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ICR: God Caused….

April 25, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

The next 5 pages I will condense into one post, as they are all in the “God Caused” category and there is little else to say about all of them as we have many times previous to this debunked the arguements building up to this point, making the claims rather devoid of logical foundations. But anyway, here we go:

God Caused Justice

The main arguement for tying Justice to a god is summed up in the line:

..since all humanity accepts the knowledge that some events and standards are better than others—even though cultures may differ on what those events or standards may be—there must be an ultimate Source of such thinking, even if the absolute standard has become distorted over time.

This sort of “reasoning by popularity” stands to prove nothing in the way of what is supposed to be perfect “First Cause”. Saying because a behavior or standard of human interaction is common among humans because God put them there is absurd. This would be like saying

Most humans agree that they like sugar, therefore there must be a god who also likes sugar.

or

Most humans have a fear of pumas, therefore there must be a god who also fears pumas.

God Caused Love

This is the argument:

The very fact that we can love and be loved (by God and by others) is yet another proof of a Creator’s love.

Again, they are using a human emotion/action/ability to argue that the “First Cause” cares about humans and made them like itself. The same could be said about hate. Other animals, as far as we can tell, do not carry resentment or hatred for others. Humans can hate, destroy and torture like no other animal can. If we use the same logic as the ICR to say that “God is love” because of the extra-ordinary way humans are able to love, then we should also say that “God is hate” in the same extra-ordinary way that humans are able to hate.

God Caused Meaning

Here, the ICR argues that atheists have no purpose in life because they think they are here only for the time they spend on earth, and nothing comes after death. They go on to say

Humans in particular seek a “reason to exist” and for the most part find it difficult to accept that we are simply here to consume the earth’s resources and die.

Here we have to ask if seeking a reason for existance merits there to be a reason beyond our existance. An atheist will tell you that the reason for your existance is to exist. Once you are done existing, you are done existing and there is no “you” to worry or be sad about your non-existance. You did not exist for trillions of years before you were born and that didn’t seem to bother you. Why should not existing for trillions of years after you exist bother you?

They go on to say that not having religion causes problems without offering an iota of evidence, stats or logic to back up the claims:

Such hopeless beliefs drive many into lives of debauchery and hedonism, and fill the couches of psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world. Teenage suicide is alarmingly high, and the therapitst themselves continue to manifest one of the highest suicide rates in civilized countries. Scandals abound among the leaders of world business, politics, and churches.

I could say the same about religion. Relgion causes wars, hatred between peoples, and encourages discrimination of women, atheists, homosexuals and people of other religions. Religions regions of america order the most cable porn, cause child sexual abuse by clergy.. religion even encourages people to pray instead of seeking medical help, resulting in their death or the death of their child.

God Caused Order

The ICR here tries to say that God is the law of entropy. Because things natural degrade to a state of less energy or order, they assume there must be a creator without providing evidence, math or logic to back it up. Simply drop a bottle of milk and you’ll see what they are getting at.

Everyday experiences, such as broken watches and spilled milk, remind us that order does not happen by itself. In fact, our entire universe teaches us that same truth. The earth’s rotation, the moon cycle, and the changing seasons are just a few of the ordered processes observable in nature. These processes don’t happen randomly but are divinely caused by God.

The last sentence is the clincher. Because of Darwin’s research, it is incorrect to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. “Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious hights of complexity and elegance.”-Dawkins These accomplishments of natural evolution manifest goal-seeking behaviour that “rewards” the process with survival and the continuation of the species and designs.

The last one, God Caused Wisdom is arguably the most absurd gap of logic in the entire “God Caused” portion.

To the extent that humans have any wisdom at all, much less the wisdom necessary to understand a meaningful amount of the working of the universe, the very fact that we can understand at all is more amazing than the marvelous physics of the universe! How can an immaterial mind, residing inside a human body, made mostly of water (along with other constituent elements of the earth), comprehend anything, even this sentence?

The ICR is pulling a classic “it’s complicated therefor it must be supernatural”. The irony of statements like this is that our brains thought up the word “wisdom” and the created the sentence. Our brains find patterns and meaning in our surroundings for survival and we can visual see inside the procesees of the brain with a machine that we created with our brains! Wisdom, or the ability to know and understand, is a lable humans give to a function of the brain. The brain, being the only organ in the body that is aware of itself is unique and highly evolved, however that does not prove or even suggest that a supernatural sky-god exists. If brains were so special and self-awareness so unique a thing, why does every living creature have one and monkeys one very similar to our own? Did god run out of blue prints or ideas and decided to make humans with the same genetic mold as monkeys? Why is it that we share 99.9% similar gene makeup with monkeys?

