Faith is believing something that you know isnt true.

[DBT]

BIG TIME DITTO!



Then stay focused on the issue at hand and stop jumping all over the place. I’m only trying to show you that I have evidence for what I believe. I’ve provided scientific evidence for premise 2 of the KCA to counter your contrary notion. You have been trying to find fault with that and are jumping all over the place to accomplish that.

Erm....that wasn't me. That was you. Hence my complaint about too many points being thrown at me to deal with at a single sitting.

I have. You seem to be misunderstanding how an argument (not assumption) is designed.

So it's insults and accusations now.

I did not see your evidence. Perhaps it was because I did not recognize what you presented as being evidence that supports the proposition of Creation.

It is not the evidence that leads to a conclusion. The evidence supports the reasoning that leads to the conclusion. Hence premise 2 is overtly supported by the science I provided.

Thus I have evidence to support the reasoning for what I believe. What is so hard about that?

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree that you have evidence that supports your reasoning.

Why?

Because when you say; 'the mechanics of this universe most plausibly infer that it is not past eternal. Thus it began to exist. Therefore it needs a CAUSE. Forensically this universe is temporal, has space, is material therefore its CAUSE must be timeless/eternal because time began, its CAUSE must be spaceless because space began, and the CAUSE must be immaterial because material began. The CAUSE of the universe could not be itself. Thus that CAUSE of the universe transcends the universe. Put it all that together, the CAUSE of the universe forensically has these characteristics; it’s spaceless, eternal, immaterial, and transcends the universe'' - the essential points of your reasoning have other explanations, other possibilities, other models.

Nor does your reasoning appear to account for the evolutionary nature of the Cosmos at large and the systems that are its parts, galaxies, stars, planets, etc, and last but not least, life on Earth, which began as simple microbes and evolved through fits and starts into complex life forms.

Which does not even suggest special Creation.

 

[remez]

There are far to many points to deal with at once, sorry

I can deal with one or two points at a time.

Then stay focused on the issue at hand and stop jumping all over the place. I’m only trying to show you that I have evidence for what I believe. I’ve provided scientific evidence for premise 2 of the KCA to counter your contrary notion. You have been trying to find fault with that and are jumping all over the place to accomplish that.

Erm....that wasn't me. That was you. Hence my complaint about too many points being thrown at me to deal with at a single sitting.

Again that is why I was only focused on the single premise 2 of the KCA. You jumped over to the FTA and mixed that reasoning with the KCA to rebut the entire KCA. When I pointed this out to you, you then claimed I was the one jumping around to purposely confuse the issue.

My case to the context of this thread was specifically ...... that I have evidence for my beliefs. That's it. I could have chosen several different pieces of evidence to refute your claim here .....

Faith is a belief, conviction, held without the support of evidence, sometimes held even in the face of evidence to the contrary....

.... I chose to specifically provide the evidence I had for the reason of p2 of the KCA which is just one argument that leads to the conclusion that God exists. It was very narrow. I'm not trying to convince you that the argument is compelling. I certainly find the argument compelling and it has physical evidence to support p2. Thus I have evidence for what I believe. I concluded this with you back in post 63. Thus I don't hold my belief without evidence. My beliefs are not blind. Should the universe be proven to be eternal my belief would surely be in need of revision, no doubt. So yes atheism would be back on the table of possibilities.

As for the rest ..................

I did not see your evidence. Perhaps it was because I did not recognize what you presented as being evidence that supports the proposition of Creation.

Creation?

It supports p2 of the KCA and that you did agree to........... lets review the case from posts 16 through 63.

your post 16...

Where is this evidence?

my reply 36......

Specifically with regards to the universe beginning to exist.
CMB, second law of thermodynamics, GTR, temp ripples in the CMB seeding galaxies, redshift, all of the spacetime theorems specifically the BGV theorem, observed time dilation in gamma-ray bursts, SBBM, the decay times of distant supernova light intensity, H-He abundance, inflation, etc.

From an atheistic cosmologist….

"It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning." - Alexander Vilenkin

your response to that in post 61

....... According to the evidence, yes, the universe does indeed appear to have had a beginning 13 billion years ago.....in its present form,

My response to that specifically concluded ...... post 63...............

Again that was my point……I do have evidence that the universe began to exist, thus I have evidence for my belief that God exists. Hold on…..I’m not asserting that a beginning universe proves God exists, only that is evidence that supports my belief that he exists because the universe then needs a transcendent cause. How many worldviews purport a transcendent cause?

Case Closed I have evidence for what I believe. I should have stopped right there.

But.....

