Showing posts with label reasons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reasons. Show all posts

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Inconsistent Foundations

I wrote in my last post how a newly popular Christian apologetic argument is claiming that God is needed as a foundation for logic. I was trying to classify the argument and the best I could come up with is simply a bundle of talking points I’ll label the Foundation Arguments. What strikes me as particularly fallacious about each example of this type of reasoning is that they clearly don’t take into account the entirety of the deity they argue for. Let’s go over a few.

God is needed as a foundation for logic.

And yet God, as many Christians define him, is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal--qualities that break logic in several different ways. Examples follow.
  • An omnipotent God can’t both make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift and then lift said stone.
  • An omniscient God can’t know what is it like to learn considering he has always known all, yet he must know what it is like to learn in order to know all. 
  • An omnipotent God can, by definition, commit suicide; yet an eternal God, by definition, cannot die.
I've heard excuses for all these and they all suck. The closest a logical deity can get is mostly powerful (quasipotent?) and mostly knowledgeable (quasiscient?)

God is needed as a foundation for morality.

And yet God, as many Christians define him, violates his alleged good nature regularly in both their holy book and day-to-day life. The lives taken by Yahweh/Jehovah in the Torah/Bible include almost everyone on earth at one point. He is a vengeful, jealous being who allows for cruel and unusual punishment. Outside of myth, Christians must accept that God either causes or allows asymmetrical suffering for every form of life.

God is needed as a foundation for beauty.

And yet ugly things exist. If God is responsible for desirable aesthetics, he is also responsible for the undesirable. Reality isn’t all sunsets and kittens, we also have excrement and maggots.