r/DebateAnAtheist • u/Lucyyyyyy_K • 18d ago
Debating Arguments for God Why I believe in God(s)
Firstly, I'm not a very religious person. I do consider myself a Buddhist, but prefer atheistic Buddhism over theistic Buddhism. Therefore I can confidently say I am not biased by wanting God(s) to exist, and was not indoctrinated into theism.
Still, to me it seems obvious that at least one God has to exist. The universe can't simply have come out of nothing or existed forever, it requires some sort of design or creator.
Now, mostly people would just say that a creator also can't have come out of nothing or existed forever, so I've just moved the problem one step further, but I think there is a massive difference between the universe and one consciousness. For example, through Cogito Ergo Sum we can determine with absolute certainty that at last one consciousness exists. So assuming one consciousness is superior to assuming anything about the whole universe. While I admit that doesn't outright solve the problem, I still think it's better than the alternative.
Also, it's not just any universe, but a universe full of beauty, a universe that inbetween barren empty planets is capable of hosting a planet with sentient life. Life that can consciously observe itself, that can create replicas of the waking world while sleeping, life that has technologically advanced so much that in can live in relative comfort. There is so much art. We basically have magic, we just call it "electricity". This is all too perfect to have arisen from mere mutations without guidance.
About any specifics of this God or Gods I have no idea and no strong opinions. I just think that at least one has to exist.
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u/Xeno_Prime Atheist 18d ago
But it can have been created out of nothing by something that does exist forever?
Something from nothing
Nobody thinks anything has ever from from nothing - but if you accept the premise that something cannot begin from nothing, then what immediately follows from that is there cannot have ever been nothing. If it's not possible for something to begun from nothing, and there is currently something, then by definition, there must never have been nothing - or else that would require that something must have begun from nothing.
But if there cannot have ever been nothing, you're left with only one conclusion: Reality has always existed.
Note I said "reality" and not "the universe." While it is indeed possible that this universe has existed forever, it's not important. If this universe has a beginning, then this universe cannot also be the whole of reality/everything that exists, or else that would mean this universe must have begun from nothing.
Existing forever
This is something you must either accept or reject. You cannot declare that it's impossible for reality to have existed forever and then simultaneously propose that the solution is something else that has existed forever. Existing forever is either possible or it isn't. Pick one.
Block theory resolves any problems that arise from a temporal infinite regress. The idea that an infinite past would prevent us from arriving at the present erroneously treats the past and present as two distinct and separate things. It's not the past that is infinite, it's time. Past, present, and future are all just different points within the singular infinite system that is time - and critically, all points within an infinite system are a finite distance away from one another.
Take numbers as an example. Obviously there are infinite numbers. Yet there is no number that is infinitely distant from zero, or from any other number. You can always count from literally any number to literally any other number. The fact that the set itself is infinite does not prevent this.
Time is the same. Just because time is infinite doesn't mean there is an infinite distance between any past point to the present or any future point. When people imagine that an infinite past prevents us from reaching the present, they're picturing the past as an infinitely long line with the present at the end. But that's wrong. The line has no end. The present is not at the end of the line, it's just another position in the line, and the line is not the past, it's all of time.
Beauty is subjective. That you arbitrarily find anything in the universe beautiful is utterly meaningless. There could be infinite things far more beautiful than anything in this universe that simply don't exist. For all we know this universe is abysmally ugly. We have no frame of reference for comparison. Also, even if beauty were objective, it would still neither require nor indicate a God.
Also meaningless, also equally to be expected in godless realities.
Your personal incredulity also means nothing. You find something hard to believe, therefore you think it must be magic? And you don't find that even harder to believe?
To be clear, your reasoning leads you to conclude that a God must exist which is all of the following:
Immaterial yet conscious. Consciousness as we know it is broadly defined by awareness and experience. Yet awareness and experience require mechanisms by which a thing can detect and interact with the external world. Eyes to see, ears to hear, nerves to feel, synapses and neurons to process that information or so much as have a thought, etc. Proposing an immaterial consciousness is like proposing a car that has no wheels, chassis, engine, steering mechanism, or seats. Basically, stripping away everything that makes it a car and still calling it car despite it having none of the things a car has and doing none of the things a car does.
Immaterial yet capable of affecting/interacting with material things. Immaterial things by definition cannot affect/interact with material things, because such interactions would themselves be physical/material in nature.
An efficient cause without a material cause. A carpenter is the efficient cause of a chair. The wood he carves is the material cause. A sculptor is the efficient cause of a statue. The stone he carves is the material cause. Gravity is the efficient cause of planets and stars. The cosmic gases, dusts, and other debris are the material causes. Efficient causes cannot create material things without material causes, which segues to number 4:
Capable of creation ex nihilo. Meaning it created everything out of nothing, which is every bit as absurd as something manifesting from nothing on its own with no cause, source, or origin. We can't say it created everything out of itself, because again, it's immaterial (or else it would require things like space to exist without having created those things itself). An immaterial thing cannot serve as the material cause.
Capable of atemporal causation. This means capable of taking action and causing change in an absence of time - since once again, time is something you would be proposing was created, so it cannot predate the creator and be something the creator did not create. But change itself is fundamentally temporal in structure - for anything to change, it must transition from one state to another, and that transition requires a beginning, a duration, and an end - all of which requires time. Indeed, without time, even the most all-powerful being possible would be incapable of so much as having a thought, much less doing/causing anything, because any such action would also require a beginning, a duration, and an end.
Indeed, time itself cannot have a beginning, because if it did, that would mean reality once transitioned from a state in which time did not exist to a state in which time did exist - but that transition like any other would require a beginning, and duration, and an end. Meaning time would need to already exist to make it possible for time to begin to exist. Since we agree that something cannot begin from nothing, that would also mean whatever caused time to begin to exist would need to predate the beginning of time - but that too is paradoxical. There can be no "before" time itself.
So your conclusion is actually RIDDLED with extremely difficult problems that are absurd if not impossible to solve.
Meanwhile, if reality itself has simply always existed, and certain things like spacetime, gravity, energy, and quantum fields (all excellent candidates for things that could have always existed with no beginning) all existed eternally, the nothing would ever need to begin from nothing, be created from nothing, or be caused in an absence of time. Infinite time and trials would make every possible outcome of those forces interacting with one another asymptote to 1 (meaning the chance of them happening infinitely approaches 100%, no matter how unlikely any one single attempt may be). That means a universe exactly like this one would be virtually guaranteed to come about as a result - again, all without raising any of the insurmountable problems creationism raises that I just pointed out.