One of the favorite arguments offered by Christians for the existence of their brand of "God" is the cosmological argument. This argument does nothing to clarify which of the more than 40,000 different versions of the Christian God is the real slim shady, but Christians don't care about that, they just care about finding any reason they can think of for why their God is real and everyone else's is offensive to them and their "God."
A “cosmological” argument is any argument
for a God’s existence that’s based on the mere existence of the cosmos,
the universe. Simply put, the reasoning of this argument claims that, since the cosmos exists, only God could have created it. Put another way, because the Christian can't imagine any other "creative force" being responsible for causing the universe but their own ideas about God, their own ideas about God must be the only "creative force" capable of creating the cosmos. Welcome to the miracle of circular reasoning masquerading as an infallible syllogism at its finest.
Here’s the basic idea, according to the "Clear Thinking Christianity" website "Stand to Reason": https://www.str.org/w/what-are-the-most-powerful-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god-
- First, for anything that came into existence, there must have been something that caused it to come into existence. Clearly, effects have causes. Pretty basic, and entirely consistent with our common-sense experience of the world.
- Second, the material universe (the cosmos) came into existence sometime in the past. Virtually everyone affirms this point because of the widespread and, I think, justified belief in the Big Bang.
- Therefore, the material universe must have had a cause.
Put most simply, “a Big Bang needs a big Banger.” The bang didn’t
bang itself. And for the Christian, that big Banger is their own brand of God, not one of the other 3000 different gods that came before. Of course, each Christian is convinced that their own brand of the Christian God is the one this argument purports to prove is real, even though the argument never helps to explain which of the more than 40,000 different versions of the Christian God is the one you must "believe" in to save yourself from an eternity of suffering.
The author of this reasoning is Greg Koukl. Koukl simply ignores David Hume, of course. Hume saw causation as a relationship between two impressions or ideas in the mind. He argued that because causation is defined by experience, any cause-and-effect relationship could be incorrect because thoughts are subjective and therefore causality cannot be proven. Simply put, Hume was skeptical of causality.
Naturally, Koukl ignores this, because only by doing so can he use the assumption of causality to build his argument of other assumptions that the reader never notices are simply unfounded assumptions. And by doing so, Koukl skillfully masquerades his rhetoric like reason to pull the Christian "God" from the hat of the "believers" unquestioned assumptions. And why does the Christian refuse to question their own assumptions even half as much as they love to condemn others for theirs? Because their own assumptions are the "holy ghost" that holds their "beliefs" in their own brand of God together, just as much as everyone else. But Christians don't like to accept that they are no different from everyone else, they prefer to see themselves as "the chosen people." It just "feels" better when you see yourself as "the chosen."
What's more important is how Koukl simply ignores Stephen Hawking, who does a wonderful job of proving Hume was right all along, by explaining how the universe can, in fact,"bang" into existence without any need for a "banger" at all. Instead, Hawking goes on to show, it is simply our own bias for expecting every effect must have a cause that we are projecting onto the question of how something can simply "bang" into existence from nothing. If we all lived on the quantum level of sub atomic particles, Hawking explains, where sub atomic particles blink in and out of existence all the time, those who claimed that something cannot "bang" into existence from nothing would be going against experience and the laws of nature. But again, Koukl both ignores this, and in doing so, blinds his faithful flock from ever having the chance to consider such perspectives at all.
Koukl goes on to point out:
"Note, by the way, that this line of thinking puts the cause of the cosmos outside of the material universe. So the cause would have to be immaterial, intelligent, powerful, and personal—since only persons can start a causal chain of events."
This kind of disingenuous reasoning is what "believers" fall for all the time, either because it is so soothing to their emotional needs for their brand of God to exist, or because they lack the creativity to notice the numerous leaps of faith such claims require the reader to make without the reader even realizing they are relying on such leaps in the first place.
For example, is it really true "that this line of thinking puts the cause of the cosmos outside of the material universe"? While such thinking CAN put that cause outside of the material universe, that does not mean that the cause MUST be outside of the material universe. Rather, such a "cause" may simply be outside of what we currently understand about the material universe.
We have no way of knowing how much we do NOT know about the material universe, however. But here, Koukl simply assumes we MUST jump over all of what we do not know, so we can conclude that the "cause" must therefore be outside of the material universe, so he can claim that "cause" is therefore "intelligent, powerful, and personal."
But wait... what? Okay, so even if we simply accept the assumption that we should just ignore everything we do not know about what constitutes "the material universe" so we can accept the assumption that the "cause" of the material universe MUST be outside of the material universe itself, why must we simply assume that such a cause is therefore "intelligent"? And what do we even mean by "intelligent" anyway? Intelligent like ourselves, or some other species, or even AI, or something else entirely, that may be as much of a mystery to our own intelligence as all of the things we fail to know or understand about the material universe overall?
Then he goes even further, insisting that the "intelligent" cause that must be placed outside of the cosmos must be "powerful." While this assumption is easier to swallow, it nevertheless leaves us wondering about the difference between something that is powerful the way the sun is powerful, and something that is powerful the way a king or a mafia don is powerful.
Then Koukl goes on to assert that this "intelligent powerful cause" of the cosmos is also personal. Really? If that is true, it is personal in the same way serial killers are personal. This also assumes the cosmos was designed with humans in mind more than any other species of life. The arrogance of such an assumption surpasses anything Lucifer was ever accused of exercising.
Aside from this being an even more narcissistic assumption than Narcissus, it also can only be accepted as true IF we assume that all of the death and suffering of human life experienced within such a cosmos can be made sense of only if there is some reward or payoff for having experienced it, even while it is assumed that no such comparable reward is afforded all of the death and suffering of all the other species of life to be found in the cosmos. And even if we assume such a reward is forthcoming, who would willingly accept that watching their child suffer and die of cancer is a perfectly acceptable "plan" to get to heaven?
Koukl concludes that "This argument doesn’t prove the God of the Bible, of course, but it gets us pretty close. and it’s a great springboard to other arguments and other evidences for Christianity."
"It gets us pretty close"?! Are you f-ing kidding me! Even if we simply accept ALL of Koukl's assumptions above, we are still faced with the fact that there are at least an infinite number of ways finite humans can use their infinitely creative imaginations to conceive of the meaning of a word as infinitely abstract as "God." But never mind all of that, Koukl seems to suggest, just accept that if we accept all of these assumptions - mostly by not even noticing we are being required to do so without ever realizing we are - we should therefore accept NOT that a "god" exists, but that the Christian conception of God exists.
WE should also simply ignore that, currently, there are over 40,000 different brands of the Christian God, and growing. Which one is the real "God" Koukl is talking about? Well, his own, of course. Or so we can assume.
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