My response to Gendo's argument re. God

We tried to debate this over the shout box, and suffice it to say, we lacked adequate room. So I'm going to lay out my argument here.

He made the case that he could "refute atheism." The core problem with this, right off the bat, is that atheism is not an ideology or even a set of beliefs--but the lack of belief. You can't exactly "refute" atheism, though you could prove that the central arguments associated with it do not follow--in other words, disprove a negative--with a positive. If you can show that a God exists, than a belief system which holds that one doesn't, necessarily, will collapse. That doesn't necessarily mean that atheism is false unless the atheist was making a positive statement--"There is no God"--which most are not and will not, and anyone who does is making a claim, much like a zealous theist who proclaims 100% certainty in the accuracy of his or her own religion, that is unfalsifiable and should thus be discarded. Instead, atheists are proclaiming that, in the absence of evidence, there is no need nor warrant to believe X, especially when a better, sounder alternative exists.

That clarification aside, let me now address the heart of his argument. He writes:

" There are two possibilities:
1. The Universe had a beginning
2. The Universe/Multiverse did not have a beginning


Sure, I can accept this, as these are mutually exclusive premises. Either it began or it didn't, and there's actually reason to think that it never "began," but always existed, and Stephen Hawking has presented this as a possibility. Granted, a quick google search bringing me to one of his lectures reveals that he has recanted that view, and does accept the truth of the first premise Gendo has laid out, but I digress. There are plausible theories endorsing the second theory, but let us roll with the first for just a moment--as I tend to think we both agree that it's the most plausible, given available evidence, of the two.

He then writes:

" If the Universe had a beginning, there must be a first cause. In this case, either Deism or Theism is the truth.


If the universe has a beginning, it is fair to say that it had a first cause. But where I think the main flaw in Gendo's argument lies is in the non sequitur of "therefore God." This is far from settled. What he is effectively doing is attempting to reconcile something he doesn't know or understand (or, to be far, what none of us really know or understand)--where we all came frame--with something else that he doesn't know--God. If you substitute uncertainty for uncertainty, we haven't gotten anywhere. You've only made the equation harder to solve, and calling that uncertainty "God" isn't digging for truths--it's begging the question. I have the same problem when pantheists claim that God exists by asserting that God "is" the universe, and because the universe exists, so too does God. That's not digging for truth: that's playing a bogus semantical game and finding another word for "universe." All that does is prove that language cannot possibly allow us to reach any objective truth because it's inherently man-made, which is what I tend to think of the God hypothesis, as well.

Anyway, there are, actually, plausible alternatives in which the universe could come into existence absent a deity. I'm not going to pretend that I know them well enough to explain them, though there are a few hypothesis--e.g., the multiverse theory that one universe caused another universe. A piece I like to cite from Michio Kaku, I think, is also offers a coherent and user-friendly account of how the universe could have came to be from its own doing. He writes (link can be found here: " rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/can-a-universe-create-itself-out-of-nothing

In Stephen's new book, he says that the Theory of Everything that Einstein spent 30 years of his life chasing is string theory (or its latest incarnation, M-theory).

In string theory, we have a multiverse of universes. Think of our universe as the surface of a soap bubble, which is expanding. We live on the skin of this bubble. But string theory predicts that there should be other bubbles out there, which can collide with other bubbles or even sprout or bud baby bubbles, as in a bubble bath.

But how can an entire universe come out of nothing? This apparently violates the conservation of matter and energy. But there is a simple answer.

Matter, of course, has positive energy. But gravity has negative energy. (For example, you have to add energy to the earth in order to tear it away from the sun. One separated far from the solar system, the earth then has zero gravitational energy. But this means that the original solar system had negative energy.)

If you do the math, you find out that the sum total of matter in the universe can cancel against the sum total of negative gravitational energy, yielding a universe with zero (or close to zero) net matter/energy. So, in some sense, universes are for free. It does not take net matter and energy to create entire universes. In this way, in the bubble bath, bubbles can collide, create baby bubbles, or simple pop into existence from nothing.

This gives us a startling picture of the big bang, that our universe was born perhaps from the collision of two universes (the big splat theory), or sprouted from a parent universe, or simply popped into existence out of nothing. So universes are being created all the time. (But Hawking goes one step farther and says that therefore here is no need of God, since God is not necessary to create the universe. I wouldn't go that far. See a previous blog entry on my attitude towards that.)

So, if the universe could create itself from nothing or from zero not energy, there are a few key conclusions:

(1) The universe would function in the same way with or without a God.
(2) God is not necessary as the first cause, and is thus an extraneous assumption.
(3) This leaves us with Theory T and Theory T*, with Theory T being the hypothesis that the universe emerged from itself and Theory T* being the claim that the universe emerged from God. Also inherent in Theory T* is that God *always* existed (which is contrary to the claim that nothing can "always" exist, so it assigns attributes to this being that it claims are impossible of the universe itself), is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipresent and is, also, atemporal, aspacial, and immaterial.
(4) Via Occam's Razor, when faced with two competing hypothesis, we conclude that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is more likely to be true. This does not presuppose truth value or claim that one hypothesis categorically is true, but only provides us with a framework for assessing relative likelihood. Under this framework, we conclude that Theory T is more likely.


