Question to atheists and agnotics: why are you not a deist?

[Mock Turtle]

Logical fallacy, argument by repetition.

Repeating your logical fallacy of mockery doesn't make it stop being fallacious just because you repeat it.

Your fallacy is still left unable to refute any of the arguments I made.



Logical fallacy, argument by assertion.
Merely asserting that someone is wrong doesn't make it true just because you assert it is.

You are required to give logical reasons and evidence to support your claim of why you think someone is wrong.


You are committing the logical fallacy of nonsequitur.
Your statement has no demonstrated logical relevance to refuting any specific argument I have made.

My my. So many logical fallacies. I must be doing well. What about your paltry example, being that it is self evident fact that someone must have created the world. One of the most basic of errors I believe. So get an education.

 

[Rise]

Yes, I think that today's atheists are the descendants of the deists of the 17th-19th centuries.

Deism was never an organized intellectual movement with coherent doctrines. It is more of a general term used by today's scholars to refer to religious free-thinkers of the past. If we look at historical individuals who are classed as deists, we find almost as many deisms as there were deists. Each one had fairly unique views.

I would go further and say that the reason you have so many deisms is because ultimately what it comes down to is people wanting to replace obedience to God with their own mind and will - becoming their own source of law, subject to no law. Making themselves, in effect, to be their own god.

Someone with that mentality has no reason to line up their viewpoint with others doing the same thing. Because that would violate the spirit of what they are doing - which is to want to place their own will as supreme and reject any other source that would try to tell them otherwise.

We see the same thing in atheism in the sense that they just decide what they think is right and wrong without regard to what other atheists are concluding. The only commonality they share is a rejection of God because it gets in the way of them thinking they get to be the ones who decide what is right from wrong.

I see deism as a natural product of the protestant reformation. The protestants had directed great skepticism at many aspects of traditional Catholic religiosity such as miracles, Mary and the saints. All in the name of their own brand of Bibliolatry. (If it isn't in the new testament, then it must be removed from their purified Christianity.) But it was impossible to stop the skepticism once it was unleashed and a generation later we see avant-garde intellectuals directing similar skepticism at the Bible itself.

I don't believe you could make that case. Skepticism towards revealed truth existed very long before the seeds of reformation were even being sown.

Proof of this is the fact that medieval theologians like Anselm wouldn't have had to go through great thought and effort to craft logical and philosophical arguments for why one should believe in God if there weren't people back then doubting His existence.

No, it's actually part of human nature throughout all of history for man to doubt revealed truth as a justification for erecting an opposing worldview that puts them in charge of deciding what is right and wrong in their own life.

It takes on many other forms than simply denying that God exists or denying that God is active in the affairs of man.

The medieval catholic church, 1st century phariseeism, modern orthodox rabbinical judaism, and the modern Chinese three self church all have the same thing in common:
They try to create rationalizations to justify why you don't need to listen directly to what God communicates to you because God has put some mere men in charge of telling you what he wants you to know.

And before that, in ancient Israel, you had the people creating their own idols and inventing their own rules that they thought the idol wanted them to live by.

One of the common threads throughout human history is people are always looking for ways to rationalize not listening to God and seeking to erect some other voice in it's place (either their own or another person).

That's why you don't historically see people just existing in a state of ignorant atheism as the default position.
That's why people propose that maybe there is a "god gene" that predisposes man to universally need to believe in a diety of some sort.

This phenomenon we observe is explained by the Bible, which tells us that every person knows the truth that God created them and that they are obligated to do what is right.

So if everyone is born with that self evident knowing, there is no way for them to start denying it without trying to erect something else in its place.

In the case of atheism, one just erects materialism in it's place. But without that seeming to be an option you'd have no choice but to invent an idol god as an alternative to the one true God.

Yes, I pretty much agree. Though I would replace your "it is self evident that creation is designed" with something like 'it seemed self-evident to most of the deists that reality appeared to have been designed'.

No no - I can justify my original formulation of that statement as the most accurate way of saying it.

"Biology is the study of complex things that appear to have been designed for a purpose."
-Richard Dawkins

Why do you say it appears to be designed as an atheist? Because the fact that it has all the features of design is inescapable.

But on what basis do you claim it's merely the appearance of design and not actual design?

