How can a being that your holy book claims is not bound by the rules of logic have given you a rational foundation for anything?

As far as worshipping creation over creator, why aren't you worshipping Paul? He played a large part in building the Christ you worship.

The God of the Quran presumably created the Universe, with logic in it. Ergo he must be real, because logic is real.

And other ancient deities also created the universe with logic in it. Ergo they are real too.

What makes the God of the Bible any truer than any other?

The variation of the ontological argument that you are using presupposes only "a creator-God", not any specific one. There are more creator-God's than your version of the Christian God who are equally valid from your argument.

So how can you descredit any of them, of you think this argument is valid?

I'm not starting by believing in Zeus or Allah, I'm starting with Jehovah.  I do this because there are no irreconcilable internal contradictions in the Christian worldview, like there are in those other religions.  But I'm not dealing with Muslims and Zeusites, I'm dealing with athiests right now; I'll worry about Muslims and flying spaghetti monster worshippers when they come knocking at my door.  So why don't you focus on accounting for logic like I've politely asked?

Have you read the bible ?

This is not rational. You're just saying "god did it", which is pulling stuff out of the sky, which is what you accused us of doing.

If you want a definition of "logic" without the word "god" in it, just open a dictionary.

This conversation just keeps getting more and more hilariously ridiculous.  Serious, I almost spewed soda from my nose laughing so hard.

Atheism is not a position of "nothing".

Atheism is simply the absence of the belief of a god (whatever that is)

Chris, what if god was us?. Buddha and Jesus etc said they and all was god, so why not you? I am an atheist fan of a jesus, but not the jesus, of saul paul, nor xainity, nor any form of idol worship. Atheism is the "saving good word", as all is one ....

What if god was one of us? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42BCZ6Csfk

Alan Watts, world religion scholar wrote:

"The religion of Jesus was that he knew he was a son of God, and the phrase "son of " means "of the nature of," so that a son of God is an individual who realizes that he is, and always has been, one with God. "I and the Father are one." .......... and,  "Let this mind be in you." that is to say, let the same kind of [rational] consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ knew he was God." [ you and all are christ too, 100% god too ]

"Wake up" [said a buddha] and find out eventually who you also really are [ god ]. In our culture of course, they'll say you're crazy or you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house (which is the same thing). But if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, "My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God," they'll laugh and say, "Oh, congratulations, at last you found out." ~ Alan Watts *

Nietzsche's The Antichrist, by Travis J. Denneson .... and SEE Part 4 , IV. The Buddhistic Jesus?

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/travis_denneson/antichrist.html

If you have no formal training in logic or epistemology, do you believe you are equipped to seriously consider the question of the fundamental nature of logic? Let alone carry on an informed debate. I'm not trying to be insulting, truly. But would you try to build a house without training as a carpenter? Would you attempt to build a bridge without knowledge of mechanical physics? Would you argue rocket design with Robert Goddard without some knowledge of chemistry, physics, and engineering?

Consider your viewpoint with an outsider's perspective. You claim the Bible is true simply because the Bible claims to be true. Do you see how an outsider might consider this a faulty argument? Further, do you see how any argument based on Biblical texts might be seen as faulty?

I understand your argument, which is the argument-for-ignorance: "Everything is as it is because God made it that way."

I'm going out on a limb here, and assuming you believe the universe is only a few thousand years old. In that light, I'd like you to explain a few things about God for me.

The closest galaxy (Andromeda) to us is over 2 million light years away. That means that light from that galaxy would take over 2 millions years to reach us. If the universe is only a few thousand years old (strict Biblical interpretation, I'm told), how did this light reach us? Did God create the light in-transit, as if the universe were older than it is? This is an important question, because it helps define the kind of God you believe in. Either your God is a trickster God, who would lead you to believe things that are not true (that the universe is older than it is), or the universe is really older than you believe. (Again, I'm making assumptions about your belief.)