Since then you have been attempting to redirect the debate to counter the KCA in its entirety. Which is a related issue for sure, but not the case I was here making. So having made my case with you, I went along with defending the KCA, but then you started blaming me for getting off point. I had already made my point. I was continuing on with this other issue out of courtesy to you and for the thrill of the debate.

Now you are complaining you don't have enough time to properly address the topic and are blaming me for purposely trying to confuse the issue. So what is it you really want?

further from your last post......

It is not the evidence that leads to a conclusion. The evidence supports the reasoning that leads to the conclusion. Hence premise 2 is overtly supported by the science I provided.

Thus I have evidence to support the reasoning for what I believe. What is so hard about that?

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree that you have evidence that supports your reasoning.

but again your post in 61.........

....... According to the evidence, yes, the universe does indeed appear to have had a beginning 13 billion years ago.....in its present form,

.......but that is precisely p2 of the KCA. Thus you understood that I presented evidence that reasonably infers a past finite universe, which was my point. I don't have a blind faith.

So what is it you want?

What you seem to be assuming NOW is that my evidence has to pass your subjective epistemological standard to count as evidence. Well you aren't the final authority of that by any means. Thus you would have to make a case as to why that should be the case. I'm ready to explore that epistemological red herring, if that is what you choose, but don't blame me for getting off the topic.

 

[Lion IRC]

How about we take bite-size segments one at a time?

Sure, that is what I said....one or two points at a time.

Do you agree that IF the universe/multiverse/megaverse had a beginning then speculation as to the type of cause (personal/deliberate/spontaneous) is not unreasonable?

Speculation is fine. I don't think that anyone objects to speculation, proposing new ideas or hypothesis....the issue is with being convinced of the truth of ones belief where there is insufficient evidence to justify a belief/ conviction. That being the definition of faith, and the issue raised in this thread.

Did you just say there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that the universe began to exist? WHOAH!!!! We ain't relying on the bible to support that premise my friend.

 

[Copernicus]

It is really difficult to get remez's point because of the way he tries to express it. I'll try to help.

For those trying to follow the discussion, but find remez's use of acronyms confusing:

KCA = Kalam Cosmological Argument
FTA = Fine Tuning Argument

For those who don't know what "premise 2" is, here is a condensed version of William Lane Craig and James Sinclair's 5-step argument in support of the KCA (See Common Sense Atheism):

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
4. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
5. Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.

All of us can probably agree to the first three steps in the argument, although some might want to quibble over premise 2 (since, at a very minimum, we are only talking about the observable universe). The "evidence" that remez keeps referring to seems to be just the evidence that supports premise 2, but his real argument is the one most of us reject--step 4. That is the step where we find all of the gobbledygook about the First Cause having to be "beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, etc." Remez didn't go through all of that as laid out by Craig and Lewis, but he is operating from their playbook. The point is that nothing in step 4 counts as "evidence" of anything at all. We just have scientific evidence for step 2. The argument beyond step 3 is where the real debate belongs.

The Craig & Lewis argument has been the subject of debate in academia and on the internet for many years, so you can find endless amounts of material on it with Google along with quite a few refutations by real and self-appointed philosopher atheists. It still comes down to a question of equivocation on the word "universe". Do we just exist in a  pocket universe? That could mean that there is some kind of greater "universe" or "metaverse" in which our observable universe is embedded and the Big Bang was a caused event. A lot of physicists seem to like that approach to cosmology. Given that assumption, then Craig and Sinclair's KCA simply falls apart. But there are many other problems with the argument, not the least of which are the very wild jumps of imagination that shoehorn a "personal creator" into the later stages.

 

[Lion IRC]

I think you (or the person you're quoting) botched premise #4

 

[Copernicus]

I think you botched premise #4

I merely copied the one from the source I cited from an online atheist blogger, Luke Muehlhauser of Common Sense Atheism. However, by all means, give us your improved version. I'm not wedded to Muelhauser's particular wording or summary, and my point still stands about the equivocation on the word "universe". My objective was just to put some context in that would help people understand the references in remez's post.

 

[Lion IRC]

For me, the steps are;

1. Events are either caused or uncaused.(eg. A billiard ball either spontaneously/inexplicably starts moving all by itself or something causes it to begin to move.)

2. The universe is an event (Big Bang)

3. At this point we can object that the universe either (a) isn't an 'event' because it has always existed even before the Big Bang, or (b) it had no cause because it happened spontaneously. NOTE. Only a past-eternal God would know if either of these unsupported beliefs were true.

