The "something can't come from nothing" argument

[idav]

At this 'point'...let's apply the current line of thought directly to ....God.

Now consider.....something from.....Nothing.....

God and anything coming from it would be something from something.

 

[johnhanks]

That is impossible since the evidence came from someone else's story. I could not have altered their evidence to suite me. Next.

No-one is saying you altered the evidence, robin; only that you insist on considering only part of it - "successful" premonitions of disaster.

Yes and since no known natural explanation exists for this then a supernatural one is all that is left unless you pull a science of the gaps argument.

You really don't get it, do you? Neither a supernatural explanation nor a "science of the gaps" argument is needed. These "successful" premonitions are merely a selected sub-set of a much wider phenomenon. If enough people have enough bad feelings about future events, some are bound to coincide with real mishaps. That coincidence is all that is needed.

I have already answered the first two. Since God did not ever promise to forewarn us of any disaster then you have no reason to find him deficient.

And you likewise have no reason to conclude god's involvement when anticipated mishaps do come about.

Here is a story your reminds me of...[anecdote snipped]

For your side I think [anecdotes are] mandatory and probably taught at seminars.

And they say Americans can't do irony...

 

[fantome profane]

That is impossible since the evidence came from someone else's story. I could not have altered their evidence to suite me. Next.

If I were to shuffle a deck of cards, announce that I was going to pull the ace of spades off the top, and then did so, you would be impressed. You would think there was something going on more than random chance.

But what if you knew that I had repeated that procedure 500 times, each time a random card coming up. Then all I would have to do is record the times that the ace of spades came up, and delete all the times when it didn't. Simple.

These "premonition experiments" are being conducted millions of times a day. Every time someone has an odd feeling. Then every time something significant happens we record it to the internet, every time nothing happens we forget about it.

You didn't alter the evidence, but you did select the evidence. If you heard about a story when someone had a strange feeling, and even took some action based on that feeling, but then that feeling turned out to be wrong, you would not be reporting that here. Probably you would never even hear that story because they are not repeated often, but they happen millions of times a day.

 

[1robin]

God and anything coming from it would be something from something.

I am afraid your both making a categorical mistake.

1. Only things that begin to exist must have a cause. God did not begin to exist.
2. Things must have an explanation of themselves either within themselves or from without. The universe does not have an explanation for it's self within it's self but God does.


Asking where did God come from is a meaningless question but a common and I guess easy to understand one.

 

[1robin]

If I were to shuffle a deck of cards, announce that I was going to pull the ace of spades off the top, and then did so, you would be impressed. You would think there was something going on more than random chance.

But what if you knew that I had repeated that procedure 500 times, each time a random card coming up. Then all I would have to do is record the times that the ace of spades came up, and delete all the times when it didn't. Simple.

These "premonition experiments" are being conducted millions of times a day. Every time someone has an odd feeling. Then every time something significant happens we record it to the internet, every time nothing happens we forget about it.

You didn't alter the evidence, but you did select the evidence. If you heard about a story when someone had a strange feeling, and even took some action based on that feeling, but then that feeling turned out to be wrong, you would not be reporting that here. Probably you would never even hear that story because they are not repeated often, but they happen millions of times a day.

I understand your argument but it has many problems.

1. It somehow presumes all premonitions are identical. That an idea I would be run over came from the same source as a prophecy. Is that a rational way to go about this study?
2. The bible also records that the dark side of the force can predict events but never with total accuracy. That is where palm readers, fortune tellers, communicating with the dead, and half correct prophecies like Nostradumba**.
3. However any time an unknown threat is communicated through non sensory means that comes to pass that is evidence of the supernatural or at least should be considered for such.
4. Announcing what card your going to pull is not a premonition, it is a prediction.
5. If there were nothing special about premonitions then their successful rate would be expected to be next to nothing. If God does not exist how many people scrambled around trying to find a seat belt based on an overpowering urge should have occurred. Maybe a couple. Yet there are thousands. I know of three personally just involving car accidents.
6. Take your card example. If you had a premonition of getting an ace of spades before you turned over each card and there was nothing to premonitions you should be right about 1 out of 352. However lets say you instead had a 20% success rate and maintained it over years. Then something beyond the natural or something natural as yet unknown is going on.