DNA is like code for living things. This DNA can be turned on or off as demonstrated by science. We see evidence of human evolution from a tailed animal or fish in the womb when a fetus has a tail early in devolopement. Through science we are becoming more versed in the workings of our world and the processes that shape it. Religion is just trying to catch up by taking science and inserting “god” into the unknown gaps of science that is being explored today. Religion runs behind science cleaning up all its blunders in history when religious leaders have been certain about the earth being the center of the solar system or they have been certain that god punishes sins with contageous diseases or when they were positive that the earth was 6,000 years old according to the bible. After they clean up their messes, they run ahead of science as say the have the answers for the unknown portions.

ICR: God Caused….

April 25, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

The next 5 pages I will condense into one post, as they are all in the “God Caused” category and there is little else to say about all of them as we have many times previous to this debunked the arguements building up to this point, making the claims rather devoid of logical foundations. But anyway, here we go:

God Caused Justice

The main arguement for tying Justice to a god is summed up in the line:

..since all humanity accepts the knowledge that some events and standards are better than others—even though cultures may differ on what those events or standards may be—there must be an ultimate Source of such thinking, even if the absolute standard has become distorted over time.

This sort of “reasoning by popularity” stands to prove nothing in the way of what is supposed to be perfect “First Cause”. Saying because a behavior or standard of human interaction is common among humans because God put them there is absurd. This would be like saying

Most humans agree that they like sugar, therefore there must be a god who also likes sugar.

or

Most humans have a fear of pumas, therefore there must be a god who also fears pumas.

God Caused Love

This is the argument:

The very fact that we can love and be loved (by God and by others) is yet another proof of a Creator’s love.

Again, they are using a human emotion/action/ability to argue that the “First Cause” cares about humans and made them like itself. The same could be said about hate. Other animals, as far as we can tell, do not carry resentment or hatred for others. Humans can hate, destroy and torture like no other animal can. If we use the same logic as the ICR to say that “God is love” because of the extra-ordinary way humans are able to love, then we should also say that “God is hate” in the same extra-ordinary way that humans are able to hate.

God Caused Meaning

Here, the ICR argues that atheists have no purpose in life because they think they are here only for the time they spend on earth, and nothing comes after death. They go on to say

Humans in particular seek a “reason to exist” and for the most part find it difficult to accept that we are simply here to consume the earth’s resources and die.

Here we have to ask if seeking a reason for existance merits there to be a reason beyond our existance. An atheist will tell you that the reason for your existance is to exist. Once you are done existing, you are done existing and there is no “you” to worry or be sad about your non-existance. You did not exist for trillions of years before you were born and that didn’t seem to bother you. Why should not existing for trillions of years after you exist bother you?

They go on to say that not having religion causes problems without offering an iota of evidence, stats or logic to back up the claims:

Such hopeless beliefs drive many into lives of debauchery and hedonism, and fill the couches of psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world. Teenage suicide is alarmingly high, and the therapitst themselves continue to manifest one of the highest suicide rates in civilized countries. Scandals abound among the leaders of world business, politics, and churches.

I could say the same about religion. Relgion causes wars, hatred between peoples, and encourages discrimination of women, atheists, homosexuals and people of other religions. Religions regions of america order the most cable porn, cause child sexual abuse by clergy.. religion even encourages people to pray instead of seeking medical help, resulting in their death or the death of their child.

God Caused Order

The ICR here tries to say that God is the law of entropy. Because things natural degrade to a state of less energy or order, they assume there must be a creator without providing evidence, math or logic to back it up. Simply drop a bottle of milk and you’ll see what they are getting at.

Everyday experiences, such as broken watches and spilled milk, remind us that order does not happen by itself. In fact, our entire universe teaches us that same truth. The earth’s rotation, the moon cycle, and the changing seasons are just a few of the ordered processes observable in nature. These processes don’t happen randomly but are divinely caused by God.

