Why have faith in a god that is demanding and controlling? Wouldn't it be easier just to admit ignorance and go on with life and wait and find out what happens?

Do you have a basis for saying this? There could be a different reason, or no reason at all, for nonbelievers to be so. I'd like to avoid these unsubstantiated declarations on principle. Onward...

This is another assumption. A conflict between religious claims and the scientific method is we don't have any phenomena to explore that either haven't been explained naturally, or would benefit from the insertion of a supernatural agent. Based on many descriptions given for supernatural agencies, there isn't a way to determine this: an omnipresent entity allows no comparison, so we have nothing to compare a thing affected by a god to one not. An omnipotent being could do whatever it likes on a whim, so again this admits no basis for comparison between what a thing affected by, and not affected by, a god would be. If we add omniscience to the description, any action by such a being becomes totally unjustifiable, as action and inaction would be undifferentiated from its perspective.

You're begging the question.

This is a false dilemma, and argument from ignorance.

If it explained anything, science and theology would be one field.

We only know of your god through theists, so the distinction is unjustified.

You can edit your signature under your account preferences. You don't need to write this every time.

I'm quite sure we've already been through this. Since you missed it, I'll repost that which I already responded to you with:

Regarding your first argument:

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Those who have read Joseph Heller’s famous novel will know of what we call in logic a Catch-22. The idea behind it has been understood for quite some time, simply put:

C=>(A^B)

(A =>~B)

(B =>~A)

This is basic logic notation. Preconditions A and B are both necessary for outcome C, but if A, then B cannot occur, and conversely, if B, then A cannot occur, hence, C can never occur. In Joseph Heller’s book, the Catch-22 was that to leave the air force, you had to be insane and you had to request to leave. But if you are genuinely insane, there is no way you can request to leave, conversely, if you request to leave, there is no way you can be genuinely insane. So, you are stuck. It’s also known as a no-win situation.

We have a similar situation here. There are two necessary preconditions that make God a necessary and coherent postulate that the Cosmological Argument may work.

A: Cause requires time (which there cannot be an infinite regress of)

B: The universe (of which time is a physical component) was caused

C: The Universe was caused by an entity outside of time

The a posteriori observation for the argument comes from the necessity of time for cause, such that infinite regress is impossible, the other postulation is that the universe was caused under the proposition that all things need a cause. This is a Catch-22.

If causality requires time, then it is impossible that time was caused. If time was caused, then it we cannot speak of causality requiring time, therefore the Universe being caused by something outside of time cannot occur, because A cannot occur if B and nor can B occur if A. C (the outcome) cannot occur since it necessarily postulates that there cannot be an infinite regress of cause because cause requires time, without that proposition we could not speak of the necessity of the God being, because these are the grounds on which the Cosmological Argument is being propagated! We cannot reference regress without referencing time, ergo, we cannot reference regress of cause without referencing regress of time. Yet postulation B specifically states that it is necessary to postulate the Prime Mover on grounds that the universe of which time is a component was…caused. If this proposition were not true, the Primum Movens would not be a sensible proposition. But it cannot occur if A occurs, since A postulates the opposite and A cannot occur if it occurs, but both of these postulations are necessary for C (the outcome), being the universe being caused by an entity outside of time.

The paradox here is “cause of cause”. Cause, per se, requires time as a substrate (the idea of the “cause of time” is insurmountable, like “north of the north pole”. When we speak of cause we are speaking of a correlation between two events A and B where there is temporal sequence between such events that A may “cause” B. Hence, what precisely does it mean to say that an entity outside of time could be the cause of such an event as what is essentially the beginning of cause itself? Surely, we have set up a greatly insurmountable paradox. We cannot reference causality without referring to time, and hence the notion of an atemporal being as the cause of cause is inherently absurd. An atemporal being, by definition, cannot cause anything or indeed execute any action since both notions necessarily refer to the substrate of time in which they may occur. Furthermore, the notion is essentially appealing to “cause of cause” which is inherently absurd. How do we intend to reference causality by the invocation of an atemporal entity?’

 Furthermore, your initial assumption from whence your conclusion derives is a falsehood. You said the BB suggested and hence atheists believe that the universe was created ex nihilo. This is false. Allow me to introduce you to Cosmology 101:

The Big Bang does not contradict the laws of either conservation or thermodynamics. It aligns with them. Your assertion regarding the Big Bang regarding ex nihilo is incorrect.. If the BB did describe such things, it would lead to an internal contradiction which would lead to a paradigm shift within physics, much the same way that the contradiction between Newtonian Kinematics and Electromagnetism lead to Relativity. It hasn’t, because there is no contradiction!