We have detected objects 13 billion light-years away. That means that either the universe really is 13 billion years old, or God wishes us to believe the universe is 13 billion years old, or God is trying to catch us unbelievers with a trick that is obvious to true believers. Or, perhaps, we merely don't understand things like the speed of light and cosmic distances.

So, which am I to believe? An ancient universe, a trickster God, or a failed understanding of the laws of physics? Or is it something else entirely?

Absolutely some philosophers have issues with induction. Just because something is so, doesn't mean it will be so tomorrow. As a universal tool, induction is flawed. In specific, well-defined cases, however, induction is a very powerful tool.

First, "proofs" are not subjective. You are projecting your own interpretation based on your view of atheism, which appears to be flawed.

You are correct in your conclusion that the universe seems to be a consistent and uniform place. Your conclusion that it is ruled by chaos, however, is incorrect. "Chaos" is a mathematical concept (in the sense we're using here). It is a property of a stochastic process, and is not itself necessarily a fundamental feature of the universe per se. Chances are, "chaos" is an emergent, and not basic, property of the universe.

One of the interesting things about information science is the demonstration of emergent chaos from simple sets of interdependent rules. What is even more interesting is the emergent third-level order from the second-level chaos. Starting from simple rule sets, a system may result in mathematical chaos; however, from this chaos, a more-complex stochastic order emerges, forming complex structures with unexpected complex interactions with each other. Funny thing is, these rulesets don't have to be particularly well-crafted for expression of these emergent properties.

This is very similar to what we see in the universe. So far, though our knowledge is far from complete, the fundamental rules of the universe are surprisingly simple. There seem to be only a few of these rules, and a search is on to find the unifying (hopefully-simple) ruleset.

Now, if our understanding of logic is based entirely on the consistency and coherency of this fundamental ruleset, what you are arguing really isn't about logic. You are arguing that God is necessary for the creation of the universe. This is exactly the same argument-from-ignorance used by theists for thousands of years.

As I explained, atheism doesn't invalidate logic. Your misunderstanding of the atheistic worldview (hint: there isn't one, except inasmuch as it doesn't include God) has led to some false assumptions about how atheist scientists view the universe. You are simply trying to imagine that our understanding of logic is the exact opposite of your understanding of logic. However, that isn't so.

For homework, please read Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason, and write an essay explaining the necessity (or lack thereof) of God in relation to logic from a Kantian perspective.

You're really just papering over the question and not answering it.  How do you, as an athiest, rationally give an account for logic, objective morality, linguistic coherency, and the uniformity of nature?  I'm accusing you of saying these things just magically exist, which is something that should not comport with your atheism because you deny the supernatural by necessity.

Saying these things exist by supernatural means does comport with my Christianity, however, so I don't have the same problem you do.  The Bible teaches that in Jehovah we live and move and have our being.

The solution for you is to just start presupposing God more consistently, since you're already doing it every time you open your mouth and use His system of coherent language or His reasoning ability. 

Atheists tend not to believe in magic.

More nonsense.  Atheists LACK A BELIEF in the supernatural because there is no evidence for it, and also because the term is inherently undefinable.

Perhaps not.  You only have the task of providing the evidence and definition for that which is supernatural.  Go!

The bible also teaches that eating yeast is a sin.  You on the Atkins diet over there?

This is so ridiculous that my only response is to ask a mod to move this to the Atheist vs. Theist board, so that I can mock your avatar.

RRS saves!  Thanks ...

The clever greedy ego maniacs have always created false memes to pacify and enslave the weak, who then emulate them.  

http://www.rationalresponders.com/ontological_and_epistemological_blunders_tag

  As for objective morals:  I've yet to claim that such a thing exists.  It looks to me like morals evolve with society.  In ancient Greece, defective\weak babies were discarded.  This seems quite horrific to me, but to the cultures that did it, it made perfect sense.  If you want to argue that god gives us objective morals, then why not explain why so many of the bible's commandments are irrelevant today.  Why do we not execute people for working on the sabath (friday, saturday, sunday)?  Why is it mostly xians who are anti choice, yet the bible has verses with orders to kill women "with child" and rip them open and slash the babies?

