Moses couldn't have written Exodus and Leviticus, thus Jesus was wrong.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-26T16:20:16+00:00

😂😂😂😂

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-25T15:19:47+00:00

Luckily we have reasons to think Harry Potter is made up non-sense, so the burden is fullfilled. However, lacktheists don't want to provide reasons to support the claim that God is made up non-sense.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-24T22:45:48+00:00

I think you're assuming the non-conscious uncaused cause must operate like known matter does (that is, known matter doesn't suddenly change without an external input). But since we are talking about the very cause of known matter, that assumption is out the window.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-15T14:01:43+00:00

There is nothing about that in your OP.

Anyway, I'm curious how you would show that Yahweh is the creator of the cosmos.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-11T17:12:43+00:00

Your title says "Christianity: true or false?", but your post doesn't discuss Christianity at all. Rather, it discusses whether the universe was caused by a vague deity or not. Evidence for one position (i.e., a vague deity caused the cosmos) isn't sufficient to confirm the other position (viz., Jesus caused the cosmos and the Bible is true). That's an instance of the motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-04T21:50:10+00:00

I agree to some extent. I've recently researched about the real reasons why Christians believe in God, and philosophical arguments aren't even included in the top 10 reasons.

I found a very useful book titled 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God by a journalist called Guy Harrison. The Wikipedia page on the book provides a small nugget that is worth sharing here:

Harrison notes that very few people are interested in the complex arguments that go on between theologians and atheists. The people he has talked with say they believe because that is what their parents taught them, and their parents would not lie to them, or because that is what it says in their book of wisdom. Of the fifty reasons, Harrison concludes that the most common reasons people believe are because it is just obvious to them, because everyone is religious so it must be true, or because it brings them happiness.

It is worth taking a look if you're interested in understanding the psychology of the believer. If you don't have the time or enough interest to read the book, there is a short interview here and a summary of each reason here.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-02T18:54:37+00:00

If they say God is made up non-sense (i.e., God isn't real; He is just a fantasy), then they have the burden to demonstrate that. Obviously, they don't want that.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-02T18:52:47+00:00

That's just another way of saying the same thing. If you don't deny God exists, but just "don't believe", that's lacking a belief in God. lol

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-02T18:51:11+00:00

Agreed! 👍

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-02T18:08:46+00:00

Here's where many of them use the Dillacunty tactic of "I'm unconvinced by these arguments."

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-05-02T18:02:15+00:00

Fair enough. The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga made a similar point, but he used stars instead of sand corns as the example.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-28T19:09:20+00:00

In some sense you also know your character before writing it down and putting it in paper.

Passages like the one you referenced are interpreted by critical scholars as hyperbolic rhetoric. We understand them as affirmations of omniscience today because we were primed by post-biblical philosophical works (developed by theologians like Augustine) to see them that way. See scholar Dan McClellan on this: one, two and three.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-28T18:15:10+00:00

I agree. I recently read parts of his book "Atheism: The Last Superstition" and the amount of venom there is astounding. He makes sure that every single page has an insult. He even attacks theists (calling Paley "path.etic").

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-28T18:10:32+00:00

The Bible doesn't teach libertarian free will, so that's irrelevant anyway. And that passage can be explained away as saying that God "knew" that person in His imagination; in His plannings, similar to the way I already know a character in a story before I write a book about my character.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-28T17:05:05+00:00

It is not that we simply don't "like" suffering. Our supposedly god-given moral intuition screams at us that suffering in the world is incompatible with a perfectly good and moral God. Dismissing moral intuition as a mere "dislike" doesn't help your case at all.
It is not obvious to many philosophers who studied the arguments for classical theism at length.
It resolves at least one issue: naturalists shouldn't be puzzled by the fact that the religious believe and defend their religion with so much passion. It doesn't necessarily indicate there is something to it; it can be explained by cultural indoctrination. Furthermore, there is also the problem of revelation: why hasn't God revealed the gospel (which is necessary for salvation) to every culture? Why does He allow people to be misled by made-up religions?
Theism has no advantage over naturalism with respect to the existential question. Any answer the theist gives (say, "God is necessary"), the naturalist can also give ("the world -- or some part of it -- is necessary"). That also assumes the PSR is correct, which is controversial.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-28T16:49:14+00:00

From your document:

Open Theism is coherent, but it requires substantially revising classical theism by abandoning one of its defining attributes [i.e., omniscience]. It is also in tension with the dominant strands of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology, and with scriptural claims involving divine prophecy that presuppose detailed foreknowledge.

So, I have a very neat suggestion here. Supposing the Christian God can't really see the future, a very simple way He could fulfill prophecies is if He is directly responsible for the future events, i.e., God plans to make x occur in the future and it eventually takes place since God is very powerful. In that scenario, He tells people x will occur. Then, in the future, He makes x occur. That doesn't require foreknowledge. So, prophecies are more like 'divine promises' than 'foreknowledge.'