The last sentence is the clincher. Because of Darwin’s research, it is incorrect to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. “Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious hights of complexity and elegance.”-Dawkins These accomplishments of natural evolution manifest goal-seeking behaviour that “rewards” the process with survival and the continuation of the species and designs.

The last one, God Caused Wisdom is arguably the most absurd gap of logic in the entire “God Caused” portion.

To the extent that humans have any wisdom at all, much less the wisdom necessary to understand a meaningful amount of the working of the universe, the very fact that we can understand at all is more amazing than the marvelous physics of the universe! How can an immaterial mind, residing inside a human body, made mostly of water (along with other constituent elements of the earth), comprehend anything, even this sentence?

The ICR is pulling a classic “it’s complicated therefor it must be supernatural”. The irony of statements like this is that our brains thought up the word “wisdom” and the created the sentence. Our brains find patterns and meaning in our surroundings for survival and we can visual see inside the procesees of the brain with a machine that we created with our brains! Wisdom, or the ability to know and understand, is a lable humans give to a function of the brain. The brain, being the only organ in the body that is aware of itself is unique and highly evolved, however that does not prove or even suggest that a supernatural sky-god exists. If brains were so special and self-awareness so unique a thing, why does every living creature have one and monkeys one very similar to our own? Did god run out of blue prints or ideas and decided to make humans with the same genetic mold as monkeys? Why is it that we share 99.9% similar gene makeup with monkeys?

DNA is like code for living things. This DNA can be turned on or off as demonstrated by science. We see evidence of human evolution from a tailed animal or fish in the womb when a fetus has a tail early in devolopement. Through science we are becoming more versed in the workings of our world and the processes that shape it. Religion is just trying to catch up by taking science and inserting “god” into the unknown gaps of science that is being explored today. Religion runs behind science cleaning up all its blunders in history when religious leaders have been certain about the earth being the center of the solar system or they have been certain that god punishes sins with contageous diseases or when they were positive that the earth was 6,000 years old according to the bible. After they clean up their messes, they run ahead of science as say the have the answers for the unknown portions.

ICR: God Caused Beauty

April 24, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

The next sections of the ICR attribute causality of the things we appreciate to a god. The first deals with “God Caused Beauty“. The entire argument states that beauty is a ration and emotional reaction to the world around us and that we hunger for beauty:

That such a hunger exists only in the human being is a wonder in itself! The flower is not impressed with its own majesty; it merely exists with no conscious awareness. The chimpanzee does not gaze longingly on the enigma of the Mona Lisa, nor do the stars muse on the heavens they themselves grace.

First of all, we do not know for certain whether other animals see and appreciate the world in similar ways as humans. They certainly are not at a cognitive level where describing, labeling and recreating beauty is within their power, but that is not evidence for the lack of appreciation. Secondly, through evolution, humans are conditioned to seek what we describe as beauty in nature. It is a survival mechanism when hunting for colorful fruit or lush streams to drink from. We see “beauty” in the opposite sex as part of an attraction mechanism that is involved with natural selection. “Beauty” is a human observation given to visible things around us that we take pleasure in. If the human race evolved to what it has become today but on the planet Mars, we would think red skies and barren desert landscapes were beautiful. Things are what they are regardless of the human qualitative descriptor.

In fact, all humanity eschews destruction and random chaos as “ugly” and attempts to mask death with various levels of cosmetic disguises, and this speaks to the realization that some sights and sounds are not beautiful, and thus there must exist a standard of perfect beauty.

This deduction does not follow. The human perspective on human actions as positive or negative does not require that there be a standard of perfect beauty. The author here is using human attributes as proof for a supernatural perfect being while asserting that humanity is itself imperfect. Perfection does not equal existance.

ICR: The Logical Implications

April 23, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

The next “step” in the ICR proof for a god is in the The Logical Implications. I find it difficult to continue at this point because everything argued in this portion rests upon the premise that there is undeniably one “First Cause” for the universe. In my previous three posts on ICR, I have provided numerous fallacies in this line of reasoning where the ICR has failed to offer scientific evidence to support their claims. At this point, the ICR giddily slides down the path of defining this “First Cause” with human descriptors and emotions:

The First Cause of limitless space must be infinite.

The First Cause of endless time must be eternal.

The First Cause of boundless energy must be omnipotent.

The First Cause of universal interrelationships must be omnipresent.

The First Cause of infinite complexity must be omniscient.

