Mini arguments for God's existence

Author: Fallaneze

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#1
Fallaneze
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God is defined as a fundamental consciousness.

(A) it is true that a fundamental consciousness exists or (B) it is not true that a fundamental consciousness exists.

Here are some of my condensed arguments to support God's existence:

The first cause argument:

The universe began to exist.
The beginning of the universe is explained by (1) chance, (2) physical law, or (3) free will.
Both (1) and (2) entail that the big bang was inevitable, because by counting backwards the number of trials leading up to the big bang, the event has a quantifiable beginning. Both (1) and (2) entail an infinite chain of preceding events, which is impossible. Therefore, the Big Bang was caused by (3) free will, meaning that the event was not inevitable and therefore doesn't succumb to the quantification problem. The only plausible candidate for something possessing free will is consciousness.

The universe began to exist.
The physical universe expanded from a zero-dimensional point at which all laws in the universe were broken down. The best explanation for this singularity is something non-physical that also possesses causal power. The only plausible candidate for this is consciousness.

The universe is fine-tuned (scientific consensus).
The fine-tunedness is either by design or not by design.
The fine-tunedness is more consistent with design.
Something non-conscious cannot design anything, so the only plausible candidate for this is consciousness.

If our internal organs have a purpose, God exists.
Our internal organs have a purpose.
Therefore, God exists. 

Without God, evolution is just a mindless process that has no aims or goals. You would need (1) intent (to reach the goal) and (2) knowledge (of the goal itself). Any prescribed function for our internal organs is predicated on goals.

The universe indicates a designing mind or it does not. A designing mind is indicated by attributes only found in consciousness such as beauty, rationality, intelligibility, creativity, and purpose. The universe exhibits these qualities. Therefore, the universe indicates a designing mind. If the universe has a designing mind, God exists.

Either moral realism is true or moral realism is not true.
Moral realism is true.
The only way moral realism could be true is if humanity has inherent ends. The only way humanity could have inherent ends is if they were imbued by an external consciousness. 

Near death experiences of God are considered dying declarations.
Dying declarations are admissible evidence in court.
The weight of evidence on this issue is in favor of God's existence.

The laws of logic are abstract, invariant, and universal. 
Since the laws of logic consists of conceptual truths, it must correspond with an abstract, invariant, and universal consciousness.
#2
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I dispute the definition of God as "fundamental consciousness"

Not because God isn't that, but because God is Ousia, not a quality of being like consciousness.


Oxford uses "Supreme Being"

Merriam-webster uses "Ultimate Reality"


Both of those definitions work in Orthodox Theology.


#3
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@Fallaneze
The universe began to exist.
You will never have any rational, logical common  sense to offer humanity as long as you follow this above premise.

For  me I go to what I believe is the root/core of Space and Time { (><)(><) i.e inversions >< from peak of Gravitational Space (> and Dark Energy Space  <).

Those root/core tori interfere with each other and create more complex geometric patterns fermions and bosons and eventually complex human consciousness with metaphysical-1,  ego (>*<)  i  {>*<)

 I believe the source of big bang { WOW! } is a degree of interference of tori where before there was mininmal interference now there was and interference of  two or more toroids.  Maybe it was a syntropic aligning of a multitude of Space - Time tori tfhat had previously reached a point of maximum entropic non interference.


#4
IlDiavolo
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As soon as I saw the phrase "fundamental conciousness" I stopped reading.

Religions define God as a powerful, omnipresent, and ubiquitous being which seems to be something pulled out from a fairy tale.

Il Diavolo
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@Mopac
Of course you would, they are contradictory so why not.
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@Fallaneze
God is defined as a fundamental consciousness.
Defined by whom?

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Defined by whom?

The OP, but also new age chakra wigglers.

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@Mopac
How would you know? The OP doesn't make that claim.
#9
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@Fallaneze
Mini arguments for God's existence
This thread is more like gish gallop.

As the logic flows through each gish, it builds on a series of false premises, equivocation or fallacy whereupon it leaps a great distance to erroneous conclusion.
#10
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@Fallaneze
The universe is fine-tuned (scientific consensus).
This is the only one I find compelling to any degree. It really is uncanny. But it's been rebutted by arguments such as the anthropic principle.

#11
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@Castin
I'd agree with that.

The other thing I think we atheists don't like to admit as problematical is the sheer complexity of even the simplest living thing, or of a single cell. 

