Proofs Against the Existence of God and the Supernatural

[Godfather of Soul]

From http://http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Theology


Theology: the study of universal being and knowing.
God

God is supernatural agency or unity, often considered necessary, perfect, timeless, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, and personal. A deity is a supernatural person, usually considered immortal, that demands or deserves human worship or reverence and that wields supernatural influence over human affairs.Divinity is the property of being supernatural and sacred. Sacredness is the property of being worthy of reverence or worship.

Humans have no credible evidence or convincing proof of any deities, including a God, Creator, First Cause, Perfect or Necessary Being.

Humans have proposed philosophical proofs of God as an alternative or supplement to historical revelation of God's existence.

Ontological Proof.  God is the most perfect idea.  If God did not exist, then the idea of god would be imperfect in its existence, and would not be the most perfect idea.

Cosmological Proof.  All effects must have a cause, and an infinite regress of causes is impossible.  Therefore, God is the First Cause.

Teleological Proof.  The universe (or its set of physical parameters) is evidently designed, and therefore must have a Designer.

Anthropological Proof.  Humans have a universal sense of morality and spirituality, and the cause of this effect is God.

Mystical Proof.  God can be experienced directly.

Pascal's Wager.  Blaise Pascal argued that it is a safer bet to incorrectly believe in God than to incorrectly disbelieve in God.

None of the proofs of God is generally accepted as convincing, due to various counter-arguments.

The Ontological proof assumes without evidence that ideas can exist independently of minds, or that universals can exist independently of instances, or in general that logical necessity is the same thing as ontological necessity.

The Cosmological proof is unparsimonious. If God can be self-caused, then so can the universe. Also, an infinite regress of causes is as logically possible as an infinite progress of effects.

The Teleological proof is undermined by unrelenting progress in reducing the number of those initial parameters and by anthropic arguments for why they should allow the development of life and intelligence.

The Anthropological proof is undermined by other, more plausible naturalistic explanations for the origin of human nature.

The Mystical proof is undermined by other, more plausible naturalistic explanations of mystical experiences.

Pascal's Wager provides no method for choosing among conflicting actual and possible religions, and invites one to follow false hope and blind fear rather than clear reason. Some religions might offer some hopes (e.g. that good behavior will be reciprocated) that may in fact be justified (even if on grounds other than those the religion offers).  But the primary hopes offered by all major religions -- of afterlife, or communion with a consequential ultimate reality -- are false.

Many humans claim to have evidence of revelation from their god(s). Any god could trivially inscribe or authenticate its revealed message through supernatural patterns (in cosmological or quantum phenomena) or ongoing miracles (such as prophecy or communication with a spirit world). There is no credible evidence that any such revelation has been competently attempted by any god(s).

Afterlife

Most humans believe that some form of reincarnation or immortality awaits them after death. Humans have no credible evidence of reincarnation or any kind of afterlife.

Faith

Faith is belief based on revelation and exempt from doubt. Skepticism involves zero faith because it holds not even a single belief that is based on revelation and exempt from doubt.  Skepticism holds that truth is not simply revealed but instead must always be subject to doubt, demonstration, and rederivation.  This belief about truth is itself neither revealed nor exempt from doubt, but is instead subject to continual test.


It is possible (but unlikely) that this epistemological belief could one day stop yielding satisfactory results.  For example, if God appeared and started violating physical laws, predicting the future, punishing infidels, and rewarding believers, then faith would suddenly be more satisfactory than skepticism. Until such a development, skepticism continues to be more satisfactory than faith.

Faith is not simply an absence of doubt, because tautologies are beyond doubt and yet are recognized not revealed.  Faith is not simply any confident reliance on authority, because an authority can be relied upon even confidently without being held exempt from all doubt. Faith is not simply any provisional hypothesis believed without complete evidence, because a proposition can be provisionally believed without being held exempt from all doubt.  Faith is not simply any affirmation of values, because to affirm a value is not to posit a proposition but to make a valuation. Faith is belief based on revelation and exempt from doubt.  Fideists often say skeptics too have "faith" in science or reason, but this corrupts the definition of 'faith'.  Faith must be embarrassing if its only defense is the claim that everybody is guilty of it.

Origin of faith.  Humans' propensity for faith derives perhaps from their dependence on teaching by parents and society. In the absence of a biological mechanism for offspring to inherit knowledge directly, a predisposition for unquestioning belief in authority might help spare each generation from having to rediscover or verify everything.

