Atheism is Logically Self-Defeating?
Matthew S, a 911 dispatcher in Kansas, writes:
I am going to make the claim that we can only dream up things that are something that exists. We have to have stimulus to regurgitate it. Well, obviously this is not true because I just thought of a Pink Elephant in my head. Actually, I am taking the idea of Elephant and the idea of Pink and putting them together, I am Re-membering the parts together, imagination just puts thinks together that don't exist together.
Ok, so now if God doesn't exist how does the idea of God exist? The idea, infinite and omnipotent, are beyond the human experiencing and thus cannot be remembered or dreamed up. Sooooooooo, they must have been placed in the mind by something that can fathom being infinite and omnipotent, hmmmm, sounds like God to me.
Matthew doesn't seem to understand the concept of "abstraction." I have an my head the idea of a perfect circle. Have I ever experienced one? No. Does one exist in nature? No. Well, if I can only have ideas of things that exist, where did I get the idea of a perfect circle? Perhaps a perfect circle put it in my mind?
I also have in my head the idea of "2." Have I ever experienced "2"? I've experienced 2 apples and 2 people, but never "2" is isolation of anything else. There is no "2" in nature, just "2" of something. So how did I get the idea in my head?
The answer here is simple: abstraction. We are capable of taking things we do experience and abstracting them in our minds into more general or extreme categories. Experiencing imperfect circles allows me to create the concept of a perfect circle. Experiencing 2 of this and 2 of that allows me to create the concept of "2" that is independent of any objects. Language is itself a series of abstractions from real-world objects. The fact that we are capable of abstracting from our experience of people to disembodied people and then to perfect disembodied beings, renders Matthew's argument invalid. Indeed, he's created an entire argument out of a known logical fallacy.
Ok, so someone will object and say, "That is just a short circuit in the software, like the blue screen of death on your Window's PC." Well, then why don't people think of God and then fall over dead, why do people never connected to each other become able to understand at a finite level these concepts beyond them and why do people come up with comparable ideas in seperate places at seperate times uninfluenced by each other?
Instead of making up fake objections that are easy for him to knock down, why didn't Matthew take the time and trouble to actually ask someone what they thought of his argument? This is another logical fallacy: straw man argument. It's invalid to create a caricature of your opponent's position (or just make up their position on your own and then attribute it to them) in order to have something easier to argue against.
Comments
>Ok, so now if God doesn’t exist how does the idea of God exist? The idea, infinite and omnipotent, are beyond the human experiencing and thus cannot be remembered or dreamed up.
Matt provides the example of the pink elephant. And you incorporate, correctly, abstraction. “Pink elephant” is an abstraction, because it takes what we know and puts it into a form that is not what we know. There are no pink elephants in nature–but we can imagine them.
According to Matt, infinite and omnipotent represent the unknown on some other level than “pink elephant”–but they’re not on another level. I’ve never seen “infinite” and I’ve never seen a “pink elephant”–how are they different?
“Infinite” is merely a measure of X. Like your example of “2″–”infinite” has no meaning as an abstraction–it only has meaning with regard to X. Infinite “time” or infinite “water”–it’s a measure–an amount. An endless amount–but not something for which I have no reference. I have a reference for “measures” of X. For time, I have “years.” I can then extrapolite 10,000 years (which I haven’t experienced, but can absolutely imagine), and I can imagine a scenario where every 10,000 years, another 10,000 are added…forever. That’s infinity. It’s simply measure piled atop measure, piled atop measure, etc. Pi is a perfect example of infinity that we are familiar with. Anyone who has ever calculated Pi understands after just a few minutes…”OH…the threes will never stop!” That’s infinity, isn’t it?
Omnipotence is the same way–it’s a measure of power. However, with regard to omnipotence, I am not certain that anyone really _can_ imagine it–as I have never met anyone who has been able to provide a defition of omnipotence that actually works.
Can god make that rock so big he can’t lift it? Sure, I can say that omnipotence is “all powerful”–but what is all powerful if my own all-powerfulness then appears to impose limits on my ability to limit myself? If I can’t limit myself–can I say I have all power to do anything? Or is omnipotence only ever conditional? And if so–is there really any omnipotence?
With regard to Matt’s claim. I’d want to know how he circumvents the limitations that omnipotence necessarily imposes upon the omnipotent entity–in order to see if he actually _can_ imagine an omnipotent being.
With regard to infinity–I’d like to know how he circumvents the idea that it’s just an abstraction of something we all area already familiar with: measurements.
I don’t see this as problematic at all.
Either Matthew is a student of Descartes, or he came up with this idea independently, but it does somewhat resemble Descartes’ “proof.”
Of course, Descartes’ version is somewhat more sophisticated, but not by much.
God, in dream or imagination, is Daddy, Priest, King, writ large