The "then who created god?" uncompelling argument and why Pascal was right
Offline First off, I have a degree in Mathematics, and working towards my masters in Physics, so feel free to use all the bad science you want, as if I dont have the answer I know where to get it.
Second, the more I understand about the nature of the universe the more I know a God exists, (although I have always been uncertain as to God's beliefs). The problem with most of your threads on this subject is that you guys do not argue against a God existing, you argue on the nature of what God thinks, Which I see constantly in Atheist arguments.
Such as: "pascal arguements fail because we dont know which religion to believe in" Okay that doesnt mean his argument fails. That is like saying you only have a 1 in 100 chance of getting it right, so the best thing to do is to gaurnatee failure and not even pick one. Pascal was saying that taking a chance, any chance, was better then taking no chance at all. Also you argue that all religions tell you that you must believe in their God otherwise you will go to hell, and sense all religions tell you that, and all religions cant be right then they must all be wrong. This, of course is a logical fallicy, and you guys should be better then that. In fact the assumptions are wrong too, The jewish community actually believes that all good people go to heaven regardless of actual practice, as is the case with most religions.
Also you fail because you fail to see that God and what people attribute to God are two different things. Just because someone says "your going to hell if your not a christian" does mean you are going to hell. This is a "side-track" argument most atheist make because it does not actually argue whether God exists, in only argues about the nature of what God is. It is impossible to argue that God does not exist.
Second bad arguement against Pascal wager's "pascal says you have nothing to lose, but you do lose your life..etc...etc." Well the point Pascal was making if that there is no God then there is no after life...which means there is no infinity of the soul. In mathematics this would be a limit problem. In the presence of Infinity then the finite becomes zero. So yes your life becomes nothing if it does not have infinity, so infact you do lose nothing by believing in God or following some sort of life rules.
Finally...the last bad argument is "Wouldnt God know you were just faking it to live in heaven"....of course he would otherwise he would not be omniscent, but what your really arguing is whether not God would care if you were faking it. This again argues about the nature of God, not whether God exists. I dont know if God cares if you only pretend to be a good person or whether you actually are a good person. My personal opinion is that God doesnt care whether you fake being good or you actually are just being good for good's sake, as the outcome is the same. But whatever your argument still does not argue whether God exists or does not exist. So this attack on Pascal fails, because you are attacking the nature of what God thinks, and does nothing to show Pascal wrong.
Finally the worse argument any atheist can make is "then who created God?" argument, this is most overused and worse arguement there is. God is not "created" as this implies he exists in the dimension of time, which of course as Einstein proved, is relative and based on perception. An omniscent being could not have such a constraint. As being subjected to any dimensional constraints would make him less the omniscent. Therefor If God was created he would not be God. So Congrats! you proved that God can not exist in time! I see a lot of people true argue this point but it is really uncompelling. Its the same problem I face when people try to ask me "How much time was before the big bang", This question doesnt makes about as much sense, because there was no time before the big bang. We are such linear thinkers that it really takes math to show that time is not seperate from the universe but a part of it.
Another bad science interpretation I saw on some you tube debate, is that Energy and Mass have always existed...therfore God does not exist. Ummmmmm....what? First off mass and energy are the same thing E=Mc^2, in Physics we can use the "natural" units and set constants equal to one....therfore E=M. Energy is Mass. So What you are arguing is there is a finite amount of Energy/mass in the universe and always has, and not that mass has always existed, or energy always existing. Also your misinterpreting the law, as we know are universe began with a Big Bang, before that there was no time. So to say something has always existed, means that they have existed since the Big Bang. Which isnt the same as arguing that God exists outside of time, and energy/mass has always existed. One is still subject to time constraints and the other isnt. Are you starting to see the difference?
If you dont understand what I am saying than please ask. I would be happy to explain it to you guys. Eventually you will come to realize that it takes far more faith to believe God does not exist then it does to believe God does exist. The reason I phrase it this way, is because you cannot prove God's existance, and you cannot prove that God does not exist, but the debate is still inetersting.