  Please define "magically".

Latin,

This is more than just an argument from causation.  I'm not so much asking for the cause for logic, morality, etc as I'm asking for an account of these things.  What sustains them?  What validates them?  Why should they and do they exist at all?  Saying evolution does this is a very blanket assertion and I'd like to hear more from you on how and why evolution would accomplish this.

Magus,

Your critique of the TAG is very weak largely because I don't think you're representing it fairly as you pick it apart, and you aren't providing an answer to it.  I'll repeat it:  "My worldview, the Christian worldview, makes sense of the fundamentals of human experience.  The athiestic worldview, (I should say, as Nigel pointed out, 'worldviews that are athiestic in nature' rather than just 'the athiestic worldview'.  The later is a simplification, but I don't think it's an invalid one) is unable to make sense of the fundamentals of human experience.  The trancendental argument therefore, based off of this illustration, demonstrates that God is trancendentally necessary to the universe in which we find ourselves."

Hazindu,

I'm not asking for a definition of logic, I'm asking for a rational account of it from your athiestic perspective. 

If good is just what the vast majority of society approves of, you'll encounter a number of problems that would ultimately render ethics arbitrary.  Let's go back to Sparta, when they threw their unfit babies off of cliffs.  As the Spartan society started to change, I imagine it did so (I'm not sure on the history of this, just speculating) by means of certian Spartans expressing moral indignation about throwing their children off the cliff.  Now, when these individuals did so, they were going agianst the society.  So, under your defintion of morality, that good is just what the society at large approves of, what these men did in attempting to reform that society was wrong or evil by definition. 

This expands to more modern illustrations also.  If cultural relativism is true, what Martin Luther King Jr did to reform a racist culture was evil, because the culture had decided discrimination agaisnt blacks was good.  Moreover, what you're doing to reform a Christian culture is also evil by definition, because we, the culture at large, have decided to believe in the God of the Bible.

Now I reject cultural relativism, I think it makes nonsense of ethics and I hope you agree from my illustrations.  Good is something cultures must try to conform to, not something cultures themselves define.

"Magic", as I'm using it, is something supernatural and unexplainable that you're accepting uncritically and without rational basis.

Before you ask, my rational basis for belief in God is that He made me, loved me, saved me, and, according to His word, He asks me for belief in Him and obedience to Him as an expression of my own love and gratitude to Him.  The issue isn't that I don't have a good reason for a belief in God, because the Bible is full of them.  The issue is that you simply reject that reason, regardless of it's individual merit.

The transcendental argument is particularly weak, as it is essentially a restatement of the strong anthropic principle, which has been fairly demolished in recent years by the discovery that many combinations of physical laws result in stable features within a universe, and also by the "evolutionary universe" concepts put forth by folks like Lee Smolin and other physicists studying things like quantum gravity.

TAG is an argument a priori, which is itself a logically-invalid proof. The only defence mountable is the internal consistency of the argument, which is acheived (as Nikolij and others have pointed out several times) by circular reasoning. As a proof for a specific God, it also fails, especially as the God of the Christian Bible has Himself violated the very laws which make the universe consistent, rendering logic useless.

A better God might be Spinoza's God, the pantheistic God of the natural universe. This provides the consistency of your argument ("God did it; God always does it" ) with no logical inconsistencies whatsoever, side-stepping the whole nastiness of God impregnating a young woman out of wedlock and becoming His own Son, and the wealth of other stories in the Bible that bugger logic.

This also avoids the points that you have been studiously ignoring, such as the "fossil light" we see from objects billions of light-years away, which gives lie to the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. So, a better explanation using your same argument comes to a more rational (though still tenuous) conclusion: God is the universe (pantheism).