Well, that comes down to your presuppositions. If you assume that materialism could or did in fact create what you are seeing, without the need for a mind to intervene, then you would be be forced to assume it is merely an uncanny resemblance to design.

But if you did not have such a presupposition, as the deists of old did not have because they could not have it, then you will say it is obviously designed. And that fact will be self evident to you with nothing to potentially dispute it as being true.

That's why people who wanted to reject the God of the Bible had to turn to deism because it was not fathomable that they could deny the fact that creation was designed.
To them it was utterly self evident that it had been designed and beyond reason to question.

Your ability to recognize design in something is a self evident process. You can look at many things and immediately just know it was designed and is not random - without any need to reason yourself to that conclusion (which is the definition of self evident).

Why? Because design implies intent. And intent is something we are capable of intuitively detecting when we look at something. Which makes it self evident to us when something was designed and created.

Of course, as the arguments of those like Dr. Stephen Meyer articulate in great detail, we now can say that the reason the world looks designed is precisely because it is. Our self evident understanding of reality was right all along. We can say this because we have found the code behind life which would be impossible to explain through random chemical chance or natural selection. We know code/language/information is an abstract concept that is only ever the product of a mind in our uniform historical experience. And we recognize the logical impossibility that any chemical mechanism could cause this to arise by random chance.

That's why people like dawkins float the idea that maybe life was seeded here by aliens - he knows its not feasible to explain the emergence of the first cells and the DNA code required to construct them by random chance. And the process of natural selection cant even start to work until you have some basic units of cellular life and DNA already in place.

The best he can do while still trying to cling to atheism is to appeal to a different type of designer. But that doesn't solve the problem of how did materialism produce those beings? All you're doing is pushing the problem off of one planet and onto another, delaying having to deal with the problem but not actually removing the problem.

That's why the Bible says:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

We intuitively recognize the design in creation because it is, in fact, designed, and we all have the ability to intuitively recognize it when we see it; which is part of why we have no excuse in the day of judgement for choosing to rebel against God. You don't need reason and tools to come to this conclusion. It's self evidently apparent to you as part of a certain inner knowing you have about the reality you inhabit.

 

[Rise]

I think that one of the reasons why we see deism dying out in the 19th century and being replaced by full-frontal atheism was perhaps the effect of Darwin, who made it possible for people to explain what they had always taken to be conclusive evidence of design in the biological world as evidence of natural selection instead.

Exactly.

I don't think that's what motivated most of the deists. It's more that they doubted that books like the Bible were really communications from whatever the source of the universe's design might have been.

Your conclusions about what motivated them will be based on what presuppositions you come in with.

If you are approaching this from the perspective that the Bible is true then you would look at such behavior and conclude they are doing what the Bible says mankind does: Suppressing the truth about God that is within them because they don't want to have to obey God.

Why don't they just proclaim they are going to disobey God and go their own way declaring that's just what they want?

Because that would be an inherent contradiction of reality that would cause cognitive dissonance. You can't admit God is real, and admit what the Bible says is true about Him, but then decide you just want to do your own thing - because then you;d also have to admit that doing so would lead to eternal separation from God and therefore eternal torment. You can't make that decision knowing what you'd be doing to yourself unless you can deceive yourself into thinking there's a chance it's not actually true.

That is why, historically, without fail, you simply do not see people affirming those things are true about God while at the same time choosing to reject God. Rejection of what the Bible says about God always has to be preceded by some kind of deception where you think all of part of it is not true.

Every rejection of God always involves a rejection of the belief that what is said about Him is true and it then also always involves the erecting up of something else that will serve to tell the person what is right or wrong. Whether an idol, another man, a manmade philosophy/ideology, or simply erecting their own mind as the ultimate source of determining what is true and right.

The deist period was the period when Europeans spread around the world and scholars became aware of religious texts like the Vedas and Puranas. These European scholars didn't accept the truth of these texts, but they knew that many Indians thought of them as revealed in some sense. If there's any one thing that the deists shared, it was doubts about revealed theology and the idea that God, the creator of reality, had made special communications to particular human individuals.

That idea is refuted by the fact that 11th century theologians were formulating logical and philosophical arguments in support of the existence of God.

Furthermore, the concept of people not believing Scripture goes back to the pre-roman early church where we see those like Tertullian offering logical arguments for why people should believe in Christ instead of whatever they were currently believing in (either nothing or believing in idol gods).

