There is no God

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

I have read these chapters. Chapter 15 utterly ignores gene duplication - the phenomenon by which a certain stretch of DNA is duplicated entirely, allowing for the functionality of the original and mutations on the new copy. It also assumes that early biology is like modern biology, with its talk of ATP synthesis.

Chapter 9 spends a good deal of time attacking theories that it also seems to admit are no longer held by many scientists. Why it should do this is beyond me - particularly when it ignores some of the theories that are held by modern biologists. Some of these can be found here:

talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

i’m not sure what you’re talking about here: you can’t get to “gene duplication” without first having a simpler self-replicating molecule. and if you can’t actually get to the first basic self-replicating structure, then how do considerations of nucleic acid duplication help matters?

and i’ve read that page you posted. i always check out the links to talk origins. it’s just not very good stuff, i’m afraid: not only is the biology cursory, but the reasoning is just plain poor.

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

Lastly, the argument from abiogenesis - or, for that matter, any sort of “unexplainable” phenomenon - is flawed. Let’s sketch the argument:

1- Phenomenon X happened
2- Our current scientific theories can’t explain X
3- Therefore God made X happen

but this isn’t the argument. at all. it’s more like this:

1. there is X.
2. for X to have occurred requires Y
3. based on everything we currently know, Y is astronomically unlikely.
4. thus Y likely did not occur, and belief in the occurrence of Y is proportionately unreasonable (or, for more of a bayesian spin, belief in Y ought to be proportionately weak).

and, for the record, i’m not making any “argument from abiogenesis” - i just think that random life from non-life is horrendously improbable and thus that belief in it ought to be resisted. and that’s all. i don’t know how it happened, and, quite frankly, i don’t care.

 

[EnterTheBowser]

john doran:

this isn’t quite right: premise 1 - the causal principle - is a proposition that is almost self-evidently true; it can be “called into question”, as you say, only at the ultimate expense of reasonableness. i mean, there’s nothing that can’t be questioned in the way you’re suggesting: the principle of non-contradiction, identity, excluded middle, modus tollens, modus ponens, the existence of the real world, and so on. but that doesn’t make belief in any of these things any less warranted, or disbelief in them any more reasonable.

I think it’s a mistake to compare logical rules to metaphysical principles. We can certainly doubt metaphysical principles - why exactly can’t I imagine a world where ping-pong balls pop into existence for no particular reason? On the other hand, I cannot even imagine a square circle.

but at any rate, it’s not clear to me how there could be anything like “evidence” for or against the causal principle, since it’s one of the basic motivating assumptions for the whole scientific enterprise: if science isn’t the systematic attempt to discover the causal structure of the world, what is it? if you don’t assume that the marks in a cloud chamber are caused by the subatomic particles you hypothesized would leave them, then what’s left? if you don’t assume that your measuring devices are caused to react by the phenomena you’re studying, how far can you get? if the causal principle isn’t true, then the scientific method is impossible to practice.

given the pivotal role played by the causal principle in our reasoning about the world, it’s just not reasonably rejected or limited; whatever “evidence” there might be for its falsehood is automatically better evidence for the falsehood of the theory calling it into question.

so. “calling into questtion” premise 1 is not equally as reasonable as accepting it.

Let’s imagine a world a lot like ours, except every once in a while, ping-pong balls pop into existence. There’s nothing that can be reasonably be called a cause. Now, how exactly would science fall apart due to these ping-pong balls? Why wouldn’t we be able to formulate things like Newton’s law of gravitation? And science could certainly study the effects of these ping-pong balls, and make measurements of the frequency of their appearance and their distribution and so forth. But their appearance is correlated with absolutely nothing.
And I’d like to note that this sort of phenomenon would probably be called evidence against premise 1.

 

[EnterTheBowser]

Gilbert Keith:

BROWSER

And more importantly… what in the world does it mean to say that something is supra-rational?

supra=beyond rational=reason

Not understandable by reason alone.

This means that God is not subject to the rules of logic He has created for us. It means the finite creation cannot fully grasp the Creator who is Infinite. It means our puny intellect cannot judge God as we judge the things of this earth.

Atheism denies all of the above. Atheism wants to discuss and juddge the existence of God only if God is assumed to be as rational as we are. But that is precisely by definition what God cannot be.

God relates to us not purely by intellect, but by instinct as well. God plants in us the desire to know Him, and to be restless untill until we find our rest in Him ( Augustine). The denial of this instinct causes us to suffer, because we are denying our own nature.