The Big Bang is derived from three primary sources:

-The Hubble Metric

-The Einstein Field Equations

-The Cosmic Background Radiation

The first is quite simple. The universe is expanding. That is to say the space-time is expanding, and so the matter within. This tumbles neatly out of the Lorentz transforms and the Einstein field equations. Einstein originally inserted an ad hoc constant which took this form:

R(uv)=-0.5Rg(uv)+ 8pi(pvac)(g)(uv)=8pi)G)/c^4)T(uv)

Where G is the gravitational constant

Pvac is the density function in the vacuum (empty space) where R is the function of topology of the space-time metric, as is g,

The universe is expanding. This means that all cosmological bodies are moving away from each other. As a result of this recessional velocity, the wavelengths as observed from other bodies from which the ones being measured are receding from will shift, and become greater. Hubble’s Law states that the amount of redshift is directly proportional to distance

The cosmic background radiation is the most distant and old thing that humans have ever observed. The universe was initially opaque but as it cooled and spread out, it became black roughly 380,000 years After The Big Bang. The microwave background, in other words, is a picture of what the entire universe looked like just moments after the original expansion, and a COBE photograph of it was taken by spectroscopes and microwave radiation probes by a device called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

None of these support the idea, in any way, shape, or form, that BB describes anything other than a phase transition. None whatsoever. Your ideas and understanding are completely flawed. All the Big Bang theory states is that the universe expanded outwards 13.7 billion years ago from a very dense, extremely low entropy prior state. Many theists miscontrue the Big Bang as ex nihilo, "out of nothing". It is not the case. There are certain models postulating pre-Big Bang occurances, the boundary condition in Hartele-Hawking, brane cosmology, etc. But the BB itself says nothing about the creation of the universe. It simply describes an expansion occurance 13.7 billion years ago from a prior state, and the model describes occurances from the Planck time onwards from this prior state, that we can describe events from the Planck Time until the end of BB nucleosynthesis.

The laws of General Relativity break down as you approach the prior entropy state, until Planck Time. According to BB theory, nothing can be known about the pre-Planck Time existence, all we know is that the universe expanded outwards from some prior very low entropy state when presumably the symmetry in the four disngaged forces were unified. There was no matter, it would have been too excited and broken down, due to Planck's Constant. This system was extremely unstable and collapsed into our present system. Remember, when one intuitively speak of "time" you are speaking of time as a progression. I am referring to the Lorentz Manifold, the causal structure. This applies to Minkowski and Non-Minkowski space. So, it is unhelpful to say that time "did not exist" before BB.

In this regard, it is necessary to consider time, being that we are describing, after all the expansion of space-time, not as a "river" that flows in one direction, but as invariant, as demonstrated in Physics.

According to the Lorentz Matrices, time, strictly speaking, is invariant, it has no direction and there is no reason it should. This is demonstrated by the light-cone experiments, which can be causal-chronological or chronological-causal. Time is not a thing unto itself, being relative to the observer, but absolute space-time is. The concept of time as we understand it is quite simple to begin with. In a 2D Euclidean manifold, with two vectors, the square of the displacement of a body will be equal to the squares of the sum of the vectors. This is Pythagoras' theorom: x^2+y^2=h^2. This can be extended to incorporate a Z axis: x^2+y^2+z^2=h^2.

Minkowski realized that if a 3D body displaced a 3D Euclidean manifold, than (and this fit perfectly into the contradiction Einstein found between Maxwell's equations and the Galilean Transformations), time could be included as being displaced as well, along a 4D manifold called Minkowski space. In this scenario, time simply becomes another unit of measurment, the same of length, width and breadth, which can be displaced. THe equation derived for this simply follows the same rule of transformation: x^2+y^2+z^2+(ict)^2=h^2. This works tidily since c is constant in all frames of reference, although it needs some righting since it is unhelpful to vector something to an imaginary number, i which is formally r(-1), and since squared, becomes: x&2+y^2+z^2-(ct)^2=h^2. In this scenario, time has no direction, although it still has causality (since it is a part of a topological structure instead of an abstraction), that causality, described by the causal manifold, an extensive topic in Relativity, can go, as the experiment demonstrated, both ways. Nonetheless, it is gibberish to speak of causality without the manifold (no values can be inserted into the equations).