So it's a human condition for people to doubt Scripture and we can see it existed at all stages of the church. It can't be pinned on the reformation.

It certainly raises the question of how, assuming that we are indeed supposed to "obey God", how humanity is supposed to know what God wants. Pretty much all of the moral stuff, both good and bad, is found in revealed theology, in God's supposed communications with man.

Your objection is based on a certain presumption that doesn't have to be true.
That presumption is that man can only know right or wrong if it's revealed to them through a form of communication like a prophet or Scripture.

But the Bible says your presumption is not true.

The Bible says God has put an understanding or right and wrong in our hearts, and that creation is witness to His reality, so we are all without excuse on the day of judgement and cannot claim ignorance.
Romans 1 and 2.

This applies to people before the Bible existed.
It also applies to people who have never even had the God of the Bible preached or taught to them by man.

Some of the deists sought to base morality on what they took to be human moral intuitions, which they believed were implanted in us at creation as part of the original design. So we see people like Thomas Jefferson editing the Bible to remove everything that he intuitively found immoral or unjust. There was great emphasis on the 'nice Jesus' image as contrasted with the thundering genocidal OT Yahweh. So we see the beginnings of the 'picking and choosing' that kind of define modernist Biblical interpretation.

If what you claim were true then it would actually only re-enforcing how I characterizes deism as something which seeks to reject obedience to God and replace it with their own mind being that which determines right from wrong.

That reliance on human moral intuition is pretty much what modern atheists base their morality on today. We still see it today in things like evolutionary ethics.

Ah, but the atheist has a problem the deist didn't: You literally have no logical way of having true objective morality in a materialistic atheistic worldview. Everything is predetermined by the laws of physics so you don't even have the free will to make a genuine choice.
And morality requires a statement of how things are suppose to be in contrast of how things are. But creation has no such statement unless it has someone to give that statement - ie. a creator mind. Because intention is an abstract concept that only can come from mind and only exists in a mind.
In a materialistic worldview, nothing is objectively "suppose" to be any particular way - it just is what is is and you can't say it's right or wrong because you have no objective standard to compare it to.

This dilemma for atheism is logically inescapable because everyone has an intuitive self evident knowing that objective morality is a real concept and not just an illusion.

Coming from the Biblical perspective, we can say this is because God put that knowing in man when He created man.

It is because this inner knowing of objective morality as a concept is so self evidentally inescapable, and completely impossible under materialism, that I believe in the future you will see atheism actually go the way of deism. And I think it will happen a lot sooner than most would think it could. I believe it will be precipitated by the evidence for genuine design in biology and design in the universe reaching the point where it simply can't be rationally justified to deny it anymore. That denying design to hold to materialism at that point would simply require too much cognitive dissonance to maintain any longer.

But, here's the interesting thing: I don't think it's going to result in most of those atheists turning to become Christians. I don't think they will even want to become adherants to other major world religions.
I think what's going to happen is they are going to turn back to old fashioned idolatry where they create their own idea of who god is and invent their own standards of what they think their god wants - so they can deceive themselves into thinking they are ok while they are actually in an act of rebellion to God. Or, it's going to result in them turning to a man who claims to speak for god to them, which is still just another type of idolatry and has the same effect.

What about turning to new age type ideas that would deify themselves instead of creating an idol to worship, you might ask? Well, you see, you can only get away with that kind of thinking if you start from the premise that there's no creator or designer behind the universe and life. Because then there's no ultimate source above you that you are accountable to. It's just you charting your own path on your pursuit of your own ascendance to a higher plane of existence. But that kind of thinking won't fly anymore once you realize there is a creator and designer behind everything who gave it purpose and intent. So that means this sense of objective morality you have is not coming from you but from your designer. That's why I don't think you see self-deifying beliefs being that common historically compared with worshipping men or idols. It's more difficult in terms of cognitive dissonance unless you start from the presumption that life is explained by chance and evolution. Afterall, atheism ends up in practice just being another form of self deifying anyway because it presumes to make the individual the ultimate source of determining right from wrong.

On what basis can I say this must happen? Because that's what we see people do all throughout history when people are looking for an excuse to justify not obeying the one true God.
When you can't deny God exists, and you can't deify yourself, you're left with no option but to invent your own idol idea of who god is and invent your own idea of what he wants and expects from you.

