The deceptive first premise of Kalam

To recapitulate the Kalam cosmological argument, it goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the Universe has a cause.

One of the major problems with the first premise is that it's deceptively ambiguous. Especially William Lane Craig is infamous for using this ambiguousness to resort to equivocation fallacies in order to defend the first premise.

The first premise is ambiguous because it doesn't specify what kind of "begins to exist" it's talking about. It implies, but doesn't unambiguously state, that it's talking about creation ex nihilo (in other words, out-of-nothing, ie. first there's nothing, then something appears.)

Assuming creation ex nihilo is unfounded because we have exactly zero examples of this. We cannot corroborate that it happens, and even if it happens, if it has a cause, and even if it has a cause, what that cause might be. Simply assuming that it happens and, especially, that it must have a cause, is completely faulty logic. "It makes sense" is not a valid argument for this.

However, when people like Craig try to defend it, they will switch to the other meaning of "begins to exist", which is the more abstract version, ie. energy/matter transforming from one form to another (in other words, for example a table "begins to exist" when the carpenter builds it.)

This is not a distortion or misinterpretation of what, for example, Craig does. This is exactly his argument. In a video, when responding to the objections to the first premise, he directly states things like "didn't dinosaurs begin to exist? Didn't I began to exist?" and then proceeds to belittle the people who present the objection.

Determining the cause for events

When faced with claims of extraordinary events (such as psychic phenomena or miracles), there are, roughly speaking, two steps to be performed to determine their veracity:

1. Corroborating that the event actually happens.
2. Determining the cause for that event.

These are two very important steps. Jumping directly to the second step is rather moot if the first step has not been corroborated. After all, if the event isn't actually happening at all, trying to discover its cause is a wild goose chase.

The second step is also extremely important, and it's the step that most of these people want to skip. They will spend enormous amounts of time and effort to convince themselves and other people that the extraordinary event is indeed happening... and then just jump to their preferred conclusion, without even attempting to corroborate if that's the true cause.

For example, many believers will spend lots of time trying to convince people that miracle healings do indeed happen. They then just jump to God.

This is, of course, flawed reasoning. Even if the event were really happening, that still doesn't tell us what causes it. That would have to be determined before we can draw any conclusions.

(Of course it doesn't help much that all such extraordinary claims fail miserably even step 1.)

"Anti-supernaturalism"

Some Christian pseudophilosophers accuse scientists and skeptics for being "naturalists" and "anti-supernaturalists." In other words, they accuse them of having the bias and preconception that only the physical exists, and every single phenomenon must have a physical, natural explanation, and that supernatural explanations are rejected outright, without consideration and as a matter of principle.

While extreme naturalists (ie. those who really and honestly think like that, and who willfully reject even the possibility of the existence of the supernatural) are a relative minority of all scientists and skeptics (the majority of them not rejecting the supernatural outright, but considering naturalism as the default position until otherwise demonstrated), even extreme naturalism is quite justified. A lot more justified than the opposite.

The reason for this is that naturalism just outright works, and gives real, tangible results that have a real effect on the real world, and has been so for millenia, while supernaturalism has an abysmal record on this.

Every single step in our technological and medical progress, every single discovery, every single advance in both real-world useful knowledge and in practical applications, has been a pure product of naturalism. In other words, of studying the physical world, finding out how it works, and applying that knowledge to affect our surroundings.

And not only has every single such step been thanks to naturalism, it has been extremely efficient at it. We make more progress via naturalist techniques and approaches in one year than supernaturalism has done in thousands of years.

Supernaturalism is just useless for anything tangible. Our knowledge has not advanced thanks to it, our technology has not advanced thanks to it, our medicine has not advanced thanks to it... in fact, nothing of real tangible value has advanced thanks to supernaturalism. Supernaturalism has not contributed in any way, shape or form to our current level of progress. The only things that supernaturalism has affected are fuzzy abstract notions, opinions, behaviors, feelings and personal subjective experiences. None of which has actually helped progress, nor can be demonstrated to be actually caused by anything supernatural.

So why exactly should one believe in the supernatural? Not only is pure naturalism a good and pragmatic choice, it's the only rational choice.

The "God vs. science" false dichotomy

There seems to be a rather curious deeply-ingrained notion among many of the most fundamentalist Christians and creationists that whatever science cannot explain, God is somehow automatically a valid default answer.

Many of them will spend countless hours trying to discredit science and find holes in it, belittling it, denigrating it and mocking it. Once they find a hole that science cannot currently explain, or the explanation is too esoteric for the average layman to understand, they will cling to it like rabid dogs.

