Does God Exist? [XIII vs Okmin]

[XIII]

Topic: Does God Exist?

Debaters:

Affirmative by: XIII
Negative by: Okmin

Rules: One opening statement each then it's a free-for-all

[XIII]

Greetings! Before I begin, allow me to introduce myself. I am a Christian hailing from the Philippines. As a Christian, I believe that God exists and that He has revealed Himself in the person of His son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

While this may hardly seem worthy of mentioning, I believe it would nevertheless be a helpful reminder for us all and anyone who wishes to engage in a debate. To conduct an honest debate, it is necessary that we set aside our preconceptions and our biases and consider that arguments of our opponent just as we would our own. I ask only that you look at this arguments that we will both present analytically and objectively, uncolored by preconception and bias.

Accordingly, I am going to defend just two basic contentions:

1. There are good grounds for believing that God exists.
2. There are no good grounds for believing that God does not exist.

Please note that I make no claims about the Bible is inspired, let alone inerrant. I intend to defend the Bible just as it historically was: just a bunch of ancient documents coming down from 1st Century Palestine.

Thank you and God bless.

[Okmin]

What he said, except the opposite.

I'll elaborate. I am an atheist originally from Maryland but currently living in Louisiana after spending almost a decade in Singapore. While I don't go around trying to force my beliefs on people, I do enjoy a good debate and I am firmly convinced that God does not exist. On the subject of Jesus, the actual person most likely existed, but I believe that he was neither the son of God nor was God. I feel that I should explain my views on religion in a bit more depth -- I do not believe that religion is a bad thing, nor do I necessarily believe that all religious people are misguided. But that's not the point of this debate. Moving on.

I fully agree with XIII on the second paragraph in his post. We will not be agreeing on much through the course of this debate, so it's good that we can at least agree on the rules.

Now, to address his two points, I believe:
1. There are no good grounds for believing that God exists.
2. There are good grounds for believing that God does not exist.

I'll go a step further and define good grounds as rational/logical reasons that involve things other than pure personal conviction and scripture.

And on the subject of the Bible, if you're going to defend it like that, we might as well leave it out since there's nothing religious involved if you make no claims as to it being divinely inspired.

Fire at will.

[XIII]

Excellent. We're up for a good debate, it seems to me.

Remember that in my opener, I said that I would debate two basic contentions, that there are good grounds for for believing in theism and that there are no good grounds for believing in atheism. I can't defend my second contention without attacking strawmen so the whole focus of this post will be my first contention.

Are there good reasons for believing that theism, the belief that God exists, is true?

I believe there are plenty (Alvin Plantinga, oft-described as the greatest living Christian Philosopher, lists at least two dozen¹) but for the purposes of this debate, I intend to focus on just three.


I. The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Arguably the most profound question in all philosophy is the question of why anything exists, of why there is something, anything really, rather than nothing. Most of us have come to a point in life where we ask ourselves, "Why do I exist?", "Why does anything exist?". Typically, the atheistic answer has been that the universe is just is, that it has always existed. Recent advances in cosmology however have done much to cast doubt on this claim, in addition to the philosophical arguments against the infinitude of the universe given by Al-Ghazali.

Atheists thus find themselves in a very uncomfortable position of defending the thesis that the universe came from nothing. Surely though, this makes no sense? Ex nihilo, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. This is rooted upon a very deep metaphysical intuition inherent to all of us: our intuition that effects do not arise without causes. An intuition that is absolutely core to our very best scientific understanding of the world around us, a principle that Kanitscheider calls, "the most successful ontological commitment that was a guiding line of research since Epicurus and Lucretius, a metaphysical hypothesis which has proved so fruitful in every corner of science that we are surely well-advised to try as hard as we can to eschew processes of absolute origin"².

We can now formalize this argument as the Kalam Cosmological Argument championed by Craig:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

It is then a very simple matter of inference that this cause must be uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful and lastly, and most remarkably, personal. It must be personal in order to bring about a temporal effect from a changeless cause.


II. Moral Argument

“The central question about moral and ethical principles concerns their ontological foundation.
If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground,
are they purely ephemeral?”³

Does naturalism furnish us with any warrant for thinking that our moral beliefs are true? Does evolution? If it doesn't, is Nietzsche correct then when he asserted that, “There are altogether no moral facts”?

