Cold Case Christianity: Wallace's completely bullshit case for God

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cumulative Evidence and the Case for God’s Existence (Free Bible Insert)

Posted: 28 Mar 2018 01:17 AM PDT

My cold cases are typically built on circumstantial evidence.

Probably because you have to admit you have no "direct" evidence for you case.  What you don't tell the reader is that cases that are entirely or mostly "circumstantial" dramatically increase the potential for misunderstanding of convicting of an innocent person.  If your god really cared about rescuing me from my hell-bound ways as much as you insist he does, he would more than likely have made his truths more clear than the stupid fortune-cookie bullshit in the bible that has caused Christianity be the ceaselessly splintered religion its always been for 2,000 years.

Cumulative circumstantial cases are incredibly powerful when considered in their totality;

And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  Here's the image that comes to my mind when i think of Wallace's chain of cumulative arguments:

the more diverse the forms of evidence (and the more abundant their existence), the more reasonable the conclusion. As jurors consider these large collections of evidence implicating a particular suspect, they must ask themselves a simple question: “Could this guy just be incredibly unlucky, or is he the cause of all this evidence because he is truly guilty?”

And the number of false convictions that has been on the rise in America for the last 50 years testifies that the more circumstantial the case, the more likely it will mislead the independent observer.  Wallace, if you were on trial for murder and you were innocent, and the prosecutor's case was entirely circumstantial, how much faith would you have in the ability of circumstantial cases to reveal truth?  FUCK YOU.

The more the evidence repeatedly points to the defendant, the less likely it is merely a matter of coincidence.

Agreed.

The cumulative case for God’s existence is similarly powerful. There are a number of circumstantial lines of evidence pointing to the existence of God, and the diverse, collective nature of this evidence is most reasonably explained by the existence of a Creator.

And when you allege that this creator is "immaterial" or "non-physical", you are positing things equally as unlikely as "dark matter" and other ridiculous unscientific speculations.  There is no evidence whatsoever that there is even any such thing as a "non-physical" thing that has existence independent of a mind.

This month, we’re featuring a free downloadable Bible insert summarizing a brief cumulative case for God’s existence, built on just five lines of circumstantial evidence:

Do you also plan to issue coupons?  Use sexy women to increase reader response to your god-commercials?  Is there a reason why you promote your god using modern secular marketing techniques that the Holy Spirit apparantly didn't need for hundreds of years?  Or do Christians sometimes get so zealous in their stupidity that they can no longer distinguish convenience from god's will? 

(1) The Temporal Nature of the Cosmos (Cosmological)
(a) The Universe began to exist

No, the standard Big Bang ('BB') model has become so ad hoc that it has evolved  and now takes several alternative forms, all of which do not allow the conclusion that the universe is temporal.  There is plenty of scientific opposition to the big bang, and Wallace's biggest problem is that he cannot explain this opposition as arising from unbelievers who are denying scientific reality merely to avoid having to admit the universe was created.  The Institute for Creation Research, where top academic Christians do all they can to falsify the theory of evolution, also say the Big Bang theory is total bullshit:
 
Maybe Wallace will do as fundamentalists typically do, and also accuse this decidedly conservative Christian think tank of being apostates for denying things Wallace thinks point toward God's existence?

Or will Wallace be objective enough to admit that the BB theory that he thinks is so obvious, actually isn't quite as compelling as he would wish?

Finally, Wallace must worry about how Genesis 1 would have been understood by its originally intended readers/hearers, since this is a basic rule of interpretation or hermeneutics.  it's pretty silly to think the pre-literate Hebrew living in the days of Moses would infer from anything in Genesis that the creation involved an enormous explosion and millions of years of cooling.  They would have understood Genesis to be describing god intelligently creating similar to the way a potter makes pots.  No explosions.  So the more Wallace wants the big bang to be true, the more he supports a theory that is contradicted by the very bible he is trying to justify.

