Justify the belief that gods do not exist.

[wiploc]

Some people believe that gods do not exist. (One can call this position "atheism" or "strong atheism" or "anti-theist perversion," anything you want. But we aren't going to argue terminology in this thread. Clarity is good, so you can explain what you personally mean by "atheist," but you shouldn't suggest that other usages are inferior.)

This thread is to make a list of arguments, of reasons to believe that theism is false.

And we can discuss the soundness of those arguments.

I'll start:

1. The Parable of the Pawnbroker.
(I'll just post titles here, so as not to take too much space at the top of each thread.)

2. Presumptive Falsity of Outrageous Claims.



Feel free to add to this list.

[wiploc]

Haven't I proven that the belief that there are no gods is reasonable? How can Christians benefit from using that in debate?

Yes, it is true that you did prove justification for this.

But it's also true that the Christians are still arguing with you and aren't convinced of your proof.

How many times have you seen someone argued into changing her mind in one session? You can count such incidents on the fingers of one hand.

Changing a mind takes longer. If you plant a seed of doubt, it may sprout twenty years later, when you'll have no awareness of it.

Also, you don't want to be wedded to persuading the person you're talking to. Other people read these threads. One of them might be the fertile ground that the seed falls on.

In any case, your objection to this thread was that it is a distraction that keeps Christians from having to confront the absurdities of the bible. Yet those discussions have the same outcome: Christians still argue with you, and aren't convinced by your proof.

By the test you have provided, then, this kind of thread is no worse than the kind of thread you prefer. So you can relax and enjoy what we've got going here.

[wiploc]

OK, what do you consider acceptable evidence?

Whatever would be persuasive on another topic. That is, no special pleading.

Can you be more specific? No special pleading would be one criteria. Are there others?

I'm sure there are others. I don't know all of the laws of rationality. I sometimes notice when people set them aside because they really want to believe something that wouldn't be supported by those laws.

If you have a point, I suggest you make it. It can be frustrating to have someone keep asking questions, putting you to the guess as to what he wants you to say.

Santa and the Easter bunny are extraordinary. That is, it would take amazing evidence to justify the claim that these amazing things really exist. And we don't have any evidence that they exist that isn't better accounted for by alternative explanations.

Sure, they are extraordinary, but your illustration fails because nobody really believes that they are real. Whereas there exists a great deal of people who believe that a god exists (Yahweh, Allah, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, etc). If you want to attack what people actually believe, you'll need to attack these, not the Easter bunny or Santa Claus.

I picked the Easter bunny because I expected you not to believe in her. "I don't believe in Jehovah for the same reason I don't believe in Jesus" wouldn't have been useful.

We all believe in planet earth, right? And we don't believe in the Easter bunny. See, I'm suggesting that Jehovah is more like the Easter bunny than like the earth. I don't see how that's confusing. It certainly is not a strawman argument.

[Divine Insight]

In any case, your objection to this thread was that it is a distraction that keeps Christians from having to confront the absurdities of the bible. Yet those discussions have the same outcome: Christians still argue with you, and aren't convinced by your proof.

By the test you have provided, then, this kind of thread is no worse than the kind of thread you prefer. So you can relax and enjoy what we've got going here.

Well you certainly have a point there. And you're right, time truly isn't important. Religions based on ancient male-chauvinism and extreme religious bigotries held up in the name of a jealous God are naturally doomed in the long haul. There is no question about that.

What the world needs isn't more better discussions on forums like these. What the world actually needs are more people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc. And fortunately that is starting to happen. Many scientists are now coming out to speak specifically against these religions. We're seeing this happening quite a bit. People like Sean Carrol, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc., are following in the footstep of people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, and others.

It won't be very much longer historically speaking before these religions are seen as nothing but "ancient myths" that simply took a very long time to die.

I think I've planted my fair share of seeds already.

It's time for me to just sit back and let them grow.

[mwtech]

If we agree that a miracle is a supernatural event, akin to having the laws of nature superseded, then we can easily agree what constitutes a miracle.

