Logical proof for the existence of holy god.

Never mind... Some things are best unsaid.

It seems that the discussion has moved from talking about the existence of God to discussing whether atheists are actually better than theists.

That's an interesting discussion, but it's for another thread. Not this one.

format_quote Originally Posted by tetsujin

I didn't point to you specifically, if you read the preceding posts, you will see that the "burden of proof" argument was made before my post.

It doesn't matter when it was made. Bull is bull, and as you'll see soon enough in that other thread, it's bull.

Yes, I agree, it is the worst kind of argument. It is like asking for robust evidence for the non-existence of the T-Rex or robust evidence for the non-existence of bridge trolls.

The first pillar of Islam is a sincere declaration of belief. The first part of the Kalimah e Shahada is a positive claim. When you say "I bear witness (testify) that there is no god but Allah...", the same reasoning applies. you are claiming no other gods exist, and you are claiming there is only one god. How would you invite someone to Islam without resorting to that "jejune" mode of thinking?

I'll let you know if and when I invite you to Islam. For now I'm going to continue resisting your repeated attempts to divert the topic.

I think you and I are on the same track, perhaps coming from opposite ends. I specifically stated that religion had nothing to do with the proposition, the existence of god is an independent claim and not affected by the form or influence of any religion, unless and until believers insist on the relationship of god and religion.

It is possible to be a theist without having religiously motivated social or economic ideologies. I realize that is hard for the pious Muslim to understand. That is why I said you can hold onto your faith for the sake of the argument, I wasn't asking anyone to think outside of their box.

Wow. Even when you're making a point that's perplexingly irrelevant to the point of a weird non-sequitur, you still manage to make a stereotype!

I don't know who that someone is, but I said books do not make claims, people make claims. Someone must have written that book. That book is a medium for the exchange of ideas. If you preceive that message as comming from the book itself and not an author, we need to stop discussing everything else. It's not a moot point or a semantic triviality. It's a byproduct of fundamental reasoning skills. If you wish to say that book was authored by god, then please say so, and we'll have a point to talk about because now you have made a claim. If you believe that the followers of muhammad wrote that book, then we have a point to talk about, because now you have made a claim. Books do not write themselves. The bulletin board, the bilboard, the radio station, the television commercial, the internet, the packaging on gum... all of these are mediums to exchange ideas. You should hold their sources accountable, not the medium itself.

My claim was a refutation of a claim previously made in this thread that the Koran does not say that it is God-inspired. I pointed out that it does indeed say that. And that's it. That's all I said. Stop trying to build monuments out of anthills.

Boy am I delighted to read the implication that, by your methods of reasoning, the Koran is not proof of god's existence. At least we're on the same page.

I say that I wasn't claiming that the Koran's claim of its being God-inspired was proof of itself (as some Christians do with 2 Timothy 3:16) and that automatically means that there is no proof of any kind to be found in it anywhere, in any way, of God's existence?? That particular subset of the issue wasn't even on the table! Work on your reading comprehension skills!

I'm so sorry. I'll be delighted to correct myself and say. I claim that it (the Koran) is a book written for believers and doesn't spend much time trying to convince anyone of the truth. :-) Repeating a claim, no matter how many times for poetry or symbolism, does not count as making a logical argument. In any case, that discussion is what you would call a diversion.

Again, work on your reading comprehension skills. I urge you very strongly to read the book again and this time pay attention to its arguments. And stop acting as though I've said things I haven't said, like that its repetitions amount to argumentation.

format_quote Originally Posted by Pyogscelis

Religion does not provide morality. It provides obedience. Islam doesn't teach you to be good for the sake of good, it teaches you to submit to the will of Allah.

That's rather a moot point when a religion subscribes to Divine Command Theory in the first place, wherein morality is synonymous with conformity to the higher law of the Higher Power, which in many ways only stands to reason, though that would take us off track, because...