Most formulations of the Moral Argument takes Nietzsche's assertion as one of it's premises but then goes on to argue that moral facts do exist and that therefore God too exists. For example, take Craig's formulation which I attempted to defend in a thread on the EMM. For this debate however, I am going to go with Mark Lindville's formulation of the argument where he argues argues that theists can, where naturalists cannot, offer a framework on which our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted.

Evolution, as a system, is fitness-aimed rather than truth-aimed. Morality then is a 'useful fiction' designed as nothing more than beneficial aids in our struggle for survival. Homo sapiens thus evolved a sort of 'herd-morality' than in time eventually evolved into the ethical systems that we have today. If for some reason, rape becomes conducive to our survival as a species then that is what evolution would fashion for us to believe as moral, as Charles Darwin, himself, explains:

"If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering."⁴

As Sommers and Rosenberg have put it, "“if our best theory of why people believe P does not require that P is true, then there are no grounds to believe P is true”⁵. We thus have an undercutting defeater against our thinking that our moral beliefs are true. We can thus formalize this as Lindville's Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism (EN).

1. If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
2. If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.
3. There is moral knowledge.
4. Therefore, EN is false.

III. A Historical Argument for the Historicity of Jesus' Resurrection

Jesus of Nazareth is perhaps the single most influential person in all of history. He has for two millennia touched and influenced the lives of millions, if not billions, of people from Christians, to Muslims, to Hindus and to Atheists alike. But who was Jesus truly? I believe, like Paul, that the key to answering this question lies in the fact of His purported Resurrection.

";and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins."
1 Corinthians 15:14-17

Traditionally, most Christians have taken the matter of Christ's Resurrection as something to be taken simply by faith but remarkably, according to Craig there are three historical facts about Jesus recognized by a wide majority of historians that is most plausibly explained by the truth of Jesus' Resurrection.


Fact 1: The Fact of Jesus' Empty Tomb

“By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”⁶

1. The empty tomb is also multiply attested in independent early sources. An account is given in Mark, the shortest and earliest of the gospels, (Mark 16:1–8), while similar accounts is given in all the other Gospels,(Luke 24:1–11), (Matthew 28:1–7) and (John 20:1–18). Moreover, Mark's Passion source probably did not end in the burial since the burial and empty tomb stories are really one story being linked by grammatical and linguistic ties.

Even further, Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, quotes from an extremely early Christian tradition referring to Christ's burial and resurrection where he implies the empty tomb. It's also mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2.29; 13.36). There are yet more but space precludes me from bringing them up.

2. The Markan story is simple and lacks legendary development. Mark’s account is remarkably straightforward and unembellished by theological or apologetic motifs likely to characterize a later legendary account. As Craig explains,

"The resurrection itself is not witnessed or described, and there is no reflection on Jesus’ triumph over sin and death, no use of Christological titles, no quotation of fulfilled prophecy, no description of the Risen Lord. Some critics might stumble at the presence of the angel, but really there is no reason to think that the tradition ever lacked the angel. We may choose to excise him as, say, a purely literary figure which provides the interpretation of the vacant tomb, but then we have a narrative that is all the more stark and unadorned."⁷

For examples of accounts laden with theological and apologetical motifs, look no further than the Gospel of Peter, where Jesus' triumphant exit from the tomb is described as a gigantic figure whose head overreaches the clouds, being escorted by two figures whose head reaches up to the clouds, followed by a gigantic talking cross and heralded by a voice from heaven. This is how real legends look like. Or look to the Koran where we see the baby Jesus, barely out of the crib, preaching Islamic theology (Qur'an 19:30-33).

3. The tomb was discovered empty by women. It is important to remember that in patriarchal Jewish society, the testimony of women is considered unreliable for serious matters.

From Josephus: "But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex;"
From the Talmud: "Any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer)"

How remarkable is it then that it is women who are the discoverers of Jesus' empty tomb! Any later legendary fictional accounts would most certainly have made male disciples be the discoverers of Jesus' tomb. We are thus left with the conclusion that it was indeed women who discovered the tomb and the Gospel writers faithfully record this embarrassing fact.