Well, at the risk of derailing this thread, I would say the creation of the universe would be miraculous. The laws of nature were superseded by the creation of the world. And its origin must've been outside our universe since our universe was what was created.

This could only be evidence of a miracle if
1) you can show that the universe was created
2) there were any physical/natural laws to suspend before the universe was created, which is nonsensical

Let's just concentrate on the "laws of nature superseded" part.

Do laws exists independently from the universe? That is, did preexisting laws operate to cause our universe to exist?
What do you consider to be physical/natural laws?
Would agree that the first law of thermo was violated regarding the origin of the universe?

I think the constants or laws of physics/nature began at the time physical and natural began. How could there be physical laws if there is nothing physical. We can't know if there are laws independent og the universe, we'd have to be able to observe "outside the universe", a concept I can't even imagine. I share the view of Stephen Hawking

At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang.

[Zzyzx]

.
Perhaps it would be most appropriate to refer to the processes of nature rather than "laws of nature."

We can (often) observe / measure processes but we can only invent or imagine "laws" to account for what we observe. Thus, the so called laws are of human origin, words or symbols to express our state of understanding of natural processes.

It might be useful to identify speculation of "how the universe originated" as guess work and not claim knowledge

[Divine Insight]

Let's just concentrate on the "laws of nature superseded" part.

I think this thread has already gone far astray from the question of justifying the belief that gods do not exist.

Just the same I find the following questions interesting so I'd like to offer my answer to these questions:

Do laws exists independently from the universe?

That depends on what you are defining as our "Universe". If you include quantum fields then as being part of our universe the answer is no. If you exclude quantum fields as being part of our universe then the answer is yes.

That is, did preexisting laws operate to cause our universe to exist?

The current best theory is that the universe arose from a quantum fluctuation.

What do you consider to be physical/natural laws?

As Zzyzx has suggested, physical laws are nothing more than our attempt at trying to label and define natural processes.

If we allow for natural processes to exist (like quantum fields for example), then other natural processes can come into being from that (i.e. the fabric of spacetime, General Relativity, Entropy, etc. These latter processes do not occur within quantum fields but rather are an expression of many quantum fields interacting. So these latter processes arise where they had not appeared to exist before.

Would agree that the first law of thermo was violated regarding the origin of the universe?

No, absolutely not. In fact, the concepts that thermodynamics is attempting to address are the macro properties of spacetime in general. Actually matter and energy can be created/destroyed as long as this is accompanied by a change in the configuration of the fabric of spacetime (i.e. gravitational potential energy changes).

The entire universe may actually sum to "zero" energy, or very close to it. And in this way the first law of thermo is not violated.

[otseng]

If you have a point, I suggest you make it. It can be frustrating to have someone keep asking questions, putting you to the guess as to what he wants you to say.

OK, I'll get to my point. What evidence do you have that gods do not exist?

We all believe in planet earth, right? And we don't believe in the Easter bunny. See, I'm suggesting that Jehovah is more like the Easter bunny than like the earth. I don't see how that's confusing. It certainly is not a strawman argument.

Yes, in believe in planet earth. Yes, I don't believe in the Easter bunny. But, just because you don't believe in Jehovah does not mean that it is like the Easter bunny anymore than I believing in Jehovah makes it like planet earth.

[otseng]

I think the constants or laws of physics/nature began at the time physical and natural began. How could there be physical laws if there is nothing physical. We can't know if there are laws independent og the universe, we'd have to be able to observe "outside the universe", a concept I can't even imagine.

If this is true, then physical/natural laws cannot account for the origin of our universe. If laws cannot, then it is reasonable to infer a teleological origin to our universe.

[otseng]

Actually matter and energy can be created/destroyed as long as this is accompanied by a change in the configuration of the fabric of spacetime (i.e. gravitational potential energy changes).

The entire universe may actually sum to "zero" energy, or very close to it. And in this way the first law of thermo is not violated.

This has been claimed by others, but I'm not sure what this means. Can you elaborate this in layman terms? I understand spacetime fabric and gravitational potential. But, what does it mean to create matter and energy by changing spacetime?

