Novel : 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

Turtwig

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

I'm just wondering has any amoral baby-eating boardsie out there got a chance to read this book yet. It's supposedly tries to explore the reason why even though every argument for God is practically refuted people still believe and pose these so called "irrefutable" arguments that no non-believer can deny! Seems like an interesting read to me, but I was wondering if anyone out there had read it.
(Or heard of it?)

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/02/characters-in-search-of-a-soul.php

Sampe from the Appendix. wrote:

1. The Cosmological Argument

1. Everything that exists must have a cause.

2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).

3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.

4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).

5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).

6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).

8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining why God must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

Turtwig

Ok, the Appendix is an absolute goldmine. I've only read the first 3 but this stuff is nice, real nice.

Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. The Cosmological Argument

1. Everything that exists must have a cause.

2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).

3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.

4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).

5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).

6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).

8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining why God must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument

1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").

2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.

3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).

4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).

5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).

6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design

A. The Classical Teleological Argument

1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)

2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)

3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).

4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).

6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.

2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."

3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).

4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).

5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.

6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious Argument from Ignorance:

1.There are things that we cannot explain yet.

2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.

2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).

4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).

5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).

6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).

7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.

8 .God exists.

FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator

1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.

2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).

3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).

4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.

5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).

6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.

7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).

8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.

10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

4. The Argument from The Big Bang

1. The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and energy, but space and time and the laws of physics.

2. The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1).

3. Something outside the universe, including outside its physical laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2).

4. Only God could exist outside the universe.

5. God must have been caused the universe to exist (from 3 & 4).

6. God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from each other. The implication is that if we run the film of the universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract, all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.

FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a "singularity" — the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from nothing.

FLAW 2: The Argument From the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological Argument — it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of "cause" outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also known as the universe) where it no longer makes sense.

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.

3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).

4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4).

6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner.

8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

1. Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry, elegance) to discover the laws of nature.

2. Scientist s could only use aesthetic principles successfully if the laws of nature were intrinsically and objectively beautiful.

3. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful (from 1 & 2).

4. Only a mind-like being with an appreciation of beauty could have designed the laws of nature.

5 . God is the only being with the power and purpose to design beautiful laws of nature.

6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Do we decide an explanation is good because it's beautiful, or do we find an explanation beautiful because it provides a good explanation? When we say that the laws of nature are beautiful, what we are really saying is that the laws of nature are the laws of nature, and thus unify into elegant explanation a vast host of seemingly unrelated and random phenomena. We would find the laws of nature of any lawful universe beautiful. So what this argument boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. And of course any universe that could support the likes of us would have to be lawful. So this argument is another version of the The Anthropic Principle — we live in the kind of universe which is the only kind of universe in which observers like us could live — and thus is subject to the flaws of Argument #5.

FLAW 2: If the laws of the universe are intrinsically beautiful, then positing a God who loves beauty, and who is mysteriously capable of creating an elegant universe (and presumably a messy one as well, though his aesthetic tastes led him not to), makes the universe complex and incomprehensible all over again. This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe is intrinsically elegant and intelligible. (See The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, #35 below.)

7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

1. The universe contains many uncanny coincidences, such as that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed.

2. Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable.

3. The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical explanation.

4. These coincidences are such as to enhance our awed appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.

5. These coincidences must have been designed in order to enhance our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world (from 3 & 4).

6. Only a being with the power to effect such uncanny coincidences and the purpose of enhancing our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world could have arranged these uncanny cosmic coincidences.

7. Only God could be the being with such power and such purpose.

8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 does not follow from Premise 2. The occurrence of the highly improbable can be statistically explained in two ways. One is when we have a very large sample. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after the fact. (There could have been a constellation that forms a square around the moon; there could have been a comet that appeared on January 1, 2000; there could have been a constellation in the shape of a Star of David, etc. etc. etc.) When you consider how many coincidences are possible, the fact that we observe any one coincidence (which we notice after the fact) is not improbably but likely. And let's not forget the statistically improbable coincidences that cause havoc and suffering, rather than awe and wonder, in humans: the perfect storm, the perfect tsunami, the perfect plague, etc.

FLAW 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from Premises 3 and 4 is invalid: an example of the Projection Fallacy, in which we project the workings of our mind onto the world, and assume that our own subjective reaction is the result of some cosmic plan to cause that reaction. The human brain sees patterns in all kinds of random configurations: cloud formations, constellations, tea leaves, inkblots. That is why we are so good at finding supposed coincidences. It is getting things backwards to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see.