The gist is that all the BB says is that the universe expanded from a symmetrical low entropy state which may have been a false vacuum which inflated, via which the force disengagement could have been created and matter could form since it is no longer too excited below Planck temperature. According to this formula: Tp=mpc^2/k=r(hr)c^5/Gk^2, matter breaks down at the Planck Temperature, 10^32K. It is nonsense to speak of matter being "hotter" since temperature is a measure of particle kinetics. In the low-entropy state, there wasn't any matter, it becomes interchangeable with energy. This is described by the mass-energy equivalence, or E=mc^2. As for the energy in question which formed matter by this equation, that was most certainly not generated in the process. It was a necessary antecedant for the phase transition called the Big Bang. The phase transition itself, or BB, is the result of the decay that is dictated by that the original state was of lower entropy than at present. Although we are unsure precisely how the original state collapsed, there are at least 100 competing proposals, and time will tell which is correct.

A symmetry in physics equations is generated by the ability to interchange expressions in an equation. Thanks to Weinberg and Salam, we can interchange all three leptons in an electric field, which gives it SU(3) symmetry. The ruling of the universe is dictated by SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry, regarding the simplest particles that make up the universe. In the singularity during the Planck era of the universe (10^-43 seconds), the collapse of the false vacuum led to the breaking of the symmetry from SU(5) to what we see today. Symmetry breaking is not properly understood, and very difficult to solve. Gravity was the first force to disengage, giving a SU(4) x U(1) symmetry. The breaking off of the other three, including electromagnetism, generated the asymmetry we see today, which explains why the electron has a negative charge (the electromagnetic force). There was no charge in the symmetry. None at all. Being that the universe iwas orignally in a state of symmetry, there is no charge in the entire universe. The electromagnetic force works both ways, it attracts and it repels (unlike gravity, which is purely attractive). It's attraction/repulsion is very, very precisely balanced, to the tune of 10^-32 electron volts difference, which is probably experimental error. This is good because the electromagnetic force is tremendously powerful, almost 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more powerful than gravity (this explains why you can cancel the entire gravity of the Earth by picking up bits of paper with the static electricty of your comb). And that means that if the electromagnetic force was any less balanced, you would be ripped to shreds instantly.

For further review of common Cosmological Misconceptions:

Common cosmological misconceptions.

Given your misunderstanding, you've all but certainly erred by referencing Christian apologetics websites, which generally speaking, are not versed in Big Bang cosmology, and therefore should not be taken seriously. The misunderstanding that BB describes ex nihilo creation which violates the most fundamental laws of physics is surely the greatest error ever propogated in popular science, perhaps superseded only by the  claim that DNA is a language.

Furthermore, your argument contains a bifurcation fallacy. Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Bifurcation and its variants are often abused in the debate process, much of the time by theists. Bifurcation is more commonly known by its other name: The fallacy of false dichotomy (the opposite of which is the fallacy of denying the correlative). In a bifurcation fallacy, a debater introduces two possibilities and only two possibilities where more actually exist, attempting to falsely dichotomize the situation to make a point. This is all too common in debate. Examples of false dichotomies are endless.

There are two formal complementary fallacies called the denying the antecedent and affirming the consequent, both of which are linked to the false dichotomy fallacy and are also oft-used. A denying the antecedent is formally expressed as:

If P then Q

~P

~Q

If I snort cocaine, I am a drug user

I do not snort cocaine

Therefore, I am not a drug user

This argument is fallacious, since snorting cocaine is not necessarily the only way in which someone could be a drug user, therefore, just because someone does not snort cocaine does not necessarily mean they are not drug users. They might be addicted to other substances.

In set theory, a denying the antecedent is essentially misinterpreting the statement:” P is a subset of Q” to mean “P=Q”. Just because P (snorting cocaine) is a possibility within set Q (drug user) does not necessarily mean it is the only possibility.

The converse fallacy is Affirming the consequent, which is expressed as:

If P then Q

Q

P

An example being:

If I attend a country club, I am wealthy

I am wealthy

Therefore, I attend a country club.

This is the exact opposite of DTA. Instead of falsely stating that if P is a subset of Q, P and only P represents Q, we are now saying that if P (attending a country club) is a possible subset of Q (being wealthy) then from Q we can automatically conclude P. This is false. It is also known as reverse causation: If attending a country club necessarily implies being wealthy then being wealthy necessarily implies attending to a country club. This is fallacious.

However, we must be careful. This argument can be rectified by replacing “if” with “iff”, which means if and only if. (ie justified biconditional premises) Such situations, however, rarely arise.

Now, let us begin with all this in mind. Some of the arguments about to be put forth have already been expressed by me here:

Let us begin with something simple pertaining to false dichotomy fallacy. Many theists argue, fallaciously, for the existence of God based on the idea that existence is too complex and intricate to have formed randomly, and often attempt to make a fallacy of conflation between “not God” and “randomness.

