philos71 : Four Atheistic Fallacies That Flood Youtube "Fallacy" #1 - God = Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny. - Atheists don't use this as an argument to prove that God doesn't exist. - It is an explanation of why we don't believe and why you shouldn't, under the assumption that the story and idea of god is seen as fantasy just as those other stories are. - Your distinguishing god from the tooth fairy by claimng he is a creator, while the tooth fairy is not, is irrelevant to the argument in the same way that distinguishing the tooth fairy from Santa Claus is irrelevant. We don't believe in any of them, because we think the stories are myths in all cases, regardless of the details of each myth. - We atheists don't claim they are exactly the same, except in their status of real world manifestation. - Believers have a ridiculously poor grasp of and have difficulty relating to what the atheist philosophy is. Drawing the analogy between the tooth fairy and god is meant to, as succinctly as possible, give the believer an instantaneous idea of what the atheist philosophy is all about. Any believer who can successfully see this analogy will be able to understand atheism. If you think its a logical fallacy (which it is not, since its not an attempt to bring up a process of logical analysis at all) then what is really going on here is that you simply don't understand atheism. - You also performed a conflation by adding in Thor and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We atheists are usually using a different argument when we invoke those. We usually include Allah, Yaweh, Siva, Zeus, Wotan and others in an argument of equivalent incredulity. In this argument we state that the Xian god is no more believable than these other gods, since all positive arguments for it have existing equivalents in all other religions. But these gods all generally are contradictory of each other, so no such positive argument can be satisfactory so long as it does not successfully and credibly distinguish itself in the details of the particular belief itself. I.e., you have to include some of the bits about speaking in tongues, prayer, confession, virtual cannibalism via communion, etc, otherwise all your postive arguments will prove a long dead and contradictory god such as Quatzequatel as well. - A well formed atheist argument will usually draw a distiction between these two ideas since the first is just an explanation of why we lack a belief in god, and the second is an explanation for why we don't believe any of your supporting arguments. - "I just believe in One Less God than you". This is not a fallacy at all. It is used to apply to the second line of explanation (the comparison between various gods), not the first. Its an accurate depiction of the status of our respective beliefs. So long as believers are monotheistic, we atheists will always believe in exactly one less god than them. There is no grounds for or reason to dispute this very simple statement. - The designer of a car argument or analogy makes no sense whatsoever, since there is no dispute from either side about the designer of a car. "Fallacy" #2 - Who created God? - This argument is usually meant as a response to the argument that "The universe is too complicated to have been created by natural processes and therefore must have had a creator". If the only argument is that complexity requires a creator, then god being at least as complicated as the universe, must itself also have a creator. - Remember Atheists don't believe in god, and so a lot of arguments seem like ridiculous questions. This is a method called reducto ad absurdum, or proof by contradiction. Its not that we believe in any of the premises inherent in the question, its that the question becomes credible and arises exactly in response to the believer's explanations about the existence of God. - You attempted to give an argument for the existence of god in order to wipe this argument out without noting the context that the argument is usually used in. Nevertheless it is easy to dispatch your so called "proof": - You claim that there are three universal premises. To be universal that means they must be reasonable accepted by nearly everyone with a basic understanding of the context. 1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause. - We need to adjust this. Assuming there is time before the current time, then all states have a pre-state -- this is fine with the proviso of prior time. Of course, this proviso is generally never an issue, except it becomes so here because of how you are using it. 2) The universe began to exist. - You whipped by this one as quickly as possible, of course. Because it is not in any way a universal premise. To have begun to exist, this would require that it did not exist beforehand. There are problems with this idea so long as we are in a physical universe that contains the law of conservation of energy. I.e., any prestate cannot have contained any different amount of total energy+equivalent mass and therefore could not have been in a prestate that could be considered distinct from the universe. You may propose that the laws of physics were different at or before the big bang, however this requires a strong theoretical phyisics argument which is hard to motivate and currently not easily addressable by anyone living today except by some truly exceptional experts. My understanding is that any questions about the universe at or before the big bang are open questions in theoretical physics, for which there is no resolution, no consensus, nor even any uncontroversial theories. 3) Therefore we must conclude that the universe must have a cause. - A premise cannot start with "Therefore". The first two are premises where the first needs minor adjustment and the second is entirely speculative. This third thing would be considered a deduction or conclusion or something of that nature. Since you neither established that time existed before the big bang (a sticking detail the renders premise #1 invalid to your conclusion) and you don't have anything approximating universality on your second premise, this third "premise" which should be a conclusion does not follow and thus is vacuous. - "God does not need or have a cause for his existence". This doesn't follow from anything you have said up until this point. It is non sequitor, and an assertion. - If, for example, a believer invokes the argument that anything with complexity requires a creator which will have a cause for enacting existence, then indeed god both needs a creator and a cause for existence. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. - You literaly pulled the conclusion that "God had no cause" or that "God always existed" out of thin air. I replayed that part of your video several times, and while I found english words, I did not find any line of reasoning at all. - It is fairly obvious that you had no intention of targeting this video to any objectively thinking person. This conclusion can only be accepted by people who already believe it before hand. There was no argument supplied for this claim at all other than simply asserting it. - What is a logical fallacy of the third degree? I've never heard of this before. "Fallacy" #3 - A Good God would not allow evil in the world. - Again, this argument is taken out of context and is usually a narrowly taylored argument against the idea that god is the creator, all knowing, all loving, and all powerful at the same time. - Humans have performed so much evil in the world. This evil is essentially derivative of god, since we are his creations. Furthermore, natural disasters are a manifestation of evil that has nothing to do with free will that the best among us could never commit. - If god both knows and is capable of stopping or minimizing such evil, he should or must do so to retain the property of being all loving. That is to say, such evil should be prevented by him. - The upshot of this argument is simply that the record of reality requires that one of the four properties: 1) being the creator, 2) all knowing, 3) all loving or 4) all powerful, must not be correct. - This is generally the limit of the argument, and how it is used. (It doesn't stand on its own, without an assertion by someone else of the 4 properties given.) - The "Free Will" argument does not cover natural disasters or things like accidental death. Also mentally disfunctional people who do evil deeds do not necessarily do so as a result of a choice or by will, but rather an inability to correctly make choices relative to what should be predictable consequences. (see "Of Mice and Men") - The "Free Will" excuse also ignores the fact that god created this free will. If he is all powerful and all knowing, there is nothing this free will can do that wasn't forseen at the time that god gave it to us. In other words he still both knows about and is the ultimate cause for any evil that results from use of "Free Will". This is not a problem so long as we drop the "all loving" property of god (I refer you to the opening chapter of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins for a more accurate description.) - Atheists don't claim that God doesn't exist because there is evil in the world. The claim is that a simultaneously all powerful, all knowing, and all loving creator god does not exist. The argument is used to demote him, not to prove that he doesn't exist. It is only if this demotion is not acceptable does non-existence become consequential. - That there is some good that balances evil does not remove the evil. And thus the "all loving" property is still not satisfied by that. Besides there being evil, there is a lot of unnecessary evil, like natural disasters. Certainly an "all loving" god could get rid of those. - The "relative" argument that you present (i.e., good only existing as a contrast to evil) is an interesting one. However, it is unconvincing and does not make the cut for two reasons. 1) The claim of "all loving" does not admit or allow for these gradations between evil and good because of the word "all" in "all loving". 2) As intelligent humans we have managed to *decrease* the amount of evil in the world as time has gone by without any divine intervention (disease is decreasing, emergency services have become common place, the concepts of sanitation, nutrition, health and safety, legal systems that reduce crime, generally increased standard of living via technology, etc.). This means that humans are more powerful than god with respect to curing the problem of evil, as we are able to reduce it in ways god never did. I.E., god is either not all powerful or not all loving. - "Please stop using this deceitful argument". Its a response to a claim, and atheist will generally never take direction or advice on argument from a theist for any reason that I can imagine. "Fallacy" #4 - The God of the Old Testament was a murderous evil and vengeful God. - This is certainly stuff I have heard from other atheists and from people like Richard Dawkins. Personally I am a pure atheist who has never been indoctrinated, and am not too familliar with the details of the genocidal maniac that you call god. I don't know too much about Ted Bundy either. It is doubtful that learning these details would either be enlightening or sway my position on the matter to me. - This argument may be derivative of the one you claim as #3. As I don't have standing on this argument and I don't see the merit of it either way, so I won't directly defend it from the positive point of view. Remember I am an atheist, so telling me that god is a prick is pretty meaningless. - Your counter argument to Dawkin's now famous description of god appears to be that god has some greater purpose that nullifies his characterizations. I.e., its ok to kill a lot of people or to impose draconian rules because there is some "ends justifies the means" kind of justification to all of it. This describes a god who is limited, not one that is all powerful. Why is he not able to obtain his ends without the introduction of such anti-social behavior on his part? - "Please stop flooding comment boxes with these 'fallacies'". Again, let me assure you that atheists just will not take direction from you for any reason, or under any circumstances that I could imagine.