(b) Anything that begins to exist must have a cause

yes, but only in the "re-configuring previously existing atoms" sense. The tree you have in your yard obviously didn't exist 100 years ago, but it didn't come into existence "from nothing", it came from a seed, nourished by other stuff already existing in the nearby dirt.

If THAT is the sense of "begins to exist" that you mean, there is no problem.  Unfortunately, if you meant it that way, then you didn't mean it in the "created from nothing" sense, and in that case, your argument ceases to provide support for the "created from nothing" sense that is meant in Genesis 1:1.

But if you meant "begins to exist" to mean "created from nothing", you hang on to the biblical sense you are apparently arguing for, but then you leave the realm of the scientific:  there is no evidence, whatsoever, that anything has ever popped into existence "from nothing", so the "create from nothing" sense that you meant above, is a sense that cannot be supported by any scientific evidence.  There are at least seven different competing theories of quantum mechanics, and only one of them, the Copenhagen School, alleges that quantum particles can appear from nothing and then go back out of existence again.  So the only possible evidence you could cite, is excessively controversial and cannot be confirmed anyway, and is denied by the majority of physicists.  Such a mater is hardly sufficient to corroborate your claim that things can possibly come into existence from nothing.

And since the first law of thermodynamics says energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, there is no reason to think that "matter" itself ever once didn't exist.  Matter spends an awful lot of time being reconfigured into new shapes, but there is no evidence that matter itself ever came into existence.  For this reason alone, it is rational to believe the universe and its matter have simply always existed.  You never get anything new by means of previously non-existing atoms.  You only get something new by taking the atoms that already exist and configuring them into new shapes.  When you burn a log to ash in the fireplace, no matter has disappeared into non-existence, it has simply taken on a changed form.  Since there is no such thing as the absolute annihilation of matter (that's why nuclear explosions are either fusion or fission, they aren't removing anything from the universe), it makes more sense to deny your premise and assert that the universe didn't come into existence, but has simply always existed into the infinite past.

(c) Therefore, the Universe must have a cause

your premises were demonstrably false, so your conclusion doesn't follow.

(d) This cause must be eternal (uncaused), non-spatial, immaterial, atemporal, and personal (having the ability to willfully cause the beginning of the universe)

This is what gives rise to the atheist argument from the incoherence of religious language.  In light of there being no scientific evidence for a god, your need to describe your god in terms that defy all attempts at confirmation (what the fuck does "non-spatial, immaterial" mean?), makes it more likely you need to do that because your god is not real by rather the result of a complex reality-defying fairy tale.It doesn't matter if non-physical gods exists, that is YOUR burden and you have failed it, so you have failed to intellectually obligate anybody to admit your position is more reasonable than atheism.  Start defining your god as a physical being, and many of these justified criticisms disappear.  Continue insisting your god lives in the 12th dimension, and continue being told that your imperfect inconsistent mind is the reason your idea of god has the same attributes.

(e) The cause fits the description we typically assign to God

(2) The Appearance of Design (Teleological)
(a) Human artifacts (like watches) are products of intelligent design
(b) Many aspects and elements of our universe resemble human artifacts
(c) Like effects typically have like causes
(d) Therefore, it is highly probable the appearance of design in the Universe is simply the reflection of an intelligent designer

 if the appearance of specified complexity implies intelligent design, then because the creator has to possess at least as much complexity as the thing created, "god" must also possess specified complexity, and therefore, God's own complexity argues for his being intelligently designed no less than does the 'amazing complexity' of the red blood cell.  I will give up atheism if you give up biblical monotheism.  Deal?

