Oh dear, due to not reading the title carefully enough, I was expecting to see Richard Dawkins getting ripped to shreds by Niel Turok, distinguished theorical physicist, but instead I see a strawman being ripped to shreds by Frank Turek, foam flecked nutter.

Oh well.

Nebogipfel wrote:Oh dear, due to not reading the title carefully enough, I was expecting to see Richard Dawkins getting ripped to shreds by Niel Turok, distinguished theorical physicist, but instead I see a strawman being ripped to shreds by Frank Turek, foam flecked nutter.

Oh well.

More like a straw man being savaged by a wet lettuce, I'd say.

Argument that the Creator sans creation is uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent:
- The Creator is uncaused: An infinite temporal regress of causes cannot exist.
- The Creator is beginningless: Whatever is uncaused does not begin to exist.
- The Creator is changeless: An infinite temporal regress of changes cannot exist.
- The Creator is immaterial: Whatever is material involves change on the atomic and molecular levels, but the Creator is changeless.
- The Creator is timeless: the complete absence of change, time does not exist, and the Creator is changeless.
- The Creator is spaceless: Whatever is immaterial and timeless cannot be spatial, and the Creator is immaterial and timeless
- The Creator is enormously powerful: He brought the universe into being out of nothing.
- The Creator is enormously intelligent: The initial conditions of the universe involve incomprehensible fine-tuning that points to intelligent design.

Vejur is that which seeks the Creator.

bribase,

I thoroughly enjoyed--am still enjoying, actually--the metaphor of topping Deity Hill, rumbling down into Theistic Valley, and still not having "enough juice to get to Christ Town".

Bribase wrote:I understand of course that it goes a little deeper than this, but do you hold the position that the KCA is only really an appeal to intuition and not as logically sound as WLC will admit?

Indeed. In fact, the appeal to intuition appears in the very first premise, and Kraig is unambiguous about this. He even states up front that P1 is intuitively true, or even obvious. This premise is the foundation upon which the house of cards that is his argument rests. If there is no such thing as an entity which 'began to exist' the whole argument falls apart.

He further leans on this in P2, although this is less of an appeal to intuition and more of an appeal to ambiguity, a fallacy more commonly known as equivocation, in asserting that not only is there such a thing as an entity that 'began to exist', but that said entity is the universe.

Now, this is where it gets a little complicated, not least because the language that physicists and cosmologists employ in this context is itself ambiguous (forgive me if I C&P some of my own material from elsewhere here, but it should serve to highlight the issues).

What Kraig and other theologians (where 'theologians' are people that make shit up about made-up entities) are leaning on here is the big bang theory, which they falsely claim provides empirical support for the idea that the universe had a beginning. There are several problems with this.

In reality, the big bang theory doesn't deal with any beginning, and certainly not the beginning of the universe. It doesn't even deal with the beginning of the expansion of our local cosmos.

There is a long-standing problem with the multiple ways the word 'universe' is employed, and it requires a little history:

For most of history, the word 'universe' simply meant 'that which is', and referred to what we can observe in the night sky. It wasn't actually thought to be that large, in universal terms (pardon the pun). Sure, it was always going to be huge, but it was thought that the entire universe was contained within just what we think of as our own galaxy. Indeed, almost all of what can be seen with the naked eye is contained within the Milky Way. Hubble, of course, changed all that in the 1930s, when he demonstrated that some of the things that had been historically observed were too far away to be part of our galaxy, and that it was all rushing away from us. Did the meaning of the word 'universe' change at that point? Of course not! It still meant 'that which is', but it now encompassed a good deal more in our perception, because our understanding of what is had expanded.

So now, we understand that our local cosmic expansion may not be the entirety of 'that which is'. Does that change the definition of the word 'universe'? of course not! The word still means 'that which is', but now it encompasses whatever (if anything) preceded or lies outside of our local cosmic expansion.

In short, there is, and can be, only one universe, because the universe is 'that which is' and encompasses all of existence.

Now, I can hear the objections already, namely that physicists and cosmologists talk about 'other universes' and 'multiverse' all the time, so I should spend a moment addressing that.

The first thing to note is that cosmologists and physicists, unlike evolutionary biologists, are not used to having their words dishonestly equivocated by propagandists for idiotic doctrinal imperatives (not that there is any such thing as a non-idiotic doctrinal imperative).

