Logical Fallacies and Arguments for God part 2

This is the second post on the arguments used to ‘prove’ god’s existence. In this post, I will focus on more specific ‘proofs’ that are used, notably the Ontological Argument, Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs, The Arts Argument, Personal Experience (Anecdotal Argument), Scriptural Argument, Pascal’s Wager, The Morality Argument, The Miracle Argument, the Argument from Desire, The Argument from Purpose, The Necessary for the Universe Argument, God’s love, immunity, and the numerous arguments argument, not   in that order.

The first arguments that I would like to get out of the way are the Scriptural arguments, the Miracle Argument, the Personal Experience Argument, the desire, purpose, immunity, God’s Love, and the Arts Argument. These are the arguments that I consider to be the most deeply flawed.

1)      Any scriptural argument is very weak. The reason for this is Circular logic. The validity of any source should be called into doubt. The bible (OT, NT, Koran and any other holy text) is no exception. The bible can only be a valid source if god is real. If god is real, then the bible is true. (Of course determining the true faith would be problematic unless god revealed itself) However, if you are using scriptural evidence to prove the existence of god, it should be obvious that the existence of god is in question. The bible cannot be accepted as a credible source as long as the thing that would make it credible is called into doubt.

2)      The question, when looking at the Miracle argument, is what constitutes a miracle. If I survive a car crash, is that a miracle? If I win the lottery and can therefore pay for my hypothetical son’s surgery is that a miracle? These sorts of things are not miracles. They might be highly improbable, but they aren’t miracles. My reason for this is that they do not violate the laws of the Universe. It is possible for them to happen without any sort of divine intervention and therefore do not act as a proof for god. What I would consider a miracle is something that violates the laws of the Universe. Something that absolutely cannot happen without the interference of a supernatural deity. Some people would consider a sudden cessation of a cancer to be this sort of miracle. Of course, this is not the case. The reason for this is that, in this case no laws of the Universe are broken. You’re just in the realm of the improbable. Of course, there are claims of events that violate the laws of the Universe, but all of them rely on Personal Anecdotes (to the best of my knowledge) or hearsay and cannot be proved to have happened. Therefore, the Miracle Argument is, at this point of time unacceptable.

3)      The next argument is the argument from personal experience, or the anecdotal argument. In other words a person or someone this person knows claims to have had a deeply religious experience. Maybe the saw images or heard voices. They could be absolutely convinced they are telling the truth. This argument is incredibly easy to refute. Many people see and hear things. They consider them to be true. It’s just that when these experiences are non-religious, the person is considered to have some sort of problem.

4)      The Argument from Desire sounds, and is, incredibly ridiculous, but it seems to be employed by a lot of people. Essentially, they believe in god and the, despite all the evidence because they have a deep desire to do so. Well, we don’t always get what we want.

5)      The Purpose argument. Without God, life has no purpose. There’s no grand plan. No scheme to it all. In a way, I agree with this statement, but I don’t think it proves anything, because there is no need, in the Universe for there to be a master plan. However, I personally believe that the purpose of an individual life is to live it.

6)      The immunity argument is extraordinarily simple and foolish. It goes like this: god is above the evidence and your need for god to prove his/her/its existence is wrong because god doesn’t have to follow the rules. Substitute god in that statement with anything else and anyone can see the flaw. When discussing the logic or rational of something, you can’t declare that something to be beyond its reach.

7)      The God’s Love argument isn’t a real argument in my opinion. It goes god loves you, how can you ignore god. Or god created you, or something along those lines. The fallacy in this, obviously, is that, in order for that to be true, god must exist. Circular logic.

8)      The Arts argument suggests that without god, we would not be able to have Shakespeare or Beethoven or any of the great artists in the world. Of course, I think this is flawed on two counts. First, I believe it belittles the human potential and second, it’s silly. It seems to be caused by jealousy. How come they’re better at this than I? It must be divine inspiration. There is no reason to believe that some people aren’t just naturally good at some things. This is completely rational to believe: People can be geniuses. This doesn’t violate the laws of the Universe.

9)      One really foolish argument is that there are so many arguments for god that one of them must be right. Not only does that not have to be the case, it ignores that there are plenty of arguments against god.