And because that's what these people ultimately want - to rebel against God's ways (and they aren't simply going where they think the evidence leads them, in opposition to what their inner witness tells them) - that is why all these people who would have been atheists today will one day be forced to just become idolators instead.

 

[Rise]

My my. So many logical fallacies. I must be doing well.

By your admittance that you do not care about committing logical fallacies, and the fact that you make no effort to correct them, you admit you are not attempting to debate in good faith.

Therefore you tacitly concede the debate in my favor by being unwilling to support your claims with any valid arguments.

What about your paltry example, being that it is self evident fact that someone must have created the world. One of the most basic of errors I believe. So get an education.

Logical fallacy, ad hominem.
Logical fallacy, argument by assertion.

Calling my arguments names doesn't refute my arguments.

Merely asserting my argument is in error doesn't make it true just because you assert it is.

You can quote no specific thing I have argued and give no specific logical reason why it is supposedly in error.

I also suspect you have a strawman fallacy in your mind - but, because you didn't actually make an argument and only made an assertion, I can't be sure what you're trying to say. So therefore I could only speculate about what you are wrongly believing about what I argued that would cause you to think there was any error in it.

 

[Rise]

As for me, I do tilt towards deism a little bit, so I do feel some kinship with them. I think that the traditional cosmological arguments are arguably stronger than most atheists are willing to accept.

But having said that, I don't see those arguments as pointing to anything like a traditional theistic God. What the traditional cosmological arguments do is point towards fundamental unsolved metaphysical questions. But I don't see a whole lot of reason to personalize the unknown answers and turn those answers into objects of religious worship.

So bottom line, while I feel considerable kinship with the deists, my own path is far more agnostic than theirs. And that's my answer to the question in the subject line.

I think you're not realizing that the cosmological argument by itself was never designed to establish traditional theistic definitions of God.

That's why the cosmological argument is always paired with the teleological and moral arguments.

The cosmological argument forces you to conclude that there had to be cause behind this space-time universe and that this cause had to be both causeless and timeless in order to prevent a logically impossible infinite regress into the past or an infinite regress of causes.

It is the teleological argument, being built upon the cosmological argument, that gets us to most of the attributes of a traditional western conception of God.
Because now we see design in every aspect of the universe from it's beginning up into the creation of mankind.

This tells us that the cause behind the space-time universe's beginning had to be a personage with a mind. Because only minds are capable of designing a creation.

So just by those two arguments alone we are now forced to conclude that God is:
-A being/person with a mind and will.
-That he is uncaused.
-Not bound by the physical laws of time an space.
-Existing before the creation of the universe.
-The one who created the universe
-That he created it with a design and intention in mind.
-That he is all powerful as he has the power to manifest his intent/will into reality by creating the universe and all in it.

That right there basically covers almost all of the traditional attributes one typically thinks of when they refer to "God" in the western world.

But then you go into the argument from morality, based on our inner knowing that objective morality is a real thing, and it tells you even more about God.
-That he had an intention for how things were suppose to be.
-That he expects us to abide by that intention.
-We can infer certain things about his character based on what we know to be good and evil, assuming God also thinks those things are good and evil.
-We can also infer certain things about his character based on properly understanding what the intent behind his creation was.

You could use these inferences to lead you to conclude things about God's character and nature that lines up with what the Bible says about God.

Your ability to infer that, of course, depends on rightly understanding the intent behind creation and not having your own sense of morals distorted. But the Bible tells us the fall of man and the introduction of sin into the world resulted in our ability to discern right and wrong being distorted and creation started to be distorted so it no longer reflected God's original design and intention (ie. death, thorns on plants, pain, toil, etc). The Bible also says that people will suppress the truth of morality that God has put in them because they want to embrace sin instead of truth. So the Bible gives us reasons why we can't 100% expect to rely on inferences to God's character from nature or even our own inner sense of morality. But, nevertheless, successful inferences still have the potential to be made.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

OK
So try this for thought.....
All is Nature. Every chip of rock, leaf, creature, planet, space, nothingness, the lot... is just Nature.
That's it...... and nothing goes away, it only changes...some of it.
But it's all part of the whole.

You don't have to call it anything........ it's just Nature.
But I call myself Deist because that directs me straight to thinking about the Boss around here.
And Boss around here is Nature. And that's OK.