COMMENT: Prominent among the uncanny coincidences that figure into this argument are those having to do with numbers. Numbers are mysterious to us because they are not material objects like rocks and tables, but at the same time they seem to be real entities, ones that we can't conjure up with any properties we fancy but that have their own necessary properties and relations, and hence must somehow exist outside us (see The Argument from Our Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30 below). We are therefore likely to attribute magical powers to them. And, given the infinity of numbers and the countless possible ways to apply them to the world, "uncanny coincidences" are bound to occur (see FLAW 1). In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, which has given rise to the mystical art of "gematria," often used to elucidate, speculate, and prophesy about the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences

1. People experience uncanny coincidences in their lives (for example, an old friend calling out of the blue just when you're thinking of him, or a dream about some event that turns out to have just happened, or missing a flight that then crashes).

2. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny).

3. These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability, reveal a significance to our lives.

4. Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen.

5. Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences.

6. God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that daydreams predict the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that don't (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn't call). Likewise, who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn't crash? The vast number of non-events we live through don't make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

FLAW 3: There is an additional strong psychological bias at work here: Every one of us treats his or her own life with utmost seriousness. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to "spread itself on the world," projecting onto objective reality the psychological assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the background like a noise you don't realize you are hearing until it stops. This form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

9. The Argument from Answered Prayers

1. Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and against enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the life of her dying child, and the child recovers.)

2. The odds of the beneficial event happening are enormously slim (from 1).

3. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2).

4. The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God listened to it and made it come true.

5. God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles below, except instead of the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles, #11, below). Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the correlation of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.

FLAW 2: The coincidence of a person praying for the unlikely to happen and its then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here: Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to God to help them and those they love is tragically large), the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument. It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the desperate pleas of some among us — but not by the equally desperate pleas of others among us. Together with The Argument from A Wonderful Life, it appears to be supported by a few cherry-picked examples, but in fact is refuted by the much larger number of counterexamples it ignores: the prayers that go unanswered, the people who do not live wonderful lives. When the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the world at Large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

10. The Argument from A Wonderful Life

1. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way.

2. These people could not have known the right way on their own.

3. These people were shown the right way by something or someone other than themselves (from 2).

4. There was no person showing them the way.

5. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way.

6. Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 & 5).

7. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our conscious lives—from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma—are the end-products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware. So, too, decisions and resolutions can bubble into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them. These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers, #9 above.

11. The Argument from Miracles

1. Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature.

2. Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known or changing the course of human history (from 1).

3. Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2).

4. We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles. (Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.)

5. Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the majority of cases, veridical.

6. The best explanation for why there are so many reports testifying to the same thing is that the reports are true (from 5).

7. The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6).

8. God exists (from 3 & 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts, that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the expense of the others. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below.

FLAW 2: The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." Human testimony may often be accurate, but it is very far from infallible. People are sometimes mistaken; people are sometimes dishonest; people are sometimes gullible — indeed, more than sometimes. Since in order to believe that a miracle has occurred we must believe a law of nature has been violated (something for which we otherwise have the maximum of empirical evidence), and we can only believe it on the basis of the truthfulness of human testimony (which we already know is often inaccurate), then even if we knew nothing else about the event, and had no particular reason to distrust the reports of witness, we would have to conclude that it is more likely that the miracle has not occurred, and that there is an error in the testimony, than that the miracle has occurred. (Hume strengthens his argument, already strong, by observing that religion creates situations in which there are particular reasons to distrust the reports of witnesses. "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.")

COMMENT: The Argument from Miracles covers more specific arguments, such as The Argument from Prophets, The Arguments from Messiahs, and the Argument from Individuals with Miraculous Powers.

12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of Consciousness

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.)

2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw feels" like seeing red or tasting salt.

3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are explained by the basic laws of physics.

4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are not conscious.

5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4).

6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness (from 3 and 5).

7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6).

8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be immaterial (from 7).
9. God is immaterial

10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial kind of being (from 8 and 9).

11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby allowing for morality and meaning.

12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11).