[wiploc]

If you have a point, I suggest you make it. It can be frustrating to have someone keep asking questions, putting you to the guess as to what he wants you to say.

OK, I'll get to my point. What evidence do you have that gods do not exist?

I have posted my argument repeatedly in this thread. I'll copy material from post 113 at the bottom of this post.

We all believe in planet earth, right? And we don't believe in the Easter bunny. See, I'm suggesting that Jehovah is more like the Easter bunny than like the earth. I don't see how that's confusing. It certainly is not a strawman argument.

Yes, in believe in planet earth. Yes, I don't believe in the Easter bunny. But, just because you don't believe in Jehovah does not mean that it is like the Easter bunny anymore than I believing in Jehovah makes it like planet earth.

Exactly so. Believing don't make it so.

And yet, I can come up with evidence that the earth exists, and I'll be surprised if you come up with evidence that gods exist.




=== what follows is quoted from post 113 in this thread ===

Seems to me that we've done a good job of justifying the belief that no deities exist.

Where there is a specific claim of deity, it is refutable.

Where there is no claim, no evidence, no reason at all to believe, then we have an extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence---without any evidence at all.

Reasonable people tend to reject such claims, to assume that they are false.

I feel like we've done our side proud. So I'm surprised that you don't.

... "most definitions" does not disprove all possibilities of any definition, even if you were correct. [\quote]

I think we've covered all possibilities, dealt with categories that included them.

Let's first divide gods into ordinary and extraordinary:

Ordinary gods: Examples of ordinary gods were Julius Caesar, Pharaohs, little piles of rocks. If you say, "I worship this pile of rocks," or, "This is my dog Rufus. Rufus exists, as you can plainly see. I say that Rufus is a god. Therefore a god exists. Case closed."

That's just not what we're talking about. There's nothing special about Rufus. The fact that someone calls him a god does not mean that gods exist. There has to be something extraordinary about you before you can be a god (according to the meaning of "god" as used in this thread).

Theism can't be made true just by someone calling something a god.

I labor this because you complained that we hadn't proved "all possibilities of any definition." We aren't responsible to disprove anything that anyone can call a god.

We undertook only to show that it's reasonable to believe that there are no extant things that fall in the category that we call "gods." This doesn't necessarily include "all possibilities of any definition."

For me, nothing counts as a god unless it is extraordinary in some way. If you can't fly, or smash suns, or walk on water, or create universes, or stop time, or otherwise have some extraordinary power, then, by definition, you aren't a god.


Extraordinary gods:

These I divide into two categories:


- Those we have absolutely no reason to believe in:

Call this the Russell's teapot category. It would be weird if that teapot were there. And there's no reason to think it is there. Reasonable people, then, assume that the teapot is not there.

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Gods in this subcategory are extraordinary, but they have no evidence at all.

Thus, reasonable people can assume that they do not exist.

Which disposes of this subcategory.

Which leaves only the extraordinary gods that do leave evidence.


- Those we do have reason to believe in:

These are gods who would leave tracks, gods for whom evidence would exist if the gods existed, gods for whom there would be proof.

Theists are eager to claim that these gods exist. They offer up evidence all the time. But the evidence turns out to be false or fraudulent. (You can't tell me that William Lane Craig, for instance, doesn't know he's talking nonsense.)

In this subcategory, we use either examples (the PoE absolutely proves that the PoE god does not exist) or generalizations (whenever someone fields a "proof" of this kind of god, the "proof" turns out to be ignorant, silly, fraudulent, or otherwise lame.)

The generalizations come down to this: We believe, based on countless examples, that the evidence for the kind of god that leaves evidence, is always the work of a motivated believer. People with the will to believe will grasp at any straw in the attempt to persuade themselves that their belief is warranted. But there turns out not to be any reason to think that such gods exist.

Thus, once again, we find ourselves dealing with extraordinary claims and no evidence.

Gods in this subcategory are, once again, presumptively nonexistent.

-

Thus, we can describe the two categories this way: There are "gods" that, by definition, aren't really gods. And there are gods that we have no reason to believe in, and that, in the absence of such reasons, are presumptively nonexistent.