(d) Given the complexity and expansive nature of the Universe, this designer must be incredibly intelligent and powerful (God)

he also must be incredibly barbaric, since the existence of vegetarian animals and insects makes perfectly clear that God doesn't "need" to bring meat-eating or carnivorous life forms into existence, who by nature make other life forms miserable by hunting them.  And you cannot say some of the vegetarian animals in the Garden of Eden became carnivorous after Adam and Eve brought sin into the world, because sin would thus be a degrading effect on the animal's DNA, while the DNA responsible for the carnivorous attributes of certain animals is something you would normally ascribe to intelligent design.  If lions originally had molars, the introducing of sin into the world would not and could not cause those molars to evolve into meat-tearing fangs.  So you cannot use "sin" to justify distancing your god from the barbarity in the carnivore animals.  You are required by your own logic to say that God wanted by intentional design for those animals to tear each other apart. THAT is one reason we just laugh in your face when you insist your God is "loving".  Your own intelligent design argument cannot account for the existence of carnivorous animals, without binding you to the proposition that your god gets a thrill out of watching creatures suffer horrific pain and misery.  It's nice to know your God is a drunk college frat boy who endures carpel tunnel from clicking too much on liveleak.

(3) The Existence of Objective Moral Truth (Axiological)
(a) There is an objective (transcendent) moral law

You are crazy, that's a conclusion that you are mischaracterizing as a premise.  If you think there is some objective moral law that transcends the human mind, that's YOUR burden to show.  You don't.  You fail.

(b) Every law has a law giver

 Correct.

(c) Therefore, there is an objective (transcendent) moral law giver

That doesn't follow logically.  You have not demonstrated that any action is "good" solely for reasons that transcend the human mind.  Come up with a hypothetical act of a man and then demonstrate why its goodness or badness MUST derive from something deeper than human opinion.  You aren't gonna do it. There are good purely naturalistic reasons to explain why most civilized adults think pedophilia and murder are immoral, so you cannot even pretend that only God can explain why there is human consensus on certain moral acts.   If we can explain an insect's instinct to defend its young without having to say it was made in the image of god, we can also explain a human being's instinct to defend its young without having to say it was made in the image of God.  

(d) The best explanation for this objective (transcendent) law giver is God

The best explanation for as yes unproven "objective" morals is a being that cannot be defined except by special words that defy all attempts at empirical confirmation. Yet you talk about God's existence as if it was equally as obvious as the existence of trees. Nice going.

By the way "objective" means "true for reasons independent of the human mind". So if you declare any human act to be "objectively" immoral (i.e., murder, rape), then you rightfully shoulder the burden to provide the reason, which has no basis in the human mind, for why that act is objectively immoral.  You aren't going to do it.  If you think murder is objectively immoral, you need to show it so without appeal to what any human being thinks, or what any human being has ever said.  That's the consequences to you when you say the immorality of murder is for reasons that transcend human opinion.  Good luck.

(4) The Existence of Absolute Laws of Logic (Transcendent)
(a) The laws of logic exist

i. The laws of logic are conceptual laws

And "conceptual" only makes sense by presupposing the physicality of the mind.  Otherwise you are talking about concepts in an "immaterial mind", and there you are again, back in fairy tale town.

ii. The laws of logic are transcendent

no, the laws of logic operate the way they do solely because of the way we humans choose to define our words.  The only reason "married bachelor" is a logical contradiction is because we have defined "bachelor" as "not married".

Furthermore, you ignore the fact that there are axioms in reasoning.  Axioms are the absolute first steps in reasoning, so that asking why they function the way they do, is irrational.  If it is the VERY FIRST STEP in reasoning itself, then there will not be a "reason" why that first step or axiom operates the way it does.

Moreover, your argument is using logic to prove logic, which constitutes the fallacy of circular reasoning.  When you ask why A can never be non-A, you are attacking reasoning itself.  If you then use reasoning to explain the reasoning, you are again arguing in a circle or begging the question.  So it would appear that reasoning itself is not subject to reason.  There really is that very first absolute beginning to the reasoning process, you cannot just explain it into an infinite regress.  You know that book is on the table because you can see it.  You know your eyes aren't deceiving you because the book can also be confirmed to be there by touch, taste, smell, and hearing it fall onto the table.  The question "yeah, but how do you know that your 5 physical senses aren't deceiving you" must be answered "I don't".