13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Granted, we do not have a theory of neuroscience that explains how consciousness emerges from patterns of neural activity, but to draw theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is inherent in matter. Our physical theories, with their mathematical methodology, have not yet been able to capture this aspect of matter, but that may just be a limitation on our mathematical physical theories. Some physicists have hypothesized that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter, which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought, feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard — the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. Just as our brains do not allow us to visualize four-dimensional objects perhaps our brains do not allow us to understand how subjective experience arises from complex neural activity.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

13. The Argument from The Improbable Self

1. I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as that unique conscious entity that I know as me.

2. I can step outside myself and view my own contingent particularity with astonishment.

3. This astonishment reveals that there must be something that accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am just this, namely, me (from 1 & 2).

4. Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this, since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of things come to be, even (let's assume) why human beings with conscious brains come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings should be me.

5. Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4).

6. God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us.

7. God exists.
FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles the mind, but waving one's hands in the direction of God is no solution. It gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not another.

COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle. There are a vast number of people who could have been born. One's own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives to oneself—same egg, different sperm; different egg, same sperm; different egg, different sperm. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Another analogy: the odds that the phone company would have given you your exact number are minuscule. But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be someone. Now that you're born, it's no mystery why it should be you; you're the one asking the question.

14. The Argument from Survival after Death

1. There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world.

2. A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1)

3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul.
4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 & 3).

5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above).

6. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God's existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The universal experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

1. I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes' Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.

2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).

3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be.

4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 & 3).

5. I survive after my death (from 4)

The argument now proceeds on as in the argument from Survival After Death, only substituting in 'I' for 'a person,' until we get to:
6. God exists.
FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability. The sense in which I can't conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read "My annihilation is inconceivable to me.", which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening— to conceive of oneself not existing!

16. The Argument from Moral Truth

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.)

3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be.

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.

2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).

3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).

4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.

5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 & 4).

6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

18. The Argument from Free Will

1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause.

2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)

3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.

4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do then the very idea of morality is meaningless.

5. Morality is not meaningless.

6. We have free will (from 2- 5).

7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).

8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).

9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.

10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9).

11. God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is it me to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's life is pointless.

2. Human life cannot be pointless.

3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2).

4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence.

5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4)
6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill.

7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.

8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 & 7).

9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don't. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the child's life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of "the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable." It is probably confusions of this sort that give Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years distant from it into the future.

3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2).

4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4).

6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3).

7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity.

8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs.

2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true.

3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic beliefs is that those beliefs are true.

4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very well come up with the same false beliefs. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are universal. Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches. Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and spring instead from unexamined emotions. The fallacy of arguing that if an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

1. Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience.

2. We cannot evaluate the truth of their experiences from the viewpoint of everyday experience (from 1)

3. There is a unanimity among mystics as to what they experience.

4. When there is unanimity among observers as to what they experience, then unless they are all deluded in the same way, the best explanation for their unanimity is that their experiences are true.

5. There is no reason to think that mystics are all deluded in the same way.

6. The best explanation for the unanimity of mystical experience is that what mystics perceive is true (from 4 & 5).

7. Mystical experiences unanimously testify to the transcendent presence of God.

8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 5 is disputable. There is indeed reason to think mystics might be deluded in similar ways. The universal human nature that refuted the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity entails that the human brain can be stimulated in unusual ways that give rise to universal (but not objectively correct) experiences. The fact that we can stimulate the temporal lobes of non-mystics and induce mystical experiences in them is evidence that mystics might indeed all be deluded in similar ways. Certain drugs can also induce feelings of transcendence, such as an enlargement of perception beyond the bounds of effability, a melting of the boundaries of the self, a joyful expansion out into an existence that seems to be all One, with all that Oneness pronouncing Yes upon us. Such experiences, which, as William James points out, are most easily attained by getting drunk, are of the same kind as the mystical: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness." Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of drunkenness because we know what caused them. The fact that the same effects can overcome a person when we know what caused them (and hence don't call the experience "mystical") — is reason to suspect that the causes of mystical experiences also lie within internal excitations of the brain having nothing to do with perception.

FLAW 2: The struggle to put the ineffable contents of abnormal experiences into language inclines the struggler toward pre-existing religious language, which is the only language that most of us have been exposed to which overlaps with the unusual sensations of an altered state of consciousness. This observation casts doubt on Premise 7.See also The Argument from Sublimity, #34 below.

23. The Argument from Holy Books

1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God.

2. The word of God is necessarily true.

3. The word of God reveals the existence of God.

4. God exists.

FLAW 1: This is a circular argument if ever there was one. The first three premises cannot be maintained unless one independently knows the very conclusion to be proved, namely that God exists.