Mysticism

Mysticism is belief base on private and direct experience of ultimate reality.  Mysticism holds that belief can be justified simply by the intensity or directness of an experience, and without a showing that the experience has any objective basis or consequences.

Rejecting objectivity and the distinction between the experiencer and the experienced, mysticism thus mistakes feeling for knowing. Mystics are forever free to claim that anyone who doesn't feel what they feel is somehow "doing it wrong". The conclusions of mysticism are usually unfalsifiable or inconsequential and thus propositionally meaningless.

Some mystics compare meditation to advanced mathematics and claim that both yield conclusions that can only be verified by adept practitioners. This claim is misleading. It is true that creating and even comprehending advanced mathematical conclusions usually requires specialized training. But all mathematical demonstration is by definition subject to verification through mechanical symbol manipulation. This symbol manipulation is not necessarily private or "interior" like the experience of a mystic, but is expressly public and exterior.

Origin of mysticism. 

Humans' propensity for mysticism derives perhaps from their nature as intelligent social animals who survive by detecting patterns and especially intentions in an environment dominated by their social interactions.  Humans appear biased to see intentionality not only in friends, foes, predators, and prey, but also in weather, the heavens, or the universe itself.  This bias is perhaps related to the general human tendency (known in psychology as the Fundamental Attribution Error) to incorrectly emphasize intentional explanations over situational or circumstantial ones.

Religion

Religion is any system of belief based on faith or mysticism, or involving worship of or reverence for some deity.

Science and Religion.

 A common misconception is that science might be an alternative to religion for answering questions about meaning and value.  Those questions are the domain of philosophy, whereas science deals with objective phenomena. Science depends on the epistemological principle of skepticism, and any "conflict" between science and religion is really a conflict between skepticism and faith (or mysticism).   Religion can be made superficially compatible with science by restricting itself to questions that are a) scientific but unanswered or b) philosophical.  However, faith- or mysticism-based religion can never be compatible with the skepticism on which science -- and all epistemologically valid philosophy -- is built.

Belief Systems

Most humans attempt to understand the world through faith or mysticism. Of the major groups of believers, only agnostics and atheists avoid both faith and mysticism.  This table summarizes the major human belief systems. Statistics on adherents are assembled from various sources, including Encyclopedia Britannica and adherents.com.  The 'Deity' column identifies each system's type of supernaturalism , except that for monotheisms it instead names the deity. The 'Fate' column tells what each system believes happens to a person after death.

death: personality ceases at death.

judged: the quality of an eternal afterlife is determined by a judgment of one's mortal behavior.

rebirth: personality is after death recycled into a new organism, usually according to one's mortal behavior and with a loss of memory, and sometimes with the possibility that with good enough behavior or insight the cycle can be broken into communion.

commun: personality ascends after death to a higher plane of (perhaps non-personal) communion with the universe.

immort: personality graduates after death to (usually disembodied but conscious) immortality.

[click on the link for the chart]

Fideisms

Judaism is the Semitic monotheistic fideist religion based on the Old Testament's (1000-600 BCE) rules for the worship of Yahweh by his chosen people, the children of Abraham's son Isaac (c1800 BCE).
Zoroastrianism is the Persian monotheistic fideist religion founded by Zarathustra (c628-c551 BCE) and which teaches that good must be chosen over evil in order to achieve salvation.

Christianity is the West Eurasian monotheistic fideist religion professing that Jesus of Nazareth (c6 BCE - c30 AD) is the descendent of Abraham and the Son of God whose sacrifice for humanity's sins was recorded in the New Testament (c50-100), and who fulfilled the prophecies of the divinely inspired Old Testament.

Islam is the Middle Eastern monotheistic fideist religion professing surrender to the will of Allah (God), whose revelations in the Old and New Testaments were superseded by the Koran revealed to Muhammad (c570 - 632-06) for his chosen people, the children of Abraham's son Ishmael (c1800 BCE).

Sikhism is the Punjab monotheistic fideist religion founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) and whose sacred Adi Granth (1604) overlays a spartan righteousness onto Hindu cyclical cosmology.

These religions place unwarranted faith in purported revelations for which there is no credible evidence of authenticity or validity.

