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accuser

Member Since 2006

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Friday Jan 22, 2010

Jan 22, 2010
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I don't know if I'm going to make this a habit. This is a post I'm just copying over from my blog. I originally wrote it in July '09. Normally, that's plenty of time for me to decide it's crap and wish I never wrote it, but looking through it again I was actually reasonably pleased with my analysis. And when I do post stuff like this, people seem to think it's interesting. So I'm copying this over here, and if you read it and think, "Huh, interesting," then great.

I was listening to some people debate the merits and faults of the Cosmological Argument for God when I noticed another common thread running through many apologists' favorite arguments.

The Cosmological Argument is the First Cause argument. Essentially:
1) Everything has to have a cause.
2) There must have been a first cause.
3) That first cause, we call God.

Setting aside the fact that, even granting all these premises, you can't then derive any information about that god from this argument, this argument is self-refuting.

Thomas Aquinas phrased this argument a few different ways and called them all different arguments. But, really, they're all just iterations of the Cosmological Argument.

Below, I'm posting a section of the Transcendental Argument for God from CARM.org, but not the entire thing because it's very lengthy.

Their own summary goes like this:

Logical absolutes exist. Logical absolutes are conceptual by nature, are not dependent on space, time, physical properties, or human nature. They are not the product of the physical universe (space, time, matter), because if the physical universe were to disappear, logical absolutes would still be true. Logical Absolutes are not the product of human minds, because human minds are different, not absolute. But, since logical absolutes are always true everywhere, and not dependent upon human minds, it must be an absolute transcendent mind that is authoring them. This mind is called God.



The first half can be summarized as, "Yes, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, it does indeed make a sound." I agree with that. Sounds are not defined by whether or not they are heard, they are defined by sound waves. All our experience shows that a tree falling creates sound waves.

You might feel a bit of a logical hiccup once you get toward the end of this summary, though (assuming you didn't feel the same one I did in the first sentence)*. There are a number of them, but this particular hiccup becomes more obvious in the expanded version.

Number 2, Section C: Something cannot bring itself into existence. In order for something to bring itself into existence, it has to have attributes in order to perform an action. But if it has attributes, then it already has existence. If something does not exist, it has no attributes and can perform no actions. Therefore, something cannot bring itself into existence.



Here's where we get to the point.

Many theological arguments are structured as follows:
1) This rule exists, applies to everything, and cannot be broken.
2) Wait, that can't be right. Something had to break the rule.
3) It must have been God.

That's called special pleading. God is exempt from whatever rule it is that they put forward, because he's God. Why is it God that's exempt, and not, say, the universe? Which god is the one that's exempt - Ymir? Nox? Yahweh? Brahman? How do we know such an entity thinks marriage is between a man and a woman? Why did it create cancer?

These can all essentially be broken down to, "Who designed the designer?" Once you ask that question, the special pleading is revealed for what it is, and their efforts to arbitrarily assign a sort of "stopping point" to the logical regression comes to a screeching halt.

There's a decent chance my next post will deal more with the Transcendental Argument. I apologize for that. It's complicated, confusing, and very weird. That, in my opinion, is precisely why some people find it so convincing. It's a logical magic trick.

*That being that "true" isn't synonymous with "exists." If you have two oranges, you recognize you have two oranges. If you aren't around, there are still two oranges. If all humanity dies, and the universe goes into heat death, and all matter goes the way of entropy except for, somehow, those two oranges, it doesn't make it any less true that there are two oranges. If nothing ever existed except for those two oranges, it is still true that there are two oranges. But in either of those last scenarios, can the concept "two" be said to "exist" in any meaningful way? I don't think it can. I think we're looking at a false equivalence between truth and existence.

VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
tristane:
I don't think any of them would ever stoop to the level of allowing anyone to call them by their SG blog names in the real world, had they known about it. Perhaps with the exception of Ace, since... Well, that's what he is.

But you are right, they are very Top Gun and Top Gun stopped being cool even before Tom Cruise turned scientologist. Better suggestions will be recieved with delight,
Jan 24, 2010
tristane:
I know... I might change Bugsy though. Never really liked that name.
Roseanne does ring familiar. I think it had something to do with a very big woman with almost equally big dark curly hair... This was, however, before we got cable and I was probably too young to appreciate it anyway, just as I was too innocent to understand the briliance of '"Allo 'allo" until only last year.
Jan 24, 2010

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