Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Disproving Proofs for Existence of God

First of all, my intention is NOT to disprove god, but to falsify the alleged proofs for god's existence. God's non-existence follows due to the burden of proof on the shoulders of believers who have no hard proof whatsoever in the first place. The reasoning mentioned here are some logical arguments.

Legend:
F.A.: for all
EL.: element of
T.E.: there exists
s.t.: such that
!=:not equal to

Nothing can come from nothing, so the universe must come from something.
So, for any entity A, there must exist an entity B such that CreatedBy(B,A) is true. The above statement, then, reduces to:
F.A. A EL. {Entity} T.E. B EL. {Entity} s.t. CreatedBy(B,A) and B!=A; {Entity} is the set of entitites.

The problem is, this statement is inherently false. CreatedBy inherently assumes a hierarchy of Entity elements, in the form of a tree (like a family tree). By definition, every hierarchy (or tree) must have a root element that is the ancestor of all the other elements. Otherwise, the family of Entity elements may have circular connections, losing its primary property as a tree; i.e. grandparents that are also the children of their grandchildren. Thus, the creator may not be a member of the set Entity.

The objection to such an analysis may be raised on the grounds that there is a set A of ancestor entities for which the aforementioned logical statement does not hold. So it is presupposed that there already are creators (or one creator) when the statement is formed. In other words, the argument presupposes that it is true as a proof for its truth. So it is no argument at all. It is a tautology. It is x=x, and does not help finding the value of x at all.

An updated version of the argument would be:
for any entity A, there must exist an AncestorEntity B such that CreatedBy(B,A) is true.

or

F.A. A EL. {Entity} T.E. B EL. {AncestorEntity} s.t. CreatedBy(B,A)

Note that B!=A vanished; since AncestorEntity and Entity are disjoint sets by definition. So the presumption of its own truth value is more apparent. It presupposes that there are members of the universal set that are not members of Entity. The proof of the existence of these entities are missing, and there is a leap of faith towards the question "did god create everything" from the basic question "does god exist". God's (or gods') involvement with the events and entities around us is only a secondary question to the questioning of god's (or gods') existence. The answer of the former question is directly dependent on the latter.

Yet, the "plausibility" of god creating everything is used as an argument for the existence of god. It is only plausible if existence of god is plausible. Therefore, it gives no clues to whether god exists or not. It is doubly so for specific gods. A relevant example to this logic would be trying to justify Bible or Koran within itself, i.e. using the verses in the book. Such self-proving statements are not logically testable.

At this point, it is also important to note that some people do notice this, and yet continue believing and concurring that it is irrelevant to logical thinking. This is why it is called belief. This statement is only here because some people try to masquarade scientific approaches and present this as "proof" of religion. Such a thing does not exist. Either accept that you are compromising logic or stop compromising logic. There is no third option just to make you feel better without actually trying.

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