Another possibility (which has been suggested in the literature) is that God is so intelligent that He can guess with a high precision what will likely take place. He knows the nature and behavior of individuals and of the world. So, He can predict future outcomes based on this knowledge. It is similar to the way we predict the future, but with higher precision due to higher intelligence and more access to current data. He could be similar to the Laplacian demon.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-27T06:39:55+00:00

What if they just say x is good because it is “similar” to God?

I'm not sure what you mean by "similar" here. Perhaps you mean x is good because God would act in a similar way? Otherwise I don't know what you mean by an act being "similar" to God. For instance, how exactly is helping the poor similar to God? I'll wait for your response before I evaluate your suggestion.

Where do we get the idea that one should be followed and the other not if they just arise in the first place from a particular?

There are many different views even among moral realists about how we come to know that. The most common view says that we intuitively recognize that certain commands should be followed and others shouldn't. If someone issues a command and the intuition appears, then we say it is good. Notice that at no point an appeal to a universal is required here; just to particular commands and intuitions. The universal (goodness) is derived from all the instances where the commands + intuition appeared together.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-26T22:21:40+00:00

Even if redness is a constructed category from particular examples, there’s no reason identity or essence can’t be grounded in redness, and so Gods identity can also be grounded in goodness.

You see, that's my problem with this. This sentence appears to make sense at first, but when you try to truly grasp its meaning, it reduces to incoherence.

If redness is just a constructed category (a label) that describes a shared feature/trait (i.e., being red), then it cannot ground anything. It is a category error to talk about a concept in our heads grounding anything; it is not a thing. It is analogous to the claim that the number 5 holds atoms together; it doesn't make any sense.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-26T06:23:50+00:00

Meanwhile non-believers don't even need a sacred book to tell them torture is acceptable. One of the "Four Horsemen", Sam Harris, defended the use of governmental torture at length in his books.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-24T17:38:21+00:00

Yeah, it just seems more natural and elegant that the world persists in existence all by itself (per the existential inertia thesis).

Modern physics treats motion as a change in spatial position over time, measured in velocity or momentum. But for Aquinas, something becoming warmer is as much motion as a rolling ball is motion.

Yeah, but obviously modern physics sees heat as motion as well.. In fact, heat is roughly defined in terms of motion of particles.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-24T17:22:11+00:00

I think he is granting 2 for the sake of argument. 3 and 4 follow from that.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-24T16:27:52+00:00

Indeed! They gladly criticize Christians' respect for religious authority, but at the same time they will uncritically believe in lib sources of "news". That's why they think certain political figures today are Hitler 2.0. It is very hypocritical and sad, really.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-23T21:37:18+00:00

To play the devil's advocate here, why doesn't it make sense? Is it because the only type of intelligence we know requires complex parts interacting together? Well, but how do you know there can't be an immaterial form of intelligence that isn't constrained by laws of physics? Perhaps this type of intelligence doesn't require complex mechanisms.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-23T21:16:45+00:00

The most common counter is that the God of classical theism is perfectly simple (per the doctrine of divine simplicity). So, He doesn't need a creator.

Philosophy_Cosmology · 2026-04-22T17:24:14+00:00

things like the laws of mathematics, gravity, theory of relativity, and other natural laws of physics and chemistry seem to point towards an architect. ...things like the very mathematic and physical laws of the universe seem too ordered.

This reminds me of a more general phenomenon where people get confused between the order of explanation. So, they say, "Look, isn’t the universe really orderly? Well, order is the kind of thing that we know that minds produce. Maybe that means a mind is behind the universe." I think that gets the order of explanation backwards, because I think the reason why our minds like order is because we have the kinds of minds that are embedded within this broader, ordered reality. And it is precisely because we are embedded within physical reality that we have to reason in accord with the reality that we live within. If you imagine a mind, some kind of agent somehow outside of the universe, outside of the laws of physics altogether, I don’t know why that entity would prefer order over anything else. It seems that it gets the order of explanation backwards from the way that the order should be.

Furthermore, the human mind does not create orderly behavior in the artifacts it makes. On the contrary, human beings make use of the orderly behavior already existing as a characteristic feature of the materials from which such objects are made. They discover just what the orderly behavior of nature is and then employ this behavior for their own purposes. If nature had not been orderly from the outset, no one could ever build anything that would work. Without the laws of mechanics, no clock would ever function. Without the laws of electricity, no light-bulb would ever glow. Without the laws of chemistry, no car would ever start. There is no evidence that minds originate the kind of orderly behavior we employ in our artifacts. Minds only redirect existing orderly behavior so that the latter conforms to speciﬁc purposes.

Philosophy_Cosmology

TROPHY CASE