The bifurcation occurs because the argument rests on the false dichotomy that “if not God, then chance”. This is fallacious because there is a third alternative (hence, we have a triconditional premise, which means that bifurcation is fallacious). That third alternative is natural process, which is not random, which is guided by the laws of physics and chemistry and such, but has no conscious will behind it. The bifurcation occurs because the theist makes the unjustified assertion that conscious will (ie a “mind” such as “the mind of God”) is necessary to create the order we see around us because it cannot be random. While it is true it cannot be random, this does not necessarily imply that it must have conscious guidance, because that fallaciously implies that we have a dichotomy between “conscious will” and “randomness”. In reality, we have unconscious, but certainly not random, processes which form the order we see. The process of biological evolution, for example, is blind-guided. But it is most certainly the absolute and precise opposite of randomness. This is true of vast numbers of natural processes which explain why things are the way they are, from star formation and cycles to geological columns . Everything down to the quantum level and up to the macrocosmic scale is governed by sets of physical and chemical laws which have no consciousness behind them, but still produce complex Order. In reality, the natural processes which do produce the order we see around us are extremely complex and anything but random. They are much, much more capable of producing natural order and complexity than we are at producing artificial complexity.

I admit, this one is quite instinctual. Since we are conscious entities, we tend to have some confirmation bias on the necessity of consciousness for anything to occur which is not random. In reality, this is not the case (and it just begs the question anyway). The problem is that we are used to the notion that only conscious entities may produce complexities, because that is what we do (this is why the unusually dim may compare natural structures and order to our artificially generated devices such as watches as per Paley). Hence, we tend to fallaciously conflate “not conscious” with “random”. This is a bifurcation which is false.

Many theists hence make the following statements

“Evolution is just randomness”

“abiogenesis (actually, most of them, fallaciously, say “evolution”) says that a bunch of molecules randomly collided to make life

Or more usually “evolution (again, fallacy of conflation) says that life came from rocks” (Take note, Hovind, this is factually false as well as fallacious)

“The Big Bang was just an explosion which was purely random”

And then use these falsehoods (which are based on the false dichotomization of “randomness” and “God” to make the following a posteriori statements:

“Life could not have formed randomly. Therefore God”

“Life appears designed. Therefore God” (This does not mean anything since “appears designed” is merely

Which are all false since they all depend on the false dichotomy.

I just had another thought, jesusFREAK41.  You said:

 You may be able to poke holes of discrepancy into Theism, but God can take the root out of Atheism.

I say: take a closer look at those discrepancies.  If God inspired the Bible, there shouldn't *be* any discrepancies.  God, after all, is supposed to be perfect.  The Bible is supposed to be inspired such that all of those things, and only those things that God wanted in the Bible are in fact in it.  So why would an omniscient being display ignorance of the value of pi...and the fact that trees *are* plants...and the fact that bats are *not* birds...etc.?  Why would an omnibenevolent God display jealousy, murderousness, intolerance, coersion, and a maddening lack of clarity coupled with an absolute demand that "his children" gain a correct understanding of his wishes...upon pain of eternal damnation if they fail?  Why would an omniscient and completely honest God...lie to his prophets...and thus give false propheices...when his own standard for prophecy is allegedly 100% accuracy?

And don't forget the big picture: do not all of these things, taken together, precisely "take the root out of Theism?"  (Individually, they may be surmountable; but all of these problems occur within the *same* Bible, and thus together they *destroy* the Bible's claim to divine authorship.)

As for the cosmological argument, that argument used to persuade me, too.  It was only when I kept trying to justify my religion as being God's (and that failed,) and then I tried to find out which other religion might be his favorite (and ran into very familiar difficulties, such that I eventually started thinking "Not this crap, again!&quot that it started to sink in that there was something fundamentally wrong with the entire idea of religion.  Now what I am--albeit slowly--coming to understand about the cosmological argument is:

1. This argument ultimately rests on the idea that any given effect can only be produced by something greater than itself.  This idea is wrong.  (I am here indebted to Professor Dawkins for pointing out the consciousness-raising effects of evolution by natural selection in his book "The God Delusion.&quot

2. That the cosmological argument, as usually stated, (...and as you seem to imply...) starts by saying, in effect, that every effect *must* have a cause...and then ignoring the fact that God can be seen as an effect.  So then, the question that Subdi Visions asked you is perfectly logical: who, or what, created God?  How did God get here?  It will not do to create "special rules" for God, as that means throwing away your own implication that *every* effect must have a cause.  It is a violation of your own standard for discussion.  I would like to see your reply to this question.

Conor

Because the voices told me so, and the voices are always right!