In my last post, I linked a video I made which addresses several arguments for the existence of God, or at least some supernatural being.  A visitor to my blog posted a detailed and thoughtful series of questions/rebuttals as a comment.  Since the original post and my response are rather lengthy, I thought I’d dedicate a blog post to the exchange.

Here is the comment by “ARS:”

Brian, I would like to begin by saying that I appreciate someone trying to make a logical argument for or against a belief, I think the quote you brought up in the beginning of your video is a great one that more people who believe your faith should abide by.

However, some of the assertions logic and arguments you use in this video can be misleading, false or flawed. I would like to first address that you do not speak for all of man, not all man needs a divine presence, there is a large percentage of the population of this world that goes through life not believing in any god, presence or being influencing them.

I do not believe a modern sceptic only argues that god is a way for people to explain the complex natural mechanisms. I understand that some people turn to religion for hope, answers to morality, strength, relationships, and many other basic human desires. A sceptic saying religion for people is just a way of explaining nature would be insulting both their own and their audience’s intelligence. I highly doubt any religion would hold water today if it was all about explaining natural mechanisms.

You state that there had to be a beginning of time, I don’t really want to get into this, mostly because time might not exist elsewhere, but you don’t prove anything here, most physicists explain events by the “big bang” simply state that time before the big bang is irrelevant because it took place in another time frame, or another field of existence. These are things that modern physics does not have the answer for yet and where some people could point to a creator. I have my doubts here, but could not fault an assertion such as that. So, yes the universe has a beginning of time, not necessarily a beginning for everything.

You state, now that we have so much better an understanding of nature and the things around us that we should have a natural explanation for everything and that we no longer need god. I would like to begin by asking you what we cannot explain with science? Explanations to the origin of the universe are abundant, however these explanations require time to prove or disprove, I do not believe that anyone of this earth believes humans have reached complete understanding of nature. The theory of evolution is weak you say, I am still waiting on the explanation of this more especially being that there is physical evidence to prove evolution. You make the argument that science cannot observe what is not there, however I disagree, the beginning of what we know as the universe is visible in the form of ccosmic microwave background radiation physical evidence for the beginning. Now these are physical things around us, but since you are answering questions about religion, where is the single shred of physical evidence affirming the existence of god “Yahweh”. I would like to ad that a universal negative can never be proven, they are merely taken as “common sense” as you so eloquently stated. Examples: Flying spaghetti monster, the silver surfer, Zeus, the sock monster in a dryer, the last one may actually exist though. I also never gathered how science supported the existence of god.

Additionally you cannot prove or disprove powerful beings without the use of omissions, as these are the foundations of what they represent. Proving one without the other is flawed logic, because as you said clearly a person must understand what this god being is something in which nothing greater than can be obtained. And if this in itself cannot be proven, then obviously this being is not is only existing in our imagination. I do not believe that even one of the omissions that Yahweh exhibits is actually possible. They all have equally devastating logical flaws. This is true in Anselem’s argument as he is arguing for perfection, something that does not exist see- Gaunilo’s argument. Additionally existence is not perfection; something does not exhibit the property of existence. And even if existence was a property, something cannot be partially more existent.

I guess I need to wait to address the teleological argument until you publish that video.

The cosmological argument is never successfully related to the existence of a deity. Just because attributes are shared by two things is not evidence making them the same thing, I could literally list infinite examples of this. Additionally the argument only needs a spark, not an interactive being in the mixture this being could easily not be self aware or have any sort of will.

In your morality argument you bring up what seems to me to be the idea of utilitarianism, I do not think you can simply argue against one moral justification for something and prove yourself right. I am not a utilitarian and you make argument that seems to combine utilitarianism with egoism, that people only do what benefits them this creates a rather unique loop here as you point out. However utilitarian’s do not ever think of benefits to themselves, only that which benefits society. A utilitarian would remove their own organs if it would benefit society more if they were of the belief in pure utilitarianism. Egoists on the other hand only perform acts witch benefit themselves. I do not see this argument as any sort of grounds for a god, more especially in such a brief synopsis as you have given in your video. Furthermore there are many god fearing or believing men who have had little to no moral compass.”

And my response:

ARS:

Wow, thanks for the thoughtful response. And thanks also for watching the video.