Cogito ergo sum
Yes it does. He commits a false dichotomy fallacy.
Nonsense. The purpose of the wager is to convert the weak willed by means of ad baculum, the wager expressly dictates that the prudency of belief is derived from that the believer is in a win-win situation, or at least, does not necessarily lose. If one realizes that the dichotomy is nonexistent, the argument is shattered because their chance of winning is reduced to, in the cae of the example provided, 1%. One cannot wager their eternal damnation on a 1% chance any more than not casting! The argument works only when the false dichotomy is being employed. I wrote something on this a while back:
Believer: God Exists (wins)
Non-Believer: God Exists (loses)
Believer: God does not Exist (no loss)
Non-Believer: God does not Exist (no loss)
Now, Pascal's Wager can be compared to a lottery, where you cast your belief in God, in hopes that you strike the jackpot, or in this case, post-mortem vindication (the idea is so ridiculous I can scarcely believe I am talking about it). So, you cast your ticket. If the dichotomy above is taken, then your chance of winning if you cast your ticket (accept the wager), is one. This can be represented by f(x) (where the function of x is "number of winning outcomes) against x (the number of variables). Now, in the above case, if one casts the ticket, then their chance of winning becomes (1). The number of possible Gods introduced into this equation are only one: The Judeo-Christian one. Imputed into the one-off mutually exclusive probability function, where f(x)=1/x, then we get 1/1, which is one.
Once we starting adding more mutually exclusive loss factors into the function, we extend the x-axis accordingly, and the probability drops according to the asymptote. The idea is simple. Whilst x increases linearly, f(x) decreases exponentially (because the function is reciprocal). So, with three possible God factors, if x=3, f(x)=1/3. This is why an asymptote works. Let us consider a graph with points. Along the y-axis I plot the probability of winning as a function of x, f(x). On the x-axis, I plot the number of Gods being introduced into the equation. Since probabilities can only be represented as being between 0 (impossible) and 1 (certain), my y-axis will start at 0 and end at one. My x-axis will start at zero and continue where the domain of x is N, all natural numbers. You can sketch this graph yourself. What you will find occurring is that you start out at (1,1), which then drops sharply down to (2,1/2), which then drops to (3,1/3). So, the asymptote runs along the x-axis, and gets closer and closer to y=0. The larger x is, the closer the line runs to y=0. If you recall, y represents the probability of winning. Only if the line actually strikes the x-axis is y actually zero, but according to the asymptote, this is impossible. This is the foundation of Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, where a runner, to complete a certain distance, must run half it, and before doing that, must run half that, and before doing that, must run half that…and Zeno argued that an infinite number of infinitely small quantities of action required to complete the motion is impossible. This is where my proposition becomes quite interesting.
Invariably we find there is a technically infinite number of propositions pertaining to Gods that will threaten us with damnation, including, hence, an infinite number we haven't even considered. The propostion is wholly transcribable, for we could apply to any proposition about a fire-and-brimstone deity, including an infinitude of such that we have not considered (what makes such propositions any different from ones we have considered?) But infinity is not really a quantity at all, so it becomes rather difficult to plot x=∞, therefore f(x)=1/∞. If a real-number asymptote looks like this:
Then it does not mean much to speak of an "infinity function" asymptote since an asymptote, by definition extends infinitely close towards the x-axis (y=0), but continue infinitely, never reaching them, the steepness of the asymptote will depend on the 1/x. The further that x extends (ie the more x variables), the steeper the asymptote. It is therefore interesting to consider what happens if the asymptote extends infinitely far along the x-axis, and the closer to y=0 it becomes. On the other hand, we can consider that if a real-value asymptote derives infinitely close to zero for any non-zero x function, then an infinite-value asymptote would get close to the axes, or rather, after an infinite length across the axes, the line would cross 0. Rather than getting infinitely close to zero.
