Is the god of the gaps a sound argument?

[Difflugia]

But a intelligent engineer can preset the dials to get the results that he wants.

An "intelligent designer" in the way Christian apologists define one can do anything at all. It's taking "I don't know" and assigning it to a god. Like I said, if you don't understand why that's insufficient, I'll start a new topic.

Do what you gotta do.

A number of posters, particularly in the Science and Religion forum, repeatedly offer what they think are arguments against scientific principles and present them as evidence for their particular conception of a god. This is informally known as "the god of the gaps."

Is the god of the gaps argument logically sound? If not, what changes must be made to such an argument to rescue it?

[Difflugia]

The super short answer is because we know that magicians are real and they sometimes pull rabbits out of hats.

This sounds like you are faulting an argument for the existence of X because we don’t know already that X exists. The argument is the evidence.

I fault the argument because it's either an extraordinarily weak argument or it tries to smuggle in the premise that X already exists.

If it's an argument for the existence of X, then the evidence is that we don't have another explanation, so it might be X. That's true as far as it goes, but it's also competing with every other purely hypothetical explanation. If one is claiming "best explanation" for X and the argument is the only evidence, then it's competing with an infinite space of other explanations for which our only evidence is an argument.

The space of things that already know exist, though, like magicians, is much smaller. We already know that magicians are the explanation in many similar circumstances, so there's a high likelihood that it's the explanation when a rabbit is pulled from a hat. It's still possible that the actual explanation is one of the infinite other possibilities for which we only have the argument, like gods, but probably not.

Pardon the pun, but this is where the argument uses a bit of sleight of hand to introduce Paley's Watchmaker, or perhaps Paley's Magician. By equating gods with watchmakers, we implicitly give the gods the benefit of the same amount of existence that watchmakers have. If we find a watch, it was probably made by a watchmaker. If a rabbit was pulled out of a hat, it was probably pulled by a magician. These happen all the time whether we argue for them or not. The evidence for gods, though, is still just the argument.

I think this misunderstands the flow of many arguments for God’s existence. Take Craig’s KCA, for example. The argument (if sound) leads to something existing that is immaterial, personal, etc., which is building out the definition that we give the term of ‘God’.

First, your parenthetical "if sound" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Even if Craig's syllogism is logically sound, he's loading things into the premises that not only do we not know are true, I'm not even sure there's a good argument for them being true. "All men are blue and Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates was blue," is logically sound if we accept the premises as true. There's a little more work that needs to be done, though, before we can actually conclude that Socrates was indeed blue.

Second, "immaterial, personal, etc." don't follow from Craig's syllogism. He claims these in his apologetic work as though they somehow logically follow, but as far as I can tell, he simply asserts them.

And there is a way to disprove this argument, so it’s not meaningless.

I'm all ears.

[The Tanager]

I fault the argument because it's either an extraordinarily weak argument or it tries to smuggle in the premise that X already exists.

Those are good reasons, but that’s different from what you originally wrote. You said appealing to an omnipotent god (with no caveats) is no explanation, not appealing to an omnipotent god (with the caveats of) if the argument is weak or smuggles in a premise that X already exists.

If it's an argument for the existence of X, then the evidence is that we don't have another explanation, so it might be X. That's true as far as it goes, but it's also competing with every other purely hypothetical explanation. If one is claiming "best explanation" for X and the argument is the only evidence, then it's competing with an infinite space of other explanations for which our only evidence is an argument.

Then you can believe nothing in reality beyond definitions and pure mathematics. Everything rests on arguments amidst competing explanations.

First, your parenthetical "if sound" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Even if Craig's syllogism is logically sound, he's loading things into the premises that not only do we not know are true, I'm not even sure there's a good argument for them being true. "All men are blue and Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates was blue," is logically sound if we accept the premises as true. There's a little more work that needs to be done, though, before we can actually conclude that Socrates was indeed blue.

Of course it comes down to if it’s actually sound or not, but you are messing up the terminology. Your example is logically valid, but the argument is not sound because at least one of the premises is false.

