Evidence for God's Existence

[WinePusher]

When I first joined this forum I remember McCulloch was creating a series of topics devoted to the various arguments for God's existence. I'd like to explore those issues in this thread and for the purpose of this thread God will be defined as a deistic, supernatural intelligent designer. We will not be using any theistic definition of God.

Teleological arguments prove God's existence based on the design and precise structure of the universe. The universe is structured in an improbable and an unlikely way. The physical laws that govern the universe are fine tuned to an extremely unlikely numerical value, and had these laws been set at any other parameter life could not exist. Statistically speaking, chance/coincidence is not an appropriate explanation, therefore a fine tuner/intelligent designer designed the universe.

Ontological arguments prove God's existence based on the definition of God. God is defined as a maximally great being, meaning that God can have no defects. Nonexistence is a defect, therefore God must exist. First of all, this argument pretty much destroys the ignostic position. Yes, I realize ignostics are willingly ignorant of all the philosophical scholarship surrounding God, but the fact is that the concept of God is pretty well defined. Therefore, the ignostics usergroup should be abolished.

Cosmological arguments prove God's existence based on the fact that the universe began to exist. Meaning, at one point in the distant past, the universe did not exist at all. The universe is itself contingent. Mathematically speaking, it is impossible for the chain of causes to regress backwards infinitely. Therefore, a non contingent first cause must exist. This cause supernatural, in the sense that it must be spaceless and timeless since space and time are bound by the universe.

Moral arguments prove God's existence based on the existence of objective morality. By objective morality I mean a moral statement or declaration. Something like 'killing is an innocent person for fun is wrong.' This is a moral declaration that is objectively true, regardless of any individuals personal opinion. Since an objective moral law exists, there must be a moral law giver. Another version of the moral argument would be the fact that the world would be morally absurd and irrational absent a moral law giver.


Questions:
1) Are these arguments logically valid and sound?

2) In light of these four philosophical arguments, will atheists please stop making the false, disingenuous claim that there is no evidence for God?

3) Are there any arguments against the existence of God?

[instantc]

If a person wins the lottery over and over and over then yes, it would be absolutely appropriate to suggest that the game is rigged and that the person is winning because somebody behind the scenes is pulling the strings. If an extremely unlikely event occurs repeatedly then it is reasonable to think that it was intentional and not just the result of random chance.

What if this week person A wins the lottery, the next week it is person C and the following week person D? These exact three people winning the lottery in this exact order is statistically speaking exactly as improbable as person A winning it three times in a row, but there is no reason to believe that the system was rigged, was there? Thus, the mere low probability doesn't make chance an inappropriate explanation.

[JohnA]

teleological arguments:

The arguments do not prove God, and they are not evidence for any God in particular, they simply offer room for postulating any number of theories that attempt to explain the origins of the universe and why it is the way it is, of which "A" God is one.

The three main explanations being thrown around by scientists are either chance, intelligent design or the multiverse theory. To use Paley's analogy, if you saw a watch in the middle of a deserted beach and were trying to figure out how it got there, you would conclude that a person designed it and placed it there. A watch cannot spontaneously generate, and since the watch exhibits signs of intricate complexity it would have required intelligence to design it. The same is true for the universe, and modern scientific discoveries have pretty much justified this.

ontological arguments:

Just because a conclusion is valid, does not mean it's true - The argument succeeds at merely validating the concept - not proving or providing evidence for what the concept attempts to explain in reality.

Please explain which premise of the argument is not true. If premises are valid and sound then the conclusion follows with necessity.

1) God is defined as a maximally great being.
2) Being maximally great requires being void of any defects or flaws.
3) Nonexistence is a flaw/defect
4) Therefore, God exists.

Cosmological arguments:

Like teleological arguments, it simply claims the space left vacant by our ignorance of what actually transpired at the universes inception. It is again conjecture - not proof or evidence of anything other than to say that God as an explanation is a possibility.

No, it really isn't conjecture. You are misapplying the term 'conjecture.' The cosmological argument is a deductive argument that proves God's existence using a combination of empirical evidence and observations. Something cannot come from nothing, and by nothing I do not mean empty space. By 'nothing' I mean whatever came before the big bang. Physicists will admit that they do not know what came before since it is nearly impossible for humans to comprehend a 'reality' without space and time. All we can say for sure is that space and time did not exist prior to the beginning of the universe.

Science has also established that the universe did, in fact, come from nothing. The universe began with an initial singularity and then proceeded to expand and the question is, what caused this singularity? A thoughtful person would answer by simply saying that they do not know, but it does leave room for the idea of an uncaused first mover.

Moral Arguments:

Are not proof or evidence of anything - For them to provide valid evidence for the existence of God, you would first need to prove that absolute morality is actually a thing, that exists in reality other than as a concept.