Religious art reflects this knowledge of God that is heartfelt, rather than headfelt. Some of the greatest art ever conceived is religious art, and I have come to learn that I will take a great religious hymn over a great secular song every time. Religious art (through the imagination) is in tune with something the head cannot by itself grasp. Try to write a great hymn to Newton or Einstein. Never been done and never will be done. Yawn. The heart cannot know or love Newton and Einstein the way it knows and loves and yearns for God.

When I look at modern art emptied of God, of the sacred, I am struck by how bland it truly is. Put anything secular by Picasso beside anything sacred by Michaelangelo and the point is undeniable unless one’s intellect is in denial of the sacred altogether.

I had a few other questions, as well… would you care to address those?

PS: It’s Bowser, not Browser (you know, King of the Koopas, mortal enemy of Mario and Luigi, captor of Princes Toadstool, all that jazz?)

 

[EnterTheBowser]

john doran:

but we do know these things when it comes to carbon-based life, so the calculation of a reasonably accurate staistical model i simple: there are x possible molecules, and x possible combinations; moreover, conditions a, b, and c need to be present to facilitate those combinations, and a, b, and c are highly unlikely in and of themselves.

hey presto. you have the odds.

We might indeed have some idea of the chances of carbon-based life developing on this planet. But we really don’t know about the chances of any sort of life developing anywhere in the universe. And without those, the argument from abiogenesis doesn’t work so good, because we can’t assert that abiogenesis is utterly improbable.

but this isn’t the argument. at all. it’s more like this:

1. there is X.
2. for X to have occurred requires Y
3. based on everything we currently know, Y is astronomically unlikely.
4. thus Y likely did not occur, and belief in the occurrence of Y is proportionately unreasonable (or, for more of a bayesian spin, belief in Y ought to be proportionately weak).

and, for the record, i’m not making any “argument from abiogenesis” - i just think that random life from non-life is horrendously improbable and thus that belief in it ought to be resisted. and that’s all. i don’t know how it happened, and, quite frankly, i don’t care.

My point was that resorting to supernatural explanations every time science is faced with a new brute fact or brute law is not a good tactic, because it imagines new entities and does not eliminate the brute thing that seemed to require explanation. And again, you admitted that you don’t know the odds of abiogenesis occurring in the previous post… so I don’t see why you asserted that it is unlikely in this one.

 

[EnterTheBowser]

john doran:

i’m not sure what you’re talking about here: you can’t get to “gene duplication” without first having a simpler self-replicating molecule. and if you can’t actually get to the first basic self-replicating structure, then how do considerations of nucleic acid duplication help matters?

and i’ve read that page you posted. i always check out the links to talk origins. it’s just not very good stuff, i’m afraid: not only is the biology cursory, but the reasoning is just plain poor.

Chapter 15 assumes that early life’s chemstry is much like modern life’s chemistry, with it’s talk of ATP and other modern chemicals. And when it talks about natural selection limiting mutations, it does in fact ignore gene duplication.

And it would be nice if you could actually attack the things said in that link, as opposed to merely asserting that it hs bad science. I’ve tried to do the same.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

BOWSER

I had a few other questions, as well… would you care to address those?

Yes, if you can do them one at a time. That would be much easier for me. Thanks.

PS: It’s Bowser, not Browser (you know, King of the Koopas, mortal enemy of Mario and Luigi, captor of Princes Toadstool, all that jazz?)

Sorry.

 

[EnterTheBowser]

I guess my question then is: why should we believe in the Christian supra-rational deity, as opposed to (for example) the FSM supra-rational deity? I mean, since we shouldn’t expect any kind of rational argumentation in support of either, and rational arguments against their existence are foolish (they’re both supra-rational, after all), shouldn’t we believe in both?

 

[EnterTheBowser]

Would you assert that there are no rational reasons for believing in the existence of the Christian God, and furthermore that such reasons cannot exist as a matter of course?

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

I think it’s a mistake to compare logical rules to metaphysical principles. We can certainly doubt metaphysical principles - why exactly can’t I imagine a world where ping-pong balls pop into existence for no particular reason? On the other hand, I cannot even imagine a square circle.

as GEM anscombe points out, you certainly can form a pircture in your head of something popping into existence without a cause, and then give that picture the title “x coming into being without a cause”. but absolutely nothing concerning the possibility of such an event actually follows from that exercise.