First off, I concede that these arguments are not absolute proofs and that they do make assumptions that not all nonreligious people will accept. But I think they do succeed in giving some reasons for why belief in God is not completely illogical or unreasonable.

And you’re right in saying that not every human feels the need for a divine presence. But the presence of religious belief in wildly diverse and disconnected cultures I think does speak to a general attribute of mankind as a whole, and that is a desire or longing for there to be a higher power than us. Obviously that doesn’t prove the existence of that power, but it’s an interesting observation. Why is it that people everywhere independently held to this idea of a supernatural being? For one, it argues for a universal ancestor from which such a concept could be passed down. But the idea’s survival shows that such belief fills a need that has been a part of man for as long as we have historical record.

I did not mean to imply that skeptics deny that religion serves other purposes in the lives of its believers. However, since my focus here is on more concrete concepts such as existence of matter, time and energy, I focused on the skeptic’s response to religion in that area. When it comes to how we explain existence, I believe an atheist/agnostic would summarize a theist’s belief in God in the way I have: as essentially a crutch for someone not willing to explore the real answer.

The existence arguments really only apply to our universe, since that is all we can observe. Whether there’s another universe outside ours is an entirely theoretical and untestable theory. But to make the argument that the big bang happened in another field of existence is exactly the point I’m making. Science cannot explain creation ex nihilo, thus it must conclude that the universe’s existence is either eternal or that some sort of “imaginary time” or field of existence was around before the big bang. Eternally existing matter would lead to the conclusion that our universe would be perfectly unordered now because without the intervention of something outside us, entropy dictates that all ordered matter would become disordered. Similar to the other alternative (other field of existence), the eternal universe argument requires the existence of something outside of it to preserve order. Either way, we’ve come to admit that there must have been something existing “before” or outside of our universe. If you repeat this argument for the external field of existence, you are left with a non-terminating recursion that forces us to conclude either that material existence is infinite (which again introduces the problem discussed earlier), or that there is a supernatural being that caused it all in the first place. Either way, you are led to a supernatural conclusion. Whether this is the Judeo-Christian deity or something completely different is an entirely different argument.

What I just mentioned is what we cannot explain by science. The big bang is a natural phenomenon, thus we can observe it through remaining evidences such as background radiation, as you mentioned (and I talk about this in the next video). But that “other field of existence” which sparked the big bang is not observable, and thus not something science can address.

As I mention, my purpose in this video is not to argue for Yahweh’s existence, but for the much more general existence of some sort of supernatural being. This video is simply setting the basis for belief in God in general, upon which the later videos depend.

I’m not sure what your point is regarding Anselm and the idea that existence is perfection. I’ll admit that Anselm’s argument is kind of a logical trick and not all that convincing in a concrete sense. But the idea that God being by definition greater than anything else implies his existence (since existence is greater than non-existence, one being something and the other nothing) is one that I think at least makes sense.

As addressed before, I’m not saying the cosmological argument establishes the existence of a specific type of deity. It’s simply pointing out that at some point you have to either conclude that matter has an eternally regressing tree of dependency, or that at some point there’s an “uncaused cause” that forms the starting point. I never said here that this uncaused cause was anything more than a “spark.” Again, to argue for anything more than that is outside the scope of this argument.

As for Lewis’s moral argument, his main point is that from an individual standpoint, there is no practical reason for the concept of self-sacrifice. Certainly from a larger perspective there is, but when people choose to sacrifice their own safety for the safety of others, it’s generally not because they’re making a conscious decision to do whatever serves society best regardless of what it does to them. There’s something present in the human psyche that is absent in other animals instincts which allows us to recognize slights even when there is no injustice, and which causes us to accept personal suffering out of genuine concern for another rather than a strictly utilitarian idea of “serving the greater good.” This isn’t an unassailable argument, but I think Lewis makes a valid point.

To your last point, the moral argument doesn’t only apply to religious people, but to mankind as a whole. It’s speaking to the concept of a conscience. So whether a person chooses to embrace or ignore this instinct is not necessarily tied to their religious beliefs. Nor do the behaviors of a “believer” prove or disprove the truth of their beliefs as we are all imperfect (an assumption inherent in the Christian faith).

Thanks again for the comments! I may need to set up a better place for these debates to occur so there isn’t such a huge block of text beneath each post…