The 6 Major Points of Dawkins in his book 'The God Delusion'

[rifleman]

(Sorry: I mean ID is wrong" [above])

No time to address your massive post right now, but here's one that jumped out at me:

You said:

"When you posit that God is the First Cause you will always get the question, “Who created God?” A logical question, but based on a false assumption. We posit that only that which is finite needs a cause.

You previously said that if it exists, therefore it had to have been created. Here though, you're suddenly dropping that requirement.

If everything needed a cause then you would have to posit an infinite series of causes. If you have an infinite series of causes over an infinite period of time, you would never have come to this moment because it would take an infinite numbers of moments in order to get here. God by definition is infinite and does not require a cause nor had a beginning because to have a “beginning” only makes sense within the confines of time, but if God is the creator of space, time and matter, then He is outside space, time and matter.

Thus goes the faulty ID argument. Who says we're not outside the constraints of space, time and matter as well? Just as a hypothetical argument, let's speculate for a moment that there really is no God. Then how did we get here? I mean, we ARE hear, right? How, if there is no God? "Somehow" is the answer for now. And one day we may well know. Perhaps it will take an IQ of about 350, and then, suddently, it will all make perfect sense.

That God exists outside all logic and reality is a Belief of Convenience, and has no basis in observable fact, just like our unprovable Big Bang theory (BTW, no-one asserts it to be an absolute fact, as you suggest goes on in school teachings. Teachers probably cut to the chase and omit the "theory" part, but honest scientists do not. We're still speculating. But we're also looking hard at the evidence trail, so to speak.)

There is no predictable "evidence trail" for Intelligent Design, BTW. Just fervent hope and a lot of placard-carrying parents at schoolborad meetings, where, predictably, they shout down logic. But, for the Big Bang, there is at least some good evidence. It's a bit hard to collect, and yet "collect" we continue to do. As I pointed out at length in my thread about "Prediction Science", IF there really was a Big Bang event, we'd expect to see certain sorts of consequential and predictable evidence. Golly-Gee, we do! Exactly as predicted. Sorta neat, huh?

It always seems so obvious a deflective argument that first-off, Christians say ""you can't have something from nothing!" and they quote the Thermodynamics argument, which has been completety debunked as it applies to creation, but still shows up on AiG because it's too hard for the scientifically illiterate to grasp it's larger meaning. It's easier to just buy into AiG's silly interpretations, which they are rightly famous for, BTW.

But then, in the very next paragraph, they assert that God doesn't need to obey such silly rules, and thus just "always was", with "no beginning and no end". How convenient, but illogical. When cornered, punt.

In other words, don't use logic for the first part of your argument, and then completely abandon it for the second. Makes you look, well, illogical.

I've also said that we may just not be smart enough yet to understand some higher function or formula. You assume, rather arrogantly, that since man has made up some physics constants or laws, that they are true under all situations and conditions. And then you cite conditons where they don't apply. So maybe, they aren't all-encompassing after all , but are a simple subset, such as Newtonian physics is of quantum physics.

Circular logic is so predictable! It keeps repeating itself!

Cheers!

[lkingpinl]

I appreciate your intelligent response rifleman, but I honestly think you need to look more at the full post. I am well aware of the attacks on the cosmological and teleological arguments and we can simply agree to disagree on those points, but you right in saying that we may never have a full understanding on either side of the aisle.

The clincher though is the morality argument. How can you shake the morality argument? I've seen Dawkins explanation of us "dancing to our DNA", but it is simply unfounded. Please review my entire post and we can have a cordial discussion at you leisure. Thank you and God Bless.

[TRANSPONDER]

Your post was to Rifleman so sorry for sticking in my 2c worth. I'm sure the rifleman won't mind.


lkingpin

I then asked, “When you say there is such a thing as good and evil, aren’t you assuming there is a moral law on which to differentiate between good and evil?” Again he replied, “Yes.” So I pursued, “When you assume a moral law aren’t you assuming a moral law giver?” He conceded that as well. So then I told him, “If there is no moral law giver, i.e. no God, then there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, then there is no good. If there is no good, there is no evil.” You see if you hold to an atheist worldview you cannot logically condemn any act as evil. If you are an atheist, the atheist worldview requires that people create their own morality; there is no higher standard than self. Who is to say what is right and wrong? Yet logically how can you deny the existence of moral absolutes? If there is no objective point of moral reference then the atheist has no basis on which to condemn anything.

What's wrong here is the assumption that, because you demand that there must be moral absolutes, a man - made relative morality is dismissed as "no God, then there is no moral law". Yet you pretty much say that there is: "the atheist worldview requires that people create their own morality".

That's just what we do. We have relative morality and we have it religion, too. I know this as there was a long debate on this and one thoughtful theist pointed out that, even with the a priori posposition of (God-given) moral absolutes, we ended up with a lot of relative morality.

That was explained as people ignoring the absolutes. That is, of course a way of explaining away the fact that moral absolutes is what we don't have. The evidence is that man - made morality is what we do have and all we can do with it is to try to widen the consensus so we don't squabble about our various moralities. Insisting that there are inviolable moral absolutes doesn't assist in this process.

That thread however also conceded that there are some pretty universal areas of agreement. This may not be the place to go into it but it looked in the end as though it was more to do with our evolutionary instincts than with any divinely implanted code of right and wrong.

I posted some support for our sharing of instinctive preferences and likes and dislikes with primates and other animals and the thread pretty much ended there as I recall.

The insistence on some sort of implanted moral code is a chimera. It only works by refusing to accept the evidence that man - made morality (whether we like it or not) is what we have and by picking out a preferred moral code (depending on which Holy Book one uses) and saying 'This is It.'

Argument from Moral absolutes is far from a clincher. In fact, pursued to the logical end it is actually an effective argument against.