I think this is where the people so desperate to prove god, therefore suddenly start positing the existence of ESP, the sixth sense, to get away from the above-cited conclusions that otherwise flow from common sense. What's next?  Bigfoot can switch dimensions and that's why we can never get a clear photo of him?

iii. The laws of logic pre-existed humans

Impossible, the laws of logic arise from the way humans define their words.  If we defined "bachlor" as married for less than one year", then "married bachelor" would no longer be a necessary contradiction.

(b) All conceptual laws reflect the mind of a law giver

Not if the law-giver is described in unfalsifiable and incoherent ways, such as "non-physical".   A magic fairy can explain why your car keys turned up missing, but the epistemological problems in the whole concept of "magic fairy" make it reasonable to discard that hypothesis and favor something that coheres with other demonstrated realities.

(c) The best and most reasonable explanation for the kind of mind necessary for the existence of the transcendent, objective, conceptual laws of logic is a transcendent, objective, eternal Being (God)

 If God's logic necessarily permeates the universe, sure is funny that his alleged morals don't.  And Christians who are 5-Point Calvinists don't believe your dogshit "god gave us freewill" excuse, so let God's likeminded ones get their act together before they insist that spiritually dead people should find the splintered house of Christianity to be the last bit compelling.

(5) The Unique Nature of Our World and Universe (Anthropic)
(a) Our universe appears uniquely designed so:

i. Life can exist

Life forms that cause horrific misery to others also exist, they are called carnivores.  So if we keep heading in the direction you wish to go, god's responsibility for "life" constitutes god's responsibility for creating carnivrores, i.e., God intended for certain animals to cause horrific misery to others, their carnivore nature wasn't merely from the degrading effect of "sin", as carnivores possess all those attributes of life you say are intentionally designed by an intelligent mind, no less than the vegetarian animals do.

ii. This same life can examine the universe

(b) This unique design cannot be the result of random chance or unguided probabilities

Why?

(c) There is, therefore, a God who designed the universe to support human life and reveal His existence as creator of the Cosmos

You haven't yet defined "god" in a coherent way, so until that day, there's good reason to view 'god' as the least probable of the possible explanations for life.  

Cold Case Christianity: Who Created God? Answer: mankind

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Who Created God?

Posted: 20 Sep 2017 01:00 AM PDT

If the intelligent design theory be true (i.e., that which is complex cannot exist except by being created by a prior equally if not more complex production-agent), then assuming God created us, we only have our degree of complexity because God himself possesses at least this degree of complexity.  So if our own complexity implies we were intelligently designed, why doesn't God's own complexity imply He was intelligently designed?

Apparently, the only reason you stop the "complexity requires intelligent designer" argument before it starts asking questions about God's complexity, is because you need to stop it at that point for the sake of theological convenience, nothing more.   Well if "complexity implies design" is a safe rule of thumb, your gonna need something more than theological convenience before you insist that there are cases of complexity where the rule doesn't apply.

 287Richard Dawkins, the famous English evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist, revived an objection related to God’s existence in his book, The God Delusion. In the fourth chapter (Why There Almost Certainly Is No God), Dawkins wrote, “…the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” In essence, Dawkins offered a restatement of the classic question, “Who created God?” On its face, this seems to be a reasonable question. Christians, after all, claim God created everything we see in our universe (all space, time and matter); He is the cause of our caused cosmos. Skeptics fail to see this as a satisfactory explanation, however, because it seems to beg the question, “If God, created the universe, who (or what) created God?”

Part of the problem lies in the nature of the question itself. If I were to ask you, “What sound does silence make?” you’d start to appreciate the problem. This latter question is nonsensical because silence is “soundless”; silence is, by definition, “the lack of sound”. There’s something equally irrational about the question, “Who created God?” God is, by definition, eternal and uncreated.

Then you are avoiding the skeptic's objection merely by defining it out of existence.  You insist your god is eternal, therefore, there can be no questions about where he came from. But you don't know your god is eternal, you simply trust a book full of fairy tales which says as much.