Message for everyone: As valid as the Moral Argument for God's Existence is, it tends not to be effective all the same--at least when not presented by the very most superb of presenters, which we may not have here: if you want a superb presentation, read the first few chapters of Mere Christianity, the only chapters worth reading (I refuted much of the rest of the book in this thread), which was so effective that when even Dan Barker attempted refuting it--and he's one of the best atheistic debaters (d-a-m-n-ing with faint praise), a few of his counter-arguments were misrepresentations or diversions and most were just things Lewis had already responded to in the text. Anyway, the Moral Argument, valid as it is, tends to be ineffective when most amateurs present it for three reasons: (1) because it leads to situations like the one we have here, (2) because like the disease it is absolute cultural relativism has infected the human race in such a worldwide epidemic that now even religious people often tend to have their minds utterly closed to the ideas that there is any remote trace of anything inherent or universal in us of morality, and (3) because morality is a more abstract thing with less tangible evidence to point to than matters of teleology or cosmology or what not. I suggest we shift gears. In fact, since it was so overlooked....

Let me try my hand at this again; here's something (admittedly a very heavily edited version of a quite excerpted portion from an extremely rough draft of a work in progress--I hope the ellipses don't make it too choppy) from the book on Islam I'm writing:

Consider what [“the forces of nature”] do to the world. They give it mechanism, organization, structure, intricacy, and what is generally seen as beauty. In other words, all their operationally defining characteristics are the marks of design. Think of a Rubix Cube. It may not be easy to solve the puzzle of precisely how the whole thing works but you can still observe with much ease that it is a designed thing. Its main characteristics are mechanism, organization, structure, intricacy, and (color-based) aesthetics. Would a Rubix Cube have simply happened to come to be somehow if no intelligent being had made it? So it is with the world, as far as we can observe. Do its laws or “forces” not provide it with a great degree of organization and structure by their mere existence? Is the world not intricate? Everyone knows it is, even the infant who has got a single glimpse out of the nursery room window. Are not many things in the way the world works—the hydrological cycle, for example—not mechanism of a sort? Is there not what most would agree is beauty in the world’s rich, lush verdure, gorgeous mountains, dazzling rivers and cataracts, and wondrous colorful caves? There might not be much meaning to any of these characteristics if they were alone (I have found that many people posing teleological theistic arguments make too singular a focus on intricacy) but they all coexist…

Think of the arts—any of them. A painter makes a painting with the use of the three primary colors (blue, yellow, and red), using and combining them in different ways to make his intricate, organized, aesthetic work of design. An author uses the three types of sentences (statements, questions, and commands) to do the same thing when constructing a story. So it is with a composer of music using the three building blocks and shaping tools for the music (rhythm, melody, and lyrics), or an architect with his ceilings, walls and floors. So it is with gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the electro-weak force. They combine with each other in different patterns to produce the world with the same characteristics. Experience teaches us that they could not were there not an Artist behind them…

I hear…all the time from atheists…the appeal to natural selection, an example of the self-negating idea of order from chaos, used as evidence against the notion of the world having been designed. Of what use is this argument when one could at least as easily use it as evidence of the opposite position? To start with the premise that natural selection happens because of impersonal or random things instead of being part of an ultimate purpose, and then use that premise on which to build an argument against the existence of that ultimate purpose, is to form yet one more bit of atheistic circular reasoning…

The agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell raised objections of his own the better part of a century ago and they are still paralleled or parroted by nontheists everywhere. These objections come from Russell’s famous essay “Why I Am Not a Christian”, in which he spends much less time on the subject of Christianity than the principal subject of God’s existence. He said on the subject of the world’s design by natural law, “Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced...You no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion…Where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.”

