From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 6:40 PM
To: 'Gary Kirkland'
Subject: RE: god

I'll only respond to the statements of yours for which I can parse out an interesting meaning:

Many parts of the world may not be logical, the edge of the universe, for example.

I fear you either misunderstand logic or "the edge of the universe" or both.

It is just as likely as not that the universe had a start.

It's equally possible, but we don't know enough to say it's equally likely.

Those who advocate the Big Bang Theory argue that it did.

Not exactly. We have no fully-developed theory of the singularity; we just know what happened after it.

This is natural cosmological argument, not a metaphysical one.

The Big Bang is indeed not a theory of metaphysics.

There is no evidence of any metaphysical anything.

Metaphysics is not about evidence. It's about interpretation of evidence. If you use the word "is", you have a metaphysics, whether you realize it or not.

Believing the world works, based on observation, on cause and effect, makes the world predictable and explainable.

True.

The world we are in is the real world.

Correct, but only because when applied to worlds, the word 'real' is indexical. "The real world" means "the world causally related to this sentence".

there is no other world.

That depends on what you think it means for a world to "be". This is a surprisingly tricky concept, and I think that only Modal Realism gets it right.

By using the word "creator" I avoid your definitions at the end of your response

They're not definitions, they're facts -- that you indeed "avoid" disputing.

My points below remain unrebutted.

----- Original Message -----

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?

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:
Dictionaries document that native speakers of English define a "god" as a supernatural being.
Almost all religions assert that one or more such gods exist.
Scientific naturalism denies that any such gods exist.