Well, David has made several points that I would like to address. But first I have to reiterate that no matter the outcome of the questions he presents, the concept of God is still problematic, and the quality of transcendence really doesn’t help his argument. I’ll expand on this in a little while.
In David’s opening, he began by trying to make a corollary between God and love. He commits a fallacy in doing this, though. He thinks we can’t prove love. I beg to differ. What is love? Well, we can sit around and ponder that question for a long time, but eventually we’ll come to the conclusion that love is a complex series of multiple biochemical reactions, etc. Now, I’m sure many people will flat out deny this, so I’ll go a little more in depth. The alternate idea they propose is that God is the cause of love. Now, this seems like a simple answer, but it really doesn’t explain a damn thing. How exactly does God cause love? We have no idea. In fact, we don’t really even know what we’re talking about when we say God is the cause of love. Also, if the theist is going to attribute love to God, why doesn’t he attribute things like hate and greed to God. Well, the usual answer to this is that there’s some little demon with a pitchfork that makes us feel these bad emotions. And again, we really have no idea how this is happening. But back to the corollary. If love can be proven, this analogy fails. If love can’t be proven, the theist has dug himself a hole. In one way because of all other emotions and the affects physical things have on them. In another way because all he’s really done is disprove love. He hasn’t done anything to prove love exists. Take Freud for example. It’s a fairly common belief that love is nothing more that reinforced behavior concerning the basic pleasure of sex.
Next he comes to the business of defining God. He thinks, and it surprises me, that God can be experienced. I can only ask that anyone who says God can be experienced to think literally about what you’re saying. A God of transcendence can not be observed or even indirectly observed. I addressed this in my opening. A transcendent God is by definition outside of all human universe, understanding, knowledge, and experience. We literally have no way of figuring out what this sort of creature is. Much less if he exists. I mean, we can sit around all day and think of invisible blue fairies flying around us that do all the same things as God. What is the difference between the blue fairies and God? Well, as I intend to show, nothing. David will present lots of arguments for why God might and why God does exist, and I will reduce them to nothing at all. But even if all his arguments are valid, they could never be sound. The premises would use a term that is not possible. Take for instance this scenario: all married bachelors are happy. Joe is a married bachelor. Therefore, Joe is happy. This argument itself is in proper form, but has no hope of being sound. There’s simply no way a married bachelor can exist. Thus the argument that Joe is happy doesn’t even get off the ground. This is the same with God. God can’t be used in a premise or conclusion of an argument because it is –by nature- impossible to exist. But for the fun of argument, I’ll explain some of these arguments, just to show that they don’t have any merit if God is a coherent thought.
First of all, let’s put this causal argument to rest. Why did the universe come to exist? I’m not sure that’s in proper form. Saying things like “what happened before the universe cam to exist?” are completely meaningless. There is no dimension for these things to happen in. Now, the theists will no doubt say that God exists outside of all these dimensions. Of course this really just furthers my point. We have no idea what it would be like to live outside of the universe. And we have no way of proving it. And we have no reason for even thinking it might be true. But even if somehow you could prove that there was some sort of cause for the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to prove that there is God. There are many sorts of ideas of beings that could have created the universe. Many of which would be long gone by now. This yields a negative answer to the question at hand. Back to the story with the invisible blue fairies. There is no difference in this argument. Blue fairies could be the cause of the universe. And immediately after that, they all died. I mean, there are millions of ways the universe could have come to exist. I do have one more thing to say about this issue. It seems as though the Christian is always ready to attack the things we don’t know. We don’t know why the universe is here. Or even if there is a why. But this ‘God story’ is one in a long list. And we have no reason to believe it over any other.
Also, the theists love to bring in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They feel that this disproves evolution and the Big Bang. Let me tell you something. This is just not true. Look at us. We’re burning energy in at a rate that is much greater than most things. We aren’t order. We are a catalyst creating a hell of a lot of disorder. We are a furnace that burns complex molecules at a steady temperature of 98.6 degrees. The total entropy of the universe decreases because of us. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is in complete accordance with evolution in this manner. It’s just that the best-fit furnaces live to continue to burn. Now the 2nd law is applied to the Big Bang. Look at our universe. It’s not ordered. Galaxies are so far apart that from each other, they look like stars (if they can be seen at all). The background radiation is a mere 3 degrees above absolute zero. That’s disorder if I’ve ever seen it. One more thing about the 2nd law. Gravity often times causes it not to function (after all, it is a probabilistic law). Why doesn’t the nuclear furnace in the sun explode? It does. Gravity just pulls it back. Gravity is what makes solar systems, galaxies, and even life appear to be ordered. The 2nd law of thermodynamics does nothing to show that there are more than natural laws at work in the universe, thus the 2nd law does nothing to help the theist in a search for God.
You also keep referring to the natural world and alluding to a supernatural realm. And my central question to you is why do think this supernatural realm exists? The scientific evidence to which you refer is just not there. Your scientific evidence for God is nothing more than scientific uncertainties and scientific unknowns attributed to some word which when we think critically about, we have no idea what it is supposed to mean.
Normally, I would stop at this last paragraph because I like the sound of the ending of it. But there is another very serious thing I want to say. There are (at least) two causes of atheism. Firstly, the one you mention. Some atheists don’t want to believe in God. To me, this seems ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you want to live forever? Why wouldn’t you want to be rewarded for what you do that is good? Well, there’s the catch. You’re punished for what you do wrong. This is probably the reason many atheists don’t believe in God. It’s a subconscious attempt to escape eternal damnation. This group of atheists I find just as irrational as theists –if not more- than the theists. Ironically, eventually some of these atheists will get morals and this causes them to convert to some sort of theism. The other type of atheists is a group you don’t think exists -the atheists that analyze the scientific evidence and rationally realize that it does not point to any sort of God. Of these atheists, I have seen no converts to theism. To claim that all atheists just don’t want to believe in God is a lie. I hope some sort of God exists, and I get to live forever, but hey, chances and reason tell me that’s just not the case. I can accept that. The theist can not, thus the desire to believe is very similar to the desire not to believe, but neither has any merit when compared to the desire of truth.