Darwinism is great, but natural selection can't kick in until you have already established reproduction.  The way DNA is translated into proteins isn't a simple chemical reaction but an intricate 'mechanical' process with moving parts such as ribosomes that 'click along' DNA strand 3 bases at a time...

Of course I don't think any god's were involved, but if you think it's absurd you probably don't know much about the internals of cells!

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@keithprosser
Darwinism is great, but natural selection can't kick in until you have already established reproduction

Are you stating a fact there? And what do you actually mean in this case by "reproduction" ? 

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@Stephen
I believe it to be a fact.

Natural selection is the principle that offspring show variation and it is the 'fitter' offspring that are 'naturally selected' to survive and go on to have offspring themselves.   Unless reproduction is occurring there are no offspring for natural selection to operate on.

(Natural selection is contrasted with artificial selection which is the practice of human plant and animal breeders to select which individuals to breed from.  In natural selection it is nature, not man, that does the selecting.)
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Unless reproduction is occurring there are no offspring for natural selection to operate on.

This is obviously true. I asked because when one speaks of "reproduction" or the "act of", one automatically thinks intercourse and or copulation  to cause "reproduction" and in turn this may cause a  variant in selection.

Your statement caused Parthenogenesis to spring to mind. This, you may be aware means development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg. Species that develop this way  include fish, amphibians, reptiles and some birds, I believe.
Interesting then that fish gave rise to amphibians that gave rise to reptiles that gave rise to birds, from what may have been an unfertilized egg, don't you think.?
#15
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when one speaks of "reproduction" or the "act of", one automatically thinks intercourse and or copulation
I must have gotten old because I didn't automtically think about intercourse and copulation... once upon a time I thought of little else!

I think sexual reproduction must really speed up evolution.  An asexual species could only evolve by a long series of one-at-time-mutations, but a sexual species can harbour many mutations in different individuals which get 'mix-and-matched'.  Its the difference between 'serial' and 'parallel'. 

That said, it's not settled why sex exists.


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@keithprosser
That said, it's not settled why sex exists.

Well the Sumerians have spoke of this and so does the bible. Without trawling through old papers and volumes of other material , it was to do with the first  human " pairs"  being incompatible. But once they had "mixed the essence of the gods" with THE AdamA, they became compatible and able to reproduce on their own at [free] will and much quicker and stronger than the "gods" could produce them for themselves. 

Maybe I should save that for a thread of its own.
#17
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@Stephen
Ah, I see this is the religion forum, not science!  I don't think I want to say much about the theology of sex.

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@keithprosser

Ah, I see this is the religion forum, not science!  I don't think I want to say much about the theology of sex.

It is, as the title suggests -  Mini arguments for God's existence  -  and you mentioned "reproduction and offspring" which amounts to sex, theological or not.




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@Castin
The universe is so fine tuned that 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of it is fatal to humans. We must be so damned lucky for that fine tuning. In excess of 75% of the surface of our planet is fatal to humans.
The fine tuning argument was created by a comedian.
#20
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The universe is so fine tuned that 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of it is fatal to humans.
However little of the universe is suitable for life, some of it is.  Maybe it didn't have to be.  Perhaps there doesn't have to be a universe at all, but I find it really hard to get my head around there being nothing at all, ie not even a void but nothing.

But I see fine-tuning less an argument for god as an open question as to how the values of the physical constants got set.  We won't know that for a long time.


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@disgusted
The universe is so fine tuned that 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of it is fatal to humans. We must be so damned lucky for that fine tuning. In excess of 75% of the surface of our planet is fatal to humans.
The fine tuning argument was created by a comedian.
The fine-tuning of the universe refers to life, not human life.

You're thinking like a human biologist, not a physicist. Well, I think your instinct is to sneer at anything that appears to challenge your presuppositions, so perhaps it's unfair to say that you're thinking like a scientist at all.

The evidence for fine-tuning is well documented. It may seem like the universe is hostile to human life, and in a real sense it is, but one must take a step back and consider that if certain forces in the universe had varied just a little bit in either direction -- if some god had just blown a stray breath on the cosmic scales -- carbon would never have been created at all, stars would never have formed or exploded to create the critical elements, and the very structure of the atom itself would not be able to hold together so neatly.

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@Castin
The fine-tuning of the universe refers to life, not human life.
Wrong, godists always mean human life.

