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Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
Religion advocates still don't have an even close to satisfactory answer for the two most basic playground arguments so personally it's hard to take discourse there seriously.
If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?
Why is your religion, most likely the one you were raised in, the correct one? Not just Christianity vs Islam vs Judaism, but also specific denominations? Statistically speaking the large large large large majority of religious believers are blasphemous in some way (not even counting the overwhelming number of people who clearly don't even follow their own belief's teachings), so why not you? And that's assuming that any of the mainstream religions are right to begin with and God isn't an Eldritch shadow beast who hides and laughs at our idiotic ideas or the ancient Greeks were right all along or the spaghetti monster or plenty of other possibilities. Religious belief doesn't seem to come from logic or first principles, but cultural indoctrination or else we wouldn't have this issue.
I've never seen a satisfying answer to these. I've seen attempts by religious people jerking each other off with a bunch of gobbledygook, but it's never been logically strong. And arguing back is easy, you can just paint a rock with their same exact logic "actually the Eldritch shadow beast spaghetti Zeus did that"
WandererintheWilderness hit the last one well, so I'll hit the first one.
God isn't material in the way that the cosmos is material. There is a creator, and there is creation. God didn't come from nothing, he was everything. We, as the creation, are finite and restricted by the constraints that God put into the created cosmos. God has no such constraints.
And this immediately fails the "and why couldn't that apply to anything else like the universe itself?" question. But even if we presume a creator, it fails the "why this specific god?" and not say, a computer simulation.
Every single thing is answered equally by "the Matrix creators want to fuck with us".
I'm not understanding the thrust of your question. Are you suggesting the material world (or something in the material world) is eternal?
While I don't believe we are in a simulated universe, in this scenario the simulation's programmer would be, to us, indistinguishable from God.
Well
You don't know it's not.
Seems like wishful thinking to assume something must be eternal to begin with. It's always possible that we just end with complete nothingness and there is no universe or god at the end.
Now we're again at the question of which God and religion. A programmer simulation theory is essentially polytheistic (even if we are only interacted with by a single one of them) since a fair assumption here is that there might be, or at least might have been, multiple of the species doing the simulation. And their particular beliefs and the reason for why the world exists could be completely opposite ours.
We could exist as an advanced AI powered history simulation to fill in the gaps on our own past, or we're just animals in the zoo, a marvel that happened to exist in the simulation. Heck we might even be unimportant, maybe a few billion light years away the real point of the simulation is taking place and we just happen to be little specks of dust that evolved on a side planet due to the ultrarealism.
God died in the space wars and we're just running off the simulation that no one has bothered to turn off, powered by a super renewable energy source.
You don't know it is. This is, ultimately, a matter solely of belief and not knowable fact. Personally, I find the belief that the natural world is itself supernatural (by always having existed) to be ridiculous, therefore I believe that there must exist something outside of the universe which set it in motion. If you disagree with that, that's fine, but I do think you have to concede that nobody can know what the uncaused cause truly is.
I believe that @PyotrVerkhovensky was referring to the universe extending eternally backwards, not saying that it will have no end.
I don't need to know! I'm not making a positive assertion!
Well at least we can agree on that, there is not a knowable factual basis for such claims.
How is it supernatural to have always existed? And how is it more supernatural and weird for the universe to have existed, than for an outside supernatural being to have existed and created the universe.
If we have the two choices of Universe exists or Universe exists + God exists, then this seems pretty close to classic conjunction fallacy logic.
That is like, the default atheistic statement. It is the religious view that positively asserts there to not just be a creator, but also typically asserts it knows what and how things happened.
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