That’s different from what I was commenting on, though, which is that you’ve got the flow wrong. Arguments like the KCA do not start with a definition of God, but moves from observations, applies logical reasoning to them, and then fills out the definition of the cause until it is rightly associated with what we call a god.

Second, "immaterial, personal, etc." don't follow from Craig's syllogism. He claims these in his apologetic work as though they somehow logically follow, but as far as I can tell, he simply asserts them.

Have you explored his actual work? He very clearly doesn’t just assert them. For instance, he offers three separate arguments for the cause being personal.

And there is a way to disprove this argument, so it’s not meaningless.

I'm all ears.

To discuss how the KCA could be disproven? If you could show that alternative premises are more reasonable, then you could disprove the argument. You could show that things that do begin to exist do pop into existence uncaused. You could show that the universe is eternal. You could show that the cause must be impersonal. There are a ton of premises with alternatives that you could conceivably show are more reasonable.

[William]

[Replying to The Tanager in post #72]

If you could show that alternative premises are more reasonable, then you could disprove the argument.

Does Craig explore in his actual work, the alternative premise that all including the creator - are material (rather than immaterial) and that doing so need not dispense with the idea of either there being a creator or that we exist within a created thing?

What arguments does Craig present which show that an immaterial creator is "more reasonable"?

[Difflugia]

I fault the argument because it's either an extraordinarily weak argument or it tries to smuggle in the premise that X already exists.

Those are good reasons, but that’s different from what you originally wrote. You said appealing to an omnipotent god (with no caveats) is no explanation,

And I meant it. Appealing to an omnipotent god offers exactly no information about what happened.

not appealing to an omnipotent god (with the caveats of) if the argument is weak or smuggles in a premise that X already exists.

I was being charitable. What I should have said is that your statement didn't apply to the current discussion: "This sounds like you are faulting an argument for the existence of X because we don’t know already that X exists." The argument that we're talking about isn't that X exists, but that X is the explanation for something. If your X is an omnipotent god, then X is just a thing that can do anything. Whether X exists or not, appealing to X with no other premise than that X can do anything doesn't actually give us any information about what happened. If X can do anything, there's no experimental filter that can ever rule X out.

As I noted, saying that magicians exist was an oversimplification. In my expansion, I said that magicians are the opposite of the above. We know what the limitations of magicians are, so we can begin experimentally filtering for magicians.

Even if an omnipotent god exists, the only information that the claim that such a god did something is that we can't think of another explanation. Whether an omnipotent god exists or not, "God did it" is identically equal to "I don't know."

If one is claiming "best explanation" for X and the argument is the only evidence, then it's competing with an infinite space of other explanations for which our only evidence is an argument.

Then you can believe nothing in reality beyond definitions and pure mathematics. Everything rests on arguments amidst competing explanations.

Depending on how you mean this, it might be trivially true. The reason that we can evaluate between different explanations is that we have evidence that allows us to place probabilistic weights on different explanations. Positing an omnipotent being with no other evidence that such a being exists puts it in the same tub as everything else without evidence that's competing on even ground with "I don't know." If we have evidence that some explanation has, say, a five percent chance of being right and the other 95% is everything we don't know about, there are still an infinite number of things we don't know about. That 95% chance that the explanation is in that "I don't know" bucket still means that any individual guess is an infinitessimal part of that space.

Your favorite way of saying "I don't know" might be "God," but that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.

Of course it comes down to if it’s actually sound or not, but you are messing up the terminology. Your example is logically valid, but the argument is not sound because at least one of the premises is false.

And if Craig's premises are all true, then his argument is sound. We don't know if they are. He asserts that they are, but I can just as validly assert that all men are blue.

That’s different from what I was commenting on, though, which is that you’ve got the flow wrong. Arguments like the KCA do not start with a definition of God, but moves from observations, applies logical reasoning to them, and then fills out the definition of the cause until it is rightly associated with what we call a god.