Mysticisms

Hinduism is the South Asian polytheistic mystical religion based on the Veda scriptures (c1000 BCE) and professing a cyclical cosmology, an ultimate reality called brahman, gods Vishnu and Shiva, and reincarnation of atman (soul) under the influence of karma.

Taoism is the Chinese polytheistic mystical religion based on the Tao-Te-Ching ascribed to Lao Tzu (c550 BCE) and which advocates a path (tao) of minimalist serenity and reverence for various deities.

Shintoism is the Japanese polytheistic mystical religion involving mainly the observance of customs and festivals honoring various deities.

Jainism is the Indian pantheist mystical religion founded by Mahavira (599-527 BCE) and which blends monastic asceticism with Buddhist cyclical cosmology.

Buddhism is the East Asian nontheistic mystical religion founded in India c525 BCE by the Buddha, who taught that existence is cyclical suffering caused by desiring and can be overcome by the "eightfold path" of right thought and deed.

Confucianism is the Chinese nontheistic mystical religion based on the sayings of Confucius (c500 BCE) recorded in the Analects, and which teaches social order, scholarship, filial reverence for family and ancestors, and divination.

These religions posit entities (such as gods or spirits or forces) to explain subjective mystical experiences which have simpler naturalistic explanations. These religions allege phenomena (such as rebirth and divination) for which there is no credible evidence. Of the belief systems in the world that currently have mass followings, Buddhism and Confucianism) are the least misguided. For this reason, thet are attractive to Westerners who recognize the bankruptcy of revelation-based religion but who are still looking for an off-the-rack worldview rather than learning enough philosophy to assemble one themselves.

[xero]

i personally believe the problem with finding proof of divine existence is that we're looking for a story book version of god...you know, the gigantic glowing santa clause lookalike dressed like zeus chillin' on a cloud reading his bedside bible and judging people on whether or not they said his name too many times before dying...any respectable theologian will tell you that god is completely intangible (which is commonly viewed as a cop out by intellectual jihadists) but i believe that the answer resides in the often implied all encompassing nature of god...

what if "god" is merely the universe itself, sort of an enormous single celled organism....that would make our solar system sort of relative to a mitochondria...and the divine presence would be some sort of nucleus...a gravitational center of the universe of which all matter was connected...

that would make us an infintecimal speck here on earth...and therefore would make it very difficult to provide any "proof" of god...i don't know maybe this post is out of place...i just think it's silly to view god's lack of existence as a fact when the very notion of god is just as hard to disprove as it is to prove...

[Godfather of Soul]

That is not evidence of a god but evidence of a physical universe.  You are making an argument for pantheism, which his equally without evidence as any type of theism.  Anything supernatural cannot exist in a natural space.  The two are fundamentally incompatible.

If what you see makes you feel there is a god, then so be it, but there is no empirical evidence to support that feeling.

[xero]

supernatural is a word created by skeptics to separate what cannot be easily explained from what can be...who is to definitely say that the spirit is not natural? i am offering no proof or scientific evidence...but a lack of proof disproves nothing in a field which we have so few means of cellecting data...

[Bob]

The probability of God being a natural entity is <0.000001%. A high probability cannot exist if there is no evidence.

You can argue that the universe is like an 'organism', but it certainly isn't the 'creator'. In that sense the concept of God be null. As you go earlier, the object or particles become smaller rather than the reverse.

As for the term 'supernatural', it actually means "above nature" and was coined by the religious to explain the relationship between God and the natural world. Even then many knew (including intellectuals) felt that there was no relationship, but to say in a theist Rome would result to death.

[metalicat]

I have an interesting idea that stilll needs more development, but it goes something like this: Possible argument on the behalf of a "Creator of the Universe"
Everyone that has studied bombs knows that when bombs explode they expand outward with tremendous force and in the process a vacuum is created then it falls back in on itself.  This is conjecture: It is possible, through natural means, that a person or a society more advanced than ours created a weapon/bomb of immense power, by our standards, and the resultant explosions/implosions are the source of the universe.

[Godfather of Soul]

What is the universe expanding into?

[metalicat]

I can't really tell you because it's a theory I have not completed and because there are an infinite number of possibilities.  I was just suggesting that it's a possibility because of current scientific theory and how certain qualities of the universe resemble an explosion. 