FLAW 2: A glance at the world's religions shows that there are numerous books and scrolls and doctrines and revelations that all claim to reveal the word of God. But they are mutually incompatible. Should I believe that Jesus is my personal savior? Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? Should I believe that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali, the prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima, ought to have been the first caliph, or that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali was the fourth and last caliph? Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? And on and on it goes. Only the most arrogant provincialism could allow someone to believe that the holy documents that happen to be held sacred by the clan he was born into are true, while all the documents held sacred by the clans he wasn't born into are false.

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice — bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people.

2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may prevail.

3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2).

4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge.

5. The Perfect Judge is God.

6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3 without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.
25. The Argument from Suffering

1. There is much suffering in this world.

3. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is a demanded by human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering, moral choice would not exist.

4.Whatever suffering cannot be explained as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 & 3).

5. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them "the virtues of suffering."

6. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues of suffering (from 5).

7. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit from suffering.

8. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony.

9. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8).

10 There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from 2 and 9).

11. Only a being who has a sense of purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10).

12. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours.

13. God exists.

FLAW: This argument is a sorrowful one, since it highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering. The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful deity. It is only the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, embodied in Premise 2, that could make us presume that what is psychologically intolerable cannot be the case.

26. The Argument from the Survival of The Jews

1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code

2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood.

3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).

4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3).

5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).

6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews.

7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The fact that the Jews, after the d

Dades

Some good stuff there!

Any believers want to tackle the refutations? :pac:

Antbert

Dades wrote: »

Some good stuff there!

Any believers want to tackle the refutations? :pac:

Could be worth posting on the Christianity forum. Although they get grumpy when you do stuff like that.

Can't think why.

*Briefly remembers appearance of "You DO believe in God" thread on A&A*

Turtwig

Antbert wrote: »

*Briefly remembers appearance of "You DO believe in God" thread on A&A*

Hmm, that thread was obviously before my time.
*Searches for it*

Antbert

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055798315

Turtwig

Antbert wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055798315

Oh sweet God, I remember that one now, it was during my time. Oh the horror of it all!

aidan24326

Malty_T wrote: »

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

I'm just wondering has any amoral baby-eating boardsie out there got a chance to read this book yet. It's supposedly tries to explore the reason why even though every argument for God is practically refuted people still believe and pose these so called "irrefutable" arguments that no non-believer can deny! Seems like an interesting read to me, but I was wondering if anyone out there had read it.
(Or heard of it?)

Not sure if this one would really be that interesting Malty. From a quick look through your mammoth post, it seems many of the arguments put forward by this author are the same stuff we keep hearing over and over again from theists with very poor reasoning abilities. I don't know how that happened so it had to be god. Couldn't possibly have been anything else. That's usually what it boils down to.

These arguments invariably include alot of baseless presumptions, logical fallacies, and all sorts of mental jumping through hoops to arrive at a conclusion they've already decided on beforehand. Rather than being an attempt to reason your way to a viable conclusion, it's an attempt to justify whatever happens to be the conclusion you like best.

Turtwig

aidan24326 wrote: »

Not sure if this one would really be that interesting Malty. From a quick look through your mammoth post, it seems many of the arguments put forward by this author are the same stuff we keep hearing over and over again from theists with very poor reasoning abilities. I don't know how that happened so it had to be god. Couldn't possibly have been anything else. That's usually what it boils down to.

These arguments invariably include alot of baseless presumptions, logical fallacies, and all sorts of mental jumping through hoops to arrive at a conclusion they've already decided on beforehand. Rather than being an attempt to reason your way to a viable conclusion, it's an attempt to justify whatever happens to be the conclusion you like best.

You missed the point of the book. The book tries to explore the dynamic as to why religion always seems to have the upper hand in the face of such intellectual and logical poverty. There's clearly something else at work in the human conditioning and the novel tries to explore the "psychology of religion".
That's my understanding of it anyway.

Sam Vimes

Malty_T wrote: »

You missed the point of the book. The book tries to explore the dynamic as to why religion always seems to have the upper hand in the face of such intellectual and logical poverty. There's clearly something else at work in the human conditioning and the novel tries to explore the "psychology of religion".
That's my understanding of it anyway.