Fact 2: The Fact of Jesus' Postmortem Appearances

“It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”⁸

1. Paul’s list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances guarantees that such appearances occurred since it is inexplicable why he would do so unless such appearances are guaranteed. Moreover, the list is plausible and guaranteed by Paul's personal contact with the witnesses. Lastly, Paul, himself, identifies himself as a witness, directly contradicting the contention that Paul was not an eye-witness.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received,
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he was buried,
and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.
Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time,
most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared
to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely
born, he appeared also to me.
1 Corinthians 15:3-8

2. The Gospel accounts provide multiple, independent attestation of postmortem appearances of Jesus, some of them even coinciding with those in Paul's list. As Wolfgang Trilling explains,

"From the list in I Cor. 15 the particular reports of the Gospels are now to be interpreted. Here may be of help what we said about Jesus’ miracles. It is impossible to 'prove' historically a particular miracle. But the totality of the miracle reports permits no reasonable doubt that Jesus in fact performed 'miracles.' That holds analogously for the appearance reports. It is not possible to secure historically the particular event. But the totality of the appearance reports permits no reasonable doubt that Jesus in fact bore witness to himself in such a way."⁹

For example, the appearance to Peter is independently attested by Paul and Luke (1 Cor. 15:5; Luke 24:34). The appearance to the Twelve is independently attested by Paul, Luke, and John (1 Cor. 15:5; Luke 24:36–43; John 20:19–20). The appearance to the women disciples is independently attested by Matthew and John (Matt. 28:9–10; John 20:11–17).


Fact 3: The Origin of the Christian Faith

“That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”¹⁰

Most New Testament historians admit that the disciples at least believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The problem for the historian is that Jewish Messianic expectations had no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel’s enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal. Moreover, Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. It is quite difficult to exaggerate the bleakness of the disciples' situation after Jesus' death. Their leader was dead, killed as a supposed blasphemer and Jews had no conception of a dying, much less rising, messiah. As NT Wright explains, “The crucifixion of Jesus, understood from the point of view of any onlooker, whether sympathetic or not, was bound to have appeared as the complete destruction of any messianic pretensions or possibilities he or his followers might have hinted at.”¹¹

Yet, shortly afterwards, we find despair had been turned into hope and joy. The disciples began to preach high and wide that Jesus was the Christ and that He had been raised from the dead and, this deserves emphasis, they were even willing to die for the truth of that belief. Where on earth did they ever get such an outlandish, preposterous, un-Jewish idea? As Luke Johnson of Emory University states, “Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was.”¹²


---

1. Alvin Plantinga, Two Dozen or So Theistic Arguments, http://philofreligion.homestead.com/...arguments.html
2. Kanitscheider, B. (1990) Does physical cosmology transcend the limits of naturalistic reasoning? In P. Weingartner and G. Doen (eds.), Studies on Marco Bunge’s “Treatise,” 337–50.
3. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit, 65.
4. Darwin, C. (1882) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
5. Sommers, T. and Rosenberg, A. (2003) Darwin’s nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaninglessness of life. Biology and Philosophy 18: 5, 653–88.
6. Jacob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien–Geschichten um Geschichte, 49-50.
7. William Craig, Reasonable Faith, 367.
8. Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, 80.
9. Wolfgang Trilling, Fragen zur Geschichtlichkeit Jesu, 153.
10. N.T. Wright, The New Unimproved Jesus, p. 26.
11. N.T. Wright, Christian Origins, 3:557–58.
12. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus, p. 136.

[Okmin]

I, in turn, will focus on three arguments to support my claims that God does not exist. There are a lot more arguments dealing with the omnipotence and omniscience of God, but those have less to do with the actual question of His existence and deal more with the qualities of God. However, I may use them to refute or prove certain points that arise through the course of this debate.

As you will notice, I've set my arguments in an order that puts them in direct opposition to your three (i.e. Causality, Morality, and Religion).

I. The Causality Problem
This is a fundamental problem with all theories and beliefs that the universe had a beginning. As you said,

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This shows quite well that the universe with a beginning must have an initial cause. Considering that Steady State theory has been fairly thoroughly disproved, we should assume the universe does in fact have a beginning, instead of saying "it's always been here." So you use the above-mentioned reasoning to say that God exists as the cause to the effect that is the existence of the universe.