This concept can be represented using first-order differentiation, taking a real equation like f(x)=x^2 as an example:
mpq=f(x+h)-f(x)/(x+h)-x, which can be reduced to mpq=f(x+h)-f(x)/h
Where points p and q are points on the curve (y=x^2) and m represents the gradient. In this case then h represents the difference in y value (or height) between p and q, supposing that p can be represented by the points x1y1, and q as x2y2 then m=(y2-y1)/(x2-x1), which, presuming y=f(x) is functionally equivalent to: f(x+h)-f(x)/(x+h)-x
Now, as the h value of the function, where h represents the change along the x-axis tends towards zero, it approaches the true gradient of point p, where P and Q represent two points, which can be expressed as lim(h=>0)(f(x+h)-f(x)/h)), this limit is the first derivative, where y=f(x), we have already seen this expresses dy/dx, where d is the infinitesimal. If the limiting value is derived, we can establish the expression that regulates the gradient of y=f(x) at any point, since if a straight line graph has a single coefficient expressing m, where y=mx+c, a second-order function will have an expression governing the gradient which is denoted ax^n.
Consider a simple function, where f(x)=x^2, if dy/dx=lim(h=>0)( (f(x+h)-f(x)/h)), considering points P and Q along f(x)=x^2, then P=(x,x^2) and Q=(x+h, (x+h)^2 ), which is substituted into the equation such that: Dy/dx=lim(h=>0)(x+h)^2-x^2/h, which can be expanded to give (x^2+2xh+h^2-x^2)/h, which can be simplified to (2xh+h^2/h, which can be simplified to 2x+h therefore dy/dx=lim(h=>0)2x+h. If h=0 (which si the best approximation of the infinitemsal, since we have divided it into a non-expressible quantity), then we derive 2x.
In this case, we have made points P and Q on the graph infinitely close, as per first-order differentiation. The function h is supposed to tend toward zero as P and Q get closer together. Now, in this case, we are expressing the function f(x)=1/x. Which basically means that for however large the pool of possible butcher-Gods there are, the chance of you picking correctly is inversely proportional to the number of Gods there are. In this case, there are infinity possibilities so the x and y values are (∞,∞^-1) (let us ignore for a moment that infinity is not a number).
The purpose of the above was to show that we can arrive at zero, or an infinitesemal quantity, when we consider the distance between points P and Q on a graph to be infinitesmal, because the limit tends towards zero. This is the concept upon which integration and differentiation work. Both break up the area under the line or the line itself respectively into infinitesmal non-zero quantities which tend extremely close to zero (in fact, the concept of breaking up a line or its area into successively smaller distances/areas can be represented by an asymptote), so close to zero that the quantities can be disregarded. This is why calculus is the solution to Zeno's Paradox, because it divides units into very small but a finite amount of quantities. In this case, our situation is more interesting. x is actually infinity as opposed to just a very small infinitesimal. What this means that instead of the limit tending towards zero, it actually is zero. Your probability is winning is zero.
No he wasn't. He was trying to show, and in this he erred, that the believer is in a win-win situation. THe believer is not in a win-win situation because his probability of winning is a function of the inverse of the number of Gods that might exist! Given the outcome if one picks incorrectly, at least. Consider a lottery in which if you win, you are awared a large amount of money, and if you lose, you are executed. Considering your probability of winning is infinitesemally smaller than that of losing, nobody in their right minds would cast.
That's ridiculous. You are attacking an argument only a moron would make. If the moron in question is a member of this site, then please call that particular moron out on it. But do not waste the time of the rest of us with poorly worded refutations of still worse arguments!
I have difficulty understanding what you are saying not because of any technical difficulties (I too have completed an MPhys) but because of your English. Your sentences ramble. You don't express propositions coherently, they start to run into each other. Its a very confusing hodgepodge of propositions, some of which are meaningless beyond the syntax. Your writing style is very confusing and overly informal and it is difficult to decipher what you are talking about.
