Early Socratic thinkers wrestled with the arguments for the existence of Gods as far back as 600

bce, 2600 years later we find ourselves engaged in much the same debate, and using many of the same
tools. As long as people have been projecting their consciousness into the empty sky, they've been
using their intellect to try explain why. Though the roster has changed from Aquinas to Craig, the
proofs remain mostly the same – some would say there hasn't been anything new presented in many
years. But regardless of development, the discussion continues, and it's one I'm glad we can participate
in; even if it wasn't an important subject, it would still be tempting to take up discussion on the
existence of Gods since it's so taboo. I think we can all agree that any topic should be carried to its
logical end, not simply stop when someone gets uncomfortable – since that's how progress gets made.
I'm going to address three of the common proof used to justify belief in the Christian God (hereafter
known as CG), and give some of the common problems with each.

The first one we'll look at is the argument from design (or the teleological argument). This argument is
presented first not because it's the best one around, but because it may allow us to brush up on some of
the concepts we may have forgotten since our last debate or philosophy lesson. This proof has a few
forms, but can be summarized as something like this: life appears, on different levels, to be designed by
an intelligent being, rather than shaped and molded over billions of years through natural selection and
mutation (constituting evolution). This argument goes back a long way, William Paley presented it as
early as 1800 or so. There is a more recent example presented by Ray Comfort. When you're done
giggling, check out the argument's syllogism:

p1. We appear to observe features in nature too complex to have happened by chance
p2. These features exhibit the hallmark appearance of design
p3. Design implies that there must be a designer
c1. Therefore nature must be the result of an intelligent designer
c2. This designer is God

This argument has quite a few holes, even at a glance. The first premise has some special pleading
(applying or removing standards without proper justification) which invalidates it. The assertion that
some life is “too complex” to have been produced by evolution is not logical. We can't take an option
off the table without presenting good reasons. Simply asserting something is possible or impossible
doesn't make it so. On top of special pleading it contains a nice straw man fallacy: it states that
evolution is a theory of chance, which is entirely inaccurate, and dishonest. When stronger and faster
humans are competing with weaker and fatter humans in a game of survival, you can hardly call it
chance when the better specimen wins the contest – one type is more adequately suited to compete, and
thus live on to pass their genes down. The third problem with premise one is that it's a mere argument
from ignorance, basically it says: “I can't understand it, so no one can!” We know this kind of thinking
to be illogical; most of us don't understand the operations of our car engines, but it doesn't follow that
no one can understand those inner workings.

Moving down to premise two, we see more problems. What is design exactly, and how do we see
evidence of it in the nature world? The complexity we observe in nature is jaw-dropping, so is nature's
beauty, and its appearance of order. As a whole, nature's attributes are overwhelming! But simply
stating that these qualities cannot occur naturally doesn't fly, again, we have to demonstrate why our
claims are true. This is another instance of special pleading, we can't simply state things as fact and
expect it to pass through the logic filter. Certainly, no theologian would let me assert that a large purple
dragon is responsible for all the “design” we see in the world, they would certainly pin me down on this
assertion – and they would be right to do so since I don't have any proper evidence to backup my
dragon claim. This standard must be applied equally to any position within the discussion, if we want
to be honest that is.

Now, since we've established one or more bad premises, we are not required to continue entertaining
this argument. The rules are simple: if we run into a bad premise, we stop reading and put the argument
aside since it's a non-starter. If we choose to continue, we do so out of curiosity, or some other interest,
not because the argument or logic demands it. But, I'd like to continue looking at the design argument,
even if it's belly up.

The conclusion(s), like the premises, are less than acceptable. Though there are a few problems with
the conclusion(s), I'll just stick to the one I think is the most interesting and run with it: why does it
have to be God A, B, or C? What empirically valid evidence do we have to conclude that the
complexity we see is the handiwork of the God of Abraham, or Baal, or any of the deities of the
Canaanites? It seems like a waste of time to go this far into the argument just to fall back on wish
thinking. Since one party can insert the CG into this hole that's been fallaciously manufactured, what
stops another party from inserting their God? What if the ever popular Flying Spaghetti Monster wants
a turn being injected into the argument? Can we put forward good reasons to deny him and his complex
carbohydrates? I don't think so, and our inability to deny the FSM is one of the reasons this argument
doesn't work for the CG: inability to support the claim that any particular God is the cause of the
perceived “design”. Finally, Bertrand Russell had the following to say about the subject of design in
our universe:

"Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid
product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the
splendor of those people. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose
that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the
pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of
conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short
time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is
tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless".

Now we have our second proof for the CG's existence, the first mover argument, or the argument from
first cause. This one goes way back to around 1250, when a really smart Catholic monk named Thomas
Aquinas thought it up. Though Aquinas was a great thinker, he was a bit odd in the supernatural way:
he claimed he flew around the towers of Notre Dame. His proof can be simplified as follows:

p1. Everything must have a cause.

p2. Nothing can cause itself.

p3. A casual chain cannot be infinite.

c1. Therefore, a first cause has to exist.