But by the same Ex nihilo... background logic, the argument should be:

1. Everything that exists had to begin to exist.
2. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
3. The universe began to exist.
4. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

And by extension, God, as you say, exists, therefore He must have a beginning and a cause, and that cause must have a cause, et cetera ad infinitum. So far, no theologian, physicist, or philosopher has been able to sufficiently solve this problem. To use a cliche, "We may never know." However, humanity has proved to be stubbornly curious, and I believe that we will eventually find the answer.

Therefore, it is apparent to me that neither of us can "win" this argument over the beginning of the universe, so I'll move on.

II. The Morality Problem (a.k.a. "The problem of evil")
Before I begin here, I will take a moment to do some metaphorical hole-poking in your Moral Argument.

Morals, it can be agreed, must have a purpose. You seem to argue that morals, if they originate evolutionary as survival mechanisms, are therefore not morals. I fail to understand that. "Morals" is merely a word devised by human beings to describe "standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable" (Oxford English Dictionary), humanities set of morals need no divine explanation. They have evolved. At first for the simple purpose of ensuring our survival, where we developed the precursor to "Thou shalt not kill" in a need to not kill off our own species (or at least our tribe whom we were interdependent with). Later we added to these evolved morals to allow our ever-growing civilization to live in relative peace. Today we believe, for example, that rape is immoral simply because we live in a world where it has seemingly always been that way.

Morals need no divine explanation, therefore God need not exist for morals to exist. Your argument is invalid.

Now for my "Morality Problem." This is attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus, but he failed to actually write it down so the earliest known record appears 600 years after his death. Whatever its origin, this is a good argument, dealing with the existence of evil in the world. One of its many forms:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is He able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then He is not a god.

It also appears in Buddhist scripture (as Buddhism rejects the belief in any god), in more poetic form:

He who has eyes can see the sickening sight;
Why does not Brahma set his creatures right?
If his wide power no limits can restrain,
Why is his hand so rarely spread to bless?
Why are his creatures all condemned to pain?
Why does he not to all give happiness?
Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail?
Why triumphs falsehood,—truth and justice fail?
I count your Brahma one th’ injust among,
Who made a world in which to shelter wrong.

Bhūridatta Jātaka (VIII)

III. Inconsistent Revelations and Non-belief
Really these are two arguments, but they are so closely related it's safe to use them as just one. Consider that if God exists, and He is the only God (first Commandment), then why did humanity take so long to arrive at the belief in one God, let alone the exact Abrahamic God? Also, why were/are there so many religions that believe(d) in multiple gods, spirits, imperfect gods, or any other non-Abrahamic God? Besides that, why are there also those of us who doubt or deny His existence?

And so the summary of the problem is that collectively, the majority of humanity (both past and present together) does not believe in God, but rather the majority believe in gods that were created to explain natural phenomena that we now have perfectly good scientific, observed explanations for. Accounting for "phenomena gods," only a small part of human history has involved belief in God. That said, how is it possible that for the entirety of human existence, except the last two thousand years, no one noticed that there was a single, all powerful, divine being?

This discrepancy between religions across time periods and cultures shows that either humans are very, very oblivious or no religion is true.*


*Disregarding the minority belief that all religions were inspired by various encounters with extraterrestrial visitors.

[XIII]

Before I begin, it will be helpful to recall my two contentions: that, firstly, there are good reasons for thinking that God exists and that, conversely, there are no good reasons to think that God does not exist. My opponent, for his part, has listed three objections to the existence of God that also, quite cleverly, provide possible refutations to the arguments that I outlined. Is this, in fact, so? Let us examine each argument in turn and assess how Okmin's arguments relate with each one.

I. The Kalam Cosmological Argument

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Here, you try to extend the argument by positing an additional premise P4 that, "Everything that exists had to begin to exist", whereby, you then ask, "what caused God?". I agree that by adding an additional premise, the argument thus generate an infinite regress of causes and is void as an argument for the existence of God (as the metaphysical ultimate). The crucial issue then is whether or not this additional premise is, in fact, entailed by the "ex-nihilo... background logic" of the argument.

Curiously, however, you never give any explanation of what exactly this background logic is and how this entails the additional premise, P4. Unless and until you have done this, I don't really think the problem of causality poses a credible objection to the KCA. For as I have read somewhere, and that I cannot for the life of me remember where, there are only two exceptions to the causal principle: Things that do not exist (1) and things that have always existed (2). God, as the metaphysical ultimate, is necessarily uncaused, by definition.

II. The Moral Argument

1. If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
2. If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.
3. There is moral knowledge.
4. Therefore, EN is false.

Here, allow me to say that I never expressed so absurd a notion as to say that morals need God in order to exist. Rather what I said is that theism can, whereas naturalism cannot, offer a framework wherein our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted.

What do we mean by warranted? Loosely speaking, it means that we would be justified in believing that a statement like, "murder is wrong" is not just a subjective expression of your personal moral beliefs but an actual objective statement about some measurement of reality. Even more simply, it means that, contrary to Nietzsche, there are, after all, moral facts. The issue is whether or not we are justified in believing that our moral values and duties are objective, not whether they would exist or not sans God.

By the very nature of the case, it becomes impossible for an atheit to condemn any act as truly, objectively evil because he simply is not warranted in his moral beliefs. Anchored on 'air', so to speak, your moral beliefs have no ontological foundation from which their reality could be based. Expressions like "rape is evil" and "the Holocaust is wrong" become nothing more than subjective expressions of your personal taste rather than some moral fact about the world. Neither would it be binding to anyone to accept your subjective view of morality rather than anyone else's. The self is the supreme arbiter of what actions are moral or not and no one view can be held to be superior to one another because they are all cut from the same subjective cloth.

The Problem of Evil becomes superfluous at this point because good and evil, as such, simply do not exist on a naturalistic world-view. In fact, evil actually proves the existence of God. It would go like this:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, God exists.

III. The Argument from Non-Belief

The last argument for atheism, however, is not a specific objection to my third argument but a general objection to theistic belief. You ask why is there so much variety among theistic beliefs and why so many do not believe in a particular theistic belief or, in fact, believe at all. This objection though is based on a mistaken understanding of the Christian perception of who God is and what He wants.

See, God's desire is not that all people know that He exists or believe that He exists. After all, even the demons know that God exists. His desire, rather, is that people come freely into a loving relationship with Him. A God that so imposes Himself upon us that it becomes impossible to not believe in Him would essentially curtail free will to such an extent that we are no longer free to not come into a relationship with Him.

Cheers.

[Okmin]

I. Causality
You say that I "never give any explanation of what exactly this background logic is and how this entails the additional premise, P4." I thought it was clear what said background logic is, but I will explain.

"Ex nihilo, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes." Since God is something (i.e. not nothing), He could not have come from nothing, therefore God has a cause. This extends to everything else in existence, because everything is not nothing, so everything in existence has a cause and thus must have begun to exist (P4).

You say there are two exceptions to causality, of which one makes sense. Things that do not exist obviously have no cause simply because they do not exist. Actually, nonexistent things are not "exceptions" to the causal principle since they are merely the inverse of the usual "If x exists then it has a cause" statement (~P --> ~Q). Considering that there are no exceptions to causality, then, why should God be any different? As you say "God, as the metaphysical ultimate, is necessarily uncaused, by definition." This is only necessary to make creation work, it is a sort of metaphorical makeshift patch to cover a hole in the idea.

II. Morality
This is where you "expressed so absurd a notion as to say that morals need God in order to exist" -- "1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist." Your premise implies that morals cannot exist without God.

You are right when you say that if I said "the Holocaust was wrong" it would merely be a reflection of my own personal opinion. In turn, if you said "rape is wrong" I could say that your morals have even less foundation in reality than mine, since you base yours on the word of a being Who to me is nonexistent. Morality in all people is grounded in our common sense of what is beneficial to humanity on the largest scale we can imagine. For many, this scale would be all of humanity. It is this understanding of what is in the long term detrimental to our survival as a species that gives our morals their foundation -- slaughtering millions of innocents on a whim, for example, is bad for our survival, so the greater part of humanity sees to it that those who would do these things are punished.

It is possible for an atheist to condemn something as truly evil. I just have a different reason for believing something is evil. I base my morals on my experiences and the culture I was raised in. This is how every individual ultimately determines what they believe is evil. Naturalism and civilization combined warrant our morals.

III. Religion
My argument was not the traditional "Why does/did God allow so many people who don't believe in him?" but rather one that asks "How is it possible that so many billions of people over so many hundreds of thousands of years took until 2000 years ago to start believing in God?" He has been here the whole time, according to Christianity (and Judaism and Islam). So how were people apparently completely oblivious to Him for almost 200,000 years?