The First Cause of spiritual values must be spiritual.

The First Cause of human responsibility must be volitional.

The First Cause of human integrity must be truthful.

The First Cause of human love must be loving.

The First Cause of life must be living.

Basically, the ICR is trying to charactarize the “First Cause” according to what was produced (the universe and humankind). If we are going to follow this logic and define the “First Cause” (FC) by what it caused into being (let’s give them the benifit of the doubt for a moment), then we have to consider the entirety of what was caused.

Lets go piece by piece. Energy, ENDLESS Time and Space are the three existant things that are attributed to the FC. The FC is said to be omnipotent, infinate and eternal because the FC created these three things. All three of these deductions are baseless and without proof, however the ENDLESS TIME example is the most out of order. In the “Time, Space, and Matter” portion of the argument, the ICR claims that the FC created time. Moreover, they say that:

Time is not eternal, but created. To ask what happened in time before time was created is to create a false paradox without meaning.

The self contradition alone is enough. In the first part of your arguement you cannot say “A is not B, but C” and then later on say “B is A therefore D.”

The next three FC premises about omni- offer no logical proof or deduction. The most obvious one to pick apart is ” The First Cause of spiritual values must be spiritual”. Considering the ICR claims to be scientific, they do not offer any law of spiritual values. Where did these values come from? Are they universal? How do we know they are spiritual? There are many assumptions made that are not explained because there simply is no explaination that could hold water.

The next three speak to the human characteristics of the FC:

The First Cause of human responsibility must be volitional.

The First Cause of human integrity must be truthful.

The First Cause of human love

These three only cover the positives of humanity. If we accept the blanket argument that the FC is a reflection of the charactaristics of it’s creation, then we cannot stop with the positives. We must continue on:

The FC of human violence must be filled with malace.
The FC of human hatred must be angry.
The FC of human greed must be selfish.

The list could go on and on… and much of it would be supported by verses in the Christian bible where the god of abraham kills over 2 million people through the course of the “good book”, is described as a jealous god, and we constantly hear about the “rath of God”.

The last ICR claim is the kicker:

The First Cause of life must be living.

That is akin to saying “the cause of death must be dead”. As we see in the physical world, many things cause something else that does not share the same property to itself. For example lets examine a fire buring from wood. The wood is the first cause and the fire is the life. Pretend for a moment that you are in a hypothetical world that cannot perceive the existance of wood, but you can perceive the flame and heat from the fire when the wood burns. Through your observations, you deduce that the flame seems to be coming out of nowhere, there fore the cause of the fire must be fire. The logic is full of holes. Things are not always as they seem:

ICR: Time, Space and Matter

April 22, 2009 in ICR Series | 1 comment

In the ICR “Time, Space and Matter” we encounter first a few of the flawed proofs I address in the two privious posts. After this, they continue with:

Many scientists today conduct their research based on their presupposition or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world—that which can be seen around us—and thus they do not accept that any ultimate Cause exists.

That is correct. However, ICR seeks to scew this position in order to later justify themselves as scientists. Objective science seeks to understand how the universe works without inserting an agenda. Science finds proof and presents it to speak for itself. Today there is no way to know how the bounds outside our physical universe operate. Scientists do not assume that nothing exists outside of the universe, however it does assume that nothing we know of exists outside of or acts upon our physical universe. There simply is no evidence to suggest there is an outside force manipulating the physical universe and we have no way to go outside of it to look. Therefor, science says “we don’t know until we know” and leaves it at that. Religion comes along and fills in the gaps with a supernatural being without evidence. let’s continue…

Scientists at ICR hold to the presupposition that the “uncaused First Cause” is the Creator who exists outside of the physical creation He made. Time is not eternal, but created. To ask what happened in time before time was created is to create a false paradox without meaning. There was no “before” prior to the creation of the triune universe of time, space, and mass/energy.

A true scientist does not hold presuppositions. Scientists have “givens” (things that have been previously scientifically proven as true) and conduct observations and experiements to find the answer to the one “not given” in an equation or question. “Physicists have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. In their quest for deeper theories of the universe, some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception.1” In A Brief History of Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect upon the present time-frame. Einstein presented the argument that space and time are entangled as space-time. Time is just one of 13+ dimensions of the universe that we can perceieve.