The point that I was making to Gendo is that he does have the burden of proof to demonstrate that his argument follows logically from his premises. If one of those premises falls apart, so too does his conclusion. That's known as the Celestial Teapot Analogy: if I assert that a teapot is orbiting Mars but is too small to be detected, the onus is not on another person to disprove that, but for me to prove me, for I alone am making a positive claim.


Any thoughts?

Before I begin, I said that I was refuting Adeism, not Atheism. Let us keep this in mind.

Dassault Papillon: Lol, you changed one letter and then made in argument in favor of theism. Let us not obfuscate the issue .

Okay, so:

My opponent acknowledges that the Universe either had a beginning or it didn't. If it had a beginning, it was either caused by an external force (and anything which has the ability to create the Universe almost certainly should be considered God) or said object created itself.
It is not logical to assume that anything could cause itself into existence. That violates the law of something that states "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed." In fact, if objects could randomly will themselves into existence, we would effectively live in an absurd Universe with no universal laws, where things pop into existence for no reason.

The other option is that the Universe always existed. In this case, it meets the criteria of God, as God is infinite and eternal. Is this semantics, possibly. But this is in fact how we would define God. Otherwise, even if God existed there would be no criteria to say that such a being is God.
If the idea of God is relative, then whether or not God exists would literally depend on whether or not you believes God exists, which is ban absurd notion.

This is not a discussion about "proof". I am using for my argument those things which can and have been proven, such as the idea that an object cannot cause itself. There's no evidence that an object can cause itself into existence, and following atheist logic there is no reason to believe that such an object exists.
Thank you.

JohnMaynardKeynes: There is a difference, actually. Proving that some kind of deity exists (or existed at one point) does not prove that the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever religion Deity exists.

This should of stayed in the adeism thread.

Dassault Papillon: It is not logical to assume that anything could cause itself into existence. That violates the law of something that states "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed." In fact, if objects could randomly will themselves into existence, we would effectively live in an absurd Universe with no universal laws, where things pop into existence for no reason.

This is a misunderstanding of the argument I raised earlier. There was a debate on DDO a while back where Mikal explains this argument better than I can, so I'll cite him for this:

Particle-antiparticles pairs are produced AS A RESULT of putting enough energy (27), which has MATTER IN IT. Energy is not "nothing". Ergo, particle-antipartcle pairs are not "created from nothing". This is not creating things from nothing. These are some changes of the energy's form. The First Law of Thermodynamics says, "Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another" (

So, in other words, this doesn't actually involve *creating* matter, thus cancelling out this argument.

The other option is that the Universe always existed. In this case, it meets the criteria of God, as God is infinite and eternal. Is this semantics, possibly. But this is in fact how we would define God. Otherwise, even if God existed there would be no criteria to say that such a being is God.

That is a matter of semantics because you haven't proven the existence of a "being," only of a universe which are choosing, of your own volition, to "call" God. There are criteria that are often attributed to God--that he is atemporal, aspecial, immaterial as well as omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Those are the criteria you would want to meet, rather than playing a semantical game.

If the idea of God is relative, then whether or not God exists would literally depend on whether or not you believes God exists, which is ban absurd notion.


This is true, which is why the idea of God is not and cannot be relative. When I say exist, I mean "having objective reality," which I believe is how Merriam-Webster defines it. In other words, to exist is to exist not only to you, but to everyone. If something exists only to you, then it exists subjectively, not objectively.

This is not a discussion about "proof". I am using for my argument those things which can and have been proven, such as the idea that an object cannot cause itself.

This is about proof, because your remark that the universe--and note that we're not discussing an object, but the universe--cannot create itself is patently false in light of modern physics. In fact, this is a well-known fact in modern science that Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and others have illuminated at several points in time, so the premise of this is simply wrong.

Moreover, you are wrong to say that "following atheist logic, there is no reason to believe such an object exists." We can see the universe, so it exists objectively. Even if your premise that nothing could create itself were right--and it's not--then we wouldn't instantly conclude "therefore God." We would conclude that there must have been some form of external cause, but that we simply don't know what that cause is, and aren't willing to call it "God" and assign to it certain criteria prescribed for it by some religion.

The point I made regarding proof was that your argument *did* not logically follow, because your conclusion did not follow from your premises.

Dassault Papillon: I don't know what this is a response to, or what point you're suggesting that I made, though I do agree that even if you could prove a deity, you haven't been able to prove that the deity for a particular religion exists. In fact, I just raised a similar argument, so I'm not sure what you think the disagreement here even is.

Blackflag: That thread died a few days ago. I don't see any problem whatsoever with starting a new OP.

Mikal's statement didn't really make sense. Can you explain in in more comprehensive terms?

JohnMaynardKeynes: Nor do I

JohnMaynardKeynes: Can you better explain what Mikal said?

Dassault Papillon: I'll try. As I said, I'm not really a science guy so this stuff doesn't make that much sense to me, either.

Basically, and tying this to Michio Kaku's argument, is that matter did exist and culminated in the energy that created the universe, but that, on net, it cancelled out to zero net energy. So it isn't a matter of creating any additional energy.

Dassault Papillon: That probably doesn't make much sense since I'm terrible at explaining it. Perhaps someone else can do better.

JohnMaynardKeynes: I still don't get it.

Dassault Papillon: I'll see if I can explain it better after reading a bit more into it.