So I'm not using the argument that can be countered with free will. Also I question the existence of free will if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, as this leads to all sorts of complex paradoxes no matter what point of view you take.

[Okmin]

It seems my opponent has disappeared

[XIII]

I. What caused God?

I agree that it was fairly obvious what you were getting at. I only asked for the clarification because it will serve to underline a crucial point that I will make here.

The premise is:

"Everything that begins to exist has a cause"

not

"Everything that exists has a cause"

The logic then is quite simple really. If it has always existed, i.e. eternal, then it, of course, could not have had a cause.

God, by definition, the metaphysical ultimate cannot have an antecedent cause since whatever caused God then that would be God anymore than a square can be a circle. The very definition of what it means to be a square, i.e. having 'sides', precludes it from being a circle. Whatever cause that is the termination of the causal regress is just, by definition, God.

Second reason: Occam's Razor stipulates that it is not necessary to posit additional causes than that which is sufficient to explain the data. Thus, I think that the question of, "what caused God?" falls on two difficulties: the very definition of God precludes Him from having an antecedent cause (1) and the question is basically irrelevant anyway because there is no need to posit an additional cause beyond necessity (2).

Now, to head off a potential difficulty. Why must the first cause be God? Simply defining the first cause to be God by virtue of metaphysical ultimacy may seem unconvincing since the first cause may have properties that are completely different to what we commonly understand God to be. For example, the first cause may not be a person but merely an impersonal force of nature (naturalism). Thankfully, Craig gives us a promising argument for the personhood of the first cause by arguing that a temporal effect can arise from a changeless cause only if the cause is personal.

"Third, this same conclusion is also implied by the fact that only personal, free agency can account for the origin of a first temporal effect from a changeless cause. We have concluded that the beginning of the universe was the effect of a First Cause. By the nature of the case, that cause cannot have any beginning of its existence nor any prior cause. Nor can there have been any changes in this cause, either in its nature or operations, prior to the beginning of the universe. It just exists changelessly without beginning, and a finite time ago it brought the universe into existence. Now this is exceedingly odd. The cause is in some sense eternal, and yet the effect which it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this be? If the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of the effect are eternal, then why is not the effect eternal? How can all the causal conditions sufficient for the production of the effect be changelessly existent and yet the effect not also be existent along with the cause? How can the cause exist without the effect?

The best way out of this dilemma is agent causation, whereby the agent freely brings about some event in the absence of prior determining conditions. Because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present. For example, a man sitting changelessly from eternity could freely will to stand up; thus, a temporal effect arises from an eternally existing agent. Similarly, a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have freely brought the world into being at that moment. In this way, the Creator could exist changelessly and eternally but choose to create the world in time."¹

Thus having plausibly established that the first cause is identical to God and Occam's Razor behooving us to not posit additional causes than that which is necessary to explain the data, the question of, "what caused God", I think, loses any further argumentative force.

II. Objective Moral Values and Duties

"If God does not exist then objective moral values and duties do not exist."

My contention implies only that morals cannot be held to be objective without God. This is explicitly outlined in my opening contentions when I laid out that I only contend that theism, whereas naturalism cannot, furnish us with a framework wherein our moral beliefs may be held to be warranted. It's not that morals wouldn't exist, it's that their objectivity cannot be affirmed under the framework of a naturalistic world-view. This leads us to the interesting conclusion that anyone who believes in the objectivity of moral values and duties, i.e. some acts being truly good some acts being truly evil, quite simply cannot be a naturalist because naturalism just does not provide the necessary framework for just such a world-view.

This presents us with an interesting situation where erstwhile naturalists, who hold that moral beliefs are nothing more than subjective illusions foisted by the evolutionary process, are the most vociferous in condemning religion for having supposedly foisted, is foisting, and will continue to foist so much evil upon the world. It seems to have escaped them that having deprived morality of anything more than an opinion, it has been robbed of any normative force whatsoever. Anyone rightly, it seems to me, condemning the Nazi Holocaust to be an atrocity worthy of moral condemnation is, on the naturalist view, doing nothing more than expressing his own personal taste. That person is doing nothing more substantive than condemning vanilla because chocolate is, to him, tastier.