Given. Logic works because the universe is fundamentally logical. Why is it logical? Because the relatively few simple relationships between objects and energies are interdependent, forming a stochastic system. Pull a string here, a marionette raises his hand there. Everything is tied together with simple rules.

Logic is our symbolism derived from observation of those rules at work.

Your assumption that there is either God or chaos is a false dichotomy. This is not chaos. This is merely the rules defined by the physical nature of the universe at work.

Now, if you are honest in your desire for debate, how about addressing these issues? I have demonstrated how logic can exist in a world without God. I have answered your question several times, and have received no adequate response.

None of those are good reasons to believe in God. Not one. Especially weak is the argument that the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true (which is implicit in your overall argument). Every one of your arguments begs the question (How do I know God exists? Because He made me.), which is one of the most transperant of fallacies. The same is true of the TAG -- it presupposes the existence of God, without offering a proof of His existence.

Why is everyone still dickering over this?  I've already explained it.

Reason exists because there is no alternative.  Axioms are self evident truths about reality.  There are only a few of them, the simplest being the axiom of existence.  For a thing to contemplate its existence, it must exist.  It is impossible to conceive of a nonexistent thing acting, for that would necessitate existence.  Contemplation is an act.  Since I have contemplated my existence, there is no alternative save my own existence.

We can then say that a thing that exists cannot also not exist.  This is a correlary to the axiom of identity, and equally self evident.  Again, if I do not exist, then I cannot exist to contemplate whether I can exist and not exist simultaneously.

Finally, there is no middle ground between existence and non-existence.  A thing cannot half exist.  Therefore, we can say with absolute certainty that the states "true" and "false" exist simply by assigning them to existence and nonexistence, which must be discreet states because there is no alternative.

When we start thinking from there, we realize that "true" and "false" are simply designations for "existing as described."  Descriptions, or more precisely, mental categorizations, exist with certainty -- again, because there is no alternative.  By contemplating my existence, I have formed a mental box for it.  It has identity (existence) and I have formed a concept of that identity.

The only boundary to the self evident nature of logic are the assumptions of uniformity and the refutation of the "brain in a vat" scenario.  In both of these cases, a little critical thinking goes a long way.  If the universe is not uniform, then knowledge is impossible.   Likewise, if we are a brain in a vat, and reality is a complete illusion, then for all intents and purposes, the illusion is real, and both of these objections to the self evidence of logic fail.

Nigel,

I'm not arguing that the Bible is true because it says it's true, that's a terrible argument.  I'm trying to argue that the Bible is true because if it isn't true, then nothing is true at all. 

Of course, I'm not a great debater or a world class logician, so if I've failed to demonstrate this, I consider it a personal failure rather than a failure of the trancendental argument.  It's a very old argument after all.  It's implicit in the writings of Moses and other bibilcal writers, and rather explicit in the writings of the apostle Paul.  Augustine used it, and more reciently the late pastor and philosopher Greg Bahnsen used it to great effect.

You're a very intelligent man, but I don't think you're fully grasping the extent of what I'm saying.  "Logic works because the universe is fundamentally logical" is begging the question.  You tried to respond without just defining logic again, but that's all you did.  Why should the universe be interdependent or a system of any kind?  No matter how simple the rules are, and I don't think they're at all simple, how do you account for these rules?

How do you account for observation, while we're on the subject?  Why should matter be interacting with other matter, and why should one bit of matter derive meaning from another bit of matter?

Since you're trying to answer my questions, it would be rude to refuse you.  Spinoza's pantheistic god suffers a fatal flaw, it was invented by Spinoza, and we know that.  Jehovah has revealed Himself as God through His Bible and through Jesus Christ.  You don't know this to be false, but we know Spinoza's god is false because he made it up.  The same goes for Thumbor. 

