Questions on religion posted for tonight’s Q&A at thinkspot

So far, these questions (and comments) have been posted. I’ll be taking them up approximately in this order tonight at thinkspot:

1. To me the greatest problem in determining whether God exists or not is in determine what is God. Some believe God is perfect and infinite. Some believe God is not perfect and not infinite. God is one of the most bizarrely contradictory concepts in human history. How in the world are you supposed to verify if something actually exists if everyone has such contradictory beliefs of what it actually is?

2.  The theodicy argument turns on the word perfect. What does perfect mean?

3. You said Kant rejected the natural theology arguments. Isn’t Kant’s idea of rational faith a way to combine reason and religion?

4. Design Argument: I want to respond to the dilemma you presented in point 7. Your dilemma is that the God posited must either be orderly, as the universe is orderly, or not. If God is not orderly, then he couldn’t create an orderly universe. If God is orderly, then he must have a creator just like the universe, and infinite regression. This dilemma is set up, in part, by the short circuiting that was done on point 4. The qualities you inferred to God in point 4 are that he is “super” powerful and smart. You made quite a point to not infer any infinite qualities. You purposefully impose assumed limits and restrictions on God. This necessarily makes the God in your argument not actually God, as the concept is understood and presented by theists.

5. I would like to make some comments after seeing the video “The Best Argument for God” and ask some questions on this basis. In the section from 10:30 am to 11:00 am, Stephen indicates that you should use an argument in its strongest form. Then I wonder why he uses the argument that the universe is orderly as the strongest argument for the existence of God. Is the universe actually orderly? This, of course, depends on the definition you use for the concept of orderly. If you use the term orderly more in the sense like in law and order, then the universe is indeed orderly. Law and order means that there are laws that everyone must abide by, and indeed there are laws of physics that apparently apply throughout the universe. Natural laws such as E = m c squared, and A squared + B squared = C squared. But you can also interpret “orderly” as indicating the opposite of Chaos. Chaos does not mean disorderly randomness in this case, but a reality that is not useful in itself, but which only contains the possibility of usefulness. I think orderly structures created in the universe have a natural tendency to fall back to Chaos. For although the universe obeys natural laws, the reality within the universe is extremely complex. Too complex for our intellect to oversee the total. This complex reality offers us the opportunity to create useful things for us. But if we want to create something useful for us out of the universe and want to maintain it, we must make constant efforts to defend ourselves against that complexity. This applies to both physical and metaphysical creations. I will clarify this with a few examples. Suppose we have collected and purified enough iron atoms, copper atoms, aluminum atoms etc. from the bottom of the earth and transformed them into a car. If you put that car in your garden and leave it there, and you want to use it again after 25 years, you obviously have a problem. Moisture and rain has rusted the sheet metal, mold and bugs have affected the interior, sunlight has ripped the tires and plastic parts … In short, it is probably cheaper to buy a new car than to repair the current one. Yet there are also hundred-year-old cars in showroom condition in the museums. We must constantly make an effort to prevent physical decay, and as soon as we stop the decay continues. So in the case of the car, we would have been better off building and servicing a garage to better protect the car. But even then it would have been necessary to replace parts with a limited durability such as fuel, lubricants and tires regularly. But while we can delay the process of decay with our labor, we cannot undo it. Where have all the possessions of people who have lived in the past thousands of years gone? It is almost all gone. Their cities, and temples and houses and furniture and art, pretty much everything is gone. And so it is with metaphysical matters. Consider, for example, marriage. Imagine a young man and a young woman are deeply in love and decide to get married. But when they get married, they will still have to keep working on their marriage so that it doesn’t fail. They will have to continue show genuine interest in each other, be willing to compromise, take each other’s interests into account, etc. Even then, marriage does not last forever, but ends with death. Also other metaphysical entities such as cultures, empires, multinational companies, etc. are ultimately doomed to cease to exist as history tells us. So the obviousness with which Stephen assumes that the universe is orderly is one of the things I object to. But I also do not understand the obviousness with which order, according to him, proves the existence of a God. He cites the existence of the seasons as an example. I honestly don’t understand his logic. Does this mean that if there were no seasons this is an indication that God does not exist? Or if there are 20 seasons instead of 4. Does Stephen perhaps see it as an indication that God does not exist if seasons do not occur in a regular (orderly) pattern of four times a year but in an irregular pattern? I can’t put myself in his logic. Order is a quality, one of the perhaps infinite qualities you can imagine for the universe. As I mentioned, properties have the problem of definition (what exactly do you mean by