Mr Harris? Hello. I’m Sue from the insurance company. I’ve come to value your artwork. Oh, yes, hello. Do come in. What a lovely house you have here! Is this the piece you want valued? That’s it, yes. How much did it cost? No idea. It was here when I moved in. It’s fascinating. How …
Category Archives: First Cause arguments
Atheists, why is the universe so orderly? Why is everything not just chaotic?
The universe certainly started out chaotic, with subatomic particles flying every which way at high speeds. But over time certain things happened: Particles collided. Some of them annihilated each other, some of them bounced apart at lower speeds, having lost energy in the collision, and some of them joined together. Those that joined together began …
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Why is belief in God as the First Cause any worse than whatever an atheist would maintain the first cause is?
It’s not ‘worse’ in any moral sense, unless you regard wilful ignorance as immoral. It’s just unevidenced and unhelpful. From a cosmological point of view, ‘Goddidit’ is a dead end. It provides no opportunity for further research, or for exploiting our discoveries in any useful way. It’s the equivalent of saying ‘It happened by magic’ …
Why the Cosmological Argument is a bait-and-switch
Because objects like gods don’t belong in a sequence of events. The cosmological argument rests on a major category mistake; it attempts to describe an object (a god) as a cause. But linguistically, objects cannot be causes or effects. Only events can cause events, and only events can be caused by events. So tracing history back to the origin …
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The ‘First Cause’ argument
There are three major flaws with the first cause argument as it is generally presented: It assumes that objects can be causes. But that’s not the way language works. When we talk about causes and effects we are talking about events ‘A god’ can’t be a cause, and nor can any other object. A god’s actions might be …
Has the Kalam cosmology argument ever been seriously rebuffed by an atheist?
Yes, repeatedly. The Kalam as it is normally phrased starts with an assumption which is unsupported by evidence. In fact it’s not clear whether anything could possibly count as evidence for it. It uses unclear terms like ‘began to exist’, which have no strict meaning in physics or cosmology. We simply don’t know what the argument means …
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Why does William Lane Craig always win on the point of the Kalam cosmology argument if the argument is so weak according to atheists?
The main audience for religious debates is believers who want to be emotionally confirmed in their faith. Craig achieves that for them, and that makes them feel good. There is no question of his ‘winning’ in the sense of providing any credible arguments for theism. The Kalam argument has been comprehensively refuted many times over. …
In my philosophy class, we learned an argument for the existence of god -there must have been a “first first”. It seems undeniable. What are some arguments against this theory?
That’s not an argument, it’s an assertion. Presumably it’s based on the idea that we can usually find a cause for the events around us when we look for one, hence we can assume that every event is caused. And all the objects we see around us appear to have been made out of the bits of …
Jon's Quora content 