From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 3:33 PM
To: 'Gary Kirkland'
Subject: RE: god
Thank you for not making this a personal discussion by mentioning me in your response.  I declare victory in a debate when my opponent starts attacking me personally. 
Did I say something about your appearance or hygiene?  In addition to rebutting each and every one of your arguments, I've tried to understand and explain your curious linguistic behavior -- viz., by hypothesizing that you want to sound provocative and iconoclastic. Feel free to dispute my hypothesis.
I found a definition of conceptualism in "Merriam-Webster". 
A better online reference for philosophy is at http://www.saint-andre.com/ismbook/ism3.html 
My idealism is that the only thing that exists is ideas.  Matter, energy, hunger, etc., are only ideas. 
It's hard to tell, but it sounds like you're a Platonist: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/
I think that our discussion has devolved to a semantical argument, which I find futile. 
Semantics is the study of meaning. In an argument, unclear meanings are usually the cause of any futility, and clear semantics is usually the cure.
I'm with Lewis Carroll when he said, "Words means what I say they mean, nothing less, nothing more.  Am I master of the word or is the word master of me? 
I don't care what meaning you attach to your words. What I care is that you be clear when you use a word whether you intend your own stipulated meaning or the meaning commonly understood by native speakers of English. When you're not careful about these things, it can look as if you're trying to pass off a truism as a provocative insight simply by replacing the normal meanings of words with your own idiosyncratic meanings.
I will now use the term "Creator."  The Creator created the world and the rules, laws, that govern the world. 
Why assume these things were "created" at all?  If there was a "Creator", what created it? If the "Creator" could have the property of being self-creating, why could that property not instead just apply to the world and its laws?
The idea of cause and effect is an extension of the First Cause. Anyone who believes in cause and effect, by extension, believes the First Cause. 
That's well-known not to be true. First, there's nothing logically impossible about an infinite regress of causes. Second, one can believe that most events have causes without believing that all events have causes.
 
What you're arguing is essentially the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, and it is considered non-compelling for very well-known reasons. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/ for details. A nice selection of rebuttals to the Cosmological Argument are at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html.
 
Perhaps, at long last, it turns out that when you said "cause and effect is the god of science", you really meant "science must accept the Cosmological Argument for God".
 
P.S. These facts remain: