Here we will outline some of the philosophical arguments for and against god. We’ll start with the arguments for god, give you a little historical context for some of these arguments, and show you where the fallacy lies. Then, we’ll cover the list of arguments against god. We’ll leave the scientific evidence related to this debate for later on, in the Books of Genesis, Biogenesis, and Human Evolution, in the Testament of History.

       We are not providing exhaustive detail on each argument, nor the array of subtleties and counterarguments that exist for each one. We are just giving a synopsis of each, so that the Good and Moral Atheist can be familiar with some of the basic arguments that they may encounter when discussing Atheism. For the Atheist who has a deeper interest in these subjects, please see the many suggested readings in the Book of Books. Some of those texts cover these (and other) arguments for and against god extensively, in much greater detail than we could fit into this book.

       This most famous of arguments for god was put forth by Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French mathematician and philosopher who is also famous for Pascal’s triangle. The essence of what we now call “Pascal’s Wager” (there were actually several) is that the reward for believing correctly in god (heaven) is enormous, while the loss for incorrectly believing in god is inconsequential. On the other side of the coin, the gain for correctly believing there is no god is inconsequential, while the loss for incorrectly believing there is no god, (hell) is enormous. So, according to Pascal, the logical man will believe in god just for the odds.

       But Pascal makes several broad assumptions that invalidate his logic. His first assumption is that admittance to a supposed heaven is conditioned only on belief/disbelief of a Christian god, only these two options. But if such were true, would evil people go to heaven merely because they believe? Would we truly want to have a god who cast out people of saintly behavior merely for not believing? Plus, the world is not the Christian Europe of Pascal’s time. Vast lands of this world not only do not believe in a Christian god, but also have not even been exposed to the concept. Would all of these innocent people be condemned to eternal damnation merely because they have not been exposed to Christianity at all?

       Beyond that, we have teachings from many different religions about who the true god or gods are. Islam teaches that those who don’t believe in Allah are all doomed to hellfire. Christians claim that denying the divinity of Christ will send you to hell. They can’t both be right, yet there is no proof that one is better than the other. And there are innocent people in both Christian and Muslim countries who have not been exposed to the other’s teachings. Are they doomed to hell for ignorance? Would a supremely good being with the power to create the universe really do such a thing?

       The Anthropic Principle is an argument used by theists who understand and support the concept of scientific inquiry. They rationally believe in the Big Bang and Evolution, given the enormity of evidence for them. But they also believe in god, and use science as their proof.

       What the principle states is that the workings of the universe depend on many finely tuned variables. These include the strength of the various natural forces such as gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces, the excess of matter present in space over antimatter, the size of the various constants, the fact that solid water floats on its liquid form unlike most other solids, and so on. They postulate that since any slight shift in these constants would doom the universe, it must have been designed to work this way, obviously by some supernatural creator who set the thing in motion and let it run on its own. It has been compared to finding quarters on a sidewalk. If you find one, somebody must have accidentally dropped it. If you find a dozen, somebody with a lot of quarters could have accidentally dropped them. But if you find 100 quarters, all standing on end, you must assume they were placed there intentionally.

       The problem with the Anthropic Principle is that we have no way of knowing if there are other universes with different values of these basic constants. Maybe all such possibilities occur, and we are only here postulating the existence or non-existence of god because we happen to be in the right one. Or maybe we’re failing to understand the nature of such constants. It’s possible that there’s no way to change just one of those constants, maybe every last one could be linked together in equations that describe all matter and space, based on only one or two variables. So there aren’t really 100 quarters on end, now we have just one quarter. And who’s to say it’s on end? Maybe we just suppose it is because this universe is right for us to evolve. Maybe if the quarter lands a different way, life evolves in a totally different manner, and they assume their quarters are all standing on edge.