His syllogism gives us that if everything that begins to exist has a cause, then there's a cause. If that's a god, then his god may have nothing like agency. All he's got is a thing that causes universes. That may be an omnipotent, omniscient, immanent being that hates bacon and gay sex. We have no information either way, though, so there are an infinite number of competing causes, some self-aware, some not, some intelligent, some not. The only information we have is that it's a fundemental property of reality that nothing that begins to exist is uncaused and that's only because we've defined the problem that way.

Second, "immaterial, personal, etc." don't follow from Craig's syllogism. He claims these in his apologetic work as though they somehow logically follow, but as far as I can tell, he simply asserts them.

Have you explored his actual work?

Yes.

He very clearly doesn’t just assert them. For instance, he offers three separate arguments for the cause being personal.

He makes many arguments for his favorite god, but none of them follow from his syllogism. Assuming his premises are true, the KCA gets him a cause. He has various other arguments for why the explanation for the universe must be a mind, why it must be personal, and why it must be moral, but they all require different sets of premises than the KCA. His assertion that the answer to the Leibniz argument is the same answer as the one to the KCA, for example, is just his assertion that Leibniz' "explanation" is the "cause" from the KCA.

To discuss how the KCA could be disproven? If you could show that alternative premises are more reasonable, then you could disprove the argument.

That's not a high hurdle, but that's not what "disproven" means. If all I had to do were show that alternative premises were more reasonable, there would be no Christians.

Quantum events occur without apparent cause. They can't be predicted. A radioactive atom has a probability that it will decay in some particular time frame, but it may decay immediately or never. As far as we can tell, it's causeless. I have no particular reason to believe that the set of causeless changes in state possible within our reality doesn't include things beginning to exist.

Since it's not something we can test, however, we're still ultimately at "I don't know." Craig's god of the KCA is a god of the gaps.

You could show that things that do begin to exist do pop into existence uncaused.

That's been done. Uncaused vacuum fluctuations are a thing. Craig denies that they fit the bill because the vacuum within the universe is a "sea of fluctuating energy governed by physical laws and having a physical structure" (On Guard, p. 76). If Craig is claiming that a vacuum within our universe isn't enough nothing to say that vacuum fluctuations lack a cause, then the necessity of a cause is something that we cannot test, even in principle. What you suggest that I do is, according to Craig, impossible to do within our universe. He has guaranteed that a fundamental part of his argument relies on "I don't know" and I'm convinced that's exactly the reason he sees God.

You could show that the universe is eternal. You could show that the cause must be impersonal. There are a ton of premises with alternatives that you could conceivably show are more reasonable.

Define what you mean by "conceivably." I think you're being a little disingenuous here.

[Clownboat]

Then unbelievers have a built-in mechanism which closes them off to explanations that are beyond science and nature.

So now what?

False and demonstrably so. An unbeliever in one of our many available god concepts is not prevented from believing in ghost for example.

Once they become atheists, they will gain a mentality that promotes a closed mindedness to any given explanation beyond science and nature.

Again, so now what?

This has been demonstrated to be a false claim. Will you correct your thinking?

And no one is contesting that religious folks and nonreligious folks can be equally closed minded.

So, it's best that you simply drop the subject, because it ain't getting you anywhere.

Identifying a valid mechanism that would prevent a person from learning about evolution for example is relevant when discussing god of the gaps. This mechanism is an attempt to protect gaps for god concepts to be claimed to be involved.

I wish you knew how to debate. The above does not count.

It counts for/to me.

I didn't say it doesn't count for you. I said it doesn't count as debating. Please note the website you are on and the rules you agreed to.

If we were debating evolution, then sure..go for it.

But since we aren't, then you can have that conversation with someone who cares.

We are discussing the god of the gaps argument. Ignoring or being closed off to the fact of evolution allows a gap to be pretended to exist for a god concept to be inserted. You may not care, but it is on point here.

At the moment, I'm not interested in proving your religion (evolution), wrong.

This us just a week attempt to level the playing field. Evolution is not a religion and as I have mentioned many times now, I do not care if it were to be proven wrong. I would just want to learn what the better explanation is. In place of addressing this, you just pretend evolution is a religion and anyone that accepts it as the current best explanation is the same as a person that inserts a god concept as the explanation. They are obviously not the same and I trust the readers see this.