Do you see what Russell’s doing here, dear reader? He’s trying to explain one kind of law (the laws of physics) by appealing to another kind of law (the laws of mathematics). That just brings us back to square one. It’s yet more nontheistic circular reasoning at worst and utter futility at best. The material world itself offers no more actual explanation for the existence of the mathematical laws (or rather the realities they’re describing) than it does for the physical ones. I would respond to Russell with his own words from the same essay:

“It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’ The argument is really no better than that.”

On the subject of design by law Russell continues, “You are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.”…If God exists then by He is a supernatural Being, which means that He is not a part of nature but beyond it. Natural law, by definition, applies to nature. So of course the train of natural law ends before God: how could it not when it’s only natural law? Were God to be subject to any sort of law, it would be a supernatural law, not a natural one, and we have no reason to believe there is any supernatural equivalent to natural law.

But by far the weakest argument Russell makes is: “If you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless.” Will a Rubix Cube last forever? Do paintings not peel, fade, decay? Does the paper on which literature, scripts and poetry are written not peel, fade, decay? Do great works of architecture not eventually fall apart? Do the sounds produced by the instruments of a band not dwindle into silence? Come now! Whether or not something is designed has nothing whatsoever to do with its transience…

In his essay “A Designer Universe?” [Scott] Weinberg admits, “I’d guess that if we were to see the hand of the designer anywhere, it would be in the fundamental principles, the final laws of nature, the book of rules that govern all natural phenomena.” But then he adds: “We don’t know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life.” Without any special role for life? What, then, do you call the laws making this planet form into the only one of its kind within interminable and uncrossable gulfs, if not altogether anywhere? What do you call the laws which keep this planet spinning in orbit in just the rate we need upon it if we are to remain on it and be graced by cool winds without which our weather would fall apart? Or keeping the earth in an orbit rather than allowing it to drift too close to the sun? What do you call the laws causing living things to grow and thrive? No special role for life indeed! Here’s an exercise, dear reader: walk around outside for just an hour and see how many instances you can spot of physical laws having special roles in our living…

The atheistic scholar Kai Nielsen objects to the concept of design in the world by saying that were the world to be designed via its laws, it would not be like it is today but instead would be more like the growth of vegetation or fungus—another mere assertion. The only way that Nielsen’s argument could work is if the kind of growth in question were a natural mark of design, like the marks I listed in the previous section—but that’s not the case, now is it? Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a vegetation-or-fungus-like growth? Is a computer a vegetation-or-fungus-like-growth? Is a Parcheesi board a vegetation-or-fungus-like-growth?

Once more, this is quite an edited excerpt; considering the predictability of atheistic counter-argumentation, though, I'm sure any responses I'll hear to it which aren't covered above will be from the parts I put ellipses over or am already planning for the "atheistic chestnuts refuted" series. So let's hear it.

format_quote Originally Posted by Yahya Sulaiman

I hear…all the time from atheists…the appeal to natural selection, an example of the self-negating idea of order from chaos, used as evidence against the notion of the world having been designed. Of what use is this argument when one could at least as easily use it as evidence of the opposite position? To start with the premise that natural selection happens because of impersonal or random things instead of being part of an ultimate purpose, and then use that premise on which to build an argument against the existence of that ultimate purpose, is to form yet one more bit of atheistic circular reasoning…

It is not 'circular reasoning' at all. The significance of evolution by natural selection to the atheistic argument is simply that it provides a naturalistic explanation of how many events that might otherwise be assumed the consequence of deliberate design by God or gods might occur without such deliberate design. The fact that it could be argued that the evolution mechanism could itself be the product of design doesn't affect that utility in the slightest unless, of course, the theist can prove that it is.

I fully agree that evolution by natural selection could theoretically be a designed process, indeed such an extremely elegant designed process compared with the alternatives suggested by creationists (and creation myths) it never ceases to amaze me why so many theists are so quick to dismiss it! To adopt the theistic counter you suggest necessitates accepting that evolution by natural selection exists. As a considerable number of those participating on the theist side of such debates resolutely refuse to do so, that alone makes it a worthwhile addition to the atheistic armory!