Somehow they have this notion that they can fill these gaps with God. In fact, they often talk like God would be somehow automatically the default valid, and only, alternative. Therefore, if you succeed in "disproving" some aspect of science, you have (they think) automatically proven the existence of God.

This is just an outright false dichotomy. Even if there is something that science can't explain, even if it's something that science will never be able to explain (for example because of our limited resources and the fact that we are bound by physical laws), that doesn't somehow automatically give credence to the existence of a god. It simply means that we don't know, and that's it.

And this isn't even going into the fact that even if we entertained the god hypothesis, we would still know absolutely nothing about this god. These Christians always jump from "the god explanation" to "the God of Christianity", as if that would be a completely sensible and valid thing to do.

This can be really blatant sometimes. I was once engaged in an online conversation with a Christian, and the subject was precisely this. When I asked how can we know anything about this hypothetical god, he literally started quoting the Bible, as if that were the completely natural and logical thing to do.

Another form of Christian insincerity

Most Christians oppose gay marriage and gay adoption rights because of their scriptures (and the most prevalent Christian theology that's taught by most denominations.) Not only that, but a good portion of them not only oppose those things, they moreover think that if a country were to accept and legalize them, bad things would happen because that would "anger God."

Of course in most civilized countries, especially in Europe, they can't just go to a government representative and say that. It would be simply ignored as a religious dogma that has no bearing on what the government should do. Therefore these Christians have to come up with some alternative, secular reasons, why gays shouldn't get these rights.

This is another form of insincerity by Christians. Everybody knows the real reason why they oppose equal gay marriage rights, but they have to come up with excuses to circumvent those reasons and invent more "plausible" reasons to protest.

This, in turn, causes them to engage in even more insincerity and distortion. The most common excuse they come up with is "the rights of children to have a mother and a father." They completely ignore the studies that have been made on the subject (whose result has been that there's no significant difference between heterosexual and homosexual parents with regard to the wellbeing of a child), and oftentimes they outright fabricate "thousands of studies" that show the opposite. (Don't hold your breath waiting for them to give the thousands of references. They don't exist.)

When you bring forth the most obvious flaw in their argument, they immediately engage in double-think. In other words, if their argument is that "children have the right to a mother and a father", that would mean that single parents should have no rights to their own children (in the same way as homosexual couples should have no rights to get children.) I have had a Christian literally answer to me along the lines of: "What do you mean? Of course they have rights to their own children!" Seemingly this Christian was completely incapable of seeing the connection between the two arguments, which would have shown a big flaw in his.

It seems to me that most Christians are just repeating this argument like a mantra, without even understanding what they are saying.

Conspiracy theories are religions

I may have mentioned some of this in an earlier blog post, but I find it very interesting how strikingly similar conspiracy theories are to religions. They may not be theistic religions and they may not deal with the supernatural, but otherwise they present most of the same phenomena that religions do.

Many of the people who have converted into them feel the urge to convert others, which is extremely typical of religion. In fact, in some places (especially the United States) conspiracy theorists are more organized, louder and more intrusive than most religions are. They will preach to people on the streets, distribute pamphlets, books and videos, they will go on radio and TV shows, they will organize protests, marches, ad campaigns and so on. They are also strikingly similar to creationists in how they present their arguments, the kinds of argumentative fallacies they use, and what their opinions are about science and the scientific community.

In fact, creationists are not the only striking parallel. Such parallels can be found with many other extremist cults such as scientologists and some of the most extreme denominations of Christianity and other religions, such as the Westboro Baptist Church.

Individual conspiracy theorists will also show striking resemblance to the most avowed religious people. Many times when you watch them eg. on TV shows, interviews, discussion panels and so on, you can clearly see the outright fervor and passion they have for it. (One particular example was outright hilarious. It was a TV show discussing the 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the guests were two of the authors of one of the most popular "documentaries" on the subject, and two people from Popular Mechanics. While the latter two remained completely calm, collected and civil throughout the entire debate, the two conspiracy theorists had really difficult time collecting themselves. They were constantly shaking their heads and clearly showing extreme frustration, so bad in fact that they seemed to have difficulties remaining seated. You could outright see their blatant religious fervor. It was quite amusing to watch.)

It's curious how conspiracy theories seem to have gained enormous popularity during the past decade or so. Before that they were just fringe phenomena believed by an extremely small minority, who were mostly regarded as silly and deluded (if not outright lunatic) by the rest of the population. And this is not just with conspiracy theories that have popped up during the last decade. For example the Moon landing hoax theories have existed since at least the 80's but didn't gain any kind of widespread popularity until well into the 2000's.

One could say that conspiracy theories are one of the fastest-growing religions in the modern world.