Why does distant starlight not disprove God?  Because I can rationalize it away from within my worldview.  I can say "The speed of light isn't necessaraly constant throughout the universe, therefore time is not necessaraly constant, therefore those stars could actually be 6000 'years' away."  Is this true?  I don't know, I'm not a scientist, I'm a Christian theology student.  Either way, God's faithfulness is not contingent on my ability to understand the universe He's created.  They may find out next year that the earth really is only about 10,000 years old, you don't know that.  God demands repentance now, not when all the evidence is in.

All of the reasons I gave are good reasons to believe in God, under the assumption that they're true.  Change your presupposition and they become good reasons, it's as simple as that.

Hazindu,

"Subjectivity doesn't necessarily equal arbitrary.  Morals evolve with the needs of society.  Good and evil are relative terms.  In Sparta, the first few to object to baby binning may well have been greeted with fear and\or disgust.  I don't think those who apposed were evil, because evil is subjective and their actions were good (also subjective) to my point of view."

The reason why you think this is because you're appealing to an objective morality, even though you're calling it your subjective point of view.  If morality is determined by what the individual approves, as I think you're alluding, you must realize that no one can make a moral judgement that's wrong, unless if he happens to misunderstand himself as he makes it.  I can justify doing whatever I want if that's true; if it invokes your approval, do it, because that's what good is. 

Such a system makes nonsense out of ethics and anything becomes justifiable.  There's something intrinsically wrong with killing people, raping people, exploiting people, etc.  Societies and individuals must conform to this standard, not the other way around.

Hamby,

There are fundamental problems in saying "I think, therefore I am."  "I think" does not account for the "I am", can someone think himself into sentience?  Nor does "I am" necessarally follow "I think".  You can't rule out the possibility of self deception.  The only reason Descartes' skepticism managed to start with even this, I think, is because he himself was a Christian and therefore had a true foundation for knowledge.  "God is, therefore I am" or as the Proverb says, "Reverence for the Lord is the beginning of knowledge."

your special pleading here, your saying that ONLY the bible can be true, but you ignore all other faiths, and facts of truth, plus you ignore all the mistakes and falsehoods in the bible, basically your saying the bible is true because your bible says it's true, and that it was revealed to man by god. However Muslims say that the Koran was revealed to Mohammad, why can't this  be true?

Again your god is no more created than Spinoza's god, except that some of the writers and of course the church claims it was revealed, but there is ZERO evidence of this. Spinoza's god has the problem that we cannot prove it to be true or false at all, because there is technically no evidence of it, however the Christian god does have a description, and description of events that are attributed to god as well he has attributes given to him by those who wrote the bible, much like a character in a book, which we can access if those event could have occurred (sorry miracles take away your uniformity of nature argument) or his description and attributes (sorry god is not logical at all given the fact of jesus and whole sacrificing himself to himself to forgive humans)

Again your ignoring TONS and TONS of evidence that says otherwise, something theists LOVE to do, ignore the facts and play with word but never face the truth. The evidence is in however your god does not exist. The evidence is in the lies of the bible, the moon has it's own light? No the moon reflects light....apparently god didn't know this. Donkeys and snakes speak? Nope they neither have the vocal cords nor the jaw to do this. I could keep on going but you see the point....then again you don't see all the evidence that contradicts everything you said so I am not really expecting you to comprehend this.

All of the reasons I gave are good reasons to believe in God, under the assumption that they're true.  Change your presupposition and they become good reasons, it's as simple as that.

Only really applies to those of the same tribe really, ESPECIALLY in the bible. Thou shalt not kill really applies to Thou shalt not kill another Jew, because in the OT the Jews kill, pillage, rape and exploit people left right and centre. morals really apply to oneself and to the society you live in. Hence why in the past it was far easier for massacres to occur, heck even in modern times it is easier for a society to kill off those outside of their society (holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the massive starvation deaths of Ukrainians, Hutus killing Tutsi, Christan's vs Muslims, Jews vs Palestinians etc, etc, etc)