Theology and fallacy

OK then, you know how I said that it wouldn’t be so long until my next post? Well it wasn’t. Except that I kinda forgot to post the damn thing. So I updated it a little, and here’s the thing you should’ve had several weeks ago. You should get today’s thing tomorrow.

OK then. In any theological discussion, a lot of time and effort goes towards deciding whether or not God exists. Some Catholic saint came up with five ways of proving that He did. So because I want to prove that I’m smarter than any mere world famous brilliant philosopher-saint, I came up with six. Granted, mine are all horribly flawed as actual reasons for believing, so they’re closer to logic puzzles than actual proof. But hideously flawed logic is the best kind! So, in rough order from least to most logical:

1: The argument from motion.

It is, quite obviously, totally impossible to move. Because before you can move any given distance, you must first move half that distance. But before you can move half the distance, you have to move a quarter of that distance. Following this reasoning to its logical conclusion reveals two things: Firstly, for even the most infinitesimal movement an infinite chain of actions must first be performed – one must first move a half, a quarter, and eighth, and so on. So clearly, you will never actually reach a point where you’re actually moving the desired amount – no matter how small that amount. Secondly, there is no first distance – any distance you move can be divided in half, and so if not the first action that must be performed on the infinite journey over to the fridge in the next room. So there is no first action on your journey. Since it is quite clear that it’s impossible to start something without having something to start with, that means that not only can you never get to a point where  you’ve finished your movement, you can never even begin it. But quite clearly, it is indeed possible to move. The only explanation is some kind of interference that allows us to break the strict laws of logic. But any being that is capable of breaking the laws of logic must be omnipotent – and thus, we must conclude that it is God.

OK, before I move onto the second way, I thought you might have wanted a brief account of my reaction on first seeing and advertisement for the Fifty Shades of Grey books: ‘Oh hey, that looks interesting. The title sounds good, and I have a mask just like the one on that cover. I’ll look it up on Amazon whn I get home… OK then, I’m home now. So let’s see what this series is… Oh God my eyes. Why, why?’

I don’t have anything against the books, but it would be nice if they were a bit more obvious about the subject.

2: The argument from infinity.

There are three possible explanations for the universe. Either it was created, or it is part of in infinit chain of events, or it has always exited. If it was created, this is generally considered sufficient to establish the existence of a God, thanks to Occam’s razor. If either of the other explanations are true, then the universe is infinite in four dimensions. Since it is not a complete impossibility that a being should come to exist with enough of the characteristics of God to be referred to as such, it is a logical certainty that such a being should have, at some point in the past, come to exist. Thus, whatever explanation for the Universe is chose, we end up with God.

Have you ever wondered why I write this blog. One reason is so I can randomly talk about stuff that I’m sure noone else would be interested in in speech, without forcing other people to listen to me.  So I write it all down and publish it somewhere out of the way…

That was a little depressing. Onto number 3:

3: The argument from knowledge.

Omniscience is not an impossibility – by which I mean that there is nothing that it is totally impossible to know. But if nothing is impossible to know, then were there anything that it were possible to know which was not known, then it would be possible to know that the thing which was not known was true but not known. But it is impossible to know that something is true but not known without knowing that it is true – in which case it is known. So it is a logical impossibility to know that something is true but not known, so if everything is knowable, then everything must be known. Occam’s razor says that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity, so it is clear that the simplest way of fulfilling this knowledge is by a single omniscient entity, which we may call God.

OK then, I’m kinda running out of things to say in the breaks between incredibly fallacious arguments so I’m going to have to give you number four whilst I think about what else to say.

4: The argument from omnipotence

God is defined as an omnipotent being. That means that He should be able to do anything. Which means that He should be able to create Himself from nothing. So… yeah. Not sure what more I can say.

Blast, that one wasn’t nearly long enough. I swear, these just keep getting shorter. There must be something interesting I can talk about. Hmmm… I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you about my memory problems. Seriously, I once forgot to breathe.

5: The argument from contradiction.

Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time. As everyone knows. So we can say that either God exists, or Schrodinger’s cat is alive. That’s perfectly true, since Schrodinger’s cat is alive, so the statement is true regardless of God’s existence. But Schrodinger’s cat is dead. So we now have two completely true statements – Schrodinger’s cat is dead, and either Schrodinger’s cat is alive, or God exists. From those two statements, the conclusion is clear – God must logically exist.

Now, it would be perfectly possible to object to the use of Schrodinger’s cat in that argument. Since I wouldn’t want to make things too easy for you, you can replace ‘Schrodinger’s cat is dead and alive,’ with ‘light is a wave and a particle’, or even the lesser known cousin of ‘this statement is a lie’, ‘this statement is true’ – which is clearly both true and false simultaneously.

Back to my memory problems. I’ve actually done the ‘forgetting to breathe thing’ more than once. Though I’ve never actually quite managed to actually pass out. So the point is, you should totally forgive me for forgetting to post this. And now let’s do number six. This one gets long, and is a bit tricky to explain.

6: The argument from logic.

Let us take, ‘if, then’ statements – statements like ‘If it rains, then I’m going to wear a coat’. Clearly, if the statement is true or not is totally dependent on the ‘if’ part – if the if part isn’t true, then you can’t say anything about the statement as a whole, regardless of the truth of the ‘then’ part of the statement. For example, the statement ‘if it is green then it is a lizard’ cannot be disproved by finding something red, regardless of whether or not the red thing is a lizard. Similarly, the statement ‘if the sky is green, then the sky is green’ is absolutely true, regardless of the actual colour of the sky. Thus, the way to determine whether or not an ‘if, then’ statement is deductively true is to say ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part necessarily follow from it?’ If it does, then the statement is necessarily true, regardless of whether or not the ‘if’ part of the statement is actually true. So let us take the statement ‘if this statement is true, then God exists.’ Following the steps outlined above, regardless of the actual truth value of the ‘if’ part of the statement, we can determine the truth value of the entire statement by saying, ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part follow from it?’ So if the statement ‘if this statement is true then God exists’ is true (which is what is stated in the ‘if’ part of the statement), does it follow that God exists? Clearly, it does. Which means that the entire statement is true. But then it follows that the statement that the statement is true is true. Which means that the ‘if’ part of the statement (if this statement is true) is true, and that if the if part is true, then the then part follows from it. Thus, by saying ‘if this statement is true then God exists’, we can logically show that God must exist. So did I explain that one OK?

Right then. Six ways of proving that God exists. Or that logic doesn’t work. Whichever. And because I don’t like the idea of posting two things today, I’ll post the thing I was going to post today tomorrow. Or I’ll forget. It’s about 50/50 really.