Saturday, December 10, 2016

Refuting ICR's Evidence for God

The Institute for Creation Research, is a website that defends a creationist view of the world. They typically try to use arguments from science in their articles, but they have a section in their website "Evidence for God" showed hilarious attempts at philosophical arguments. This is a list of the articles I'm going to attack:

Evidence for God
     1. Cause and Effect
            1. Everything has a cause
            2. The effect problem
     2. The triune universe
            1. Time, space, and matter
            2. The logical implications
     3. Design and purpose
            1. God caused beauty
            2. God caused justice
            3. God caused love
            4. God caused meaning
            5. God caused order
            6. God caused time, space, and matter
            7. God caused wisdom

1.1. Everything has a Cause


Before I attack what I think they actually meant, I want to say how poorly this was titled. It would be better to have titled it "everything that begins has a cause" or "everything except God has a cause", because saying "everything has a cause" implies that God would also.

The article begins on what people observe about time, that we always assume that there is a cause and effect. That every event can be traced back to another event; a cause. What they left out, is that when we observe cause and effect in action, we see not only an efficient cause, but a material cause. That means, there is the action, and what the action happens to, and that produces the effect. If we assert that a God was the first cause, there was an efficient cause, but no material cause. Now, I don't want to reject the argument based on this alone, but it prevents the theist from just shouting so confidently that God fits right in as an explanation.

The article goes on to explain how all science assumes that there is a cause and effect "law", which is fine, but the question is what exactly is that law if we're going to let go of the principle that both an efficient and material cause are required to produce an effect.

After that, the article explains how you can either accept that there is a first cause, or an infinite regress, but the article doesn't try to explain why we shouldn't accept an infinite regress. Some theists might try to explain that an infinite regress is impossible because any actual infinite is impossible, but I would argue that the existence of God would imply some type of actual infinite. For example, if God were omniscient, it would mean he knew infinite truths. ICR even says that God is infinite (see 2.2 The logical implications).

1.2 The Effect Problem


This argument is part 2 to the last argument. It starts talking about the first two laws of thermodynamics. They define the first one as "There is no new mass/energy coming into existence anywhere in the universe, and every bit of that original mass/energy is still here". In those exact words. The problem for them is, if we take that definition of the first law of thermodynamics, then we have to completely throw out the idea of all forms of divine of miraculous intervention in the world, because it would result in a violation of the first law. A better way to describe the first law of thermodynamics is "energy in a closed system is conserved". This is how the law is actually defined (see here), and it is consistent with the existence of a God, because we don't really know for sure if the universe is a closed system or not. Once you define the law like that, you see that it doesn't help your case at all.

The article goes on to talk about how the second law of thermodynamics proves that the universe had
a beginning. This is because every time there is an energy transfer, some of the energy will be lost as heat. One possible explaination is that there is a "big bounce", which means that the universe retracts and expands, infinitely into the past. I'm not going to to into detail on this, because I'm not very knowledgeable about it.

A large problem with the last two arguments is that they assume a presentist view of time, when there is also an eternalist theory of time. The presentist view is that "now" is the only time that really exists, where the eternalist view is that the past, present, and future all exist just as much. The significance of this in relation to the argument is that if the eternalist view is true, then the universe can simply exist as a four dimensional "block", where the fourth dimension is time, and thus it never actually comes into existence.

The fact that this doesn't seem to be talked about in these articles either shows some lack of knowledge, or intellectual dishonesty on the part of the people at ICR. It's a very complex and big discussion, so a few tiny articles aren't going to end it.

2.1 Time Space, and Matter


The article begins by talking about how huge the universe is, and they make a comment about how we seem to be the most significant part of it. I honestly wonder if they forgot that we haven't seen much in the universe. There are billions and billions of galixies that we haven't seen, yet the people at ICR are just saying how we're the most important part of it, which is fine if you're doing it based on a religious doctrine, but not if you're stating it based on what we've observed through science, because we haven't seen much.

They goes on to make another rush to judgment when they claim that "any attempt to determine the cause of the universe is completely hypothetical", and that they're all based on presuppositions and belief systems. They claim that all of the belief systems break down to either first cause, or infinite regress.

It's not clear what exactly they mean by "belief systems", but I would assume they're talking about uniformitarianism in some way. ICR doesn't like uniformitarianism, but it is a presupposition in a lot of practices, if you don't think it should apply in science, then think about criminal investigation. If you don't assume some kind of uniformitarian system, you can walk in to a court of law when all of the evidence was put against you, and you could say "a ghost did it", and you would be let off. That would be absurd. So if we assume there is a uniformitarian system, then we can essentially go back it time and understand what happened via the scientific method.

The claim that everything breaks down to either first cause, or an infinite regress is a rush to judgment, because it doesn't even consider an eternalist view.

