• Welcome to League Of Reason Forums! Please read the rules before posting.
    If you are willing and able please consider making a donation to help with site overheads.
    Donations can be made via here

Today we will be discussing the evidence for a Loving, Logical, Lawgiver God. His name is Jesus.

arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
God doesn't require us to scientifically prove his existence. God says he has already given us the evidence of himself and even his invisible attributes, in ourselves and in his creation, so that anyone who denies the truth about him is without excuse.


God may not require us to do so, but we're entitled to do so under the Free Will clause, right? Or is Luke 4:12 an injunction against 'testing' God in that sense rather than in the moral temptation sense?

If we're testing whether God exists, then we're hardly going to consider what God allegedly said as being relevant given that accepting that God said anything at all is necessarily already predicated on believing that God exists.

Rather, if we wanted to establish God's existence according to the principles we use to validate other claims, then we'd need to be able to point to actual independent corroborating evidence. It is very difficult to imagine what form that evidence would take, but that's really a problem for the claimant.

What's worst of all about your statement there is that there's an implication that if anyone finds the God claim lacking, they have no excuse. This isn't true at all. A proponent of ANY position owns the burden of proof - if believers in gods cannot satisfactorily provide convincing reason or persuasive evidence, then the fault is theirs and their justification for belief is shown lacking.

Let's put it another way: would you find your own statement above convincing if it was written by a Hindu about Siva? If a Hindu said this to you, would it cause you to then simply believe that Siva exists? Or would you hold the Hindu's claims to a higher expectation than you're asking others to hold yours?
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Today we're talking about science. Science can only be done because of a loving logical Living lawgiver God who doesn't change over time.

Problem 1: You're a Christian claiming that God doesn't change over time, yet God clearly changes dramatically in the Bible from a vengeful god promising retribution in the OT to a loving, accepting God in the NT. There are dozens of instances of God changing observable directly in the solitary text you necessarily must appeal to in order to even contend that this god exists.

Problem 2: Science is expressly about discovering and explaining natural phenomena - this is opposed to supernatural phenomena, ergo there's no logical link betwixt the two. Your god, with respect to a scientific understanding, is a 5th wheel - if an explanation works without appealing to the unknown and unknowable, then there's no reason to so appeal.



This is why we have laws like laws of gravity, magnetism, thermodynamics that do not change over time. Because they come from a lawgiver that doesn't change over time.

Problem 3 - the main problem with your argument: Could God have made all the laws differently and still produced the same results including the structure and nature of the universe, and the living systems on this planet?

Either 'he' couldn't as this is the only way in which life could have arisen and evolved over time in which case your god contention suddenly becomes redundant, or 'he' could have made it all differently in which case you can't contend that the existence of the order of our universe necessitates or evinces a god.

Incidentally, your argument is borrowed from the late classical period and appears absent knowledge of the intervening centuries of theology, let alone philosophy and science. It's also not well conceived from a logical perspective.


Not to mention the laws of logic such as the law of identity, noncontradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. If these laws did not exist we would not be here to complain about it. If these laws ever changed over time we would not be here to complain about it.

You're so close! :)

This statement...

If these laws did not exist we would not be here to complain about it.

... is actually an argument that removes any necessity of agency. Basically, you're trying to put the cart before the horse; it's the fallacy of question-begging. The Weak Anthropic principle is not an argument for an agent of creation because "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist" - if they weren't, there would be no observer to speculate.


Why do these laws exist where do they come from?

It's essentially impossible logically to answer a 'why' question with respect to the existence of the fundamental laws structuring our universe; they are the 'whys' - the alpha and omega. You can't answer this question either because just saying 'God' is not actually an explanation - here try and answer it yourself:

why did God create these specific laws and not some other laws?

Similarly, where does God come from?

If you wish to suggest that you don't need to answer this by saying that God just exists, then why can I not say exactly the same - the universe (and all contained therein) just exists?

Assuming we both have exactly the same answer here, my response is still preferable to yours because I don't need to add unobservable mechanisms and complex immaterial entities allegedly existing outside the perceivable universe.

Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate


What causes them not to change over time? And what's going to cause them to be here tomorrow? That is the question for my atheist and non-believing Friends.

This is an irrational question - there is no way to answer it because it is internally broken.

A cause is something that produces a result, and that result is necessarily some quantity of change. So how can a cause result in a not-change? There can logically be no such thing as a cause that causes nothing.

Similarly, nothing is 'causing' the laws to be here tomorrow. The necessary inference from your belief position and the format of this question is that you perceive your god to be something like a plate-spinner who must continuously maintain every single interaction down to the subatomic scale or else it would fail to occur. This is positively antiquated - I don't believe I've met anyone contemporary who actually thinks like this. It also makes god the cause of everything, and that necessarily includes all the bad things too. 'He' doesn't just see every sparrow that falls, but 'he' also causes the sparrow to fall. Such a god is not consistent with the God of the Bible by the way who frequently fails to notice things happening when according to your argument, 'he' must be causing them to happen.


This is my first post from Mr Batman of www.MrBatman.com

That site is a complete mess - frankly, websites like that project a lack of credibility. You really should consider minimizing the amount of information on any given page, and choosing a coherent colour theme and sticking to it.
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="Secular Theist"/>
Today we're talking about science. Science can only be done because of a loving logical Living lawgiver God who doesn't change over time.

This is why we have laws like laws of gravity, magnetism, thermodynamics that do not change over time. Because they come from a lawgiver that doesn't change over time.

Not to mention the laws of logic such as the law of identity, noncontradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. If these laws did not exist we would not be here to complain about it. If these laws ever changed over time we would not be here to complain about it.

Why do these laws exist where do they come from? What causes them not to change over time? And what's going to cause them to be here tomorrow? That is the question for my atheist and non-believing Friends.

This is my first post from Mr Batman of www.MrBatman.com
Hold on. As a Christian you believe that you have a divine revelation.

Would God have revealed to us anything that we could normally think by our selves? No. It would be a waste of time. A divine revelation is necessarily something outside our normal range of understanding.

We don't need a divine revelation in order to understand how physical laws work or the age of the earth or how organisms developed on it. We can figure that stuff out just fine using our ordinary faculties.

I don't understand the premise you're starting from.
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
I think there have actually been very both great pro-secular and non-secular arguments on a wide variety of topics here on this forum. If you stick around long I am sure it will be worth your while. Brilliant minds dwell here from time to time.
 
Back
Top