Finally, the proof takes a giant leap without proof:

Yet even more amazing (and the universe is amazing) is the historic fact that the Creator-God, after purposefully creating the time-space-matter universe, chose to enter it in the God-human person of Jesus Christ—for the sole purpose of providing a means by which humanity could have a personal relationship with the Creator.

1. Just because something is amazing does not default it to unknowable. We used to worship the sun and moon because they were amazing and mysterious to us.

2. Jumping from saying there must have been a “First Cause” to saying that we know for a fact that that first cause PURPOSEFULLY started the universe, still cares about it, is a MALE, and wants to have a personal relationship with the one species out of trillions on a tiny planet out of billions in a tiny solar system out of billions is a very LARGE assumption to be making without repeatable evidence.

Let’s visit Flatland with Dr. Quantum to get an idea of how dimensions like space-time can be limiting on the human perception and may just be an illusion:

ICR: The Effect Problem

April 21, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

Here is the arguement of the Effect Problem:

1. There is no new mass/energy coming into existence anywhere in the universe, and every bit of that original mass/energy is still here.

2. Every time something happens (an event takes place), some of the energy becomes unavailable.

The First Law tells us that matter (mass/energy) can be changed, but can neither be created nor destroyed. The Second Law tells us that all phenomena (mass/energy) continually proceed to lower levels of usefulness.

In simple terms, every cause must be at least as great as the effect that it produces—and will, in reality, produce an effect that is less than the cause. That is, any effect must have a greater cause.

When this universal law is traced backwards, one is faced again with the possibility that there is an ongoing chain of ever-decreasing effects, resulting from an infinite chain of nonprimary ever-increasing causes. However, what appears more probable is the existence of an uncaused Source, an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and Primary, First Cause.

Yet again, they jump from provable science Laws to labeling that which set the physical universe in motion. In the “Everything Has a cause” proof, they deduced that there is only two answers to the problem of causality. In this proof, they jump from saying there is only two choices to saying ‘they obvious choice is a singular First Cause’. Saying that there is an ever-decreasing chain of effects since the beginning of the universe tells you nothing about HOW it was caused. That simply tells you how much energy it had when it began and the rate of decay of energy in the system. Just because we cannot wrap our minds around how the universe started does not default it to being an “omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and Primary First Cause.”

To quote Dawkins in “The God Delusion“:

Omniscience and onmipotence are mutually incompatable. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history (miracles, answered prayers) using his onmipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

ICR: Everything Has A Cause

April 20, 2009 in ICR Series | No comments

This is the first in a series of posts addressing the issues with Institute for Creation Research (ICR) “proofs” offered on their website. This post deals with the “Everything Has a Cause” proof.

The line of reasoning they offer is very short and in a nutshell, they argue that because everything has a cause (cause and effect), all that exists harkens back to the “First Cause”.

Eventually, we must face the question of the original cause—and uncaused First Cause. … Science in the modern sense would be altogether impossible if cause and effect should cease.

At this point, they are logically correct and in line with science. So far what we have been able to assertain through scientific research is that the big bang was a singularity where all the energy and matter in our universe today that comprises all the elements, dark matter, solar systems and tiny planets like earth were all compacted into that singularity. Science so far has not been able to answer the question of what came before that singularity “burst” into our expanding universe. This is where they go awry:

This law inevitably leads to a choice between two alternatives: (1) an infinite chain of nonprimary causes (nothing ultimately responsible for all observable causes and effects); or (2) an uncaused primary Cause of all causes (the One absolute Cause that initiated everything).

Basically they are saying that either one thing caused the big bang or the universe is perpetual and no one thing caused the universe to be set in motion. What they do not provide is how we get from saying we know the universe had a starting point to saying there are only two options for its beginning.

Why does the law of causality lead to a choice between only two alternatives? There could be multiple events or things that caused the universe to begin, not just one. It is possible that whatever caused the universe no longer exists or perished in the prosess of the birth of the universe. It is also probably that outside of our physical universe bound by certain laws of physics and causality, these laws do not hold true or other laws might exist. There are many more probably theories on what existed before the start of the universe:

Hartle–Hawking state
Brane cosmology
Chaotic Inflation theory
Mulitverse

There is currently no way of knowing that which is outside of our physical universe and how the “outside” operates. Also, conjuring up causality and then saying “here are your only two possibilities” does not defunct the answer to the option that offers singularity.