I never said premonitions prove God exists, it is a cumulative case, at best your argument dilutes slightly that one aspect. However the bible contains 2000 plus accurate out of 2000 plus premonitions and prophecies and your attempt to dilute won't help a bit. They don't help in the other 3 or 4 cases of spiritual intervention I mention of for the hundreds of millions that have been claimed to have occurred. And any dilution of even this tiny fraction of the totality of evidence for the supernatural is very minimal.

 

[idav]

I am afraid your both making a categorical mistake.

1. Only things that begin to exist must have a cause. God did not begin to exist.
2. Things must have an explanation of themselves either within themselves or from without. The universe does not have an explanation for it's self within it's self but God does.


Asking where did God come from is a meaningless question but a common and I guess easy to understand one.

You misunderstand. God is some thing that creates something. That is something from something regardless of where that first some thing came from. If God created stuff from nothing well that's another discussion but still amounts to "something from something".

 

[metis]

I wonder why anyone really thinks they can define or understand "God"? Seems to me to be nothing more than speculation, based on more speculation, based on.... Or is it "Gods"? How could one possibly know?

Belief is OK as far as it goes, imo, but belief simply is not evidence. As difficult as it was for me to accept this many years ago, there simply is no objective evidence to determine if there's a "God", "Gods", or none of the above.

So, when I see people giving all sorts of descriptions of "God" or the "Gods", I just flash back to when I blindly believed as well, which is understandable for both them and I as most of us are brought up to believe, including all sorts of arguments why we should believe. But the arguments don't really provide objective evidence, especially since one person's "logic" is another person's "fallacy".

It's a mystery that quite possibly will always remain a mystery.

 

[1robin]

No-one is saying you altered the evidence, robin; only that you insist on considering only part of it - "successful" premonitions of disaster.
You really don't get it, do you? Neither a supernatural explanation nor a "science of the gaps" argument is needed. These "successful" premonitions are merely a selected sub-set of a much wider phenomenon. If enough people have enough bad feelings about future events, some are bound to coincide with real mishaps. That coincidence is all that is needed.
And you likewise have no reason to conclude god's involvement when anticipated mishaps do come about.And they say Americans can't do irony...

I finally figured out what you were saying. I was busy yesterday and a little stupid every day. I answered it in a post above this one. You can use it for the response to this.

 

[1robin]

Explanations that already exist are preferable to made up ones, I'd say.

I do not get it. You do not have even a hint of an explanation for any of the last four supernatural claims I made including that one from thief.

Why is your god the mostly likely candidate?

Is this rhetorical? Have I not laid the small fraction of this case out that can be done in a hundred posts or so. Evidence, philosophic consistency, textual reliability, moral consistency, scientific consistency, prophecy, unknowable knowledge recorded long ago, explanatory scope and comprehensiveness, etc......

When you are talking to a person who has been born again, and has had the same prayer answered by leading me in very strange circumstances to the same person, and who believes in the most scrutinized and beloved theological work in history what is the source of an event that has no reasonable natural explanation my answer is of course my God and should be, however even a non-believer should view my God as the best non natural candidate for the reasons above and the volumes I have posted before?

Why is any god a likely candidate?

Because no natural agent for any of those four or the millions of miraculous claims that exist.

You're saying that what he supposedly experienced is extremely rare, and so its occurrence must be explained by invoking the supernatural? How about first demonstrating that the supernatural exists at all, before jumping to it as an explanation? Because the problem is that it doesn't end up being an explanation at all, rather it just adds more mystery to the situation. Rare things do actually happen. My stepfather has an extremely rare skin condition, that less than 1% of the world's population suffers from. Do I go with the medical explanation, or do I assume the supernatural is involved in some way? Never mind that you're ignoring the fact that epilepsy is not extremely rare.

It looks very much like your just trying to get me to type a lot of stuff to waste my time as I have answered every challenge above many times. I would even do it again if it was not so boring and so did not become instantly dismissed.