[Godfather of Soul]

That's not how the universe works.  It isn't exploding into anything.  It's best to think of it as a balloon with coins taped to its surface.  However it is impossible for us to fully conceive of something that expands into nothing.

[metalicat]

It hasn't been proven that it isn't exploding in anything, though to say "That's not how the universe works" is a bold statement and especially in the definitive manner in which you state it.  It is entirely conceivable that as the universe expands it consumes whatever it is expanding into.  There's more but im at work so thats about as much detail i can get into in one post with a timely response.

[Godfather of Soul]

This is from talk origins...

a) Common misconceptions about the Big Bang

In most popularized science sources, BBT is often described with something like "The universe came into being due to the explosion of a point in which all matter was concentrated." Not surprisingly, this is probably the standard impression which most people have of the theory. Occasionally, one even hears "In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded."

There are several misconceptions hidden in these statements:

    * The BBT is not about the origin of the universe. Rather, its primary focus is the development of the universe over time.
    * BBT does not imply that the universe was ever point-like.
    * The origin of the universe was not an explosion of matter into already existing space.

The famous cosmologist P. J. E. Peebles stated this succinctly in the January 2001 edition of Scientific American (the whole issue was about cosmology and is worth reading!): "That the universe is expanding and cooling is the essence of the big bang theory. You will notice I have said nothing about an 'explosion' - the big bang theory describes how our universe is evolving, not how it began." (p. 44). The March 2005 issue also contained an excellent article pointing out and correcting many of the usual misconceptions about BBT.

Another cosmologist, the German Rudolf Kippenhahn, wrote the following in his book "Kosmologie fuer die Westentasche" ("cosmology for the pocket"): "There is also the widespread mistaken belief that, according to Hubble's law, the Big Bang began at one certain point in space. For example: At one point, an explosion happened, and from that an explosion cloud travelled into empty space, like an explosion on earth, and the matter in it thins out into greater areas of space more and more. No, Hubble's law only says that matter was more dense everywhere at an earlier time, and that it thins out over time because everything flows away from each other." In a footnote, he added: "In popular science presentations, often early phases of the universe are mentioned as 'at the time when the universe was as big as an apple' or 'as a pea'. What is meant there is in general the epoch in which not the whole, but only the part of the universe which is observable today had these sizes." (pp. 46, 47; FAQ author's translation, all emphasizes in original)

There are a number of reasons that these misconceptions persist in the public mind. First and foremost, the term "Big Bang" was originally coined in 1950 by Sir Fred Hoyle, a staunch opponent of the theory. He was a proponent of the competing "Steady State" model and had a very low opinion of the idea of an expanding universe. Another source of confusion is the oft repeated expression "primeval atom". This was used by Lemaitre (one of the theory's early developers) in 1927 to explain the concept to a lay audience, albeit one that would not be familiar with the idea of nuclear bombs for a few decades to come. With these and other misleading descriptions endlessly propagated by otherwise well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) media figures, it is not surprising that many people have wildly distorted ideas about what BBT says. Likewise, the fact that many in the public think the theory is rather ridiculous is to be expected, given their inaccurate understanding of the theory and the data behind it.

[metalicat]

Your Quote does not disprove the credence of my claims.  As your Quote states: * The BBT is not about the origin of the universe.  Rather, its primary focus is the development of the universe over time.
    * BBT does not imply that the universe was ever point-like.
    * The origin of the universe was not an explosion of matter into already existing space.
(keeping in mind that the BBT is primarily speculative up to a point although much of this speculation is based on a slew of scientific principles)

Because the BBT is not about the origin of the universe, it can not necessarily be used to disprove a concept for the origin of the universe.  Just because the BBT doesn't imply the Universe wasn't point-like it also means that it is not expressly denied.  For the last part I would like to know their definition of already existing space i. e.  do they mean something like our current space-time? Therefore it can not be completely denied that the singularity that the BBT is based could have been spawned from a ultra high energy explosion.

[Godfather of Soul]

It could, but it would be wholly speculative.

[metalicat]

Yeah, on a side note Your sig is awesome

[Godfather of Soul]

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html

Knock yourself out.

[[_KaNdii_]]

This one is too funny 

[Godfather of Soul]

I had been looking for that one forever!

[yuyaymimi]

i'ma post a bulletin/blog with all this valuable information.

[shitmeister]

fuck u science, jesus saved me.