Religious apologists who use the "First Cause" Argument - please read

[ancient warrior]

Originally Posted by Sci Fi Fan

Yes, we've all heard of it before:

"The universe is ordered and rational. There are a set of deterministic laws that allow for life. Everything we know would be impossible if a universal constant were off by one billionth of a percentage point. Such order could not have come by accident. Ergo, God must exist."

This argument, appears to be so elegant and simplistic as to make atheism debunk. In reality, it's incoherent enough to allow for literally dozens of different avenues of rebuttal. I'll just list a few.

1. This proves nothing about any particular religion. It does not prove Christianity. It does not prove Islam. It does not prove Hinduism. It does not prove any of these any more than it proves ancient Greek myth. It only "proves" deism.

2. This proves nothing about the Creator's morality or amorality, or about the existence of an afterlife, or about any sort of special place we have in the cosmos; perhaps the Creator set the universe in motion and then did nothing; in fact, this explanation would better fit the observed evidence, given that the universe is deterministic and there is no evidence of God's current intervention.

3. Here's the kicker: adding in a Creator serves nothing. You can apply the same logic to prove that there must be a Creator of the Creator; who made God? Religious persons constantly exempt God from this regression, claiming that their deity is the "first cause". But why can't the universe be the first cause? This way, no extra variable of literally infinite complexity (ie: God) is added, and the end result is actually simpler.

The usual result is that something complex could not have sprung from something simple, which indicates a complete lack of understanding of Occam's Razor. The principle of Parsimony states precisely the opposite of what Christians (as an example) have been led to believe. The first cause must be as simple as possible - it's a far smaller question how a universe could just exist than how an infinitely more complex, sentience, omnipotent deity could just exist.

Furthermore, the universe is already known to exist, so using the universe as the first cause introduces no extra variables. Adding in an observable God does. Occam's Razor therefore favors the universe in this regards as well to be the first cause.

4. Further examples of religious texts disregarding parsimony are so numerous as to be uncountable. It is logical to conclude that the Creator is not interventionist and not perfect, for the universe is deterministic and imperfect. Yet the Christian bible, for example, asserts that God is perfect and loving, even though there is no logical reason to believe this, and indeed plenty of reason to disbelieve it. It undergoes a convoluted and arbitrary rationalization of how this conforms with the simple observation of evil and suffering - yet such a rationalization is not logically necessary, because one can just conclude that the Creator (and this is generously assuming that one exists) is indifferent and no complex story is needed.

5. If God really could be logically deduced (which it cannot, given the misunderstandings of Occam's Razor and cherry picking of necessary properties of God needed to give the illusion of "proof"), then his existence would be a matter of Science, not Faith. Christianity should be a scientific institution with lab equipment, but a church that relies on emotions and gut feelings.

RESPONSE:

Interesting. Tell me, do your believe that there was always something in existence? Or the alternate that something originally sprang from nothing?

[LuminousTruth]

If science is such a fanatical religion I call for more faithful in the Agnostic Spirit of Science! At least science, if it was a religion, is actually worth something more for society then a crutch club.

[Horn of ‘83]

Originally Posted by Griffis

Would that be a problem?

I'll assume that's a yes. That seems illogical to me. Such an "accident" is not plausible.