4a. A past eternal, perpetual motion universe is metaphysically possible but is it parsimonious to believe that everything has already happened an infinite number of times like Groundhog Day yet here we are still wondering about stuff? How long do we have to wait for time travellers to show up? Surely we have had long enough to invent a time machine.
4b. Purely spontaneous uncaused events like billiard balls moving around a table unpredictably (like magic) is metaphysically possible but is it more plausible than the premise it would otherwise negate?

5. A personal (intentional) cause has much better explanatory power for moving billiard balls around unpredictably.
Kalam wins the argument.

 

[Copernicus]

For me, the steps are;

1. Events are either caused or uncaused.(eg. A billiard ball either spontaneously/inexplicably starts moving all by itself or something causes it to begin to move.)

2. The universe is an event (Big Bang)

3. At this point we can object that the universe either (a) isn't an 'event' because it has always existed even before the Big Bang, or (b) it had no cause because it happened spontaneously. NOTE. Only a past-eternal God would know if either of these unsupported beliefs were true.

4a. A past eternal, perpetual motion universe is metaphysically possible but is it parsimonious to believe that everything has already happened an infinite number of times like Groundhog Day yet here we are still wondering about stuff? How long do we have to wait for time travellers to show up? Surely we have had long enough to invent a time machine.
4b. Purely spontaneous uncaused events like billiard balls moving around a table unpredictably (like magic) is metaphysically possible but is it more plausible than the premise it would otherwise negate?

5. A personal (intentional) cause has much better explanatory power for moving billiard balls around unpredictably.
Kalam wins the argument.

Well, that isn't exactly the Kalam argument that Craig and Sinclair proposed. In fact, it is far less coherent, given that you sprinkle in a few rhetorical questions and other gratuitous assumptions and musings along the way. The atheist blogger's version was quite a bit more logical and coherent.

If you are going to invoke parsimony, than the existence of a perpetual physical reality is far more parsimonious than assuming that physical reality itself, not just the visible universe, had a beginning. When you do that, you are forced to invent a cause to explain the putative beginning. For some reason, you seem to think that the newly-imagined cause must have been a sentient, intentional being and that such a being would be needed to explain the unpredictability of events in our universe. A far more parsimonious assumption would be that the unpredictability has to do with the nature of physical chaotic interactions in the stuff that physical reality consists of. Otherwise, you then have to explain how it would make more sense for a sentient being to have been waiting around (forever?) before suddenly coming up with the idea of creating a physical reality that had not previously existed in its experience. And then it came up with a physical reality in which sentient beings only came to exist as creations of chaotic deterministic interactions in this physical reality it had created, because it would be a uniquely uncreated sentient being.

Oy! Now I'm getting a cognitive dissonance headache! How do you endure it? Opioids?

 

[bilby]

Sure, that is what I said....one or two points at a time.



Speculation is fine. I don't think that anyone objects to speculation, proposing new ideas or hypothesis....the issue is with being convinced of the truth of ones belief where there is insufficient evidence to justify a belief/ conviction. That being the definition of faith, and the issue raised in this thread.

Did you just say there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that the universe began to exist? WHOAH!!!! We ain't relying on the bible to support that premise my friend.

If he didn't, he should have. That claim is not supported by any evidence. We simply do not know what happened before the Planck Epoch. Anyone claiming otherwise must provide compelling evidence for his claim.

 

[DBT]

Again that is why I was only focused on the single premise 2 of the KCA. You jumped over to the FTA and mixed that reasoning with the KCA to rebut the entire KCA. When I pointed this out to you, you then claimed I was the one jumping around to purposely confuse the issue.

My case to the context of this thread was specifically ...... that I have evidence for my beliefs. That's it. I could have chosen several different pieces of evidence to refute your claim here .....

Faith is a belief, conviction, held without the support of evidence, sometimes held even in the face of evidence to the contrary....

.... I chose to specifically provide the evidence I had for the reason of p2 of the KCA which is just one argument that leads to the conclusion that God exists. It was very narrow. I'm not trying to convince you that the argument is compelling. I certainly find the argument compelling and it has physical evidence to support p2. Thus I have evidence for what I believe. I concluded this with you back in post 63. Thus I don't hold my belief without evidence. My beliefs are not blind. Should the universe be proven to be eternal my belief would surely be in need of revision, no doubt. So yes atheism would be back on the table of possibilities.

As for the rest ..................

I did not see your evidence. Perhaps it was because I did not recognize what you presented as being evidence that supports the proposition of Creation.

Creation?

It supports p2 of the KCA and that you did agree to........... lets review the case from posts 16 through 63.

your post 16...

Where is this evidence?

my reply 36......

Specifically with regards to the universe beginning to exist.
CMB, second law of thermodynamics, GTR, temp ripples in the CMB seeding galaxies, redshift, all of the spacetime theorems specifically the BGV theorem, observed time dilation in gamma-ray bursts, SBBM, the decay times of distant supernova light intensity, H-He abundance, inflation, etc.