EnterTheBowser:

Let’s imagine a world a lot like ours, except every once in a while, ping-pong balls pop into existence. There’s nothing that can be reasonably be called a cause. Now, how exactly would science fall apart due to these ping-pong balls? Why wouldn’t we be able to formulate things like Newton’s law of gravitation? And science could certainly study the effects of these ping-pong balls, and make measurements of the frequency of their appearance and their distribution and so forth. But their appearance is correlated with absolutely nothing.
And I’d like to note that this sort of phenomenon would probably be called evidence against premise 1.

not being aware of a cause isn’t evidence of there being no cause; vacuum fluctuations are unpredictable, but that doesn’t entail “uncaused”.

the causal principle is more certain than any quantum mechanical model, so rejecting the former for the latter just doesn’t make sense.

besides, there are quantum mechanical models according to which everything proceeds in a traditionally deterministic fashion; given that such theories exist, it is eminently more reasonable to accept one of them rather than reject causality.

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

We might indeed have some idea of the chances of carbon-based life developing on this planet. But we really don’t know about the chances of any sort of life developing anywhere in the universe. And without those, the argument from abiogenesis doesn’t work so good, because we can’t assert that abiogenesis is utterly improbable.

that is as may be, but we’re not talking about life somewhere else - we’re talking about the likelihood of life beginning here.

EnterTheBowser:

My point was that resorting to supernatural explanations every time science is faced with a new brute fact or brute law is not a good tactic

well, i mostly agree with this, which is what i was getting at when i pointed out that i was not, in fact, formulating an argument for god’s existence from the unlikelihood of abiogenesis.

EnterTheBowser:

…because it imagines new entities and does not eliminate the brute thing that seemed to require explanation.

you seem to have an overly simplistic concept of theoretical parsimony. also, the “brute thing” that requires explanation is the origin of the phenomena, which is addressed perfectly well by the supernatural-cause explanation.

 

[EnterTheBowser]

john doran:

as GEM anscombe points out, you certainly can form a pircture in your head of something popping into existence without a cause, and then give that picture the title “x coming into being without a cause”. but absolutely nothing concerning the possibility of such an event actually follows from that exercise.

Do you have some reasons that would show that things which begin to exist without cause are logically impossible?

not being aware of a cause isn’t evidence of there being no cause; vacuum fluctuations are unpredictable, but that doesn’t entail “uncaused”.

the causal principle is more certain than any quantum mechanical model, so rejecting the former for the latter just doesn’t make sense.

besides, there are quantum mechanical models according to which everything proceeds in a traditionally deterministic fashion; given that such theories exist, it is eminently more reasonable to accept one of them rather than reject causality.

I don’t believe I mentioned quantum mechanics; I merely asked you to imagine a universe in which these ping-pong balls pop into existence. Their so popping is not correlated with any other event. Since causality implies correlation, in such a universe we can infer that there is no thing which causes these ping pong balls to pop into existence. Or would you argue that there must be some cause of these ping pong balls, and that we just haven’t found it yet?

 

[EnterTheBowser]

john doran:

that is as may be, but we’re not talking about life somewhere else - we’re talking about the likelihood of life beginning here.

well, i mostly agree with this, which is what i was getting at when i pointed out that i was not, in fact, formulating an argument for god’s existence from the unlikelihood of abiogenesis.

What exactly are you arguing, then? I’m sorry if I’ve misintepreted your statements.

you seem to have an overly simplistic concept of theoretical parsimony. also, the “brute thing” that requires explanation is the origin of the phenomena, which is addressed perfectly well by the supernatural-cause explanation.

Enlighten me, then, on how parsimony works - I do love to learn. In any event, how does an appeal to the supernatural deal with these brute facts? Why is this supernatural thing that way and not some other way?

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

Chapter 15 assumes that early life’s chemstry is much like modern life’s chemistry, with it’s talk of ATP and other modern chemicals.

so what?

EnterTheBowser:

And when it talks about natural selection limiting mutations, it does in fact ignore gene duplication.

i don’t understand what you mean.

EnterTheBowser:

And it would be nice if you could actually attack the things said in that link, as opposed to merely asserting that it hs bad science. I’ve tried to do the same.

his discussion of the relationship of statistics to the epistemology of belief-formation is wrong; it’s a similar mistake to the one you made a couple of pages back when you suggested that incredibly unlikely odds are not evidence against a theory, since everything is always unlikely.

also, while none of his sources are available for actual review, the abstracts that come up often indicate that the papers deal either with only the most general theorizing (“maybe it went like this”, “perhaps this would have happened”), or with molecular models that were actually fabricated by the experimenters.

i am always distinctly unimpressed by people who argue for the certainty of a position using tonnes of citations that are either unavailable for analysis by the reader, or require fairly extensive familiarity with a complicated discipline (organic chenistry, biochemistry, molecular biology); i am even more unimpressed by people without the requisite expertise who then simply take what the writer says as gospel.

i remain at a skeptical distance from this stuff because i’ve seen enough poor reasoning and reading comprehension in my time, and have gone with enough frequency to the source materials and found them to be either only vaguely supportive or, even worse, flat-out unsupportive of the hyporthesis for which they are being used as evidence. and it’s worse when the writer has an ideological axe to grind.

