My two arguments against the existence of God

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My two arguments against the existence of God
OP - February 24, 2015, 05:04 AM

Since Dawahfilms shared the argument he developed for the existence of God, I thought I'd share two I developed recently.

1) What humans believe depends on the evidence available and the amount of evidence needed to convince us.
2.1) God is responsible for the evidence available and the amount of evidence needed to convince us.
2) God is responsible for unbelief
C) It is unjust to judge humans for their belief in God or lack thereof

My second argument based off the Qur'an and needs a bit of context. The Qur'an repeatedly states that you will believe in Allah if you reflect on nature, the Qur'an or even reality.
Example:
*Insert teleological argument*
"Indeed are signs for a people that are wise" Al-Baqara - 2:164-165
"Thus do We explain the Signs in detail for those who reflect" Yunus - 10:24
"Behold, verily in these things there are Signs for those who consider!" Al-Rad - 13:3
"Verily in this is a Sign for those who give thought" An-Nahl - 16:10-11
"And they will say, "If we had listened or reasoned, not we (would) have been among (the) companions (of) the Blaze." (67:10)
+ countless others.

In essence, The Qur'an is claiming that if you reflect on either nature or the Qur'an, you will be Muslim. So let's look at the facts:
- 70%+ of philosophers are atheist with less than 15% theist (Significantly less than that are Muslim) http://io9.com/what-percentage-of-philosophers-believe-in-god-485784336
- 93% of elite scientists are atheist http://www.strangenotions.com/tag/national-academy-of-sciences/
- There are countless Qur'anic scholars who are not muslim

So here is the argument:

1) The Qur'an claims those who reflect on nature and/or reality will be Muslim
2) The majority of academics who reflect on nature and/or reality are atheists
C) The Qur'an is wrong

Please criticise Thanks!
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Reply #1 - February 24, 2015, 08:51 AM

Two? I have 36 for! I have the greater number I winz!

http://rebeccagoldstein.com/books/thirty-six/index.html

Quote
You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
—Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

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Reply #2 - February 24, 2015, 11:49 AM

Quote from: questioner on February 24, 2015, 05:04 AM
Since Dawahfilms shared the argument he developed for the existence of God, I thought I'd share two I developed recently.

1) What humans believe depends on the evidence available and the amount of evidence needed to convince us.
2.1) God is responsible for the evidence available and the amount of evidence needed to convince us.
2) God is responsible for unbelief
C) It is unjust to judge humans for their belief in God or lack thereof

1) The Qur'an claims those who reflect on nature and/or reality will be Muslim
2) The majority of academics who reflect on nature and/or reality are atheists
C) The Qur'an is wrong

Please criticise Thanks!

Argument one: needs an extra premise so we know how injustice comes into it. Also 2.1 and 2 can just be 2 and 3.

Argument two: it takes deductive form yet premise 1 appears to be universal though it is not - so the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the previous two premises. Also just on a general note it appeals to authority (it implies only academics belong to the set of "people who reflect"). Also if you say the Quran is wrong I am guessing you mean entirely wrong? This doesn't necessarily follow from the premises it is just wrong on those points addressed by the premises (and yes inerrancy invoked means entirety is nullified but that's only if you accept inerrancy! And this isn't in the premises so it cannot be invoked in the argument anyway)

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Reply #3 - February 24, 2015, 12:08 PM

Yes, I agree with the analysis of argument one by PhysMath, it's good that he has been been listening to me with regards to hidden premises

By the way, Dawahfilms' argument isn't one for the existence of God.

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Reply #4 - February 24, 2015, 12:43 PM

Hahahaha indeed I have I did say I'm the student, that was when I was really rusty okay XD

I still don't understand why he went such a convoluted way to explain something that is self evident from the definition of scientism!

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Reply #5 - February 24, 2015, 03:09 PM

I think the first argument is similar (or the same) as the argument from nonbelief - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_nonbelief

The 2nd argument can be added to the long list of empirical errors in the Qur'an. I think it needs some modification esp. your 2nd premise. The way it is stated now, if, hypothetically, tomorrow all those atheistic scholars became Muslims, then your argument can be used to argue the opposite.

Although, I think Muslims could just point to the verses that say God has put a seal on your hearts to explain why some don't find the Qur'an to be true despite reflecting on it.

Anyways, you could probably modify your 2nd argument to fit the pattern of the following arguments.

I)
1. If the Qur'an is from God, then there is no doubt in the Qur'an (as per sura 2:2)
2. There is doubt in the Qur'an (I doubt it. Many other doubt it etc)
C. The Quran is not from God.

and my favorite...