Exactly. There's something strange going on when someone can say with a straight face that the way to convince yourself of christianity is to begin with the assumption that god exists and then everything in the bible seems reasonable without realising that if the god you're assuming is some kind of generic creator it makes every supernatural claim in history equally reasonable and if you're assuming the specific christian god then you're just begging the question

Rev Hellfire

Life is too short to be reading books like that.

I mean once you've made your mind up why do you keep needing to read this stuff.

Sam Vimes

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

Life is too short to be reading books like that.

I mean once you've made your mind up why do you keep needing to read this stuff.

I refer you to my sig

Turtwig

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

Life is too short to be reading books like that.

I mean once you've made your mind up why do you keep needing to read this stuff.

I find the science behind Religion, its evolution and its psychology to be fascinating. I mean if I perfect my understanding of it then I'm one step closer to my ultimate plan of world domination.:D
*Evil laugh*

marco_polo

Malty_T wrote: »

Ok, the Appendix is an absolute goldmine. I've only read the first 3 but this stuff is nice, real nice.

,,,,
[/I]

Summary in ten words or less? :pac:

Myksyk

Is that officially the longest post ever posted on Boards?

iUseVi

Myksyk wrote: »

Is that officially the longest post ever posted on Boards?

I dunno but I bet only one in a one hundred will read all of it. But thanks Malty, we can refer the Christians here!

stevejazzx

Myksyk wrote: »

Is that officially the longest post ever posted on Boards?

@ some 16,254 words I'd say so. I thought there was a limit?
Oh and I read a good chunk of it, it is nice but that ground is well trodden.

Wacker

Remember that insane post by the guy complaining about Ryan Tubridy and Dara O'Brien (or whatever - I don't watch TV) that was going on about Joe Coleman and the apparition in the stump? Was that longer, or did it just feel longer?

Turtwig

Wacker wrote: »

Remember that insane post by the guy complaining about Ryan Tubridy and Dara O'Brien (or whatever - I don't watch TV) that was going on about Joe Coleman and the apparition in the stump? Was that longer, or did it just feel longer?

It probably was, but mine was quality and resourceful.:D

Dades

stevejazzx wrote: »

it is nice but that ground is well trodden.

Should feel right at home here then!

robindch

marco_polo wrote: »

Summary in ten words or less? :pac:

God?

No.

johnny_ultimate

Been meaning to read this alright. While I enjoy the rants of Dawkins or Hitchens (reading God is Not Great at the moment, and it is entertaining and logical, though angry) I think a more probing, muted work of fiction would be appealing. While it is hard to argue with the scientific / social arguments against God / religion (well, people will certainly try) this book sounds like an alternative take on a crisis of faith.

I'd read the appendix pasted here, but I think the glare of the laptop screen would melt my eyes in the process :pac:

aidan24326

Malty_T wrote: »

You missed the point of the book. The book tries to explore the dynamic as to why religion always seems to have the upper hand in the face of such intellectual and logical poverty. There's clearly something else at work in the human conditioning and the novel tries to explore the "psychology of religion".
That's my understanding of it anyway.

Having only had to time to scan it initially I misunderstood somewhat. I thought it was a guy actually making these arguments but now I see it's someone asking why these arguments are accepted by so many people despite their obvious flaws. That right?

I do think the psychology behind religious belief is interesting, why some people feel such a strong need to believe something they will wreak havoc on logic and reasoning in order to do so.

johnny_ultimate

Just finished reading this book, and I'd strongly recommend it as a self proclaimed "work of fiction" about atheism, faith and academia. The previously posted 36 arguments are a fascinating appendix, but the novel itself is a surprisingly funny and touching dissection of the themes. Particularly involving is a subplot about a young mathematical genius, unable to truly engage with his natural talents due to the fact that he is destined to succeed his father as the head of an insular Hasadic Jewish sect. It's an intelligent way to tackle issues such as the persistence of ideas over generations, and the rituals of belief. It's not entirely cynical - Goldstein does take time to capture the sometimes hypnotic and memorable nature of these rituals. However, the academia parts of the story particularly are very biting (a colourful parody of narrow minded professors discouraging independent thought is very funny).

The 36 Arguments posted earlier are a fun 'gimmick' of sorts, but this is an excellent novel in it's own rights, worth checking out!

Zillah

Sticky thread, close forum.

Dave!

FYI that's Steven Pinker's missus

Jammy bitch! err, hang on, maybe not