I am, however, interested in proving my religion (Christianity) right.

Neato! You have my attention.

I don't know your methodology, but when I want to establish the truth of something, strong evidence is welcomed.

You are not offering strong evidence though. You have strong feelings about the truth of something. You are pretending it seems that having strong feelings is strong evidence and this is not the case.

Maybe your methodology is different than mines, but hey.

Yup, I leave my 'feelings' out of my search for truths. Our methodologies are most certainly different.

What are you arguing?

Currently I am observing that religious beliefs can be a mechanism in order to close off one's mind for gaps to remain for their god concept to be inserted in.
For example, an unwillingness to learn about evolution leaves that gap open, or an unwillingness to note that people are not tied to evolution as they are to their religious beliefs or that evolution is not a religion.

I wish you were more openminded to learn about such things as it might prevent you from evil (IMO) statements like, "atheists have no moral accountability", but you do you. Do you think you would hold such positions about atheists if you were not religious or is it solely your religious belief that makes you say such a thing?

To say you missed the point, would be an understatement.

You made a vile statement about a group of people that currently don't accept any of the god explanations as being reasonable (even though you share in their beliefs when it comes to the gods, less one). Are you sure it is I that has missed the point? If so, please explain.

[RBD]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #1]

Any argument for or against God by science or logic is false. Those used against God are unbelief in God. Those used for God are unbelief in His words.

Because the God of the Bible declares He cannot be known by science, observation, or philosophy, then even the effort to prove He is God, is unbelief in His words saying He has made it impossible for any man to do so.

Therefore, if the God of teh Bible is the only true God, then any proof of a God by any other means than faith in His words, is proof of false gods alone.

This is what is meant by man not knowing God by wisdom nor sight nor knowledge alone, and any arguments about God by such things apart from His written words, is vain and decietful.

1Co 1:20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

Mar 8:16 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have no bread.

Luk 9:46 Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be greatest. And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child, and set him by him,

Any reasoning of man with himself and others, whether by science, sight, logic, or philosophy is apart from what God says of Himself, is foolish.

[Clownboat]

Any argument for or against God by science or logic is false.

Please show that you speak the truth.

Those used for God are unbelief in His words.

Please supply the words of this God for all of us to view.

Because the God of the Bible declares. He cannot be known by science, observation, or philosophy, then even the effort to prove He is God, is unbelief in His words saying He has made it impossible for any man to do so.

The same is said for most/all god concepts. This just seems to be justification for why religious followers of said gods cannot supply evidence that their god claims are true. Not only yours, but why are all the gods undetectable?

Therefore, if the God of teh Bible is the only true God,

Please show that this starting premise is true before we move on from it.

This is what is meant by man not knowing God by wisdom nor sight nor knowledge alone, and any arguments about God by such things apart from His written words, is vain and decietful.

Why do you say such things? If I had knowledge of a God, how would I not know about this God? This doesn't make sense. Can you clarify how having knowledge about something can equal not knowing the said thing?

<snipped Bible verses for not being authoritative here>

[SiNcE_1985]

False and demonstrably so. An unbeliever in one of our many available god concepts is not prevented from believing in ghost for example.

Yeah, and a belief in God doesn't prevent one from believing in evolution, for example.

This has been demonstrated to be a false claim. Will you correct your thinking?

You admitted that atheists can be closed minded, which is in agreement to my statement that "atheists can also be closed minded".

So, no correction needed.

Identifying a valid mechanism that would prevent a person from learning about evolution for example is relevant when discussing god of the gaps.

One can learn about evolution without accepting it...just like one can learn about Christianity, without accepting it.

This mechanism is an attempt to protect gaps for god concepts to be claimed to be involved.

?

I didn't say it doesn't count for you. I said it doesn't count as debating. Please note the website you are on and the rules you agreed to.

Opinions. Because I'm saying it counts as debating, to me.

We are discussing the god of the gaps argument. Ignoring or being closed off to the fact of evolution allows a gap to be pretended to exist for a god concept to be inserted. You may not care, but it is on point here.