The second is to note that when cosmologists and physicists write, they tend to write for other cosmologists and physicists and, as such their language is a) geared toward an audience that understands what they mean when they use the word, based on context and b) often lazy. For an example of the latter, one need only look at how popular science authors treat the concept of entropy. Even Brian Greene, one of the few physicists in the vanguard against irrationality, treats entropy as disorder, with very little qualification of what he means, in his book Fabric Of The Cosmos (a thoroughly frustrating book for one who both understands the relevant phenomena and spends time in the demolition of cretinist fantasy (although an excellent read, once that qualification is taken into account)). More on that particular topic HERE.

Since even in the most basic definition of the word 'universe', one finds 'the entirety of time and space', and since it is far from clear that time began at the big bang (I will be happy to expand on this on request), and since, in fact, we have models on the table that deem time to be eternal (not least the two front-runners), then the most that can be said is that our local cosmic expansion arose from the big bang, not the universe. Indeed, the standard big bang model doesn't even deal with the beginning of our local cosmic expansion, because it only deals with a finite time after the beginning of expansion. It cannot extend (for the moment) beyond the Planck time, 10-43 seconds after the beginning of expansion. Further, one of the models on the table actually deals with some of the problems of the standard big bang model, and it is one of the aforementioned front-runners.

What all of the above should make clear is that our language is often insufficient to deal with the deep principles of what constitutes the universe, and how careful we have to be when dealing with the jackboots of doctrinal imperatives. This is not a failure of understanding, but a failure of language. It is precisely for this reason that I am such a pedantic cunt, and why semantics, oft-maligned and dismissed as irrelevant, is so important. Semantics is the heart of communication, and in my opinion, any dismissal of an argument based on the idea that 'it's just semantics', is not just fallacious, but indicative of a failure to think critically.

That should suffice for now. Now I'm going to go back and deal with the presentation that Murshid posted, since I haven't spent any time debunking the Kalam fallacy for a while.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

This would be all well and good if we could point to something that actually began to exist. Since, however, we can point to no such entity, and since all we have ever observed is changes in state, further supported by the first law of thermodynamics, this constitutes a rectally extracted blind assertion. In short, it is the assertion that all members of a set which, as far as can be ascertained, has no members, all share a particular property additional to its membership of the set. It is precisely equivalent to the statement 'all moons that are made of cheese are made of roquefort'.

The universe began to exist.

This is more of the same, with the additional fail detailed in my previous post.

Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

And now that the above two are dealt with, the blind assertion here, totally unsupported by any observation or scientific principle, is exposed for what it is.
.

If the universe has a cause of its existence, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans creation is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent:

Setting aside for a moment the unsupported 'has a cause of its existence', here we see the introduction of Kraig's presuppositions. Now, he does lay out some reasoning, if such it can be called, to show how he 'arrived' at this conclusion (again, setting aside the fact that this all constitutes post hoc reasoning, because it isn't like his motivation for believing in his magic man arose from this reasoning, more like the reasoning was a twisted attempt to justify what he already believes).

The universe was brought into being either by a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions or by a personal, free agent.

Or by a set of wholly unnecessary conditions. The presupposition here is that the universe is metaphysically necessary. Let's run with his dichotomy, though, and see where it gets us.

The universe could not have been brought into being by a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Why not? I have yet to see any kind of justification for this statement, and without such justification, it represents yet another rectally extracted blind assertion, and that's even before we deal with the perfectly valid possibility that his argument for necessity doesn't hold water.

Therefore, the universe was brought into being by a personal, free agent.

Boom, set up a dichotomy by blind assertion, and then knock it down by blind assertion. Is this how logic works?

Argument that the Creator sans creation is uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent:
- The Creator is uncaused: An infinite temporal regress of causes cannot exist.

Why not? In his attempt to justify this rectally extracted blind assertion (how many is that now? I've lost count) he invokes such things as Hilbert's Hotel. In one of his rare moments of posting something useful, Teuton linked to a thorough debunking of this.

Teuton wrote:For those interested:

* Dever, Josh. "Worlds Apart: On the Possibility of an Actual Infinity." Taiwanese Journal for Philosophy and History of Science 10 (1998): 95-116.