10)  The Ontological Argument I consider to be the most ridiculous argument outside of those seven. This is the argument. A person is told to imagine a completely perfect being. Once they have done that, they are told, wouldn’t it be more perfect if it were real and then, viola, god exists. The mind boggles at how such an argument could be taken seriously. It has three huge flaws.

a.      Flaw number 1- Circular Logic. This relies on circular logic twice, actually. First it assumes that god is perfect. Of course, for god to be perfect, it has to exist. Therefore, it also assumes that god exists.

b.      Can we actually imagine a perfect being? I say that we can’t? How could we? Perfection doesn’t exist in our world, so how would we know what a perfect being was. I suppose we could imagine the idea of a perfect being, but we could not really contemplate how it is perfect.

c.      Ignoring these flaws, there is the big one. The Ontological Argument assumes that because we imagine something exists, it exists. I could imagine I got a great score on my test. Doesn’t mean I did.

11)  Pascal’s Wager really isn’t even an argument. It is a bet. The bet is this: If you bet that god exists and are wrong, you have lost nothing. If you are right, you gain heaven. If you bet against god and are wrong, you are eternally punished.

a.      If you bet on god and are wrong, then you have wasted your life serving a lie.

b.      If you bet against god and are right, you have lived your life to the fullest and should have no regrets.

c.      This doesn’t actually try to prove anything or succeed in even providing the slightest bit of evidence that god exists. It relies, in order for you to make the decision in favor of god, on the other arguments, which are also flawed.

12)  Is God necessary for morality? This is actually among the more valid questions. Without the promise of reward, why should we be good? Where would our morals come from, if not god? Doesn’t our morality come from the bible?

a.      First, I would question if you were being good if the reason for it is the desire for reward. In that sense, the charitable atheist is better than being a charitable person of faith.

b.      No, I would not say that our morality comes from the bible. First of all, the bible is a repulsive book from a moral standpoint. It allows slavery, the oppression of women, the killing of homosexuals and people of different faith. It allows the stoning to death of children. Second is that people who do not live in a Judeo-Christian culture have very similar morals to those who do.

c.      I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so this is the best I can do in answering the question of the origin of morals. The creatures we evolved from were probably, similar to us as well as many other primate species, social animals, pack animals. It would be beneficial if members of the pack looked out for each other and helped each other. Morals could have come from that pack instinct.

13)  Another Popular argument is the use of Thomas Aquinas’ Five proofs. All of these are easily disregarded.

a.      The Unmoved Mover- Nothing moves without a previous mover. In order for things to have begun moving, something must have moved without a mover. That is god.

b.      The uncaused cause- Everything must have a cause. The first thing did not have a cause. This, you guessed it, is god.

c.      The Cosmological Argument- At some point in the past, there must have been a time when nothing physical existed. Now, physical things exist. It must have been god. These three arguments all just arbitrarily assign this position to god with absolutely no reasoning as to why. Further more, there can be a natural termination. You have a piece of copper. You can keep cutting it into smaller pieces and eventually, you will reach the smallest piece of copper. You can keep cutting until you reach Hydrogen or a positron(?), which is just the proton of a Hydrogen atom. But, there comes a point where you can’t keep cutting.

d.      The Argument from Degree- things in the world have differing degrees of properties. We can only judge these degrees by comparing them to the maximum. The max is god. Why can we only compare these properties to the maximum? I can say that Fred is nicer than Barry, but meaner than Greg. Where’s the need for god?

e.      The Argument from design- Things in the world look as though they’ve been designed. As far as we know, everything that looks designed Is designed. Therefore god designed the world. There is one major problem with this that I will deal with in part 3 (Atheist Arguments), but for now, I can just say that we now have much more rational explanations for why things look designed. There are biological reasons and geological reasons. We don’t need god to have what we have in nature.

14)  Is god necessary for the Universe to exist?

a.      I do not believe so. While I don’t have a deep understanding of physics, so I can’t explain the theories, I believe it is far more logical to believe that a scientific procedure occurred to create the Universe rather than some super powerful deity. As expressed in the refutation of Aquinas, things can start and end naturally. I believe that the Universe does not need god. Just because we don’t know something today doesn’t mean that it will remain forever unknown.

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