My first paragraph is factually wrong? Biblically wrong?
Okay how, since I haven't disputed or challenged your argument in any way?
I have only pointed out that your argument is seen as foolishness to the non believer if he even understands it.
Please, don't be sore at me, but I and Thunderbird are trying to establish the realities of the issue, the proper foundation for discussing the central topic of the OP, particularly for the purpose of refuting the routine objections to the classical arguments for God's existence should newpolitics return to give us something more than just bald assertions to chew on.
I love you, FoxFyre. You know that, right? But now I must be blunt.
You're confounding an important distinction due to what appears to me to be a serious case of closed-mindedness.
You're the one making a simple matter more complex than it actually is, not I. You're the one unnecessarily appealing to biblical authority regarding a matter that has absolutely nothing to do with the intimate things of God that are foolishness to the nonbeliever. You're the one dragging an utterly irrelevant and complex aspect of Christian epistemology into the fray, contributing to the very confusion that is nothing more than the failure on the part of some to dispense with the conventional slogans of post-modern popular culture and to bear down, perhaps for the first time in their lives, on the obvious.
The universally self-evident imperatives of the absolute rational forms and logical categories of human consciousness, which entail the fundamental laws of logic and the delineations of the problem of origin are
not foolishness to the nonbeliever!
1. Everybody, the believer and the nonbeliever alike,
knows that it's humanly impossible to explain
how two mutually exclusive/diametrically opposed propositions could both be true at the same time, in the same way, within the same frame reference.
2. Everybody
knows that the prospect of something arising from out of nothing is an apparently inexplicable absurdity and, consequently, recognizes the concomitant exigency that something or another must have always existed.
*
3. Everybody
knows that there are but two ontological categories of things pertinent the problem of ultimate origin: inanimateness and sentience.
4. Everybody
knows that the construct of God imposes itself on the human mind without the human mind willing that it do so. In other words, everybody
knows that the idea of an eternally self-subsistent Sentience objectively exists in and of itself, and the atheist necessarily concedes this to be true every time he denies there be any substance behind the idea. Even
newpolitics concedes this, which is refreshing given the baby talk of so many other atheists on this forum who stupidly argue that the idea of God is merely a fabrication of human culture in the face of this undeniable fact of human cognition. But, then, such atheists are cognitive sociopaths or pathological liars.
5. Everybody
knows, in spite of what some have thoughtlessly asserted on this thread, that the problem of origin necessarily presupposes that the existence of the universe constitutes the evidence for the existence of a Sentient First Cause, whether or not, objectively speaking, such a Being actually exists. For crying out loud! The existence of the universe
is the very essence of the problem of origin, and it's not merely an empirical problem, but, ultimately, a rational problem.
Even atheists necessarily concede that the existence of the universe constitutes the evidentiary substance of the arguments for God’s existence. (Aside:
PratchettFan, get real!) What
is the intrinsic substance of the arguments that atheists are compelled to refute? Answer: the existence of the universe and its rational constituents!
**
Hawking might be smarter than all of us put together, but none us are so dumb that we cannot recognize what he recognizes: the evidentiary substance of the problem of origin and the arguable existence of God is the apparent fact of the universe's existence: material, physical, empirical evidence.
6. And now everybody who has read this
knows that those who allege that there is no empirical evidence from which God's existence may be reasonably inferred needs to stop being stupid.
These are the pertinent, universally recognized facts of human consciousness regarding the problem of origin.
These are the foundational imperatives of the classical arguments for God's existence, which are nothing more than the cosmological, ontological, teleological and transcendental ramifications of the very same imperatives.
There's no appeal to authority here. There's nothing theologically heavy duty about any of these facts of human consciousness touching on the problem of origin. Neither the teachings of the Bible nor the teachings of any other putatively sacred text you care to name has any relevance whatsoever! Belief in Christianity or belief in any other religion of divinity has no relevance whatsoever! Indeed, as atheists and agnostics routinely demonstrate, a
lack of belief in God or any given system of religious thought has absolutely no relevance to the universal recognition of these imperatives whatsoever!
Everybody recognizes these things! That's what I’m telling you!
Whether one is ultimately convinced of God's existence by these imperatives or their subsequent formal arguments is up for grabs.
_______________________________________________
* The likes of Hawking et al. have not discovered anything new that would overthrow these imperatives of human consciousness or raised any new objections that the classical arguments for God‘s existence cannot account for insofar as they are properly understood. The guff of Hawking et al. is the stuff of logical fallacy and cognitive illusions. While the likes of Hawking may fool the naïve minds of unexamined lives, everyone of the their supposed refutations of the cosmological argument, for example, come down to a variation of the following conceptual sophistries which beg the question:
1. The quantum vacuum is a metaphysical nothingness.
2. Nothing residing beyond the space-time continuum can be the cause of the universe's existence in any conventional sense as causation can only occur in the medium of space-time; that is, there is only potential existence, not actual existence or causation "before" the existence of the cosmic singularity.
3. The cosmic singularity, like the spontaneous emergence of virtual particles in quantum fields, has no cause, as such are produced by random vacuum fluctuations; hence, the quantum vacuum eliminates the necessity of a transcendent First Cause.
4. The delineations of the problem of origin and the concomitant, empirical arguments for God's existence are ordinary commonsense assertions, not universally absolute imperatives of human consciousness contingently grounded in the mind of God.
The atheist apologist in the video attached to my post in the above does not waste our time with the first objection, which is why I chose it. The fact of the matter is that the implications of the theories of special and general relativity, quantum physics and the Big Bang scream the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, but I digress.
** In fact, the reason that all of the historically prominent counterarguments against the classical arguments for God’s existent invariably fail for paradoxically irresolvable reasons goes to the very fact of existence itself, except in the case of the purely ontological argument or perhaps in the case of the teleological argument, which, properly understood, are merely conditional/incidental justifications, not absolute logical proofs of justification. Also, the argument from the
reductio ad absurdum of the irreducible mind/of the infinite regression of origin, an absolute logical proof, is a cosmological-ontological hybrid.