Lastly, these two statements are in mutual contradiction:
And
The former is an affirmation of theism, and the latter of agnosticism, and this demonstration is largely what I mean when I say your prose is largely incoherent.
Scientia potentia est
Congratulations, but all self promotion aside, you still adhere to a mythology that an eighth grader should be able to identify as complete crap ! That's not just a tragedy, but a complete waste of education.
What you're saying is what dozens of others before you have stated and been soundly refuted. Your arguments are the same, tired and often immature apologetics that already fill this site. What's not to understand ? While I read your entire post, it would have been nice if you had also done your homework by reading the posts already here. You could also have saved the condescencion and worked on your poor sentence structure, many misspellings and general poor writing skills, as would befit someone who is working toward their "master's".
A lack of faith does not = faith. I weep for our educational system.
It is not necessary to prove god's non-existence as most theists find it completely unnecessary to disprove a plethora of god's. You make a positive claim: "Thor created the universe".... It now becomes your responsibility to prove this fact. It's not mine to prove the non-existence of Thor or his creation skills. However, it may be my role to point out that there is not a shred of evidence that your statement holds water.
See how this works?
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
First, I think we argue at least as much about theexistence of God as to his attributes, since you only just joined, you may be forgiven for making that mistake.
Whatever you argue about the origin of the Universe, it either required some 'triggering' event, to initiate the Big Bang, which could be an event in a larger Metaverse, like higher dimensional m-branes colliding, or in some sense 'our' Universe is all there is, and may need no time extension beyond the Big Bang singularity.
Whatever we may speculate about a 'cause' of the Big Bang, we only arrive at a logical problem if we assume the common simplistic un-scientific idea of strict cause and effect, and especially if we assume that effects cannot be greater than causes. Once we allow that a cause 'event' may be lesser in energy, duration, and any other attributes than what it triggers, then even an 'infinite regress' is finitely bounded, as is the sum of an infinite geometric series where successive elements decrease in magnitude.
If it is not OK for some reason for our Universe to 'just exist', without some external intervention, then no amount of argument can logically justify the assertion that another 'agent' of some sort is allowed to arbitrarily bypass that requirement. We simply have no data to make logical assertions one way or another about the Universe requiring some 'cause', let alone say anything useful whatever about the attributes of such an agent.
I may comment on other points later.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
I don't buy it, but that's of no consequence.
An omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent being's "beliefs" would be identical to reality, so unless you're following some other program, this statement makes no sense.
There is no decent argument for any god existing. In contrast to other (read: real) fields of research, theology tries to rationalize an unsubstantiated assumption into being. Your accusation is pointlessly broad.
Pascal offered 1:4 odds, but didn't consider the possibility of other religions and other sects. One could take the world's religion's into consideration each, evaluating their strictness to adherence to their specific doctrine, etc, and create a complex map showing the most favorable distribution of harm to one failing to pick the right religion. Even then, it's still only an appeal to consequences fallacy.
They are not.
True.
You're shifting the burden of proof.
That assumes a "salvation by works" scenario, in contrast to the Augustinian "salvation by grace," which isn't uniform among Christian sects.
You're begging the question. Something has to exist to have been created or not, which hasn't been demonstrated.
Congratulations, you've committed reification.
Still begging the question.
You're definitely wrong here -- the debate wasn't the least bit interesting.
People attack the attributes of God to show that in general he is inherantly evil. The reason there tends to be not as much about the disproving the existance of a God is simply because you can't prove that something does not exist.
Simply put, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Until you can prove that God DOES exist, don't expect to find people investing too much time into proving that he does not exist.
So what? You have a degree in blah blah blah...... So do alot of Jews and Muslims, which makes a god concept, any, meaningless and makes science universal.
If you dont atribute lighting to Thor, then claims of virgin births, or 72 virgins or multiple armed deities, should be equally absurd as claims. Your mathmaticall brainyness has nothing to do with your mundain human phycology that allows you, to falsely believe that a god exists, just like any laymen.
Having a sense of "awe" is not justification to believe in pink unicorns, much less deities. Retrofiting science to ancient comic book stories is an old game, tried by all the major labels, and has lead to newer bullshit, like Scientology, Kaballah, and pantheism.
Change the wrapping on the package all you want, and your box is still empty. "God" is a broken concept and utterly meaningless because of it's playdough nature in the mind of the individual. Mental gymnastics and psuedo science wont fool us. "God/god/supernatural" is nothing but a case of the "warm fuzzies". Dress a turd up in a tuxedo and it is still a turd. ("turd" refuring bad logic)
Your logic sucks and is nothing new.
A+B=god
Is the same as
A+B=Flying Spagetti Monster
Is the same as
A+B=purple snarfwidget
Is the same as
A+B= I can fart a Lamborginni out of my ass
Of course god exists in your mind because you can make it up as you go along and move the goal posts while you do it.
You come here expecting us to be wowed by your degree, but fail to understand that we have seen this three card monty before.
Deities do not follow a "method" because imagination is a whim, not a method.
If you mean you want to separate god from religion, that will make the debate much more consistent. If you can deny all religions and only accept god as a scientific idea and not a religious idea, then perhaps pascal's wager makes sense. But would you agree the only reason for a scientific god is to explain things we do not yet understand scientifically?
This implies that with enough scientific research, god can be proven. Throughout history god has been used as an explanation until science gave us the real one (ex: flat earth, earth centered universe, life, etc). That is the reason I dislike the belief in god, it seems to deter real scientific progress. For arguments sake, lets simply replace the term "god" with "the scientific unknown".
Back to pascal's wager, would it make sense to believe in the scientific unknown? There is no fear of damnation, there is nothing to gain or lose, so how does pascal's wager apply now? The ONLY way pascal's wager "works" is by attributing human made ideas to god, such as heaven and hell. When you realize this, deludedgod's explanation makes more sense than pascal's.
This is probably the best refute against pascal's wager (at least on this thread). The most logical religion to believe in would simply be the one with the biggest difference between it's reward for believing and punshment for disbelieving. I think we can all quickly realize that is not logical.
I must worship you because I am in awe over your funny and yet brilliant post.
"The God of Abraham is a vague, illiterate and ignorant creation of man. It belongs among those stories of easter bunnies, santa claus, fairies and unicorns."
-Me
I'll deal with this one.
First, it is not meant to be compelling. It is however a succinct and correct debunking of the theistic argument on offer which is: Everything had to come from somewhere. Therefore there had to be a god to create it or else there wouldn't be anything. The "where did god come from" rebuttal is perfect because the original argument sites an exception to its own premise, that everything had to come from somewhere. And this is all the argument is meant to do, point out the arbiitrariness of the original argument.
As for god existing outside of time, what could this possibly mean? As I understand it, existence MEANS to be somewhere and to do something. If you remove the time element, you remove a basic criterion of existence. If god is outside of time then he is also outside of existence. So saying that god is outside of time is identical to saying that there is no god.
It's not unlike the statement, "I always lie."
Some statements create paradoxes, and must be false, due to the axiom of non-contradiction. "All things need a cause" does not have an inherent contradiction until you add "and therefore god caused everything"
Put another way:
1) All things have (need) a cause. (Valid form, but not deductively true.)
2) God is the cause of all things.
"All" is universal, so either:
*God is not one of "all things" and therefore does not exist.
*God is one of the set of "all things" and so cannot be the cause of all things.
Credulity is much easier to sustain when we've been taught that facts are things to be memorized and repeated, rather than sought out and discovered.
-- Me
I don't buy your education background due to the numerous grammar / spelling mistakes. I don't care if you have 10 degrees if you can't even present a coherent case.
