One argument proposed by the theist is the following:
If one believes in God, one loses nothing if he or she is wrong, but if one doesn't believe in God, one loses everything.
Pascal's Wager fails in so many different ways it's embarrassing:
First off, suppose God does exist. If he wants people to follow reason and evidence and not believe in things simply because it will save their hide, then if one agrees with Pascal, they could go to Hell and the atheists to heaven.
Second, Pascal's Wager does not specify which god one should follow. Is it Zeus, Tupa, Yahweh, Shandi, etc...? Get it wrong and you could end up separated from God or tortured for all eternity.
Third, the argument assumes believing in God means you lose nothing -- which is just not true. Every moment you spend praying, believing in an unproven or even contradictory idea, following rituals of a religion, etc..., is a moment you will never get back that has been wasted when it could've been used to do something good.
Fourth, if God is so immoral that he rewards blind faith and punishes logic and reasoning, it is a god I would never worship or want to be in the presence of.
Fifth, Pascal's Wager assumes you can just make yourself believe God exists. Saying one believess doesn't make it so, and it wouldn't fool any omnipotent deity.
To show how big a caricature of a logical argument Pascal's Wager is, consider another argument I just made up off the top of my head:
If we believe in giant invisible killer bunnies that won't attack you if you believe in them then we lose nothing if we're wrong, but if you don't believe in giant invisible killer bunnies they might kill you.
Pascal's Wager is an incredibly naive argument, and one I hope I will never hear again.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Kalam Cosmological Argument
An argument commonly used by theists is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It's an argument that attempts to prove the existence of God using a few relatively simple premises. It is quite elegant, and goes as follows:
(1) Everything that began to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore the universe has a cause.
This simple argument is valid, which is to say that the conclusion follows if the premises are true. However, I reject the second premise and would have a different interpretation of the conclusion even if the premises were true.
The second premise (The universe began to exist.) makes an assertion that is not known to be true. Cosmologists, philosophers, astronomers, and physicists alike don't know weather the universe began. Theists often cite the Big Bang Theory as the beginning of the universe, which is a misuse of the theory. The Big Bang is a theory of how the universe evolved from a dense state roughly 13.7 billion years ago, not of if or how it was created (see this for further information).
I would invite you to think of anything that was created. Physics tells us that matter is neither created or destroyed, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, that momentum is neither created or destroyed. Not only is the second premise unproven, but looks quite contrary to what we know of the universe.
Let us forget for a moment the absurdity of premise (2) and accept that it is true, and come to the conclusion (3) Therefore the universe has a cause. Lets look at what this means.
So the universe had a cause. Does this mean that God was the cause? That one of an infinitude of other universes was the cause? That we're brains in a vat? The problem with coming to the ambiguous conclusion such as 'the universe was caused' is that you can't really say what caused the universe. At best you can say it was caused by some phenomena, which says nothing for a deity. For God to have created the universe, one would have to show that there are no other possibilities (note that this does not mean one can't think of one -- that is an argument from personal incredulity), and this has not been done with the Kalam Cosmological argument.
In sum, I reject the second premise as untrue and also opposite to what we see in the universe, and even if we accept these premises and the conclusion, it says nothing about whether God was the cause.
(1) Everything that began to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore the universe has a cause.
This simple argument is valid, which is to say that the conclusion follows if the premises are true. However, I reject the second premise and would have a different interpretation of the conclusion even if the premises were true.
The second premise (The universe began to exist.) makes an assertion that is not known to be true. Cosmologists, philosophers, astronomers, and physicists alike don't know weather the universe began. Theists often cite the Big Bang Theory as the beginning of the universe, which is a misuse of the theory. The Big Bang is a theory of how the universe evolved from a dense state roughly 13.7 billion years ago, not of if or how it was created (see this for further information).
I would invite you to think of anything that was created. Physics tells us that matter is neither created or destroyed, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, that momentum is neither created or destroyed. Not only is the second premise unproven, but looks quite contrary to what we know of the universe.
Let us forget for a moment the absurdity of premise (2) and accept that it is true, and come to the conclusion (3) Therefore the universe has a cause. Lets look at what this means.
So the universe had a cause. Does this mean that God was the cause? That one of an infinitude of other universes was the cause? That we're brains in a vat? The problem with coming to the ambiguous conclusion such as 'the universe was caused' is that you can't really say what caused the universe. At best you can say it was caused by some phenomena, which says nothing for a deity. For God to have created the universe, one would have to show that there are no other possibilities (note that this does not mean one can't think of one -- that is an argument from personal incredulity), and this has not been done with the Kalam Cosmological argument.