       Simple examples can be found in nature to disprove the Anthropic Principle. Drop a stone into a pool of water. The ripples go out in a mathematically perfect circle. Did a machine create that circle, or was it just natural? You can find crystals that are perfect cubes or octahedrons, yet they prove no intelligent intervention to create such things, just the workings of nature. Maybe what looks like a hundred quarters standing on end to us is really just a nice crystal, or a circle of spreading water: something that is near perfect, yet totally natural. The Anthropic Principle is clearly insufficient as a proof.

       This argument for god is really quite simple: the universe exists, therefore something must have caused it. That something must be god. Nothing that we ever encounter exists without a cause. The Big Bang sounds like it exactly fits the bill for the hand of god creating the universe.

       The problem with this is that we have, in our universe now, quite a few things that occur without cause: particles and anti-particles in a vacuum. In empty space, particles appear out of absolutely nothing, for no reason other than that is the very nature of space. For the non-physicists out there, don’t worry if this sounds weird or counter-intuitive, because it sounded just as weird and counter-intuitive to the physicists when they started talking about it!

       The very nature of the existing universe includes basic uncertainties, and something out of nothing is a common event, no matter how wrong it sounds. Physics, and the nature of spacetime, often comes to some very odd conclusions that just plain strike us as wrong. Here’s one example of how physics can be completely at odds with common sense. If you shoot a beam of photons, such as a beam of light, through one small slit in a piece of paper onto a further piece of paper, you will see one line of light on the second piece. However, if you shoot the beam through two parallel, close-together slits, you will get an interference pattern, because the light acts like waves, and the waves interfere with each other.

       But if you slow it down, and just shoot a single photon at a time toward the slits, the interference should stop, right? After all, a single photon should act like a particle, and there are no other photons to interfere with it. When it hits the second piece of paper, you should be able to tell which slit it went through (it had to go through one or the other), and there should be only two lines. But no! If you shoot single photons through the slits, the resulting pattern of hits on the second piece of paper has the exact same interference pattern. Somehow, the single photons interfered with themselves! From a common sense point of view, it sounds very wrong, but that does not make it false. The same applies to the start of the universe. Just because it happened doesn’t mean something caused it, and just because there is no way it makes sense to our minds doesn’t mean that it is not true.

       So we do a little research, and find that there exist reasonable scientific hypotheses out there that suggest that the Big Bang is just the way the universe works. It just is. Not only did nothing cause the Big Bang, but nothing existed before the Big Bang, either. It was merely the start of spacetime, the start of time altogether. Again, it sounds wrong—time has a start?—and it hurts our sensibilities to think of such a concept, but that does not mean it is not right.

       Which of the various hypotheses about the beginning of the universe is correct? We don’t know, maybe someday science will enable us to come up with an answer. But we have already encountered enough natural instances of both something out of nothing and simple breaches of human common sense that we can reasonably discard the First Cause argument as requiring something that may not be required or may not exist.

       You can also call this the “Bible Says So” argument. Since the bible is god’s divine word revealed to man, it must be true, right? This argument is actually rather silly, and it quickly devolves into circular reasoning. God revealed the bible to man himself, so it must be true. Who said god revealed it? God said so himself. Where? In the bible. And how do we know again that the bible is true? And we’re back to: god revealed the bible to man himself, so it must be true. Start the circle again.

       The bible, just like all other holy books, was written down by men a long time ago. These men thought the earth was flat, that rainbows were gifts from the heavens, and that comets and stars foretold our fates. We now know that the earth is round and orbits the sun, rainbows are caused by the refraction of light, comets are iceballs in space, and stars are merely faraway suns. Relying on the “revealed word” is the same thing as trusting that many uneducated men thousands of years ago were all directly contacted by god and perfectly transcribed what god said. However, it also means that you have to assume that many other uneducated men from thousands of years ago were not directly contacted by god. Is there any logical way to tell which of the many book-based religions is correct? Of course not. There is no revealed word, only the words of man.

