From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 9:34 PM
To: Gary Kirkland
Subject: RE: god

I am not trying to define the supernatural out of existence.

Just checking. It's a common mistake.

I am claiming there is no credible evidence of anything supernatural, and as an empiricist I do not accept anything as true or real without credible evidence. Thoughts and statements about the supernatural exist in the natural world. By this view, if "god" exists it has to be in the natural world.

That we don't currently have credible evidence of anything supernatural hardly implies that tomorrow we couldn't discover supernatural phenomena (like gods) that would not have to be natural (i.e. "in the natural world").

The argument for the existence of god or first cause goes like this

It's called the Cosmological Argument, and I'm quite familiar with it. See http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html for what my fellow atheist authors on infidels.org have written about it.

Every subsequent cause is a logical corallary of the first cause. As I mentioned earlier this is the "god" of both science and religion, regardless of what one calls it.

And as I've told you twice already: just because a principle -- like causality or parsimony or non-contradiction -- is essential to a worldview does not make it a "god" of that worldview.

[Standard observations about causality omitted.] I will stick with my god, as I suspect all other organisms do also. The above argument stands or falls on its own.

What argument? All you've done is make some non-controversial observations about causality that Hume first made centuries ago, and then repeated your implication that causality is a "god". It's not. It doesn't satisfy the definition. Pretending it does is just a waste of time.

Referring to others for support is a type of false reasoning

You had said that "the big bang is a modern version of the Unmoved Mover". Your statement is either a characterization of how modern philosophy construes the big bang, or it's a statement of your own naive construal of it. Either way, your statement is indeed rebutted by me describing how modern philosophy actually construes the big bang, and why it does so:

Almost no informed atheist would seriously claim that the Big Bang -- or more precisely, the framework of physical laws that allow the Big Bang to arise from an uncaused singularity -- is its own cause completely ex nihilo. (An exception is the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, but his attempts seem questionable.)

The modern atheistic alternative to God as Uncaused Cause is in fact the metaphysical theory called modal realism, which explains the existence of our universe by saying that all possible universes are equally real -- or at least seem real to their hypothetical inhabitants.