You reflect this same confusion by, at first, conceding that your moral beliefs are merely the reflection of your own personal opinion yet just a paragraph later, you maintain that your opinion has normative force.

Why?

Because naturalism and civilization warrant it? Why does naturalism warrant it? No argument was ever given why it would. Civilization? Why would civilization warrant our moral beliefs? Civilization itself is, on naturalism, merely the outcrop of an indifferent evolutionary process. Why would it warrant our moral beliefs any more than evolution does?

III. The Hiddenness of God

The answer is the same actually. God's desire of free creatures freely choosing to come into a loving relationship with Him precluded Him from certain actions that would impinge on free will. Moreover, God was not idle at all during that time, rather He was preparing the stage for the fulfillment of His plan for the salvation of man. To quote Craig,

"...'But why did God wait so long before he sent Christ? Human beings have existed for thousands of years on this planet before Christ's coming.' Well, what's really crucial here is not the time involved rather it's the population of the world. The population reference bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever lived on this planet is about 105 billion people. Only 2% of them were born prior to the advent of Christ. Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research says, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. Christ showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population." The Bible says in the fullness of time God sent forth His son and when Christ came the nation of Israel had been prepared; the Roman peace dominated the Mediterranean world; it was an age of literacy and learning; the stage was set for the advent of God's son into the world and think that in God's providential plan for human history we see the wisdom of God in orchestrating the development of human life and then in bringing Christ into the world in the fullness of time."²

PS. Sorry about the delay.

--

1. William Lane Craig, Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, 193-194.
2. William Lane Craig v Christopher Hitchens, Easter Debate, "Does God exist?"

[Okmin]

I. Causality
Again, you are using the convenient assumption that God was a special case (actually, the only special case) in the universe, in that He is the only thing that needs no cause or explanation.

Considering that the universe, it is generally agreed, must have a beginning (no matter if it was 15 billion years ago or just several thousand), then before that there was nothing.* And since there was nothing, God could not exist to create the universe. The only ways God could exist in such a model are one, if He came into existence after the universe, and two, if He is the universe. Either way, God could not create the universe, because no thing can create that which came before it, and no thing can create itself.

To use the metaphor in your quotation, a being cannot stand up if it has nothing to stand up in.

*I'd like to take a moment to explain my use of the term nothing. For clarity's sake, when I say nothing while talking about the universe, I mean nothing in the sense of the absence of space and time (i.e. absence of everything). When I say vacuum, I mean nothing in the traditional sense of "there is nothing in space." And when I say no thing, well, that's self-explanatory.

II. Morals
Nothing is truly objective, and belief is the most subjective thing that exists. The objectivity of your morals depends on your subjective religious beliefs. And belief is, again, highly subjective. To me, your morals are based on the word of a being I firmly believe does not exist. They are less objective than mine, which are based on thousands of years of evolution and collective agreement.

Now, from your perspective, my morals are my opinion, Therefore yours are more objective since they are based on God's will.

No one has truly objective beliefs, but some seem more or less objective, depending on one's point of view. In this way, somewhat ironically, one person's objective morals are actually subjective to their personal experience.

Again, I could say of your morals the exact the same things you say of my morals. You condemn the Holocaust because it does not fit with your personal taste, which is influenced by your religion. Meanwhile, Hitler believed he was a perfectly good Catholic and person and was doing what was best for his country and humanity at large. That was his personal taste, his interpretation of morality. My opinion is that it was wrong because no one should have their life forcefully taken from them. Your opinion is that is was wrong because "thou shalt not kill". Either way, we come to the same conclusion, which in the end turns out to be good for the world in general. So in hindsight, our beliefs are objectively moral, and Hitler's were objectively immoral. Of course, this is all subjective to what one believes is good for the world.

To summarize, there is no such thing as objectivity.

III. Apparent Collective Human Ignorance
So we, humanity, did not notice God for hundreds of thousands of years because and while he was actively interacting with the world to make it a better place? I find that illogical. Are people just oblivious, then?

Also, why did he have to send Jesus to save us when the world was becoming a better place under God's guidance? And then why was there a millennium now called the Dark Ages after the world was "saved"? (Also why is the world still here and having problems?)

[Darth Red]

Bump. Should I file this or leave it open?