Anyway, it's a story in a very old book that we can't even verify ever occurred at all.

By that absurdity Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Xerxes, Leonidas, Lycurgus, Euripides, or any other ancient figure ever did a single thing. What is this magic date range where all knowledge is unknowable. Is the 2nd century back to 5000BC a complete blank but everything before and after reliable? WE know exactly what happened 17 billion years ago and what will occur in another billion but a 1st century document that impressed Greenleaf and Lyndhurst so much they claim it admissible is a complete blank. Strange logic and more evidence of bias. You just rendered about ten thousand professors unnecessary.

 

[1robin]

You misunderstand. God is some thing that creates something. That is something from something regardless of where that first some thing came from. If God created stuff from nothing well that's another discussion but still amounts to "something from something".

No you misunderstand. That is the point.

We have two options.

1. A universe that popped into being by it's self, from nothing, uncaused, because there is no God.
2. A universe that was created by something that is not natural and is called God.
3. We have a universe.

4. There for God exists.

Second part.

Anything that exists must have an explanation of their existence within themselves or externally.

The universe does not have an explanation within it's self. It is explained by something out side nature. God.

God contains his own explanation of existence in his eternal nature. He was never created.

God exists and is philosophically accounted for.

 

[1robin]

The point is these unconscious things affect our actions without us being conscious of it. You seem to not want to differentiate between something subconscious affecting our action vs some spirit or whatever affecting our actions. How are we to tell the difference? We only have evidence for one type and that is the unconscious thoughts that occur all the time. It doesn't matter what they mentioned or what they thought they are aware of. Our brains are aware of much more than we are conscious of.

Our unconscious is not aware of a drunk driver out of our sensory inputs and an impending crash with them inevitable. That in any case where it does not introduce an unwanted God, would be called by anyone a miracle.

 

[idav]

Our unconscious is not aware of a drunk driver out of our sensory inputs and an impending crash with them inevitable.

One can't very easily know what they are not conscious of so why assume? I gave the evidence and there is no way to tell the difference if it were spirits or an suppressed memory making a decision for you? I would bet on the natural cause before resorting to imaginative influences.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I do not get it. You do not have even a hint of an explanation for any of the last four supernatural claims I made including that one from thief.

You’re pulling my leg now, right?

I (and others) offered all kinds of natural explanations that we know actually exist and actually happen.

Is this rhetorical? Have I not laid the small fraction of this case out that can be done in a hundred posts or so. Evidence, philosophic consistency, textual reliability, moral consistency, scientific consistency, prophecy, unknowable knowledge recorded long ago, explanatory scope and comprehensiveness, etc......

Why does any god have to be behind any of it?

Even if we could verify that these things are bona fide premonitions, how do we draw the line from that to the specific version of the Christian god you believe in? The Kalam Cosmological argument doesn’t get you there. Textual reliability of the Bible (if it existed) doesn’t get you there. Moral consistency doesn’t get you there. Unknowable knowledge recorded long ago (if it existed) doesn’t get you there.

When you are talking to a person who has been born again, and has had the same prayer answered by leading me in very strange circumstances to the same person, and who believes in the most scrutinized and beloved theological work in history what is the source of an event that has no reasonable natural explanation my answer is of course my God and should be, however even a non-believer should view my God as the best non natural candidate for the reasons above and the volumes I have posted before?

There have been plenty of reasonable natural explanations provided for you.

No offense, but it seems you’ll appoint a supernatural explanation to just about anything for which you don’t have an immediate and/or desirable explanation available to you.

And if it’s so obvious that the specific, personal god you believe in is behind premonitions that even a non-believer should view your god as the best candidate, then it should be easy for you to draw a line from point A (premonition) to point B (your god). Where’s the connection? Because I don’t see that any god has to be behind any of it, or that the supernatural needs to be invoked at all.

Because no natural agent for any of those four or the millions of miraculous claims that exist.

Ah, but there are natural explanations available. Ignoring them doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

It looks very much like your just trying to get me to type a lot of stuff to waste my time as I have answered every challenge above many times. I would even do it again if it was not so boring and so did not become instantly dismissed.