It is, therefore, illogical to ask, “Who created the uncreated Being we call God?” And, if you really think about it, the existence of an uncreated “first cause” is not altogether unreasonable:

It’s Reasonable to Believe The Universe Was Caused

Famed astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is everything that ever was, is and will be.” If this is true, we are living in an infinitely old, uncaused universe that requires no first cause to explain its existence. But there are good scientific and philosophical reasons to believe the universe did, in fact, begin to exist. The Second Law of Thermodynamics,

No, this law does not teach that the energy in the universe is running down.  Energy is nothing but matter in motion, matter doesn't disappear into nothing when it is converted to energy, it just changes its physical form.  The first law of thermodynamics prevents the creation or annihilation of matter, logically requiring that what's here, has always been here, and new things are just recombination of the same original atoms.  I am made of the dust of the stars and the oceans flow in my veins.

the expansion of the universe,

 That's based on the Doppler interpretation of the red-shift (stars moving away from us).  Wouldn't matter if it was true, the Andromeda Galaxy is blue shifted (moving toward us), and your big-bang theory, if true, would not allow for an entire galaxy to do a complete u-turn while racing away from us, and start coming back toward us.  There's not enough matter around the Andromeda Galaxy to explain how it managed to slow down from the initial big bang thrust, do a u-turn, and start heading in the opposite direction.  The proper conclusion is that movement of celestial bodies in the cosmos goes in all directions, which of course contradicts the "expanding away from each other" theory required by a big bang explosion.  Guth's Inflationary theory does not fix this problem and remains speculative nonetheless.

the Radiation Echo,

This is likely misinterpretation, see
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/big-bang-echoes-that-proved-einstein-correct-might-just-have-been-space-dust-admit-scientists-9461699.html

http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/do-we-have-the-big-bang-theory-all-wrong

And of course, who doesn't know that the conservative evangelical young-earth scientists over at two creationist websites deny the big bang theory and explain this radiation echo otherwise:

https://creation.com/echoes-of-the-big-bang-or-noise
http://www.icr.org/article/big-bang-theory-collapses/

You can hardly say spiritually dead skeptics/atheists "should" know the scientific truth proving your god, when your own spiritually alive brothers and sisters in the faith disagree with your interpretation of the scientific data.  Does it makes sense to tell you to avoid trumpeting from the rooftops until God's like-minded ones get their act together?  Or do you care somewhat less about divisions in the body of Christ than Paul and Jesus did?

and the problem of Infinite Regress cumulatively point to a universe with a beginning.

No, if the universe is indeed infinite, as appears likely,an infinite regress of causes would be real and would correctly explain any currently moving object.   And your God's eternal nature logically requires that the list of his past actions goes on forever, as a real and true infinite regress.  So you cannot say infinite regresses are logically impossible.

In the classic formulation of the Kalam cosmological argument: (1) whatever begins to exist has a cause,

This assertion is stupid, we have no scientific evidence that anything ever came into existence in the sense of being composed of new previously non-existent atoms.  A baby begins to exist, of course, but this is only a recombination of previously existing matter.  You probably don't mean "begins to exist" in the sense of "using preexisting atoms to produce a new shape" when you talk about God creating the universe.  You probably meant "begins to exist" in the sense of "brand new atoms that didn't previously exist".  And there you go...we have no empirical evidence that any material thing is composed of atoms that previously didn't exist.  its just a cosmos wherein the same atomic sub-structures that have existed for infinity continually combine and recombine.    If you think some of the matter in a log disappears into literally nothing after the log has burned up in the fireplace, you are sorely mistaken. ALL of the matter that was once part of that log, still exists after it has burned up, it is just that the application of heat caused it to change chemically and physically and for some of its matter to depart from it.  The heat that comes out of the chimmney is made of atoms that continue to exist even after the heat cools down.  Matter is eternal, just like the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says.

(2) the universe began to exist,

that logically requires the logical absurdity of a beginning to time itself, so your second premise is assuredly false. What fool talks about things that happened before time itself?

therefore, (3) it is reasonable to believe the universe has a cause.