that property), but also the problem of arbitrariness (I think this is the most important property and you think another one). Therefore, doesn’t it make much more sense to choose the universe as a whole instead of choosing from one of the properties of the universe? Then you come to the, in my opinion, much more fundamental question of where the universe comes from. Was the universe created by a God or is the cause of the universe’s existence to be found elsewhere? This was one of the questions I asked myself as an 18-year-old Catholic when I struggled with my faith. I remember how I asked an astronomer where the universe came from, to which he of course answered with the big bang theory. To which I naturally asked where the big bang came from and what was there before. Then came the surprising and unsatisfying answer, that at the beginning of the big bang, the entire universe was a so compressed and hot mass, that there were even no atoms. One of the consequences of this was that all information of what previously existed was lost. That makes sense, if you set an archive on fire, you can no longer reconstruct the contents of that archive using the smoke. It’s just gone. On the other hand, you can of course build a theory based on indirect Indications. The priests’ answer to the question that if God created the universe, then where God came from?, was just as unsatisfying. The bottom line was that we as simple humans did not have the capacity to fully comprehend the great mystery that is God. Both answers that of the scientist and of the priests had their own logic, and both were unsatisfactory. Still, I had a slight preference for the idea that a God had created the world. For everything in the Universe seemed to conform to the principle of cause and effect, therefore it seemed illogical to me that the universe as a whole did not have to comply with it and was somehow created out of the blue. It seemed more logical to me that a God who created the entire universe and the associated laws (including the principle of cause and effect), did not have to comply with the rules of his creation. A bit analogous to the idea that you can design a video game, but that in daily life you obviously do not have to comply with the rules that apply in this video game that you have made. I came back from this somewhat agnostic point of view because God’s existence revealed itself to me through certain events in my life. Stephen does not want to use such events for his argument for the existence of God. According to him, revealed theology usually involves some special individuals who then share their insights with the others. Really? If you were to ask all believers whether events in their lives have caused their faith to be strengthened or perhaps even has led them to faith, would it be only a few believers who would respond positively? I leave it to the reader to make an estimate of this himself. I think for many people, personal experiences in their lives are far more important to their belief in God than any theory. Finally, after these reflections, I have some questions for Stephen. 1. What exactly is your definition of orderliness? (This in light of my claim that the universe is in some way characterized by the tendency to turn everything back into chaos). 2. What do you think of my statement that if you choose a certain property of the universe as an argument, you implicitly indicate which property in your opinion is important to God, and that the argument thereby loses its power for all images of God that are not caracterized by that property?3. Why don’t you choose the existence of the whole universe as an argument for the existence of God, but limit yourself to only one property of it. Finally; English is not my native language, so I ask for understanding for the possibly illogical/wrong word choices that I may have made. POHLOPSARIT
6. Question: It is a mistaken treatment of God to assume that he must be somehow bound by the qualities and rules of the observable universe. This ignores the whole point that the creation of the universe necessarily requires a supernatural, transcendent creator; one who stands outside the creation and is above and beyond it in every sense. As such, “orderly” as we observe in the world around us, would be an inferred characteristic, not a limit or restriction, especially as puny and impoverished our concept of “orderly” would be compared to God.

7. Question: You said that we cannot posit God to be either good or bad. By what yardstick of morality would one presume to judge the creator of the universe? It’s preposterous. A God that creates the universe is a self- defining entity. Apart from a transcendent moral law, which necessarily also must come from God, there is not even the concepts of good and bad, only personal preference.

8. The universe not only requires an outside source for its order, it requires an outside source for its very existence. Nothing inside the observable universe explains itself. That is why it is necessary to go outside the universe to a transcendent creator.

9. It is not possible to explain away God by simply transferring his qualities to the universe and say the universe caused itself or that it has always been. Again, there is nothing in the universe that explains itself. Everything in it requires an outside cause and has a beginning.

10. If the universe has always been, has no beginning, then there would be no beginning of time. If there were no beginning of time then there could be no point in time for us to exist.

11. The deist argument that maybe there was a God but he did his work and now is gone, also does not work for the same reason that assuming limitations on God automatically negates the concept. God has no beginning and no end. To posit a God who is no longer there is a self defeating contradiction.