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(bill) As I pointed out in the last post, and demonstrated by your lack of any response to that post, your "I don't know" hand waving is just smoke and mirrors in a lame attempt to divert from the real issue, which is that atheism ends in circular logic and is encompassed with ill-logic. Rather then face that music the atheist will just hide behind their smoke and mirrors of "we don't know" and maybe in 200 years or somewhere in the future someone will figure out to repeal "law", "cause and effect", and "commonsense" and will replace them with "anarchy" and "for no reason" on a full time bases. That day is the only hope the atheist can cling too, and his faith must remain in that hope as his worldview is currently stuck in a quagmire of circular and ill-logic.

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Originally posted by Dave W.

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Originally posted by Bill scott

Well, we know that matter would not be able to be used in the big bang, otherwise this would have to be eternal matter as we also know, thanks to nasa, that the universe is finite.

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No, we only know that matter as we know it came into being with the Big Bang.

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So if the atheist begins their origins hypothesis off with physical matter already in existence then the next question that will have to be asked is where did this matter come from? This ends in circular logic.

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No it doesn't. "We don't know where all this matter comes from" isn't circular logic.

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Now, if the first cause of the universe is eternal, this would break the circular logic of a finite first cause redundancy.

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Since the circular logic you assert isn't present, then no "eternal first cause" is needed to break the non-existant circularity.

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Now understanding that it takes an infinite cause which would be the more logical suggestion for this infinite cause?

A. eternal matter is somehow the first cause of the universe, even though NASA proved the universe was not eternal. If the universe is not eternal, then how can eternal matter exist as a first cause? Eternal matter is an oxymoron. You are taking matter, and giving to it the attribute of eternal existence, which is an attribute of deity.

B. The eternal first cause is an infinite deity. Eternal existence is an attribute of deity. If the deity is not eternal then he is not a deity

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There's no reason to assume that these are the only choices.

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Good, then that will help us narrow it down quickly to an eternal first cause then, because those are your only two choices.

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You keep saying that without proving it.

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Now the main question shifts to what/who is the eternal first cause?

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Not at all, since the previous question has yet to be answered.

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The choice would have to be infinite matter of some kind or an infinite deity? If you have any others please share here.

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Non-infinite matter, a different kind of matter, a non-infinite being, the list is practically endless.

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I subscribe to a deity, who would be eternal, or he would not be a deity, as the first cause, while you subscribe to nothing. You can't come up with an eternal first cause, apart from God, and you acknowledge the universe is not eternal, so where does atheism go from there?

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Originally posted by marfknox

Bill

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Oh, and why do atheists search for "loopholes" if they are in search of truth? Shady denfence lawyers, who seek to to distort the truth, search for loopholes.

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False analogy, Bill. Lawyers deal with man-made laws. Made-made laws can be broken and often are, which is why we need lawyers.

A requirement to be a natural law is that it cannot be broken. If the law of gravity is broken, physicists would strip it of its status of “law”.

No natural laws are repealed by Quantum physics. “Common sense” and “cause and effect” are not natural laws. They are mere ideas from the imagination of man.

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False analogy, Bill. Lawyers deal with man-made laws. Made-made laws can be broken and often are, which is why we need lawyers.

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A requirement to be a natural law is that it cannot be broken. If the law of gravity is broken, physicists would strip it of its status of “law”.

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No natural laws are repealed by Quantum physics....

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Originally posted by Bill scott
(bill) They are just suspended long enough for the atheist to get his/her hypothesis on the table, then they are unsuspended by the atheist, so that they might align with reality again. *sigh*

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Originally posted by moakley

In a nut shell bill's only argument has been, "The universe was created by god because it took a god for the universe to exist."

I think I'm beginning to see the light.

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rather then give the attribute of eternal first cause to that which fits the definition of eternal, and would posse infinite power.

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To save Shaw from hell-fire, a friend prevailed on a Roman Catholic priest to catechize the upstart atheist. Having repaired with his catechumen to a church cell, the priest began:

“The universe exists; somebody must have made it.”

“If that somebody exists,” interposed Shaw, “somebody must have made him.”

“I grant that for the sake of argument,” said the priest. “I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you please; but an infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant; it is no harder to believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind him will remove your logical difficulty?”

“By your leave,” Shaw replied, “it is as easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that the maker of the universe made himself, in fact much easier; for the universe visibly exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a hypothesis.”