       Some say miracles prove that god exists. They either rely on accounts of ancient miracles, or on modern-day miracles. The ancient miracles are easy to debunk, again we’re looking at accounts witnessed by the uneducated, often second- or third-hand accounts, embellished for a text designed to inspire belief and fear, written thousands of years ago. Making the lame walk, the blind see, and liquids change form are common tricks of current-day faith-healers, but we all also recognize them as hokey and fake. Just because they were written down a long time ago does not make them less dubious.

       But some claim miracles continue to happen today. Maybe a person is given a one in a million chance of living through a trauma, and they survive. “It’s a miracle!” No, it isn’t. First of all, many doctors will purposely give a lower chance of survival, to not raise up the family’s hopes needlessly. Also, since many of the workings of the human body are still being investigated, doctors may not know the true odds. Still, even if the true odds are only one in a hundred thousand, isn’t that still a miracle? Not really. How many people are admitted to the hospital each day? How many are likely to die? How many of those one-in-a-hundred-thousand chances die? Almost all. How many of those fifty-fifty chances die? Quite a few. One success story does not mean a miracle happened. You might just as well have everyone in the United Stated get ten dice, and roll them one time. If all ten end up exactly the same, it must be a miracle, right? Actually, the odds are that across the country, you’ll get over twenty people with all ten dice the same. Winning that one-in-a-hundred-thousand shot in the hospital is just like winning the lottery. It was luck, that’s all.

       The same goes for water-stains or toast-burns or salt-marks or birthmarks that look like Jesus or the Virgin Mary or the name of Allah or whatever. How many pieces of toast are toasted each year? Maybe a billion? More? With all those random burn marks on random toast, we should be surprised if one doesn’t have a resemblance to a woman or a man or Arabic script.

       If you search the internet, you can find hundreds of sites that will tell you the bible is literally true because certain biblical prophecies within have come true. Often these prophecies require extensive explanation to determine what they really meant, because the original wording is quite vague or not really on topic. This is usually explained away as being god’s attempt to explain things to men who could not understand them at that time. Is there a way to check to see if biblical prophecies really are accurate?

       Well, if the bible was infallible, certainly all of its prophecies would come true, right? And for some of the prophecies contained in the bible, the resolution of the situation is actually recorded elsewhere in the bible, so we can see if at least the bible’s own prophecies come true in the very same book. Let’s check a few:

“Yet hear the word of the Lord, O Zedekiah king of Judah; Thus saith the Lord of thee, Thou shalt not die by the sword: But thou shalt die in peace: and with the burnings of thy fathers, the former kings which were before thee, so shall they burn odours for thee; and they will lament thee, saying, Ah lord! for I have pronounced the word, saith the Lord.” Jeremiah 34:4-5, KJV

       That’s a prophecy that’s clear as a bell, by today’s standards or the standards of thousands of years ago. Zedekiah will die a peaceful death, and his people will burn “odours” for him upon his death and lament his passing. So, does the bible fulfill its own prophecy?

“But the army of the Chaldeans pursued after the king, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was scattered from him. Then they took the king, and carried him up unto the king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath; where he gave judgment upon him. And the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes: he slew also all the princes of Judah in Riblah. Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of Babylon bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in prison till the day of his death.” Jeremiah 52:8-11, KJV

       So Zedekiah lived to see his sons killed before his eyes, then he was blinded. Finally, he was imprisoned until he died. Not exactly the peaceful death originally predicted! Let’s try one more prophecy and see if that one came true. This one is about the fate of the city of Damascus, and we can judge it against actual history:

“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.” Isaiah 17:1, KJV

       Again, a pretty clear prophecy: the imminent destruction of Damascus. Sometime in biblical history, we’re looking for a ruinous heap. But the city was never destroyed, and still exists today, proudly claiming to be the longest continually inhabited human city in the world. Isaiah lived in the 8th and possibly 7th century BCE, some 750 years or so before the 1st century apostle Paul. Let’s see if Paul recounts a destroyed city.

“Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.” Galatians 1:17, KJV

       So when did Damascus become a ruinous heap? The answer is that it didn’t. Just as Jeremiah’s prophecy failed to come true, so did Isaiah’s. And so did dozens more in the bible. If we can’t believe the obvious prophecies, then why should we even consider giving weight to the ones that need so much more “interpretation” to figure out? And if such prophecies are so important, why aren’t they unambiguous in the first place? Vague prophecies and like the astrology column in the paper. If you twist the words a bit, you’re probably going to come sort of close to something real. But just like that astrology column, nobody really predicted anything at all.

       Some of the current writings on biblical prophecy also claim that the bible predicted the newest scientific discoveries being announced. Again, there’s quite a bit of word-twisting being used to get something that looks like a real confirmation of the bible through science. Apart from the obvious fallacy that such “interpretations” bring about, it’s strange that often the same people who are willing to twist the words a hundred different ways to find one passage that sort of resembles something scientifically proven, are also willing to ignore that same scientific proof when it comes to evolution or the Big Bang. It shows a mentality of trying to change the facts to fit an agenda.

       Those using the argument of Design—also known as the Teleological Argument—say that the human body is designed so perfectly, it couldn’t have been a random product of evolution, it must have been designed that way. All the parts fit together nicely, there are no extraneous parts that don’t belong there, no vestigial fins or gills or tails. Tails? What about the tailbone, the coccyx? Exactly why do we have that? The development of our coccyx is controlled by the same genes that develop tails in other mammals.

       There are numerous similar examples of relics of evolution. Did you know that dolphins have legs? Not adult dolphins, but dolphin embryos do. They develop legs just like any other mammal, then reabsorb them before birth. Adult whales still have a few leg bones, buried deep inside, completely useless. And why do elephants and manatees have toenails? They serve no purpose in either species.

       The list goes on and on. Eyes in blind creatures that live in absolute darkness. Nasal passages in birds that have permanently-sealed nostrils. Teeth and limbs in embryos that are reabsorbed. If you look at the DNA of almost any living thing, you can find segments that code for things that are not present in that animal. Instead of removing the code, a separate set of code appears in the DNA that shuts the first part off. Not exactly the best way to design things, is it?

       Sometimes, the argument of Design is taken to absurd levels. One common example is the argument that the banana is the perfect fruit. It fits the hand exactly, has an easily removable outer skin that not only protects the fruit inside, it also changes color to tell us exactly how ripe the fruit is! Such perfect design! Of course, bananas are also quite easily bruised, making them difficult to transport and keep, and very difficult to grow outside a narrow tropical climate, and susceptible to various funguses and pests. Like any other evolved plant or animal, bananas (and humans) have advantages and disadvantages. None are perfect. The Design argument falls apart in the face of the great quantity of evidence of evolutionary relics and mistakes.

       Some claim they have “personally encountered” Jesus or god, and can hear his voice in their mind or in their heart. Such a personal god must exist, right, or they wouldn’t hear his call?

       Well, we can all imagine someone with a serious mental illness who hears voices in their head as well. Are those voices true, do those people exist? If not, then why should a personal Jesus or god heard in a different person’s head exist? Who is to say that the “sane” person claiming to hear Jesus really isn’t actually slightly mentally ill?

       We are all programmed by evolution to have some sort of level of “spirituality.” There were significant advantages throughout history for those who felt spiritual and followed spiritual belief systems without question. Those individuals fit in better with society, and could cope better with the terribleness of war, disease, and unexplained actions around them, by assuming a higher plan for their existence. This coping/conformity mechanism keeps us seeking some sort of higher purpose or spirituality around us. Whether we ascribe spirits to animals, nature, the dead, or the heavens, we are merely following our genetic predisposition to “religious” experiences. We all suffer from a little of this mental illness, one that pushes us to see supernatural forces or explanations. What the Atheist will do is recognize that such a feeling is merely an evolutionary solution to the problems of the past, and will turn their wonder and awe to real things such as nature, fate, and the human spirit, rather than some artificial deity.