First of all, your line of argumentation here is completely futile. The basic premise of all these arguments are irrefutable, so you are wasting your time by attacking the premises. Even Sam Harris has conceded that objective morals do exist, and he has attempted to provide a nontheistic explanation for objective morality.

Second of all, will you admit that the world be morally absurd and irrational without God, or an afterlife?

We have examples of watches being made by people.
We have no examples of universes being created by beings.

So, you analogy fails. Agree?

[TheJoshAbideth]

[Replying to post 58 by WinePusher]

The three main explanations being thrown around by scientists are either chance, intelligent design or the multiverse theory. To use Paley's analogy, if you saw a watch in the middle of a deserted beach and were trying to figure out how it got there, you would conclude that a person designed it and placed it there. A watch cannot spontaneously generate, and since the watch exhibits signs of intricate complexity it would have required intelligence to design it. The same is true for the universe, and modern scientific discoveries have pretty much justified this.

The three main explanations are - even the ones lauded by scientists - at their core ignorant of what actually happened – we have no way of testing, no way of truly knowing. God is a possibility… but cannot be shown to be measured for probability – hence the arguments are not by any means evidence.

And yes the watch maker argument… it’s been around the block you know – and is just as deficient when you use it as when anybody else does. It’s a self-attesting argument made only because we already knew the watch was designed. Furthermore if you want we can take the argument a bit further – God is a complex being, should we then assume that God was created?

Please explain which premise of the argument is not true. If premises are valid and sound then the conclusion follows with necessity.

1) God is defined as a maximally great being.
2) Being maximally great requires being void of any defects or flaws.
3) Nonexistence is a flaw/defect
4) Therefore, God exists.

1. Presupposes that God exists or else how do you define a thing that doesn't exist?

No, it really isn't conjecture. You are misapplying the term 'conjecture.' The cosmological argument is a deductive argument that proves God's existence using a combination of empirical evidence and observations. Something cannot come from nothing, and by nothing I do not mean empty space. By 'nothing' I mean whatever came before the big bang. Physicists will admit that they do not know what came before since it is nearly impossible for humans to comprehend a 'reality' without space and time. All we can say for sure is that space and time did not exist prior to the beginning of the universe.

Science has also established that the universe did, in fact, come from nothing. The universe began with an initial singularity and then proceeded to expand and the question is, what caused this singularity? A thoughtful person would answer by simply saying that they do not know, but it does leave room for the idea of an uncaused first mover.

I am not misapplying the term conjecture – you simply don’t like how I am using it. The cosmological arguments do not prove god exists, they simply argue towards the conclusion that he/ she/ it does. Science has established no fact regarding how the universe came into being, whether from nothing or something. Sure, there are a few theories floating around – some are given more weight than others… but nothing even close to a fact. The only fact that remains is that nobody – up to this point - has ever been able to witness or test exactly what or where our universe was born from.

I agree with you, and I leave room for the idea of an uncaused first mover – but the fact that there is room, is not in itself reason enough for me to believe it is so, and much less – place labels and definitions on it.

First of all, your line of argumentation here is completely futile. The basic premise of all these arguments are irrefutable, so you are wasting your time by attacking the premises. Even Sam Harris has conceded that objective morals do exist, and he has attempted to provide a nontheistic explanation for objective morality.

Second of all, will you admit that the world be morally absurd and irrational without God, or an afterlife?

Wait… when did Sam Harris become the final say on whether or not there is such a thing as objective morality? I don’t agree with Sam Harris, and neither do many other prominent atheists – your attitude towards this is quite arrogant – and it seems that you are inserting your arrogance here as a proxy instead of an actual argument.

In short I believe there is a morality that exists that arose from its penchant for propagating a civilized society that has allowed our species to flourish – in essence, none of us live in a vacuum… what I do affects the people around and so on and so forth, which is why our current system of morality is in place such as it is. But I also believe that if our species died off and another conscious species arose in our place… their system of morality would be markedly different than ours – maybe they have genes that drive them to cannibalize their mates after copulation – like some spiders do?? Who knows right??

With all that said, I think this earth is plenty morally absurd… so if there is a God, he messed up big time.

On a side note… why Wine Pusher? I only ask because I am getting ready to press off about 450lbs of Cab Sav grapes…

An edit after the fact: when I say objective morality I mean absolute objective morality.

[olavisjo]

.

Could you please explain what exactly you mean by fine tuning?
Thanks

Here is an example...