From an atheistic cosmologist….

"It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning." - Alexander Vilenkin

your response to that in post 61

....... According to the evidence, yes, the universe does indeed appear to have had a beginning 13 billion years ago.....in its present form,

My response to that specifically concluded ...... post 63...............

Again that was my point……I do have evidence that the universe began to exist, thus I have evidence for my belief that God exists. Hold on…..I’m not asserting that a beginning universe proves God exists, only that is evidence that supports my belief that he exists because the universe then needs a transcendent cause. How many worldviews purport a transcendent cause?

Case Closed I have evidence for what I believe. I should have stopped right there.

But.....

Since then you have been attempting to redirect the debate to counter the KCA in its entirety. Which is a related issue for sure, but not the case I was here making. So having made my case with you, I went along with defending the KCA, but then you started blaming me for getting off point. I had already made my point. I was continuing on with this other issue out of courtesy to you and for the thrill of the debate.

Now you are complaining you don't have enough time to properly address the topic and are blaming me for purposely trying to confuse the issue. So what is it you really want?

further from your last post......

It is not the evidence that leads to a conclusion. The evidence supports the reasoning that leads to the conclusion. Hence premise 2 is overtly supported by the science I provided.

Thus I have evidence to support the reasoning for what I believe. What is so hard about that?

I understand what you are saying, but do not agree that you have evidence that supports your reasoning.

but again your post in 61.........

....... According to the evidence, yes, the universe does indeed appear to have had a beginning 13 billion years ago.....in its present form,

.......but that is precisely p2 of the KCA. Thus you understood that I presented evidence that reasonably infers a past finite universe, which was my point. I don't have a blind faith.

So what is it you want?

What you seem to be assuming NOW is that my evidence has to pass your subjective epistemological standard to count as evidence. Well you aren't the final authority of that by any means. Thus you would have to make a case as to why that should be the case. I'm ready to explore that epistemological red herring, if that is what you choose, but don't blame me for getting off the topic.

So much for one or two points at a time.


It is not ''case closed'' because you claim it.

Your assumptions are flawed for the given reason; each and every point that you base an assumption has other possibilities, has other explanations, or it is simply something unknown.

Just because the origin of something is unknown and there is no current explanation for it, it is not justified to assume that it is the work of a Creator.

There lies the false assumptions.

The honest position being, we do not know how the universe came about, whether it is a part of a greater system, colliding branes, matter/energy eternal, etc, or something as yet unimagined.

Your assumption is but one of many possibilities, therefore neither supported by what is understood or what is not understood.

Which is why religious beliefs fall into the category of faith.

 

[DBT]

Sure, that is what I said....one or two points at a time.



Speculation is fine. I don't think that anyone objects to speculation, proposing new ideas or hypothesis....the issue is with being convinced of the truth of ones belief where there is insufficient evidence to justify a belief/ conviction. That being the definition of faith, and the issue raised in this thread.

Did you just say there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that the universe began to exist? WHOAH!!!! We ain't relying on the bible to support that premise my friend.

Your reply does not appear to relate to what I said. I have repeatedly said that it has yet to be determined whether time had a beginning or not, hence, nobody can claim to know.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

For me, the steps are;

1. Events are either caused or uncaused.(eg. A billiard ball either spontaneously/inexplicably starts moving all by itself or something causes it to begin to move.)

2. The universe is an event (Big Bang)

3. At this point we can object that the universe either (a) isn't an 'event' because it has always existed even before the Big Bang, or (b) it had no cause because it happened spontaneously. NOTE. Only a past-eternal God would know if either of these unsupported beliefs were true.

4a. A past eternal, perpetual motion universe is metaphysically possible but is it parsimonious to believe that everything has already happened an infinite number of times like Groundhog Day yet here we are still wondering about stuff? How long do we have to wait for time travellers to show up? Surely we have had long enough to invent a time machine.
4b. Purely spontaneous uncaused events like billiard balls moving around a table unpredictably (like magic) is metaphysically possible but is it more plausible than the premise it would otherwise negate?

5. A personal (intentional) cause has much better explanatory power for moving billiard balls around unpredictably.
Kalam wins the argument.

Kalam is an argument. Winning an argument isn't much to hang a hat on.

But Kalam loses because it states the cosmos had a beginning, which is nothing but pure invention. How does Kalam demonstrate this claim?