Ignoring or being closed off to the fact of Christianity, allows a gap to be pretended to exist for naturalistic hypothesis to be inserted. You may not care, but it is on point here.

This us just a week attempt to level the playing field. Evolution is not a religion

Well lets see, it attempts to explain origins, and it is defended vigorously by those that believe it.

Sounds religiousy, to me.

and as I have mentioned many times now, I do not care if it were to be proven wrong.

Sure, that's what your fingertips say.

I would just want to learn what the better explanation is.

Jesus of Nazareth. Learn.

In place of addressing this, you just pretend evolution is a religion and anyone that accepts it as the current best explanation is the same as a person that inserts a god concept as the explanation. They are obviously not the same and I trust the readers see this.

Gotta give props to you here, because you've just nailed it. That is exactly where I'm coming from.

Neato! You have my attention.

Jesus of Nazareth.

You are not offering strong evidence though. You have strong feelings about the truth of something. You are pretending it seems that having strong feelings is strong evidence and this is not the case.

Just like you have strong feelings about evolution. Right back to religion, aren't we?

Currently I am observing that religious beliefs can be a mechanism in order to close off one's mind for gaps to remain for their god concept to be inserted in.
For example, an unwillingness to learn about evolution leaves that gap open, or an unwillingness to note that people are not tied to evolution as they are to their religious beliefs or that evolution is not a religion.

I know about evolution, but I reject it as fact.

You know about Christianity, but reject it as fact.

So, if I am closed minded, then so are you.

You made a vile statement about a group of people that currently don't accept any of the god explanations as being reasonable (even though you share in their beliefs when it comes to the gods, less one). Are you sure it is I that has missed the point? If so, please explain.

"atheists have no moral accountability".

This is the point of contention.^

Yeah, I said it, but I clarified what I meant by it...and you apparently misunderstood the meaning behind it.

You said that my religion gives me hope, when I stated that "justice is coming, even when a person gets away with due to failures in the judicial/legal system...the person does not get away with in God's system" (im paraphrasing myself).

My counterpoint to that is....on atheism, there is no moral accountability, on a cosmic scale...meaning that when if a person gets away with murder and is never caught, justice is never served.

But on Christianity, justice is served.

You called it a mere "hope" for the believer, but for the unbeliever, is also a mere hope...a hope of a lack of accountability beyond man's system.

That was my only point.

I have no desire to debate morality...just clarifying my point.

[The Tanager]

[Replying to The Tanager in post #72]

If you could show that alternative premises are more reasonable, then you could disprove the argument.

Does Craig explore in his actual work, the alternative premise that all including the creator - are material (rather than immaterial) and that doing so need not dispense with the idea of either there being a creator or that we exist within a created thing?

What arguments does Craig present which show that an immaterial creator is "more reasonable"?

Yes, the KCA addresses whether everything, including the creator is material and leads to the conclusion that this is not the case. To keep everything together, with some more initial conversations going on with Difflugia, and the benefit I see in taking things one step at a time, following the actual argument on this would require some patience. I would be honored if you allowed me that.

[The Tanager]

I was being charitable. What I should have said is that your statement didn't apply to the current discussion: "This sounds like you are faulting an argument for the existence of X because we don’t know already that X exists." The argument that we're talking about isn't that X exists, but that X is the explanation for something. If your X is an omnipotent god, then X is just a thing that can do anything. Whether X exists or not, appealing to X with no other premise than that X can do anything doesn't actually give us any information about what happened. If X can do anything, there's no experimental filter that can ever rule X out.

As I noted, saying that magicians exist was an oversimplification. In my expansion, I said that magicians are the opposite of the above. We know what the limitations of magicians are, so we can begin experimentally filtering for magicians.

Even if an omnipotent god exists, the only information that the claim that such a god did something is that we can't think of another explanation. Whether an omnipotent god exists or not, "God did it" is identically equal to "I don't know."

I think we read Since_1985’s comments differently. I saw them as being summary statements, not the actual arguments themselves. You seem to have read him as offering the full reasoning in the initial post you responded to.