II)
1. If the Qur'an is from God, then it is true that, "if Qur'an is not from God, then humans can find many errors in it." (as per sura 4:82)
2. It is not true that, "if Qur'an is not from God, then humans can find many errors in it."
C. The Qur'an is not from God.

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Reply #6 - February 24, 2015, 03:30 PM

I) I think the doubt in the ayah you quoted is an impersonal concept of doubt - if people doubt it then it is the personal fallible understanding that leads to such doubt.

II) Nice use of Modus Tollens there, though the second premise does need some form of justification. So adding a premise before hand as an example (only need one) before it to suggest why the negative holds could lead to a more structured proof.

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Reply #7 - February 24, 2015, 03:38 PM

edit

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Reply #8 - February 24, 2015, 03:47 PM

1) I don't think an "impersonal" concept of doubt makes sense. Doubt is necessarily personal. At best, maybe the muslim apologist can appeal to the concept of "reasonable" doubt. But then the argument would be about what it means to have "reasonable" doubt.

2) The justification is that humans are capable of creating books without a single error, let alone "many" errors as stated in the verse. I believe this justification is inductively strong.

In the case of the Qur'an, one could easily create a book without 'findable'/'falsifiable' errors if it were just to have statements about God, teleology, genies, angels and some moral commandments. A book with such content could be easily produced without any findable errors.

If on the other hand, it were to contain some complex mathematical calculations etc, especially if it were unknown at the time, one could grant the case that producing such a work without a single error would be very improbable.

But instead, what we have is a book like the Qur'an; one were it is more probable to have no 'findable' errors given that it mainly deals with either the non-empirical (imaginary) or moral commandments.

Edit: I make this argument in my blog. It needs to be modified as I need to emphasize that the verse specifies "many findable errors"; which makes my case even stronger. -> http://captaindisguise.blogspot.com/2013/02/qurans-error-sura-482-if-quran-had-been.html

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Reply #9 - February 24, 2015, 03:54 PM

1) Yes sorry a better term would be objective doubt. This argument makes for a subjective outlook since people always manage to blame the doubt placed in it as a subjective experience. At best we can use inductive reasoning or Bayesian logic for it the way I see it. Maybe someone else can contradict me here.

2) There are many findable errors in the Quran. I was just interested in hearing what you had to say. Only one suffices since it is a universal statement so showing one counterexample is sufficient. I could offer some scientific ones (mountains as pegs, sun and moon equivalent, bones and flesh formed separately, no salt and sweet water mixing) for instance.

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Reply #10 - February 24, 2015, 04:47 PM

1) I think I agree. I also think all arguments about the Qur'an (or any other text), whether pro or con, will have to rely on inductive knowledge.

2) You may have misunderstood the argument, The argument is about the false conditional statement in surah 4:82 rather than other empirical errors in the Qur'an. I am claiming the verse itself is an error.

Quote
sura 4:82 - If it had been from [any] other than Allah , they would have found within it much contradiction.

If we let A = "The Qur'an is from Allah", then ~A = "The Qur'an is not from Allah" (which is the antecedent above).
Let E = "many Errors will be found in the Quran" (which is the consequent).

The verse can be stated as "~A --> E". I am arguing the truth value of "~A --> E" is False.

The basis for claiming it is false is that it is neither impossible nor improbable for a human being to produce the Qur'an without there being any "findable" errors in it. Of course, there are other empirical errors in the Qur'an but this argument is separate from that issue.

For example, if I were to make the following statement, "If this comment was not from God, then many errors can be found in it", then the statement itself is false because even if this comment was from myself, it does not entail that there should many errors in it. I am capable of, as a human and not a God, making comments without errors in them.

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Reply #11 - February 24, 2015, 05:36 PM

Ah right, sorry I should have clicked on the link before further commenting; you explained it quite intricately there. Reading it in your way, I can think of a problem - the lack of error (i.e. correctness of information) is subject to information present at some time. So given some more time, further information may falsify or change what was initially considered free from error. This is a process which occurs regularly in the field of science ("proof" does not exist in the scientific field) for instance. We could then place a probability on the correctness of information, i.e. say that there is some high probability of change, and given enough time, there will exist some contradictory statement or sentence which nullifies or weakens some part of a text for all texts that exist. However, my interpretation of yields the same result (i.e. the existence of errors also introduces the negated form then modus tollens yields the same result) - just the "not" comes from a different part of it. Rather than trying to prove there exists some text with no errors, I would just try to prove there exists some error in the Quran. Hope this makes sense!

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Reply #12 - February 24, 2015, 09:44 PM

Quote
. If the Qur'an is from God, then there is no doubt in the Qur'an (as per sura 2:2)

Satanic Verses?