• The fine-tuning of the universe is seen most clearly in the values of the constants of nature. There are many such constants, the best known of which specify the strength of the four forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. If these forces took on even slightly different strengths, the consequences for life would be devastating.4 Two of these in particular, the strong and electromagnetic forces, are responsible for the unusually efficient production of carbon, the element upon which all known life is based. The forces cooperate in such a way as to create a coincidental match up of energy levels, which enables the production of carbon from the fusing of three helium atoms. For three helium atoms to collide and create carbon is very unlikely, however, because under normal circumstances, the energies would not match up perfectly, and the three helium atoms would come apart before they had time to fuse into carbon. It takes a little extra time to deal with the energy mismatch. But, if there is a statistically unusual match of the energies, then the process is much faster. The slightest change to either the strong or electromagnetic forces would alter the energy levels, resulting in greatly reduced production of carbon and an ultimately uninhabitable universe. In the 1950s, Cambridge University astronomer Fred Hoyle recognized the precision of the energy match up, called carbon resonance, and made the following observation:
  
  • "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." 5

http://biologos.org/questions/fine-tuning

[olavisjo]

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Yes there is. I believe the point that TheJoshAbideth was making was that if fine-tuning is valid evidence for God, it can equally be valid evidence for the multiverse.

There can be reason why you can't detect God, but where can you put an infinite number of universes and find no trace of them?

[olavisjo]

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The universe is structured in an improbable and an unlikely way. The physical laws that govern the universe are fine tuned to an extremely unlikely numerical value, and had these laws been set at any other parameter life could not exist.

The laws of physics tell us that the universe and "improbable" structures in it exist primarily because they are THE most probable by the second law of thermodynamics.

When a system is in the most probable MACROSTATE we have the largest number of the microstates in that macrostate, so the entropy tends to be at maximum.

The system tends to go to a state with the minimum energy.

This is the second law of thermodynamics in the nutshell.

This is why I discourage people who don't know science to make general comments on failures of science.

I am not really commenting on the failure of science but the failure of your explanation to account for the constants of physical laws.

Can you tell me how the second law of thermodynamics has placed, for example, the value of the four known forces into such a razors edge balance as to allow life to exist in our universe? They are clearly not in the "most probable MACROSTATE" as you say.

[Jax Agnesson]

Please explain which premise of the argument is not true. If premises are valid and sound then the conclusion follows with necessity.

1. Everything that exists had a beginning.
2. God didn't have a beginning.
3. God doesn't exist.

[Jax Agnesson]

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Yes there is. I believe the point that TheJoshAbideth was making was that if fine-tuning is valid evidence for God, it can equally be valid evidence for the multiverse.

There can be reason why you can't detect God, but where can you put an infinite number of universes and find no trace of them?

Anywhere outside your light-cone.

[FarWanderer]

[Replying to post 64 by olavisjo]

Fine-tuning arguments don't prove anything that theists actually want them to prove. Not that I'm inclined to believe the universe really was designed, but even if we granted that it was, there is no particular reason to believe the designer entity is anything more than just another contingent, imperfect entity.

In fact, the entire premise of the fine-tuning argument basically presupposes an imperfect creator. "Tuning" something is improving it. A perfect creator would never need to "fine-tune" his creation. He would never need to affix our souls to carbon-based bodies in the first place; he could have had us experience material existence in any context he wished.

Indeed, if science concluded the exact opposite of the fine-tuning argument (that life was probabilistically unavoidable from the very beginning) the theists would in turn claim THAT to be proof that the universe was designed for life. (And I think it would be a more compelling argument than the one we have now).

.

Yes there is. I believe the point that TheJoshAbideth was making was that if fine-tuning is valid evidence for God, it can equally be valid evidence for the multiverse.

There can be reason why you can't detect God, but where can you put an infinite number of universes and find no trace of them?

Outside our universe?

Natural causes can play hide and seek just as well as supernatural causes, while maintaining the advantage of actually being a kind of cause known to exist.

[Bust Nak]

Late to the party, I am guessing others have already mentioned it but here is my entry:

Teleological arguments prove God's existence based on the design and precise structure of the universe... Statistically speaking, chance/coincidence is not an appropriate explanation, therefore a fine tuner/intelligent designer designed the universe.

Invalid. While it is true enough that improbable event does imply it is not by chance or coinidence, but it does not imply designed. Besides, we don't know the possible range of value, there is no way to calculate the probably of something happening. i.e. you can't tell me the chance of rolling a 6 is, if you don't know what dice I am rolling.

Ontological arguments prove God's existence based on the definition of God...

Valid but unsound. There are a lot of hidden premises that would lead to absurdities.

Cosmological arguments prove God's existence based on the fact that the universe began to exist.

Valid but unsound. The premises relating to causality and infinite regression/actual infinite are question begging, they need proving as much as the conclusion.

Moral arguments prove God's existence based on the existence of objective morality.

Valid by unsound. I would go as far as to say the premises are not just question begging but outright false.

In light of these four philosophical arguments, will atheists please stop making the false, disingenuous claim that there is no evidence for God?

When we say there is no evidence for God, we mean empirical evidence. It's not like we don't acknowledge there are argument or testimony for the existence for God, it's just not what we are after. I reject your notion that "there is no evidence for God" is false or disingenuous.

Are there any arguments against the existence of God?

Not for the God as defined as "deistic, supernatural intelligent designer."