 

[Juma]

1. Events are either caused or uncaused.(eg. A billiard ball either spontaneously/inexplicably starts moving all by itself or something causes it to begin to move.)

events? event is a part of an observation. not something real. you divide your observation into events, not reality.
the observation of the motion of a billiard ball that first is at rest and then moves is just that, an observation.
now how do we explain that observation? if it started to move by the ridiculusly unprobable reason that the thermic movement of the balls parts became sufficently aligned then that was the cause, if it was because quantum effects then that was the cause. there is nothing such as an uncaused event. even the decay of an particle into energy and other particles is caused.

being a particle that can decay is such a cause.

ah, you say, i meant external causes.

yes, but those are special cases.

a billiard ball is just so big that quantum effects are very rare.

but why do a billiard ball move when hit by another? because of the electric forces between atoms: the changes in the electric field affects the wavefunction for the electrons, neutrons and protons. but the electric field always affects the wavefunctions... so what is the real difference between a ball that starts to move when looking att the ”cause”?
not much. its just a change from rest to movementof the system of atoms that we call an billiard ball.

if you look at the details you see nothing but a constant flow of interaction. the ”events” is what we call the recognizable features. the things our bodies makes us see: motion of large objects. colours etc.

 

[Lion IRC]

Kalam is an argument. Winning an argument isn't much to hang a hat on.

But Kalam loses because it states the cosmos had a beginning, which is nothing but pure invention. How does Kalam demonstrate this claim?

That the universe had a beginning is a religiously neutral proposition. Science doesn't care if the Big Bang was spontaneous or caused by an impersonal prior event or by the volition of a deliberate action.

 

[Lion IRC]

Global Warming - if it's not spontaneous and not inevitable - has a prior cause.
Do atheists get all worked up over the possibility that it might be the result of sentient personal beings?
No. So why are theists so trenchant in their belief that the Big Bang wasn't deliberately caused?

 

[braces_for_impact]

I just wanted to drop this in here from our other thread, because in the context of this one, I think it's illustrative.

Originally posted by Lion IRC

You don't have to think about it.
You can just accept it's a glorious mystery.

 

[Opoponax]

Global Warming - if it's not spontaneous and not inevitable - has a prior cause.
Do atheists get all worked up over the possibility that it might be the result of sentient personal beings?
No. So why are theists so trenchant in their belief that the Big Bang wasn't deliberately caused?

Because there's no evidence of a "deliberate" cause of the big bang.

Because we can live with "I don't know" until some convincing evidence is offered.

Further, nobody debates that there isn't a cause for the planet periodically heating and cooling, and we have pretty damn good ideas as to why this happens--not just for the recent warming trend, but for climate changes that have taken place throughout nearly the entirety of earth's history. And none of those ideas involve some god plugging in a portable space heater or air conditioner and setting it down really close to the planet.

 

[Copernicus]

Global Warming - if it's not spontaneous and not inevitable - has a prior cause.
Do atheists get all worked up over the possibility that it might be the result of sentient personal beings?
No. So why are theists so trenchant in their belief that the Big Bang wasn't deliberately caused?

Did you mean "atheists" instead of "theists" in your last sentence? Theists believe that it was deliberately caused. What we have been asking is why theists are so trenchant in their belief that the Big Bang WAS deliberately caused.

 

[abaddon]

Unbelievers being "trenchant" about it comes from wanting evidence better than word games. The rationalizations for EoG are quite visibly based on how some metaphysical types of personality feel their "soul" must have a purpose/meaning supplied from outside the universe. And on nothing else, because the traces of God are visible nowhere but in these people's dogmatic insistence. He's just barely there in the arguments themselves...

Tossing reasons at a story doesn't make faith or "trust" in a metaphysical entity reasonable. Theism is not a plausible explanation, because there's no coherent definition for this entity. Theists can skip whether universes begin or not until after they've made the case for God more directly... God doesn't become plausible because anyone's at a loss to explain the universe (or anything else) without God.

https://youtu.be/TgisehuGOyY?t=393

 

[Lion IRC]

I just wanted to drop this in here from our other thread, because in the context of this one, I think it's illustrative.

Originally posted by Lion IRC

You don't have to think about it.
You can just accept it's a glorious mystery.

Responding to this dishonest quote-mining.

The point I was making relates to a dogma held by the Catholic Church which the Church itself agrees is a mystery. I was calling it into question because it IS questionable.
I then freely admitted that one can, if they prefer, accept it as described - a sacred mystery.
Sacred mysteries don't require apologetics and frankly speaking... #pearls/swine

The notions that global warming has a cause or that the universe had a beginning are NOT mysterious woo.
And so I ask again, what is so objectionable (to atheists) about a cause being the product of personal volition?
Why so adamant that the Big Bang was either spontaneous OR inevitable?