Regardless of Since_1985’s intentions, I’m appealing to the philosophical arguments that Christians have traditionally offered and you’ve got the flow wrong. Take the KCA, it can be confusing because the connection that results in God existing is through being the first cause of spatio-temporal matter, but it is an argument for God’s existence. It is not taking an observation and lining up possible explanations and saying this one fails and this one fails and this one fails, but if God existed, it would work because God can do anything and since we have no other options, let’s go with it. That would be a god of the gaps, but the KCA is not doing that.

If one is claiming "best explanation" for X and the argument is the only evidence, then it's competing with an infinite space of other explanations for which our only evidence is an argument.

Then you can believe nothing in reality beyond definitions and pure mathematics. Everything rests on arguments amidst competing explanations.

Depending on how you mean this, it might be trivially true.

I meant it to combat the view (not necessarily yours, but it would fit your language above) that philosophical arguments (even if built off of scientific or historical elements) get us nowhere in what we should believe as rational humans, while, say, scientific demonstration, does get us somewhere.

And if Craig's premises are all true, then his argument is sound. We don't know if they are. He asserts that they are, but I can just as validly assert that all men are blue.

But he doesn’t just assert it, he gives evidence and reasoning for us to track with.

He makes many arguments for his favorite god, but none of them follow from his syllogism. Assuming his premises are true, the KCA gets him a cause. He has various other arguments for why the explanation for the universe must be a mind, why it must be personal, and why it must be moral, but they all require different sets of premises than the KCA..

No, I’m talking about premise 4 and 5 of his KCA that are a conceptual analysis of what the cause (from premise 3) must be like. They do come directly out of and build upon the first 3 premises. ‘Moral’ is not one of those, but ‘personal’ is. And he doesn’t just assert those premises, but argues for them.

That's not a high hurdle, but that's not what "disproven" means. If all I had to do were show that alternative premises were more reasonable, there would be no Christians.

Could you define what you mean by “disproven” so that we aren’t talking past each other?

Quantum events occur without apparent cause. They can't be predicted. A radioactive atom has a probability that it will decay in some particular time frame, but it may decay immediately or never. As far as we can tell, it's causeless. I have no particular reason to believe that the set of causeless changes in state possible within our reality doesn't include things beginning to exist.

Since it's not something we can test, however, we're still ultimately at "I don't know." Craig's god of the KCA is a god of the gaps.

Not being able to predict something isn’t the same thing as it being causeless. You are also just talking about efficient causation here. There is still a prior material cause present, something within the nature of the atom, that results in random decay (if it is truly random).

That's been done. Uncaused vacuum fluctuations are a thing. Craig denies that they fit the bill because the vacuum within the universe is a "sea of fluctuating energy governed by physical laws and having a physical structure" (On Guard, p. 76). If Craig is claiming that a vacuum within our universe isn't enough nothing to say that vacuum fluctuations lack a cause, then the necessity of a cause is something that we cannot test, even in principle. What you suggest that I do is, according to Craig, impossible to do within our universe. He has guaranteed that a fundamental part of his argument relies on "I don't know" and I'm convinced that's exactly the reason he sees God.

Could you explain what you mean in the bolded part differently? Quantum energy is definitely not nothing; it’s either clearly something that exists or it shouldn’t be part of the discussion because we would be saying it isn’t anything and ‘nothing’ has no bearing on ‘anything’ by definition. Why would that truth lead to us not being able to test the necessity of a cause? And why does it show his argument relies on “I don’t know”?

Define what you mean by "conceivably." I think you're being a little disingenuous here.

You were arguing that unfalsifiable arguments are meaningless. I don’t think that is true, but even granting it were (to avoid a tangent that wouldn't matter too much), arguments like the KCA are falsifiable (as long as you aren’t holding to a 100% certainty standard). It is not illogical (or impossible in theory) to show such arguments are not sound. The critiques I've come across, I don't think show those arguments are unsound, but I remain open to them and any new ones (to me) that I haven't investigated.