Why ontological arguments fail: When it comes down to weighing up the evidence and the philosophical arguments for god, it’s important to make it clear which kind of god we are talking about, because arguments that attempt to prove a deistic god do not translate to a theistic god, yet this is a common tactic which theists use in debate to score points. The most favourable god the atheist can offer the believer is the deist god because the deist god only did one thing: kick start the universe. It would take a lot less to prove this kind of god than one more involved in our universe. The point to be made here is that even if a deistic god could be proved it would not provide any evidence for a theistic god, one which answers prayers, performs miracles, sends prophets and personal incarnations. This is why ontological arguments are so poor. So now, imagine a string of blue plasma that stretches out to infinity. It is made up of a type of matter and energy of which we have no knowledge and have never encountered. It exists in its own dimension that has no commonalties or laws that might apply in our universe. Time here does not exist. An infinite numbers of spheres bubble out of the energy, pushed out by more spheres which are formed underneath them creating a foam. Each sphere in this foam is a universe, like or unlike our own. The spheres expand as they move outwards and eventually lose their cohesion. This process is infinite; it has no beginning and no end. What I’ve just done is created a hypothesis for first cause: the creation of our universe. One that would mean our universe was a temporal feature of an infinite system. Let us look once again at the properties of a deistic god: a) It created the universe then did nothing. b) It doesn’t care about us and pays no attention to human affairs. c) It doesn’t answer prayers d) It doesn’t provide us with an afterlife. So what is the difference between the model I proposed and our idea of a deistic god? On the surface, none: all four of the above statements are true for both my model and the deistic god. But the naturalistic model has the benefit of being more parsimonious. When a theist argues there is a god, they mostly argue for their own theistic god, but they will often present arguments that only work for a deistic god and hope people won’t notice the switch when they tell you this proves the existence of the deity in which they happen to believe. There would be no difference in our own lives or deaths should a deist god exist. The effort in argument for the proof of a deistic god is like going to the shop and coming out with an empty tub of ice cream, and probably not even the tub. It gives us nothing that a purely naturalistic/scientific explanation for our first cause would give us. It is a coat hook for those who, for some reason, can’t hang their jackets on the atheist peg while waiting for the answers that I believe science will eventually provide for us.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 02:21:49 +0000
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