Refuting ICR (Part I): “Cause and Effect”

A very good article about arguments used on the ICR website to prove the existence of God – and how they can be refuted.

ICR stands for the Institution for Creation Research, probably one of the most famous – or rather notorious – sites on the internet, promoting creationism and other religious true believer bullshit.

Rounaqb is, as I have written before, an unusually clever blogger and, as such, also good at logical reasoning, which you all can see, if you read his newest blog article, which is now reblogged my me.

Because the most important of the ICR God arguments revolves round cause and effect, I think my own comment, given in the comment field below rounaqb’s blog, can be seen as a kind of summary of what is at issue here (at least some aspects thereof). So I choose to re-use the content of my comment also here in this “introduction”, to my own readers, of rounaqb’s refutation arguments.

I wrote: If something has a cause it’s pretty easy to believe that this same cause also has a meaning.

Why being a cause without having a meaning as well?

Being a cause, which is often bothersome in itself, without any meaning at all, wouldn’t that be “meaningless”, almost a waste of time and energy?

I think evolution has given us a brain that is constantly searching for causes. AND, therefore, meaning, too

If you can’t find any visible cause while looking around you, then the brain tries to invent Hidden Causal Agents (HCAs).

Your brain seems to prefer HCAs capable of also conveying, at the same time, an “attached” message of meaning.

It looks, according to your brain, like the HCA does this to you to reward or punish you.

Thereby you can imagine – and feel – there is a locus of control located inside yourself. Or in other words, it seems, at last partly, that it’s up to you if the HCA causing/originating the cause will choose to reward, or punish, you for your deeds.

When in doubt, you can always ask the sage of your tribe/group/community.

That sage has often many similarities to a medicin man, a shaman or a priest (a.k.a. god interpreter).

With that said, I hope you are going to acquaint yourselves with rounaqb’s own arguments.

I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Refuting God

Googling ‘evidence for God’, the first suggestion Google gives(at least in my location) is the official website of The Institution for Creation Research. The title seemed quite interesting to me, probably because I thought that here I will get most of typical theistic arguments, well presented. It didn’t disappoint me in that sense. I got what I expected. There are three ‘lines of evidences’ ICR has proposed. The law of causality, “the triune universe” and “design and purpose”. So, I am introducing this series, through which I will try to refute the proposed arguments from ICR. So, let’s begin.

1.Everything has a cause.
The article starts with “In ordinary experience, one knows intuitively that nothing happens in isolation”. This statement is true, as it clearly mentions ‘ordinary experiences’ and ‘intuition’. Of course, our ordinary experiences always tell us the an effect must have a cause, like…

View original post 622 more words

The Teleological Argument From Design

I’ve already recommended a blog called “Refuting God: Exploring the reasons to believe in the existence of God”. And now I’m doing it again.

I like the topics chosen by the blogger (called rounaqb). And his (?) sound, rational, logical, almost humble and always well written way of debating.

He (?) provides a lot of arguments that are useful for people who, like him (?), want to oppose all the theological bullshit reasoning that can be found on the internet.

The article I chose to reblog is just one of many such examples of good refutation of common theistic argumentation and dogmas.

BTW, here you can see some other interesting topics and articles from rounaqb’s Refuting God blog:

• A Brief Analysis of Deism
• Response to the article ‘5 ways to stump an atheist’
• Modified version of the refutation of KCA
• Responses to the refutation of the Kalam Cosmological argument
• Pascal’s Wager

Refuting God

Earlier in this blog, I tried to respond to the complexetic argument from design. I am now trying to refute the teleological one which is also known as the fine tuning argument. Thanks to the numerous people who advised me to do this and motivated me get my PC and type.

The teleological argument from design asserts that in this beautifully complex universe, everything is in the perfect order and is made for some definite purposes. Like everything is just in the right place at the right time everywhere. For example, the colour of the grass grass is green, the perfect colour for our eyes, if it would have been blue then it would have been awkward. Another example is given that earth is in the exact distance from the sun, not too far not too close as we can live in in it. Further they assert that if the…

View original post 583 more words