Answering Believers

The following post was previously posted on several internet forums. In it I try to dissect and debunk the most common arguments for the existence of God. If you want to tell me why I am dead wrong, you are more than welcome to do so. But first I want you to ask yourself what kind of reasons it would take to convince you that some religion other than yours was true, because that is the kind of reasons you are going to need if you want to convince me.

The cosmological argument comes in many forms, all of which share the same basic flaws. In its purest form the argument says that God exists because something must have caused the universe to exist.

Criticisms:

• If you take as a premise that everything needs a cause to account for its existence, then the same thing must be true of God himself or the whole premise is worthless. But then God is not the first cause after all. Instead we get an infinite regress of causes.
• If it is possible for something to arise spontaneously or exist from eternity, then that "something" may just as well be the universe itself (in some form). Modern physics seem to favor such an interpretation.
• Even if the universe did need a cause, it does not follow that what caused the universe to exist is a supernatural, personal creator - let alone any of the specific gods that are worshipped in the worlds competing religious traditions. Occam's razor favors a simple, natural cause over an intelligent, supernatural one.

Many attempts have been made to immunize the traditional cosmological argument against the problem of infinite regress (what caused God?), the most common of which are known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Contingency:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

• Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
• Conclusion: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.

The Argument from Contingency:

• Premise 1: All contingent* things must have a cause.
• Premise 2: The universe is a contingent thing.
• Conclusion: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.

*"Contingent" things are defined as all things that don't exist by logical necessity. By this definition everything that exists is a contingent thing, since there is no contradiction involved in imagining a reality in which nothing exists.

Notice first that both the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Contingency also suffer from the last two flaws mentioned under "criticisms" (above) and can be dismissed on that basis alone. But it is worse than that: Both arguments try to dodge the problem of infinite regress by treating everything in the physical universe as a subset of things that exist and postulating that only members of this subset need a cause. The arguments are both circular in the sense that the only justification for singling out things that have a beginning or contingent things as a subset is the assumption that a non-contingent being with no beginning exists. But that is just what the argument was supposed to prove! In essence what both arguments boil down to is:

• · Everything except God needs a cause