       What we will term a “negative testimonial” is the argument that the most evil people in the world were Atheists, therefore Atheism must be evil. The most common citations for Atheism are Stalin and Hitler. While it is true that Stalin was an Atheist, Hitler was not. Hitler professed Christianity all his life, and his troops wore belt buckles that said “god with us” in German. Is Christianity to be considered evil for the actions of its adherents such as Hitler and Torquemada, the torturer of the Spanish Inquisition? Certainly not, most Christians (just as most people) are good and moral. So why should Atheists be considered evil for the actions of Stalin?

       Moreover, communism itself is often erroneously described as a result of Atheism, because 20th century communists chose to explicitly encode Atheism into their political philosophy as a way to break the power of the church. But they have misunderstood cause and effect. Atheism did not cause communism, and the Good and Moral Atheist would certainly be opposed to any authoritarian regime. Such a regime would violate the most basic tenets of the Good and Moral Atheist, being neither free nor life-valuing.

       The phrase “godless communist” is a historical relic of the 1950s, and today it is an insult to the Atheists who love freedom, democracy, and self-determination. Atheists are Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives and moderates. If an old historical link between Atheism and communism is justifiable from an evangelical Christian point of view, why don’t we use the phrase “torturing Christian” since Hitler and Torquemada adhered to that religion? Or, if the resulting government explicitly defines the goodness of the values of the founders of that government, why don’t the evangelical Christians throw away their biblical literalism and adhere to the Deism and Skepticism of the founders of the United States of America?

       Propagating such linkages is a result of inferior reasoning, a mistaking of cause and effect. Communism used Atheism as a tool to increase their power, much as Hitler used Christianity. Such poor usages should not reflect directly on Atheism and Christianity, instead we should hold both creeds accountable on their own.

       Oddly enough, the positive testimonial argument against Atheism is not based on the greatness of people who are not Atheists. It instead argues that certain great Atheist or Deist thinkers are actually theists and strong proponents of Christianity, or in the political arena, supporters of a Christian or god-based government. Some of the more famous people often cited this way are Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Albert Einstein.

       Most such arguments either use quotes taken out of context, or use quotes that are completely made up. Below we will see an example from each of these three famous figures, and then follow it up with some actual quotes from their recorded writings and speeches.

Thomas Jefferson

       Often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States, are the following quotes:

“The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.”

“I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens.”

“I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator.”

       The first two are not found anywhere in any of Jefferson’s recorded writings or speeches, and even some noted Christian revisionists have put out retractions about the second quote after publishing it as Jefferson’s. They are so out of character with the rest of Jefferson’s writings as to be absurd. The third quote steals a line from Jefferson’s correspondence, taken quite out of context, and appends an additional sentence Jefferson never wrote. The actual quote, below, shows that Jefferson meant something entirely different:

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book [Jefferson means the bible], and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the Gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.”
[Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Charles Thomson, January 9, 1816.]

       In other words, Jefferson considered himself a student of the philosophical and ethical teachings of Jesus, not a proponent of the divinity and infallibility of Christ. When he said “I am a real Christian,” he meant that in contrast to followers of different philosophers. Below are some more actual quotes from Thomas Jefferson, to compare with the above falsehoods:

“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.”
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, undated.]

“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
[Thomas Jefferson, letter to his nephew Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787.]

James Madison

       James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, has had this quote attributed to him since the 1940s:

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves ... according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

       Again, the quote is found nowhere in the actual recorded writings and speeches of Madison. Instead, Madison was a staunch and unyielding defender of church-state separation. Compare the above quote to two actual quotes of his:

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect.”
[James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774.]

“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”
[James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785.]

Albert Einstein

       One of the most noted physicists of his time, Albert Einstein was uncomfortable at first with the concept of quantum physics. So uncomfortable, that he uttered the following statement:

“God does not play dice [with the Universe].”