Fifty years later, Shaw stuck to his guns. He told an interviewer for a church magazine: “A First Cause is a contradiction in terms, because in causation every cause must have a cause; and therefore there can no more be a First Cause than a first inch in a circle. If you once admit a cause that is uncaused, you give up causation altogether. And if you do that, you may as well say that everything makes itself.”

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Shaw got it, why can't bill?

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Many times atheist do not deal in natural law, and when they do if it does not fit in their hypothesis then they just suspend it. When asked how it was suspended they respond with, "it just was". So lawyers, and atheist are much in the same. They both search for loopholes that can be used to distort the truth, to present their case favorable even if they know the truth was distorted. If atheism was true to begin with loopholes would not be searched for. But since the atheism is bankrupt they next search for loopholes.

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The atheist's infinite amount of unknown universes that they hypothesize about are not law. And the loopholes they search for are not law either.

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(me)No natural laws are repealed by Quantum physics....

(bill) They are just suspended long enough for the atheist to get his/her hypothesis on the table, then they are unsuspended by the atheist, so that they might align with reality again.

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Originally posted by H. Humbert

My great-grandmother on my mother's side came from Czechoslovakia when she was a young woman. According to my grandmother, she was a very devout Christian (but not exactly what you would call "worldly") and locked herself in her ship's cabin the remainder of the journey to America after spying her first ever black man, which she mistook for Old Scratch himself.

Even living for decades in modern America did little to dispell her Old World superstitions and supernatural worldview. My grandma says that as a girl, her mother used to pinch and twist her skin whenever she fell ill, to "pull out" the evil spirits responsible for the affliction. My great-grandmother would also spend hours praying alone in the small garden they kept, often at night. She would pray to the moon, which she called "Daniel's Moon" because that was where she believed God had placed him. She could even see Daniel's face.

During the great Space Race of the late 1960s, my great-grandmother would fume at the folly and pride of men who dreamed of putting a manned capsule on the surface of the moon. "God will throw their ship back down to the Earth," she would say, and fling down her arms dramatically. On the night of July 21st, 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, she locked herself in her bedroom and refused to watch the televised broadcast with the rest of the family. I believe she died never thinking of that night for the rest of her life. She was just utterly unable to cope with reality.

I bring this up because bill is similarly unable to adjust his worldview to accomode reality. Particles have been observed popping into and out of existence without cause, yet he blindly shakes his head and refuses to believe that his fantasy of a perfectly ordered cause-and-effect Universe has been disproven. His brain, riddled with religious superstitions, is equally hobbled by the peasant mentality which so afflicted my great-grandmother born more than a century ago. Like her, he is incapable of processing any fact which disrupts his belief system. He is stuck in a delusion, alone and locked in a bedroom. And he will die that way.

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My great-grandmother on my mother's side came from Czechoslovakia when she was a young woman. According to my grandmother, she was a very devout Christian (but not exactly what you would call "worldly") and locked herself in her ship's cabin the remainder of the journey to America after spying her first ever black man, which she mistook for Old Scratch himself.

Even living for decades in modern America did little to dispell her Old World superstitions and supernatural worldview.



My grandma says that as a girl, her mother used to pinch and twist her skin whenever she fell ill, to "pull out" the evil spirits responsible for the affliction.

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My great-grandmother would also spend hours praying alone in the small garden they k

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Originally posted by H. Humbert

And by coincidence, today's posting from Red State Rabble posts a dialogue excerpted from "George Bernard Shaw: Mystic or Atheist?" by Gary Sloan, having to do with this very subject.

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To save Shaw from hell-fire, a friend prevailed on a Roman Catholic priest to catechize the upstart atheist. Having repaired with his catechumen to a church cell, the priest began:

“The universe exists; somebody must have made it.”

“If that somebody exists,” interposed Shaw, “somebody must have made him.”

“I grant that for the sake of argument,” said the priest. “I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you please; but an infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant; it is no harder to believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind him will remove your logical difficulty?”

“By your leave,” Shaw replied, “it is as easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that the maker of the universe made himself, in fact much easier; for the universe visibly exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a hypothesis.”

Fifty years later, Shaw stuck to his guns. He told an interviewer for a church magazine: “A First Cause is a contradiction in terms, because in causation every cause must have a cause; and therefore there can no more be a First Cause than a first inch in a circle. If you once admit a cause that is uncaused, you give up causation altogether. And if you do that, you may as well say that everything makes itself.”

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Shaw got it, why can't bill?

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Shaw got it, why can't bill?

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Originally posted by Bill scott
(bill) I think in reality you have a complex that you try to cast on me. You are worried that you are going to follow the same path as your grandma, lost in a delusion when you die.

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