is evidence that there is anything, and certainly not nearly enough evidence to say that there is a God like that of the Bible. Even if there is something spiritual, I think the chances that the Christian God exists are exceptionally low.

The truth is someplace in the middle. IMHO

I agree. I think people should accept that they just don’t know.

 

[Cinette]

I think before we get to the Catholic/Christian conception of a God we need establish the proof of God creator before we can move to the God who reveals Himself in the Bible. The God who is Love.

The Catholic God cannot be proved from either Teleological, Philosophical or Metaphysical arguments. All that is possible with these proofs is a Creator God. Creator is just one attribute of God as Christians know Him.

You think. But you do not know that for a fact. You have to know what the Catholic’s believe before you can know whether their conception is correct. At this point I think your understanding of what we truly believe would be closer to nil so it is understandable that you “think” that way.

We do not believe in a God who is a genie who grants wishes. It is so much more profound than that. Our belief is hard enough to explain to some who have a modicum of faith let alone to one who has no faith.

We take the Bible as a given and until you can take the Bible as a given then you will never understand what we truly believe.

But as I have said before it is a gift. Same gift that was given to Alphonse Ratisbonne who within a span of 12 minutes changed from an atheist to a believer. I believe and have always believed and yet I only learned about the Uncaused cause when I got to college.

The most that we could hope to prove at this stage in the discussion is that there is an Uncaused Cause, an Intelligient Designer which we call God.

Hey Benedictus! I notice you mention Alphonse Ratisbonne. I read his conversion story in a book called Honey from the Rock by another Jewish convert called something Schoeman I think. What an amazing story! Yes he too was a cynical atheist and one day out of the blue he walked into a Church and BOOM! I must go and re-read the story. I know I was impressed. In fact I think there has got to be more on his life after that. Do you know of any book on his life that you can recommend? Did you read Honey from the Rock?

WOW!

You know, you can go on looking at science for proof of the existence of God but you need to look at God for proof of the existence of science! LOL!

Even Einstein acknowledged the existence of God in the end.

Faith is belief without understanding.

Faith is a verb.

God is a verb.

Beijinhos
Cinette

 

[anEvilAtheist]

No, you misunderstand. When I spoke of a team of Doctors - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Atheist - I was referring to Lourdes. The team changes over the years of course because Lourdes has been going on for 150 years. I wanted to illustrate to you how very careful the Church is in researching these matters. I also mentioned Medjugorje which has been taking place for many years and the Church has not endorsed it. You can say that the Church is stubborn. So when it comes to Padre Pio you can be sure that the Church has done its homework. Don’t forget the Church “sent him to Coventry” for a number of years and he accepted this graciously.

Yeah, I didn’t realize you were talking about Lourdes. The problem I have with Lourdes is that we have no way of knowing if the number of unexplainable remissions is higher than the number of such remissions for people who don’t go to Lourdes. According to Father Liam Griffin of the Sanctuaries of Lourdes, there have been 66 declared miracles over about the past 150 years at Lourdes. However, he also says that they receive 80,000 sick visitors every year. Even if that number used to be somewhat lower, we’re still talking about many millions of total visitors. So somewhere around 1 in 100,000 had a recovery that the Church was confident could not be explained naturally (not just cases where there wasn’t enough information). Considering that spontaneous remissions do happen, even without attending Lourdes, I’d need to see that the odds of recovering of those who went to Lourdes was much higher than for those who didn’t. Right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a significant difference.

And I know the Church is careful about ruling something a miracle, but I would expect that regardless of whether God and miracles exist. If there is no God, the Church would still want to avoid declaring something a miracle and having it later disproven because that would make them look bad. So I don’t think the fact that there’s an elaborate process for declaring something is a miracle is proof that it is a miracle.

Say Honest Atheist, have you done your homework on Jesus? Have you researched? There were people who didn’t believe in Him and they even put Him to death after much torture.

I’ve definitely done some research on him. But given the countless books that have been written about him, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface. I have read some articles and listened to some top Christian apologists on the evidence for the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. So even if I haven’t yet read shelves full of books on him, I think I have a pretty good idea of what people think is the best evidence that he was divine.

Wherever you find human beings you find controversy, dishonesty and they will disappoint. But you must cast your gaze at those who are honest, good and self-giving and loving.

But it’s really hard to know who is honest and who isn’t in the modern world, let alone decades ago. There were a lot of seemingly good people who thought Padre Pio was a fraud. Even Catholic sources acknowledge that a lot of church leaders at the time thought he was a fraud: nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word1228.htm .

 

[benedictus2]

Well pretty much nothing is knowable with 100% certainty epistemologically speaking. Even some basic laws of physics were based on a series of experiments which were themselves based on assumptions. Physics is about coming up with theories and discarding those that don’t work once more data comes in. By the way, I am not ‘postulat[ing] other universes’. What I am saying is that our universe may have been expanding and contracting eternally.

May have been. But is there data to support this? Once we start going into science we can’t accept may have beens. What we do know at this stage is there is a universe and that we know to a certain degree is that there is a universe that started with the Big Bang. How did the Big Bang comes about?

I don’t know what happened before Planck time, and I don’t claim to. You are making a really odd claim when you say that proofs are about what is observable. We cannot observe if the universe began, and yet you assume this.