I believe that the main reason for this is the popularization and wide availability of the internet, as well as the progress in technology, which has allowed basically anybody to create writings and videos and publish them for the entire world to see. Back in the 80's and long into the 90's only an extremely small portion of the population could ever hope to be able to create such a work and make it widely available. The most that people could hope to achieve was to write a book, which would then usually have a ridiculously small circulation and would mostly be forgotten.

For the past ten years or so, however, anybody can create online "books" and videos with little to no money, using free and cheap tools that were only available for the rich in the past, and with a cheap channel to distribute their work for basically the entire world (which in the past would have required enormous amounts of money.) This has therefore created an outlet for this religion to spread, causing an avalanche effect: The more people read or see about it, the more they will spread the word to others, and so on.

While conspiracy theories resemble in many regards religions, the reason why people believe in them might be slightly different. Most religions appeal to the innate beliefs that people have about their own spirituality (in other words, the instinct that most people have that their consciousness exists independent of their body, that it's separate from it, and that the body is just a conduit that the consciousness uses to interact with the physical world.) They appeal to the worry that people have about what happens to their consciousness when they die.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, excite peoples imaginations and their sense of self-importance. They entice people with the prospect of knowing more than others, with being part of a knowledgeable group that's "in the loop" so to speak, that know the innermost secrets of the governments and other organizations they consider shady. It's also a form of pseudointellectualism: It gives them the feeling that they have a special form of knowledge that most other people don't have. On a different tangent, conspiracy theories also appeal to the fear people have of being deceived (which is highly ironic given how deceitful conspiracy theories are.)

The two most common excuses for God

Imagine a father who has a child under his care. The father has plenty of food and absolutely no impediment or reason to not take care of his child. Regardless, he just lets the child die of starvation, while simply watching by while the child is withering away, crying and pleading for help. Any sane person would consider this father to be either mentally ill or extremely wicked. Any sane person would certainly agree that this person should be either locked away in a mental institution, or prosecuted for his crime. This is, after all, a perfect example of criminal negligence.

Or imagine another scenario: A father simply watches by while his child is being raped, tortured and beaten to death. The father has no impediment or reason to not interfere and try to help or, at the very least, call a police officer to help. The father sees every gruesome detail of this act, but does nothing to help, not even if his child is asking him directly to help. Again, any sane person would certainly agree that this father is either mentally ill or completely evil, and should be prosecuted appropriately.

A third scenario: A father locks his child in a torture cellar he himself built, and tortures that child for the rest of his life, and the reason he does this is because the child didn't love him enough. Any sane person would again agree that this father is a monster and belongs in a mental institution.

Now consider that according to Christian beliefs, God is doing this all the time: He simply watches people, his own creation, his own "children", starving to death, being raped, tortured and killed, being mutilated by disease and natural catastrophes... and does absolutely nothing to help, even though he's all-powerful and could most certainly do so. Not even if those victims are pleading for help directly from him.

What's worse, not only does God refuse to help those in need, according to Christian theology he will send them to hell to be tortured with indescribable torment for all eternity if they don't love him in the right way.

When you present these problems to Christians, all kinds of excuses will suddenly pop up to defend their god (even if they otherwise would agree with those scenarios I presented above.) It's actually quite ridiculous the lengths to which they are ready to go to defend their own theology.

By far the two most common excuses are "free will" and "Jesus died for us." Yet both of these are complete and absolute non-explanations and make absolutely no sense.

Imagine that the father in the scenarios above is on trial for his crime, and he presents the excuse that he "didn't want to interfere with the rapist's free will." Would any sane person consider that as a valid excuse and exonerate him from his negligence? Of course not. That would be one of the stupidest reasons ever given for not helping those in need.

Or imagine that he presented an excuse like: "But I already helped! I allowed my previous son to die to appease myself, so that my other children would be saved!" Again, any sane person would consider this to be an outright insane argument, and would certainly not absolve the father.

Yet Christians are constantly using these two excuses to absolve their god for his criminal negligence, and they do it with full conviction that these are valid and perfect explanations. And they are so obstinate about them that no matter how you try to point out how nonsensical the explanations are, they will keep repeating them over and over, as if that would somehow make everything alright.

And they have the audacity of claiming that God condemning people to hell for all eternity is the people's fault because it's their "choice." The "it's your choice" argument is one of the most obnoxious ones ever presented. It's basically a sadistic choice. It's exactly the same as if the father told his child "either you love me, or I will torture you in my cellar which I built for that exact purpose, your choice." Again, any sane person would agree that such a person would be a mentally ill monster that should be locked away. Except if he's God, apparently.