It looks to me like this response is just a cop out.

So we can’t demonstrate the existence of the supernatural. I don’t recall your ever doing so.

How do we know it exists? And if we don’t (or can’t) know it exists, how on earth can we attribute any occurrence of anything to the supernatural?

Rare things do occur.

By that absurdity Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Xerxes, Leonidas, Lycurgus, Euripides, or any other ancient figure ever did a single thing. What is this magic date range where all knowledge is unknowable. Is the 2nd century back to 5000BC a complete blank but everything before and after reliable? WE know exactly what happened 17 billion years ago and what will occur in another billion but a 1st century document that impressed Greenleaf and Lyndhurst so much they claim it admissible is a complete blank. Strange logic and more evidence of bias. You just rendered about ten thousand professors unnecessary.

With the huge difference being that in order to accept that say, Socrates lived once upon a time, I don’t have to invoke some unknown supernatural realm to justify my belief in the events that he recorded or that others recorded about him. And if I did, I’d be just as skeptical about those supernatural claims as I am about the ones we’re discussing here. They would be just as unverifiable as the ones in question. And I think you would be just as skeptical.

 

[Thief]

Perhaps the argument revolves about the word...nothing.

In terms of....void....

Spirit first....or substance.

If Spirit is something....the discussion is dead.
If Spirit is nothing....then we might recalibrate our sense of .....void.

 

[johnhanks]

I understand your argument but it has many problems.

1. It somehow presumes all premonitions are identical.

"Identical" is an exaggeration. More accurately, it assumes that the feelings we call premonitions are all of the same kind (but we call them premonitions only if they turn out to be true). This seems to me more reasonable than assuming that the ones that happen to come true are of a different nature from the rest.

That an idea I would be run over came from the same source as a prophecy. Is that a rational way to go about this study?

Yes, entirely.

2. The bible also records that the dark side of the force...

Hang on. Which book of the bible did George Lucas write?

... can predict events but never with total accuracy. That is where palm readers, fortune tellers, communicating with the dead, and half correct prophecies like Nostradumba**.

You do Nostradamus too much kindness in calling his prophecies half correct. Like all such prophecies, his are given a simulacrum of accuracy only by tortuous retrofit.

3. However any time an unknown threat is communicated through non sensory means that comes to pass that is evidence of the supernatural or at least should be considered for such.

And when I'm playing darts, every time I hit the bullseye that is evidence that god is guiding my hand, or at least should be considered for such. The times I miss the board, or the dart strikes the wire and bounces off, have no bearing on this conclusion.

5. If there were nothing special about premonitions then their successful rate would be expected to be next to nothing. If God does not exist how many people scrambled around trying to find a seat belt based on an overpowering urge should have occurred. Maybe a couple. Yet there are thousands. I know of three personally just involving car accidents.

Where do you get your "Maybe a couple"? If you're going to get anecdotal again, I'll respond by recalling plenty of occasions when I've braced myself for a crash that didn't occur (though I didn't brace myself for the one that did).

 

[ArtieE]

1. A universe that popped into being by it's self, from nothing, uncaused, because there is no God.

You mean like this? New Scientist TV: How the universe appeared from nothing

 

[McBell]

Perhaps the argument revolves about the word...nothing.

In terms of....void....

Spirit first....or substance.

If Spirit is something....the discussion is dead.
If Spirit is nothing....then we might recalibrate our sense of .....void.

Now all you need to do is define "spirit" in a meaningful or even useful way...

yeah, still waiting for that.

 

[Thief]

Now all you need to do is define "spirit" in a meaningful or even useful way...

yeah, still waiting for that.

You're not waiting.
You're already doing what spirit does.

Aren't you paying attention....to yourself?

 

[McBell]

You're not waiting.
You're already doing what spirit does.

Aren't you paying attention....to yourself?

Your denial is comical.

 

[fantome profane]

1. Only things that begin to exist must have a cause. God did not begin to exist.

Why? Just because you say so?

2. Things must have an explanation of themselves either within themselves or from without. The universe does not have an explanation for it's self within it's self but God does.

Why? Just because you say so?