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

What exactly are you arguing, then? I’m sorry if I’ve misintepreted your statements.

just that abiogenesis is astonomically unlikely, at least given our current state of scientific understanding. and that the enormous unlikelihood of it is a real theoretical difficulty for any biological model of which it is a part.

s’all.

EnterTheBowser:

Enlighten me, then, on how parsimony works - I do love to learn.

sorry if i sounded arrogant, or anything - i didn’t mean to…

it’s hard to provide a useful synopsis of the philosophy and epistemology of science - you could spend your life studying it.

as a gesture in that direction, though, you just need to keep in mind that there are all kinds of simplicity when it comes to modelling in science: there is conceptual simplicity (how many and how difficult are the concepts required by the theory), ontological simplicity (how many things are postulated by the theory), theoretical simplicity (how simple the theory is in and of itself - e.g. feynman’s mathematical formalism for QED was way less complicated than schwinger’s).

then you have to consider that these kinds of parsimony are themselves only some of the values that are used to arbitrate between scientific models. some others are: elegance, quantity of ad hoc revisions, verifiability, fit with other theory, explanatory power, predictive power, and so on. and then, of course, you need to be able usefully to weight the various values as they arise (is a more elegant theory that posits more stuff in the world to be preferred to a way more complicated theory that has fewer entities? what if one theory is supported by almost impenetrable mathematical formalism and another has more basic equations but actually explains less?).

anyway. it’s not just a matter of “theory A has less entities than theory B; therefore theory A must be correct”.

EnterTheBowser:

In any event, how does an appeal to the supernatural deal with these brute facts? Why is this supernatural thing that way and not some other way?

again: the brute fact is that the “brute facts” need a cause; the supernatural thing is the cause.

as for why it is the way it is - it’s that way because it’s necessarily that way, because it’s impossible that it have ben any other way.

 

[john_doran]

EnterTheBowser:

Do you have some reasons that would show that things which begin to exist without cause are logically impossible?

yes: the causal principle seems self-evident to me.

EnterTheBowser:

I don’t believe I mentioned quantum mechanics; I merely asked you to imagine a universe in which these ping-pong balls pop into existence. Their so popping is not correlated with any other event. Since causality implies correlation, in such a universe we can infer that there is no thing which causes these ping pong balls to pop into existence.

sure. but that’s just an image with a title - it doesn’t entail the possibility of the picture. it’s the pictorial analog of saying that, since i can write the sentence “sam drew a square circle”, it must be possible for sam to draw a square circle.

EnterTheBowser:

Or would you argue that there must be some cause of these ping pong balls, and that we just haven’t found it yet?

yes.

 

[Alois]

Gilbert Keith:

You still don’t get it.

I don’t have to show any such thing because I have already said that God is by the very nature of conceiving Him a supra-rational Being. If God’s logic is vastly superior to ours, which is what anyone would naturally claim, how could we show “a rational, logical God.” You are asking us to show that which we cannot grasp except by our natural instinct and imagination and through Revelation. It would be as if you were asking an ant to explain and prove the existence of the universe. The ant isn’t up to the job based on the limitations of insect logic.

So do you believe in the Tropocater? He is the creater of Gods, including yours. You can not disprove him for he is supralogical, and he is above all other Gods. According to your reasoning, you would be an absolute fool for not believing in Him, the King and Lord of all beings and Gods, and you will be damned to something infinitely worse than Hell if you don’t believe in him.

–

This post is proof that you are not reading anything I type. For one, nothing is “above logic”, there are only things outside of logic, otherwise known as illogical things. Supralogic is a made up word and concept on your part. Secondly, I am not asking for the reasoning and logic of how a God works. I am asking for logical proof that there is a rational reason for believing in a God. You should, by all means, be able to show me this reason if there were a God.

These are your words, not mine.

You have to follow what Christ taught to be a Christian. Yes.

Which is why saying “You have to believe in a God to believe in God.” is an invalid argument.

 

[Alois]

The burden of proof is equally on you to prove the claim that God does not exist. You can’t do it.