       Many theists have taken this to be Einstein’s admission of a belief in god, and have gone further to say that if the smartest man of his time believed in a personal, biblical god, well, it must be true.

       But Einstein was at most a Deist, and most likely an Agnostic. He firmly believed in the use of reason over the use of old religious books in explaining the world, as he clearly stated in this quote:

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
[Albert Einstein in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas (his secretary)
and Banesh Hoffman.]

       About the soul, Einstein said:

“I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
[Albert Einstein in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas (his secretary)
and Banesh Hoffman.]

       Many other notable personalities have had false quotes, misquotes about their religious stance, or false deathbed conversions attributed to them. The list includes a variety of persons, from the 18th century Deist and patriotic journalist Thomas Paine to modern-day noted Atheist and comedian George Carlin. Sometimes the effort to “prove” such quotes can be extensive, or the false quotation can be so widely circulated, that the inquirer must be quite vigilant to ascertain whether a quote is a true one or not.

       The Kalam Cosmological Argument is one of the more recently touted “proofs” of a god or intelligent design of the universe. It is the most complicated of the arguments for god we will cover here. Philosopher William Lane Craig published a book on it in 1979, and many modern theists have claimed it proves, or at least makes likely, that there is an ultimate maker.

       The core of the argument is simple, although the philosophy behind the proof is more complicated. The basic premise comes in three sequential parts:

Part 1. Did the universe have a beginning or not?
Part 2. If it had a beginning, was there a cause to the beginning or not?
Part 3. If it had a cause, was the cause a “personal” one or not?

       The argument attempts to prove each part, and use it as a basic proven premise for the following part. Pretty straightforward, but the proofs of each part get a little more detailed. We’ll have to look at each part separately.

       For part 1, the “proof” has one major assumption, that there is no such thing as an “actual” infinite series. If we take that as true, then it follows that there cannot be a series of temporal events without a beginning, because that would be an actual infinite. There can be “potential” infinites, which are described as things to which you can add another item or event. An example of a potential infinite would be the counting numbers. No matter how high up you count, you can always add one more, right? So you can go to infinity, but only by adding another item. Such potential infinites lead to counterintuitive results, according to the theory. One example that’s easy to understand is to compare the set of counting numbers vs. the set of even counting numbers. Both sets go on to infinity, but obviously, the counting numbers are twice as many as the even counting numbers. So in the real world, there must be no such thing as actual infinites, without generating such contradictions.

       However, there is one huge flaw in this argument, because it completely depends on the assumption that there is no such thing as an actual infinite. Yet none of our astronomical data to date contradicts in any way the possibility of an infinite-sized universe. We cannot see any end, we cannot find anything that looks like a middle, and there’s no evidence that the universe wraps around upon itself. We have one enormous-sized possible “actual” infinite in front of us every time we look up at the night sky. Sure, infinity just doesn’t “sound” right, and in human experience we think that there always must be an end somewhere. But the sky tells us otherwise. That right there pulls out the linchpin of the entire Kalam Cosmological Argument.

       But what about the Big Bang? That was the beginning of the universe, regardless of what types of infinites exist, right? Well, it was the beginning of our universe, there’s no doubt, and it was the beginning of our time. But there is no proof that there were not events before the Big Bang. Maybe the universe has repeated Big Bangs, we do not know, and there are currently theories that suggest that such a cycle might be possible. “Our” universe, as we know it, had a beginning, but “the” universe may not have had such a beginning. However, there are physicists who say that all time may have started with the Big Bang, so maybe we leave any conclusion on part 1 as uncertain, even though we have taken apart its primary assumption. The “proof” is no longer certain, for sure.