In any event, we don't require an infinite temporal regress of causes, regardless of the fact that there is no good justification for asserting its invalidity. Again, this is pretty much dealt with in my previous post.

The Creator is beginningless: Whatever is uncaused does not begin to exist.

In direct contradiction of his earlier argument, he asserts now that his magic man is eternal. Whether the infinite temporal regress constitutes the existence of a single entity or the universe (with the caveat regarding the simple fact that this entity is necessarily a subset of the universe if it indeed exists, as detailed in my earlier post), an eternally existing entity that has causal properties constitutes an infinite temporal regress of causes.

The Creator is changeless: An infinite temporal regress of changes cannot exist.

Why not? Another ex recto erection.

The Creator is immaterial: Whatever is material involves change on the atomic and molecular levels, but the Creator is changeless.

Errr, what? On what basis is this assertion erected? How is it justified to assert that whatever is material involves change, let alone on the atomic and molecular levels? Do photons change? They are, after all, material, yet they do not change, nor can they, because they don't experience time.

The Creator is timeless: the complete absence of change, time does not exist, and the Creator is changeless.

Now he asserts that somehow time does not exist. While there are entities that do not experience time, this does not assert that time does not exist, only that those entities do not experience it.

The Creator is spaceless: Whatever is immaterial and timeless cannot be spatial, and the Creator is immaterial and timeless

More rectally extracted blind assertion. He might want to have a word with Euclid about that.

The Creator is enormously powerful: He brought the universe into being out of nothing.

Powerful, eh? Energetic, even? Of course, that which is powerful has mass, as demonstrated by the equation of the wild-haired genius. This is also a direct violation of the first law of thermodynamics.

The Creator is enormously intelligent: The initial conditions of the universe involve incomprehensible fine-tuning that points to intelligent design.

Oh dear. And here we have the insertion of en entirely different argument, itself unjustified, in the form of the fine-tuning of initial conditions. This is yet another fallacy of equivocation, and when he erects this, he is leaning on the work of real physicists and cosmologists with no regard to what they actually mean when they talk about the fine-tuning of initial conditions. They are not saying that the initial conditions of the universe were fine-tuned, they are saying that the parameters of their models are fine-tuned. In short, they are saying that, if their models are correct, certain parameters must fall within a very narrow range of values. Contray to Kraig's assertions here, there are several problems with employing this 'fine-tuning' guff in the way that he employs it, namely that a) those models may not be correct or accurate and b) there is no good reason to assume that those parameters could actually have different values. In short, those values could be 'brute fact', in precisely the same way that there is every reason to assume that the universe itself is jst a brute fact.

Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans creation is "beginningless," changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent.

Therefore this argument is dead in the water.

That was fun.

Lasted 90 seconds before getting angry and eating my garden shed.

Sorry, dad.

murshid wrote:.
"Richard Dawkins Gets ripped to shreds by Dr. Frank Turek":



I bet his audience never read "The God Delusion" and Turek knows that, which is why he so confidently misrepresents Dawkins' argument. Apparently arguments from ignorance and god of the gaps arguments are good enough to rip someone else's argument to shreds.

ETA: Here is Dawkins' actual argument: http://www.rationalskepticism.org/nontheism/richard-dawkins-gets-ripped-to-shreds-by-dr-turek-t20621.html#p766419
.

Here's a new link to the video. The old one doesn't work any more.

I see: we "know" there's a "god" because we've heard of "Him"! Doesn't that presuppose that the people who tell us about this god are absolutely correct, and not at all deceiving us!

We know there is a Gandalf because we've heard of him. Works for me.

Please note the following is a classic ad hominem.

Who has the cred?

Richard Dawkins, He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his MA and DPhil degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. Now Emeritus Professor at Baliol. As far as ratings go Oxford is one of the top 3 universities in the UK, as an equal of any Ivy League university in the US.
His has dedicated his life to his work on Biology.

So called Dr. Frank Turek, is not so dedicated being is a former aviator in the U.S. Navy, and has a Masters degree in Public Administration from George Washington University and a doctorate in Apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary.
Southern what? Seminary?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_ ... l_Seminary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDvaPzg32W8

This is Turek's best shot. Mis representing Dawkins open minded speculation and characterising it as a suggestion.

Turek is one huge, seething ball of incredulity. He should really think about ending on a song.