Nope, see above.

It’s Reasonable to Accept the Existence of An Uncaused “First Cause”

This “first cause” of the universe accounts for the beginning of all space, time and matter.

Only if you ignore the serious problems that attend the concept of a first cause, such as this first cause logically existing temporally prior to time itself, your God being intelligent without a physical brain,  and the other problem previously stated, that your god has at least as much of the complexity that humans have, which you say implies an intelligent designer, but you blindly insist no intelligent designer is implied by God's own an infinitely greater complexity. 

You just stop the "complexity implies intelligent design" train where you need it to for no other reason than theological convenience, not for any logically compelling reason.   You either ride that train all the way to the end of the logic line and admit God's own complexity proves he himself was intelligently designed, or admit that because you know of at least one case of complexity that can exist without being intelligently designed, your rule of thumb that complexity implies intelligent design is not as logically forceful as you wish.

It must, therefore, be non-spatial, a temporal and immaterial.

Yeah, about as believable as something existing "beyond nature".  But I certainly agree that your god is immaterial.

Even more importantly, the first cause must be uncaused. If this was not true, the cause of the universe would not be the “first” cause at all. Theists and atheists alike are looking for the uncaused, first cause of the cosmos in order to avoid the irrational problem of an infinite regress of past causes and effects.

No, the atheists who think the universe is infinite, like me, no longer search for a first cause since that logically wouldn't exist in the infinite universe.

It is, therefore, reasonable to accept the existence of an uncaused, first cause.

It’s Reasonable to Believe God Is the Uncaused, “First Cause”

Rationality dictates the ultimate cause of the universe, (even if it isn’t God), must have certain characteristics. In addition to being non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial and eternal (uncaused), it must also be powerful enough to bring everything into existence from nothing.

No, creation ex nihilo is a logical contradiction.  We have no empirical evidence that zero could ever produce something, and the mathematical impossibility of this strongly argues the notion doesn't work anywhere else either.  SO if God really did create matter, than it can only be pieces of God or God's power, and thus pantheism is logically implied.

 The apologists who say quantum theory allows for virtual particles to be created from nothing and disappear back into nothing, are being dishonest by failing to inform you that this is only the Copenhagen school of quantum theory, there are several schools of quantum theory, and some of them deny that particles can come into existence from nothing. 

Finally, there is good reason to believe the cause of the universe is personal. Impersonal forces cannot cause (or refuse to cause) at will.

Stuff in the universe was never proven to have been put here by a will anyway, so no dice.

The minute an impersonal force exists, its effect is experienced. When the impersonal force of gravity is introduced into an environment, for example, its effect (the gravitational attraction) is felt immediately. If the cause of the universe is simply an impersonal force, its effect (the beginning of the universe) would occur simultaneous with its existence. In other words, the cause of the universe would only be as old as the universe itself. Yet we accept the reasonable existence of an uncaused first cause (one that is not finite like the universe it caused). For this reason, a personal force, capable of willing the beginning of the universe, is the best explanation for the first cause of the cosmos. This cause can be reasonably described as non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial, eternal, all-powerful and personal: descriptive characteristics commonly reserved for the Being we identify as God.

The universe was never caused, its always been here, obviating any need to refute your above-cited statements which stand on the falsified premise of the universe having a beginning.

All of us, whether we are atheists or theists, are trying to identify the first cause of the universe.

Count me out, the universe is infinite, there is no such thing as a "first" event in an infinite universe.  I've stopped looking.

The eternal nature of this non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial cause is required in order to avoid the problem of infinite regress.

Infinite regress was never a problem in an infinite universe.  Ever see the Hubble deep field?  The farthest we can see into space, there is no outer limit to the field of stars, it just continues on indefinitely.  There's no reason to think we'd ever reach the farthest star if we flew in a rocket ship in a straight line for 99 trillion years, we'd still see endless stars in front of us the whole time.  But we'd have to have eternal life to make this observation, and Lord knows, I don't want that.