In sum, I reject the second premise as untrue and also opposite to what we see in the universe, and even if we accept these premises and the conclusion, it says nothing about whether God was the cause.
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Euthyphro Dilemma
I often hear theists give arguments for the existence of God, but rarely hear arguments to the contrary. Indeed many atheists tend to have a consensus that it isn't possible to disprove a deity's existence, so atheists focus on positive arguments given by theists. There is one argument that, while not proving God's nonexistence, does lead the theist to an unwanted conclusion: the Euthyphro Dilemma.
Atheists often groan when we hear a Christian insist that the Bible is the unequivocal place we get our morality. Invariably the reply is that one would have to slaughter homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13), could own slaves (Leviticus 25:44), and stone women who are not virgins on their wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13-21), if one believed that. The atheist then adds that any sane person with a decent moral compass would obviously not do such things, so he or she must get his or her morality from elsewhere or that person could not cherry pick around those horrid rules.
But what if we get rid of the horrid and immoral God of the Bible in favor of a more amorphous and ambiguous Deistic god? Can we do better by saying a nebulous creator of the universe grounds our morality as absolute? It seems reasonable that such a god would. The Euthyphro Dilemma tries to say no by showing that God either gets his morality from some other objective source or makes it up (which is arbitrary). In neither case, as the argument goes, is God the source of absolute morality. Here is the argument:
Is something good because God commands it (1), or does God command it because it is good (2)? If (1) then God could command anything he wishes since he is the source of morality, so morality is arbitrary. If (2) then God isn't the source of morality, so we don't need Him. Therefore in either case God is not the source of absolute morality.
After some arguments and attempts to show the dichotomy is a false one, Deists invariably converge to the following answer to show the argument to be wrong: God does not possess good, but is the paradigm of Goodness; he is the very definition of good by his nature.
This is where the one posing the dilemma replies: then we shall express the Euthyphro Dilemma in a reworded form. Do you define God as "the Good"/the paradigm of Goodness from a priori moral knowledge external to God and saw that He coincided with it (1), or did you define God as the paradigm of Goodness without external knowledge (2)? If (1) then you didn't need God to determine morality, or if (2) you defined God as moral arbitrarily, and could have chosen Gandhi or Hitler, for example.
I think this last statement of Euthyphro's Dilemma is irrefutable. One either has to have a priori knowledge of what is good to recognize something else as good (God), or one must accept something as a standard arbitrarily. If one chooses the second option then God could barbecue babies and one would have to say it is a moral act since we defined him to be moral.
Atheists often groan when we hear a Christian insist that the Bible is the unequivocal place we get our morality. Invariably the reply is that one would have to slaughter homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13), could own slaves (Leviticus 25:44), and stone women who are not virgins on their wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13-21), if one believed that. The atheist then adds that any sane person with a decent moral compass would obviously not do such things, so he or she must get his or her morality from elsewhere or that person could not cherry pick around those horrid rules.
But what if we get rid of the horrid and immoral God of the Bible in favor of a more amorphous and ambiguous Deistic god? Can we do better by saying a nebulous creator of the universe grounds our morality as absolute? It seems reasonable that such a god would. The Euthyphro Dilemma tries to say no by showing that God either gets his morality from some other objective source or makes it up (which is arbitrary). In neither case, as the argument goes, is God the source of absolute morality. Here is the argument:
Is something good because God commands it (1), or does God command it because it is good (2)? If (1) then God could command anything he wishes since he is the source of morality, so morality is arbitrary. If (2) then God isn't the source of morality, so we don't need Him. Therefore in either case God is not the source of absolute morality.
After some arguments and attempts to show the dichotomy is a false one, Deists invariably converge to the following answer to show the argument to be wrong: God does not possess good, but is the paradigm of Goodness; he is the very definition of good by his nature.
This is where the one posing the dilemma replies: then we shall express the Euthyphro Dilemma in a reworded form. Do you define God as "the Good"/the paradigm of Goodness from a priori moral knowledge external to God and saw that He coincided with it (1), or did you define God as the paradigm of Goodness without external knowledge (2)? If (1) then you didn't need God to determine morality, or if (2) you defined God as moral arbitrarily, and could have chosen Gandhi or Hitler, for example.
I think this last statement of Euthyphro's Dilemma is irrefutable. One either has to have a priori knowledge of what is good to recognize something else as good (God), or one must accept something as a standard arbitrarily. If one chooses the second option then God could barbecue babies and one would have to say it is a moral act since we defined him to be moral.
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