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@Castin
and in a real sense it is
But here is some meaningless apologetic where we are encouraged to consider that if the dog hadn't stopped for a shit we could have had rabbit for supper. I wonder if anyone can make these arguments from within a universe that doesn't support human life? The hole fits the puddle perfectly.

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The so called fine tuning argument fails on so many levels, the hole and puddle a common one. Another simple one is the universe itself and what it consisted of shortly after the Big Bang; an ocean of electromagnetic radiation. So please, go on to tell me how an ocean of electromagnetic radiation is fine tuned?
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@Goldtop
Well, tell me how an ocean of radiation crystalises into particles and forces just right to produce conscious life!   Most combinations of constants wouldn't produce stable atoms, let alone conscious entities.
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@disgusted
I'm a bit startled that you think I was talking about theist rhetoric, gus.

From the Stanford physics article I linked you:

Considerations according to which the laws of nature, values of the constants, and boundary conditions of the universe are fine-tuned for life refer to life in general, not merely human life. According to them, a universe with different laws, constants, and boundary conditions would almost certainly not give rise to any form of life (Lewis & Barnes2016: 255–274).
Theist rhetoric, I won't speak for. But I do try to listen to physicists.

Did no one look at the article? I thought it was pretty interesting. It does get pretty technical, but it does a good job covering all points and sides of the matter, including its worth as this argument for a designer.

Even if fine-tuned conditions are improbable in some substantive sense, it might be wisest to regard them as primitive coincidences which we have to accept without resorting to such speculative responses as divine design or a multiverse. It is indeed uncontroversial that being improbable does not by itself automatically amount to requiring a theoretical response. For example, any specific sequence of outcomes in a long series of coin tosses has low initial probability (namely, 2−N if the coin is fair, which approaches zero as the number N of tosses increases), but one would not reasonably regard any specific sequence of outcomes as calling for some theoretical response, e.g., a re-assessment of our initial probability assignment. The same attitude is advocated by Gould (1983) and Carlson and Olsson (1998) with respect to fine-tuning for life.Leslie concedes that improbable events do not in general call for an explanation, but he argues that the availability of reasonable candidate explanations of fine-tuning for life—namely, the design hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis—suggests that we should not “dismiss it as how things just happen to be”(Leslie 1989: 10). Views similar to Leslie’s are defended by van Inwagen (1993), Bostrom (2002: 23–41), and Manson and Thrush(2003: 78–82).
And of course the anthropic principle, as I mentioned earlier:

We could not possibly have existed in conditions that are incompatible with the existence of observers. The famous weak anthropic principle (WAP) (Carter 1974) suggests that this apparently trivial point may have important consequences:

[W]e must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers. (Carter 1974: 293,emphasis due to Carter)
Our methods of empirical observation are unavoidably biased towards detecting conditions which are compatible with the existence of observers. For example, even if life-hostile places vastly outnumber life-friendly places in our universe, we should not be surprised to find ourselves in one of the relatively few places that are life-friendly and seek an explanation for this finding, simply because—in virtue of being living organisms—we could not possibly have found ourselves in a life-hostile place.
Ultimately my view, as of now at least, is:

fine tuned =/= deliberately designed

And, more broadly:

improbable =/= God did it
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@Fallaneze
God is defined as a fundamental consciousness.

I take issue with your above words. I assume you are speaking of the Christian god(if I am wrong, correct me). If so, by what authority do you define this god this way? Certainly not by the authority of the Christian bible, as the Christian bible does not define its depicted god at all, much less as any kind of consciousness. The premise of your entire argument rests of the above quote, and the above quote is factually incorrect. Your argument is therefore false.
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#28
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@BrutalTruth
No I am not talking about any god in particular.
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@Fallaneze
Then your entire post is moot.
#30
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@Fallaneze
I'd say your arguments are variations on the neccessity (or otherwise) of conscious intent at the origin of things; 'God' is then the embodient of that intent.

The alternate view is that consciousness and intent are not neccessary and the origin of things was mindless and purposeless.

The latter raises the question: if purpose was not there at the start, where can it come from?

Many people conclude 'nowhere', leading to the bleak prospect that life - and existence itself - would be pointess and meaningless.  For that reason they reject a godless origin.

i think we have to accept that meaning and purpose are not 'out there' and imposed on us but must come from within and imposed by us on 'out there'.   The problem is to chose meaning and purpose wisely.