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.
Showing posts with label Argument. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Argument. Show all posts
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.
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