The biggest mistake in your post was not grammar though. You cannot choose to believe in something just because you think it is possible mathematically. If I could proove mathematicaly that there was a 1% chance a god existed, I still would not believe in the god. I think this is the biggest error in Pascal's Wager.
Deludedgod: I enjoy reading your thorough replies. I wish people would actually try to respond to them more.
I'll summarize what I expect is the general response to DG's posts:
*ahem*
"I have no fucking clue what this says, but it's not like it matters because I'm still right anyway."
"Oh, here's someone that asked a question I can answer. I'll just reply to this one and make a comment about how there are too many replies, that way I can pretend like I forgot or accidentally overlooked the longest, most thorough post on this thread."
"When did I realize I was God? Well, one day I was praying and I realized I was talking to myself."
Lmao. So true. So True.
Interesting, drm5977. If you had put as much thought into your post as condescension, you may have had something worthwhile to contribute.
COME TO THE DARK SIDE -- WE HAVE COOKIES
wow he got is a-- handed to him o_o.
If you think you can be a true scientist and a Theist at the same time, let's test your propositions about God.
Would you be willing to submit to a scientific study of whether your prayers cause a supernatural being or force to intervene?
Would you be willing to submit to lie detector test to give us evidence that you truly believe?
Like all theists the answer is no cause you don't practice true science or seek the real truth. You just have some lame excuse.
Stop global whining.
After reading the rest of your post, you might want to hold off on that masters in Physics until you take some elementary grammar.
For the sake of theory, let's say that Pascal's Wager does work. I wager that God is going to send atheists to heaven (for not bothering him) and all you stupid xians will burn in hell. Happy?
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Lie detectors aren't 100% and even if they were there might be an issue of detecting a Christian lying. If a Christian truly has faith in their belief they believe they are not lying and they believe it to be absolute truthful.
There fore any lie detector tests would show they are telling the truth and would be proof for them to say "look I'm telling the truth, god really does exist".
"The God of Abraham is a vague, illiterate and ignorant creation of man. It belongs among those stories of easter bunnies, santa claus, fairies and unicorns."
-Me
__| ]2 U ]{ /\__]\[ /\ ]\/[ | ]\[ () ]2 |__
"Finally the worse argument any atheist can make is "then who created God?" argument, this is most overused and worse arguement there is. God is not "created" as this implies he exists in the dimension of time, which of course as Einstein proved, is relative and based on perception. An omniscent being could not have such a constraint. As being subjected to any dimensional constraints would make him less the omniscent. Therefor If God was created he would not be God. So Congrats! you proved that God can not exist in time! I see a lot of people true argue this point but it is really uncompelling."
Actually, its very compelling, if you cannot see why then I beg you to get out of science now. I don't use the argument to argue there is no god, I use the argument to point out the fallacy in the logic people use to prove the existence of god. In science we are not allowed to create new laws which we cannot test to explain our data. We have no evidence of this god, but you are able to assign it all kinds of abilities. A paper on this would be rejected for good reason.
The observation that people have used for the existence of a god is that the universe and our planet is very complicated and therefore requires a designer. Time is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the argument for god involves an observation of complexity in the natural world. The rebuttal is simple and its truth obvious to people with a brain, if you are going to argue there is a creator based on complexity, then there is a hidden assumption in the argument that something complex requires a creator that is more complex. If the creator is not more complex then complexity can from less complexity and there is no need for a creator, or at least not an omniscient one. In time or out of time, this god of yours is more complex than we are and thereofre requires a creator of greater complexity whether or not it is in or out of time.
It is very telling that on the one hand believers want to make an argment about complexity requiring a creator, yet at the same time make up baseless arguments to make them immune from the same logic. I love the "God is not "created"" part, if we are proceeding down that path then I will turn the tables and just simply assert like you, life was not created it just is and therefore requires no explanation! Your simply making up your counter argument out of thin air and its got nothing to with math degrees or physics.