They go on to make the absurd claim that scientists perform the scientific method assuming there is no cause, that there is nothing beyond the natural world . I question what that means, the scientific method doesn't have a bias in favor of a particular religious view, or lack thereof. What it does, is it doesn't treat it as a conclusion you can just jump to, when scientists find cosmic background radiation, they don't shout "it was GHOSTS". Science works within the natural realm, what we get from it can be interpreted through different presuppositions and viewpoints, but science itself works within the natural realm.

They go on to sow just how biased they are when they made the statement "Scientists at ICR hold to the presupposition that the "uncaused first cause" is the creator who exists outside of the physical creation He made" [emphasis mine]. What they are saying right there is that they assume that God exists, and they work from there. That is not what a scientist should do, at least not one who claims to be objective.

2.2 The Logical Implications


This article is an attempt to get around atheists saying the last 3 articles were just describing a God of the gaps argument, they want to show that if there is a first cause, it has to be God. Let's take a look.

"The first cause of limitless space must be infinite"

AHA! By infinite do you mean an actual infinite? One that is impossible? Statements like these would never be said by William lane Craig, who believes actual infinities are impossible. I'm not very sure about whether they are actually possible or not, but them not being possible is one of the largest reasons theists give to justify the premise that "the universe had a beginning".

"The first cause of endless time must be eternal."
I'll grant this one, assuming by eternal they mean exists outside of time.

"The first cause of boundless energy must be omnipotent."
I'll also grant this one, assuming the first cause is a living being.

"The first cause of universal irrelationships must be omnipresent"
Why? This one doesn't seem justified.

 "The first cause of infinite complexity must be omniscient."
No, the first cause just needed to create something huge, and fairly ordered, and it's possible for some complexity to arise from it. Secondly, what is considered "complex" to us may be different from someone different, we don't know everything. Thirdly, there is no "infinite complexity".

"The first cause of spiritual values must be spiritual."
"The first cause of human responsibility must me volitional."
"The first cause of human love must be loving"
"The first cause of life must be living."
These are just goofy. I can make the same argument and say "the first cause of human greed must be greedy", or "the first cause of human evil must be evil", but I acknowledge that that wouldn't be a very good argument to make against the existence of God. There's no end to the arguments atheists could make using this logic.

3.1 God Caused Beauty


The article talks about how there is some form of objective standard for beauty, it doesn't support it. This really shows how hard they're trying to get evidence to support the existence of their God. We know that there are huge differences on who or what is considered beautiful by certain people. For example, Aphrodite was considered the goddess of beauty, but she could be considered unattractive in this day and age. 

They go on to say how animals usually don't have this type of emotion in them, but how could they say that without actually analyzing what goes on inside the brains of animals. Don't jump to conclusions.

It's honestly sad that some people want to preach like this, and basically say "yay for objective standards, you're not just ugly for some people, even God thinks you're ugly, and he's always right, by definition."

3.2 God Caused Justice


This one is just the moral argument. The articles here are so quick, so I'm also going to be fairly quick with this. There is no real hard reason to say that objective morals exist, the reason we have an instinctive desire to follow what we consider moral is because we evolved to be moral creatures, it will ultimately be better for the species.

But even if we grant that that there is some kind of objective standard, I don't think we could just say it was God. Moral divine command theory equivocates good to God's nature. The question a person can ask about this is "why do we want to be like God's nature?" The theist would basically be forced, eventually, to say that it's an axiom, true because it's an axiom. If that is the case, then why don't we just say that there is a logically necessary standard of morality, simply because there is?

3.3 God Caused Love


This one can easily be explained through evolution, we developed love so we would be more willing to mate, and be protective over members of family.

3.4 God Caused Meaning 


This one is just preaching about how great it would be of God existed. It talks about how humans have a special desire to find out what the meaning of life is. It's a fact that animals are curious, curiosity is not special to humans. Since humans are more intelligent than other animals, we get curious about deferent things. 

It's angering how they go obviously to talk about how great it would be if God existed, and that the evolutionary has no good news. Firstly, reality is reality, but ICR is making the argument that because reality would be sad if we accept a certain worldview, it makes that worldview false. But just think about it, does Christianity really have good news? Most people will be damned to a burning fire for not following the right religion, out of the many religions that exist. That's not good news. "Oh, YAY, most of the people in the world will spend eternity in burning fire, but I won't!"

3.5 God Caused Order


This is just the teleological argument. I'll respond to this by simply saying that a multiverse could easily produce this level of order a trillion times. 

3.6 God Caused Time, Space, and Matter


This is just a continuation of the arguments they presented talking about the first cause, so see the refutations above for that.

3.7 God Caused Wisdom


This one just says "humans are smart", but it doesn't give any concrete reason as to why that is so. It talks about how humans are smarter, but that simply means we evolved in a differently way than animals. Furthermore, every animal understand so their enviornmwnt and the nature of reality to some degree. A monkey can look at a tree, and they won't think "look at that banana". All animals have at least some degree of knowledge.

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