(unsurprisingly) I don't have any issues with your points here. My thoughts are pretty similar, but I don't call myself a Deist. Nor do I think there is a Boss in any anthropomorphic sense. But the sea can kick my butt any day of the week.

 

[Mock Turtle]

By your admittance that you do not care about committing logical fallacies, and the fact that you make no effort to correct them, you admit you are not attempting to debate in good faith.

Therefore you tacitly concede the debate in my favor by being unwilling to support your claims with any valid arguments.



Logical fallacy, ad hominem.
Logical fallacy, argument by assertion.

Calling my arguments names doesn't refute my arguments.

Merely asserting my argument is in error doesn't make it true just because you assert it is.

You can quote no specific thing I have argued and give no specific logical reason why it is supposedly in error.

I also suspect you have a strawman fallacy in your mind - but, because you didn't actually make an argument and only made an assertion, I can't be sure what you're trying to say. So therefore I could only speculate about what you are wrongly believing about what I argued that would cause you to think there was any error in it.

Oh get over yourself. You are the one committing the most basic fallacy of 'God created life because it is obvious, and self-evident', even when there is a very plausible other explanation and a few others not so plausible. Hence self-evident is just bias as to what you prefer to believe.

 

[Rise]

Oh get over yourself. You are the one committing the most basic fallacy of 'God created life because it is obvious, and self-evident', even when there is a very plausible other explanation and a few others not so plausible. Hence self-evident is just bias as to what you prefer to believe.

Logical fallacy, strawman.
You are misrepresenting what I have argued.
You can not quote anything I have specifically argued and then give any reasons why it logically fits the description of what you are trying to claim

 

[Mock Turtle]

Logical fallacy, strawman.
You are misrepresenting what I have argued.
You can not quote anything I have specifically argued and then give any reasons why it logically fits the description of what you are trying to claim

So you don't believe this?

 

[Rise]

So you don't believe this?

The onus is on you as the one making the claim about what I believe to prove why you think your claim is true by quoting what I have said and giving logical reasons for why you think you can draw that conclusion from what I said.

You can't do that because your assertion was baseless.

Which is why it was a strawman fallacy.

 

[Mock Turtle]

The onus is on you as the one making the claim about what I believe to prove why you think your claim is true by quoting what I have said and giving logical reasons for why you think you can draw that conclusion from what I said.

You can't do that because your assertion was baseless.

Which is why it was a strawman fallacy.

Just answer the question or admit defeat.

 

[Rise]

Just answer the question or admit defeat.

Logical fallacy, shifting the burden of proof.

The burden of proof is on you as the one making the claim to prove your claim is true.

I don't need to prove your claim isn't true just because you've claimed something.

You would need to provide logical arguments or evidence for why we should believe your claim could be true before I would have the burden of rejoinder to offer a counter argument.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Logical fallacy, shfiting the burden of proof.

The burden of proof is on you as the one making the claim to prove your claim is true.

I don't need to prove your claim isn't true just because you've claimed something.

You would need to provide logical arguments or evidence for why we should believe your claim could be true before I would have the burden of rejoinder to offer a counter argument.

So, ducking out. Fine. Tarrah!

 

[Rise]

So, ducking out. Fine. Tarrah!

Logical fallacy, argument by repetition.

You are merely repeating your fallacy of shifting the burden of proof by implying that you think I have a responsibility that I am not meeting. But you give no logical reason why you would have a reason to claim any burden of proof is on me in this situation.

Repeating your fallacy doesn't make it stop being fallacious just because you repeat it.

 

[oldbadger]

(unsurprisingly) I don't have any issues with your points here. My thoughts are pretty similar, but I don't call myself a Deist. Nor do I think there is a Boss in any anthropomorphic sense. But the sea can kick my butt any day of the week.

I think you are an atheist, yes?
If so, then frankly there is not a giant chasm between deism, non theism, and even atheism. We Deists just don't get invited to atheism bars.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I think you are an atheist, yes?
If so, then frankly there is not a giant chasm between deism, non theism, and even atheism. We Deists just don't get invited to atheism bars.

Yup, atheist. And you can come have a drink in my bar anytime. Well...not right now (we're in lockdown again), but you get the vibe.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Question to atheists and agnostics: Why are you not a deist?

See no reason to.

Why? Do you see a reason to?