And why the assumption that God is good perfect blah blah? What if Allah is a misbehaving sexually very aware teenage God?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #13 - February 24, 2015, 09:48 PM

Quote
Just what sort of God would make a world like this? A world of tsunamis, and tsetse flies; of genocide and really bad hair days; of dolphins and leprosy and strawberry blondes; of chaotic misery, interrupted by occasional flashes of astounding beauty.

The question goes back at least as far as Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and its subsequent elaboration in Candide. Voltaire's view was that the deity – remote, and sublime – simply doesn't care. Jung's response to the same question was that God is mad.

Meg Rosoff's answer, presented with a beguiling grace as well as a genuinely unnerving strangeness, is that God is a teenage boy called Bob: a feckless, floppy-haired, carelessly good-looking youth, who spends most of the day in bed, reliving past and anticipating future romantic conquests. He is a Zeus without the majesty, a bone-idle Apollo who really can't keep it in his pants. He's even mean, in a neglectful sort of way, to his pet – an odd, penguin-lemur sort of a creature called Eck.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/12/no-dog-meg-rosoff-review

Actually a formally propose the god Bob to argue against!

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #14 - February 25, 2015, 01:28 AM

Thanks for the discussion and criticisms guys
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Reply #15 - February 25, 2015, 07:35 AM

Quote from: PhysMath on February 24, 2015, 05:36 PM
Ah right, sorry I should have clicked on the link before further commenting; you explained it quite intricately there. Reading it in your way, I can think of a problem - the lack of error (i.e. correctness of information) is subject to information present at some time. So given some more time, further information may falsify or change what was initially considered free from error. This is a process which occurs regularly in the field of science ("proof" does not exist in the scientific field) for instance. We could then place a probability on the correctness of information, i.e. say that there is some high probability of change, and given enough time, there will exist some contradictory statement or sentence which nullifies or weakens some part of a text for all texts that exist. However, my interpretation of yields the same result (i.e. the existence of errors also introduces the negated form then modus tollens yields the same result) - just the "not" comes from a different part of it. Rather than trying to prove there exists some text with no errors, I would just try to prove there exists some error in the Quran. Hope this makes sense!

Haven't been on here for a long time, but in essence, what you said is irrelevant to his argument. Things that seem to be an error may of course be found to be correct later on, and vice versa.

However, the argument ONLY rests upon the premise that humans CAN produce a book with no errors, much less "many errors". I consider this premise to be very strong unless every single book that has and will be written throughout history contains an error.

Also, even if your contention was true, it is worth noting that your suggestion of trying to prove that there is an error in the Qur'aan would run into problems with your own contention itself (I.e. a perceived error in the Quran may turn out to be correct).
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Reply #16 - February 25, 2015, 12:40 PM

It isn't irrelevant to his argument, I am not using deduction but Bayesian logic here. I am simply showing that there is a possibility to weaken the clause of it by considering the above stipulation - then extending it to all literature. There is an invisible premise too which the OP missed - the Qur'an explicitly states not to take verses in isolation but read the book as an entirety. So adding this premise then the idea of the challenge of a book like it, by extension any "free from error" book must be like the Qur'an - again subjective. So what we need to do is look at what is objective, a false statement which is unequivocal such as "the sun orbits the earth" would suffice to provide the required contradiction then Modus Tollens takes care of the rest! We could add the premise of "the book is clear" to break down the multiple interpretations argument.

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Reply #17 - February 25, 2015, 06:21 PM

Sorry, Physmath, but what you said is irrelevant to my argument. Hocuspocus is right.

I still think you have not understood the verse properly. Perhaps, you think the verse states the following;

1) If you find an error in the Qur'an, then the Qur'an is NOT from God <-- I can agree with this. This is a true statement.

BUT, the Qur'an in 4:82 is not saying (1), but rather the following;

2) If your DON'T find MANY errors in the Qur'an, then the Qur'an is from God <-- This is a false statement.

(1) and (2) are not the same.

What you said would have been relevant if the Qur'an had stated (1). Then we could point out an error, then modus ponens and we can conclude that the Qur'an is not from God.

On the other hand, since the Qur'an is stating (2), pointing out an error is irrelevant to this specific argument. It is relevant for arguing the inerrancy of the Qur'an in general but for this specific argument, we are not concerned about whether there are or there aren't any empirical errors in the Qur'an. We don't even have to prove there exists texts without errors (although that is easy, I could just make one up right now).

Also regarding your statement, "the OP missed - the Qur'an explicitly states not to take verses in isolation but read the book as an entirety.". What other verse do you think there is in the Qur'an that is relevant to this specific verse (4:82) such that it changes anything I have said?

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Reply #18 - February 25, 2015, 07:12 PM

Ah, yes, you're right actually. Hmm...sorry about any confusion (actually I was the confused one)! The contrapositive is a strange statement indeed.

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