Wow, you really don’t know anything about this, do you? If someone makes a claim, it is up to them to provide evidence for it. The burden of proof is not on the skeptic to show a reason for not believing it when there is no evidence for it.

Not only have I spoken to atheists, I have been one … and for a long time.

Doubtful. You show such ignorance towards the subject of atheism that it outweighs your own assertions that you were one.

Alois, I’m sorry to say that your arguments have less and less weight as you become angrier and angrier. I can only assume that you haven’t got reasonable answers, so you have turned to language that you think will hurt the other side. I am familiar with this as a typical atheist tactic.

Refute my arguments and back up your own then. You sure haven’t done a good job thus far…

 

[Alois]

Gilbert Keith:

But you can’t possibly know all that exists. And therefore God may exist. So how can the existence of God be illogical the way a circular triangle may be illogical? A circular triangle cannot be imagined. God can be imagined through our yearning for Him.

God can not be imagined at all. You’ve said so yourself when you claim he is “supralogical”. We can not imagine a being that is sentient, wields all power in the universe (not contains, more on this later with hurst), is all knowing, and is all-loving. We can imagine aspects placed into an example in finiteness, but not the whole picture. Much like we can imagine a square and a circle, but not both put together.

You don’t want to confront God. There are many reasons atheists do not want to confront God. The straw man of your own making is that you attack God as an irrational or illogical concept. But that is simply because you don’t want a relationship with God.

This is ridiculous. If he isn’t illogical or unreasonable to believe in, then show me that he isn’t. Stop making claims you can’t support.

I know a man who was angry that his father did not live up to his expectations of him. He went so far as to move to another country to avoid having to confront him. This reaction reminds me of my own brand of atheism. I only saw that God was logical when I ceased to be disappointed in him, angry with him for my own suffering.

Suffering? Angry? How can I be disappointed in something that doesn’t exist? Stop with the “You have to believe in God to believe in God.” rhetoric. No one is listening.

Confronting God face to face at last, my atheism ended. I have been ashamed of it ever since … because it was the ultimate insult to spit in the face of my Creator by denying His very existence.

Good for you? I don’t really care about your life story, no offense. I don’t believe you have seriously considered an atheist standpoint at all, because you have shown so much ignorance of it. If you can’t discern between a weak atheist and a strong atheist, then I know you haven’t.

 

[hurst]

EnterTheBowser:

… why exactly can’t I imagine a world where ping-pong balls pop into existence for no particular reason? …

EnterTheBowser:

… My point was that resorting to supernatural explanations every time science is faced with a new brute fact or brute law is not a good tactic, because it imagines new entities and does not eliminate the brute thing that seemed to require explanation. …

I couldn’t help but notice that you answered your own question.

Imagining something “popping into existence for no particular reason” is “resorting to supernatural explanations”…

But I would say that those ping pong balls you imagined popping into existence actually came from your own imagination, based on the already-existing concept of ping-pong balls. That is why it is easy to imagine. You were the cause, and the concept was the substance.

So I find it ironic to observe a group of theorists inventing a cause (called nothing?) to fill in the gaps of their understanding of nature, while they complain that the religious-minded “invent” a cause (called “God”) to fill in the gaps of their understanding of nature.

In either case, there is implied a cause beyond ourselves. It seems the only difference between the two is that such theorists are willing to submit themselves and their existence to “nothing”, while the religious-minded are willing to submit themselves and their existence to “God”.

This may have more to do with desire than with logic. This “God” is claimed to be represented by various groups on earth, and seems to require conflicting things by them. In particular, the RCC claims our obedience and loving faith, even in our private life and secret thoughts. But we also observe people with evil dispositions holding positions of authority in these groups, even the RCC. So combine the desire to do as one pleases with the ire of having to obey someone incompetent, and you get one who trades such illogical conflicting desires with the illogic of coming from nothing and going to nothing (having no cause or purpose). They may now be at peace regarding the tensions of willful desire, but they obtained it at the expense of losing eternal peace regarding their cause and purpose. And the believer is the opposite, for he accepts the tensions of fighting his own desires to maintain obedience to his cause and be at peace regarding his purpose. Either way, we must all suffer. And it is more logical to suffer in this temporary world in order to remain at peace in the eternal world. But free will allows one to prefer one’s own eternal loss for the sake of temporary gain, to trade eternal peace for temporary peace, selling their eternal birthright for a tasty, though temporary, “pot of porridge” (cf. Jacob and Esau, Genesis 25:29-34).

hurst