       Going on to the second part of the argument, was the universe caused or uncaused? Some physicists have come up with scientifically plausible theories that the universe, and the Big Bang, had no cause whatsoever. They are merely the way the universe works, there was no time before, and the universe arose causeless. Yes, it sounds strange and goes against our basic intuition, but that does not mean it is incorrect. Just like the quantum effects that have a single photon going through a single slit yet interfering with itself, it boggles the mind and yet is true. So for the second part, we can say that it may be false. Again, we are uncertain as to whether the argument holds for a second reason, and the Kalam Cosmological Argument now has two holes.

       However, we can still move on to the third part, and find a third hole in the argument. The theistic argument says that if there was a non-personal cause, why didn’t the universe always exist? By having an actual beginning, there must have been a “personal agent” that chose to start the universe when they did. If it was non-personal, the cause would’ve always been there, and so would the universe. One example would be to look at a match. If it is struck, the fire comes instantly. If the cause was non-personal, yet the “struck match” was there, why hasn’t the universe always existed? The theistic answer is that somebody must have chosen when to strike the match, and that entity must be god.

       But there are several obvious explanations that refute the “personal agent” argument. First would be the possibility, under exploration now, that the universe just arose out of nothing whatsoever. Again, it is weird, but that does not mean it isn’t possible. That just simply may be the nature of things. A second possibility would be the “bouncing” universe, a theory that universes exist in a sort of a membrane in some other dimension and occasionally collide with each other (called the “ekpyrotic” model), causing a Big Bang. There are other variations on theories of the second type, which all give us an infinite-time system that has periodic Big Bangs, completely by natural causes. There are also other explanations of a natural system before the Big Bang, which have not yet been proven false. Which of these various theories is true, we don’t yet know. However, it is clear that the third part of the Kalam Cosmological Argument has holes in it, much like the first two.

       So the result is that the Kalam Cosmological Argument has multiple possible physical world explanations that disprove the so-called “proof.” We have shown faults in the underlying premise of no actual infinite, and have also shown faults with each of the three parts of the argument. Much like the other arguments for god, it is essentially Swiss cheese. Once you tear apart the assumptions, there is little left.

       Occam’s Razor, also called the Principle of Parsimony, roughly states that we should not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily. In a simpler form, we can say that the simplest explanation is the best. It is often used to attack the proponents of intelligent design, the concept that the Big Bang was caused by a god, or the universe was created to look like the Big bang happened by a god.

       Which is simpler, that the universe just happened (no matter how hard such a thing is to fathom), or that a more complicated entity such as god created it? If there is a complicated entity such as a god, what created god? Is there yet an even more complicated entity that created god, and so on? Postulating god violates the concept of Occam’s Razor by adding an additional layer (or layers) of complexity and hypothesis to the explanation of the origins of the universe.

       Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who lived around 300 B.C.E. He was a supporter of equality, allowing slaves and women to study under him, and a denier of any sort of god-based divinity in a time when neither the concepts of equality or Atheism were accepted. He coined the concept of a nature-given right to “life, liberty, and safety,” which we will later recognize paraphrased in Thomas Jefferson’s words stating our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

       The Riddle of Epicurus, also known as the Epicurean Paradox (or more generally as the Problem of Evil) is often paraphrased as follows:

“Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?”

       The stock answer to the riddle from those who follow traditional religions is that god gives us “free will,” and we can choose between evil and good. The problem with this answer is that while those in power can control whether to commit acts of evil or good, those who are powerless may suffer under evil without control. Therefore it is not enough to say that we each have control over whether the world is evil or good. Some will suffer horrible evils, which god is either unable or unwilling to prevent.

       Traditional religions have used the concept of gods to explain things that mankind did not yet understand. Gods were once thought to bring the sun and moon to the sky each day, to bring plagues, to bring weather, to make crops grow. We now know how and why those things happen. Modern theists confronted with fossil evidence have tried to apply the same concept. If we have a fossil from 4 million years ago, and another from 2 million years ago, they claim the transition was due to god. When we later find a fossil from 3 million years ago, they now claim the two transitions were due to god. As evidence piles up, the gaps get smaller, until god is completely squeezed out of the explanation.

Science

Conclusion