This seems like a fairly good argument to some people, but this is another argument of hunger, it only
convinces those who are friendly to the conclusion to begin with. The first problem we see with this
proof is familiar, we just dealt with it in the previous argument: it's illogical to simply plug your
favorite god into the argument as the first cause, or the unmoved mover. If it can be the CG, it can be
the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Putting that aside, another obvious problem is presented, a pretty bad
self-contradiction haunts this proof. It's not kosher to say everything has to have a cause, then turn
around and say that cause itself is doesn't need a cause. Also, this calls for the question of where does
the God come from? Does the God have a cause? If it does, then all we've done is stalled at his
insertion into the argument with no empirical way to move forward. It may be said that adding the CG
to this argument only muddles the infinite casual chain even more, since we cannot determine if the CG
has a cause or not. While we're talking about infinity, it's worth noting that our minds are not fond of
dealing with infinity, but it doesn't follow that reality shares our baggage with the concept. This
solipsism is obviously not supported when we look at how little the universe seems to care about our
comforts and welfare; are we to believe that the same universe that's about 14 billion years old cares
about the mental constraints of some young (200,000 years tops?) upstart race on a remote planet that
itself is hostile to their very existence? Clearly, the universe doesn't have a care for us, one day it will
give you beautiful child that fills you with purpose, and the next day: brain cancer. It's clear to see that
our kind is not meant to stand as the primary benefactor of all creation, and it stands to reason that
reality doesn't care about our uneasiness with infinity.

All that aside, there have been some recent discoveries that, unknown to Aquinas (and other people
who followed the physics of Aristotle) show this proof to be short of scientific consideration. The laws
of thermodynamic and our developing understanding of quantum physics have been used to counter
this proof, and Einsteinian physics has broadened our understanding of how things get from A to B in
space and time. We're able to view the world with better understanding now than we could in the time
of Aquinas, now we know that pairs of virtual particles come into existence out of nowhere, in a
vacuum, and then get annihilated. There have been more than a few scientists, armed with information
unknown to Aquinas, that have come forward to say that the big bang was the beginning of everything,
in all dimensions, so asking what came before the big bang is like asking what's farther north than the
north pole. Overall, this argument is not going to convince that many thinkers (anymore), but
considering what Thomas Aquinas had to work with, and the conditions he had to work under, he made
some real pieces of work, that have lasted quite a long time.

The third and final proof we'll look at is presented by William Lane Craig, a leading Christian apologist
and philosopher. Craig is known for being as well thought out in his philosophy as he is well rehearsed
in his debates. Given some of his great performances against some of the better thinkers in the Atheist
movement, he has painted a bit of a target on his back – he's wrecked Hitchens, put Stenger on the
ropes, and has been dodged by Dawkins. That's why I was surprised to see him routinely use a
rehashed, modified, but clearly unsound Cosmological argument as a proof for the CG. The argument is
similar to Aquinas' argument above, except it puts the CG outside of space and time (S/T). In putting
the CG way out there, it makes the proof a bit more believable when it states that the CG was the
creator of all this stuff. After all, it's crazy to assume a being that exists inside of S/T created said S/T –
everyone knows you can't exist in something you haven't built yet. But Craig runs aground because
even if we granted the claim of the CG transcending our S/T, it doesn't mean that it necessarily exists
outside all space and time, that's an assumption on his part, not a claim backed by our knowledge. It
may be plausible that since the CG exists outside our our S/T, it could have its own S/T. If the CG can't
get out of all S/T, the argument falls apart, so Craig pushes this space-less and timeless CG feverishly.
But that's not all, this argument has another problem, and it's one I like even more than the previous: If
the CG has a mind – which it must if it's making choices, taking conscious action, or otherwise
exercising its own volition – then its mind must exist outside of S/T as well. If that's the case, it follows
that we could characterize the CG's mind as being non-temporal and non-spatial, like the rest of the
CG's being is claimed to be. But that's the final coffin nail in the Kalam Cosmological proof: a mind
that's non-temporal (read: non-changing) is by definition non-functioning. A mind has to be allowed to
change, since it has to be able to reason, will, and feel to be considered a mind. By putting the creator
outside of S/T, Craig has only accomplished making a self-contradicting entity, and we know entities of
that variety cannot exist.

Although there have been some really great minds that have grappled with the proofs of different
deities, the debate still goes on, even if it has to reuse and recycle some old arguments to keep it going.
We shouldn't have many complaints about that otherwise boring status, since most of us are either
ignorant of, or amateurs with, these proofs – we still have a lot to learn if we care to learn it. Even
better, assuming we learn all the arguments inside and out, it doesn't follow that we're able to debate
them with enough precision to convince a sharp audience of one side or another. I mean to say that
knowing of the arguments and their flaws should not be the final destination, since we can't say we've
mastered all aspects of the proofs. Knowing something, and being able to debate that something
competently against a heavy-weight sophist, are two very different things. There are people that think
knowing how to articulate these points to a skeptical audience is an important part of breaking the spell
of religion, but this won't be easy when we live in a philosophically deficient society. From the other
side, a Theist would be doing themselves a service by learning the arguments for the existence of their
given deity, since we live in a society that is embracing, more and more, freedom from religion. The
days of a diving club keeping skeptical inquiry out of public discussion are over, with the development
of secular ethics we have progressed into a better age; we don't tolerant divine murder and torture for
those that don't share a given faith, or those that see inconsistencies with them. Now, we can make real
progress in the way of understanding important happenings around us, and being free of religious force
and violence, we can really roll up our sleeves on the subjects of ethics, morality, truth, and knowledge.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed compiling it.