What I mean when I said proofs are about what is observable I am referring to the observable universe (ours). We cannot observe if the universe began but base on current scientific evidence it did have a beginning.

We cannot know what happened before Planck time and it is a little silly to infer from this that God must have done it.

All I am saying is based on available scientific data the universe began so therefore finite. Based on available scientific data the universe is not eternal.

If you start accepting speculations then it is equally possible that God may have caused that universe into existence but you seem adamant to rule that out.

Before the theory of evolution, we had no idea how humans could possibly have come about if not from God. This did not prove that God exists, merely that our knowledge was limited. We are actually in a much better situation with the universe. We have a number of theories that show how things could be the way they are without God; we just don’t have enough data to determine which of these explanations is correct or whether the correct explanation is still undiscovered.

While it is true that we cannot with 100% certainty infer from scientific proof that God caused the universe into existence, you can conclude this from philosophical proofs.

I think the problem is we have been entangling philosphical and scientific proofs.

I don’t think you understand what I was getting at. My point was that all those estimations of probabilities are based on guesses about the likelihood of the universe having certain characteristics. Maybe the probability that a certain constant would be about like it is in our universe is 1/1,000,000,000, or maybe it’s 1/10, or maybe even 1/1. The probability of a constant being a certain way could be incredibly high or incredibly low. We just don’t know. But since we are dealing with science, could be’s are inadmissible as evidence, so there is no evidence that our universe is especially unlikely

Well, Fred Hoyle does not support this idea…I am not scientifically minded but I would think that Fred Hoyle’s work is merely a series of guesses.

I disagree. What discoveries do you think provide evidence of intelligent design?

I thought I had just stated them.

 

[benedictus2]

You have said this before. But you have not given any good reasons why it is true. You keep claiming that an infinite universe is impossible, but do not give evidence that it is.

I did not say that an infinite universe is impossilble. What I said was an infinite number of caused-causes is impossible. If every caused-cause is dependent on another caused-cause then the end of the equation is zero. In a series say of 1-3, 2 being the cause of 1, 3 being the cause of two and so forth then you will end up with nothing because say the remotest cause will still need a further remoter cause and so forth.
Sorry, I did not explain this before because I thougt you were familiar with this.

Right, but just because we only know what happened in the last X years doesn’t provide evidence that the number of years has been finite.

But the only evidence we have is the finite number of years.

All I am saying here is that we tend to mix speculation and scientific fact.

Just because the only beings we know are humans, there is a possiblity that there are fairies and hobgoblins in my garden. Based on your line of reasoning, just becuase we cannot show scientific proof that there is God does not mean there is no God.
If you are going to accept possiblities, then God as a possibility is equally acceptable. Yet you do not want to consider that possibility.

 

[benedictus2]

Because you do not explain what you mean by first cause and why something that has eternally existed must be the first cause. If you want to make a philosophical argument, you have to do a very good job of defining your terms or we will get nowhere.

I don’t think I used the term first cause. I think the term I used is Uncaused-cause. An uncaused-cause would be a being that does not depend on anything for it’s existence. A few posts back I think I have defined this when I wrote Pure Existence, Pure being. But you decided that this pure being is the universe. Which I reasoned cannot be since the universe is finite and the universe does not cause anything into being.

No, we do not know that the universe (i.e. the natural world) had a beginning.

I think this is the common concensus among scientists. This is the accepted belief. That the universe started with the Big Bang.

There are a lot of scientists who would disagree with you, and if you want me to accept this claim, you will need to provide some pretty good evidence. Otherwise this is no better than saying, on an isolated island, that because our history books only go back 200 years, God must have created us at that point.

You may disagree with that and agree with dissenting scientists but the fact remains that at this stage, the only thing that has been accepted is that the universe had a beginning.

I say it is merely rhetoric because you are trying to make a philosophical argument without supporting your claims with more than mere assertions.

They were not mere assertions. My error was in thinking that you would have grasped what I meant regarding the impossibility of an infinite number of caused-causes.

 

[benedictus2]

I actually don’t completely discount the possibility that there is something outside the known physical world. I just don’t there is evidence that there is anything, and certainly not nearly enough evidence to say that there is a God like that of the Bible.

If you do not discount the possibility that there is something outside the known physical world, why would you discount the possibility that that something that is outside the known physical world is the God of the Bible?

Even if there is something spiritual, I think the chances that the Christian God exists are exceptionally low.

Why?

 

[benedictus2]

Atheism is not a self-help book. I am not an atheist to make my life better; I am an atheist because I think there is no God. I think my disbelief in God does make me kinder though. I realize that if I hurt someone, I really hurt them. I cannot merely make it right by apologizing to God. I realize that we are all really in the same boat, going through life as best as we can and based on what we know. I think people are not as different as they seem and I bear no hatred towards anyone. But even if atheism was worse, I think it is better to embrace the truth. Have you seen ‘The Truman Show’? No matter how happy I was in that dome, I would want to get out and embrace life for what it truly is.

But how do you know that what you embrace is indeed the truth?

 

[anEvilAtheist]

But how do you know that what you embrace is indeed the truth?

I don’t ‘know’ that what I embrace is the truth. It’s merely where the evidence has led me.