Anyway, I posted to Andrew's blog under my first name.

(BTW, Adam, I've been wanting to know this for a while, but do you or did you use a pseudonym for your last name? During an e-mail correspondence of ours a few years ago, the e-mails were from "Adam Marcyzk (sp?).)

Proof that the universe is eternal and/or caused itself.

I can't understand what the infiniteness of the the universe has to do with the existence of God. Would the infiniteness (in either space or time) of the universe be a proof of the God's nonexistence? Why?

Majority of physicists today (regardlessly if they are atheists or not) think that the universe is finite (in both space and time). If it is so (and it is probable according to the observations we have done until today), then the proof is simply impossible. But we can't say for sure. By that I don't mean the obvious fact that you can never be 100% sure with anything, but I want to stress that the physical laws governing the behaviour of the universe at the very beginning are difficult to find out. It is useful to look back at the history of physics. Aristotle thought that the natural state of all bodies is to lie steadily on the ground. Galilei realised that (roughly speaking) this is valid only in the environment with friction, and otherwise the bodies move on straight trajectories when any force is absent. Newton thought that relative velocity of two bodies is a subtraction their velocities, but the experiments in late 19th century shown this is not true for large velocities like that of the light and the resolution was the theory of relativity. In the fifties the neutron and proton were considered elementary particles, but experiments with higher energies prooved they must have internal structure, and so on. Always the older laws were discovered to be only an approximation of some more fundamental ones, but the difference betwwen the old and new is visible only in some previously unattested conditions. So we can say that is is with a reasonable level of confidence prooved that the universe was very compressed once upon a time, but in these conditions of extremely compressed matter one can expect that a completely new physics takes place. But all we can do today is to extrapolate our present laws that are "prooved" to be valid only in conditions we are able to create in laboratories. (This is not too exact, because we can also observe the world outside the laboratory and gain the knowledge from there, but still, events like the big bang are far from direct observation).

That's about the eternality and why I think such proof is probably impossible. The latter suggestion for proof ("that the universe is caused by itself") is even more peculiar. What does it mean "caused by itself"? I personally think the phrase is a nonsense. First, events have causes, objects don't (at least in modern meaning of the word "cause"). Second, a cause of some event is some other event preceding the former in time, by which the latter is implied. One event can not be the cause of itself - statement that the beginning of the universe was caused by the beginning of the universe says nothing. Obviously, if the history of the universe is finite, there was some first event, or, say, first cause. The theists since the times of Thomas Aquinas usually identify somewhat the first cause with the God, but I can't see any reason for that.

"It could be that matter could appear in a vacume."

Well, if this is about the big bang, it is misleading. Vacuum is an empty space (by definition). There is no vacuum outside the universe and there was no vacuum before the universe began, because the space and time are properties of the universe and there is none of them outside the universe. It is even more correct to say that phrases "before the universe began" or "outside the universe" have no meaning. It is maybe difficult to imagine, but the imagination usually doesn't work well for matters of cosmology.

"maybe Jesus's diciples stole the body."

Imagine a situation (this may be, unlike the big bang, easily imaginable) when you see an apparently death man (very ordinary man, e.g. your neighbour) put into the morgue. When you come back next day the body is away. What will you believe?

a) somebody has stolen the body

b) you have been not enough careful when investigating the body and the man hasn't been really dead

c) miracle has ocurred

Imagine also a slightly changed scenario, when there is a guard at the morgue who says he saw the dead man ascending to heaven. Will you believe

a) that the guard is insane

b) that he lies for some reason (e.g. he fell asleep and doesn't want you to realise that)

c) that he tells the truth and a miracle has ocurred?

If you don't pick the answer c) if the dead man is your neighbour, what makes the difference for Jesus?

It might be a little biased of me, but I have a hard time taking anything seriously that's posted on Myspace.

I have to agree wholeheartedly in most situations; but this is a rare case where the Myspace content in question is actually of some sort of thought-provoking variety; and attempts (albeit fails somewhat) at proper grammar and linguistics.

Chris

If not, on what basis does he dismiss them? I doubt he can prove those miracles false. So why does he believe in Christianity, and not Hellenism?

I prefer to modernize the argument. If having thousands of claims of the miraculous is de facto proof that the miraculous exists, then thousands of "eyewitnesses" to UFOs are de facto proof that we're being visited by aliens who like to mutilate cows and have a fetish for cybernetic anal rape.

This counter-argument has a huge STFU factor built right in.

Regarding Andrew's response to your guide to theists, I laud him for making a genuine and fairly well-reasoned attempt to point out what a theist would need to deconvert. Adam, I wouldn't link to it without editing it for typos, though... it would be a shame for one of the more thoughtful theistic responses I've read in a long time to be discredited for superficial errors.

One by one, then:

1. Proof that the universe is eternal and/or caused itself.

I'm in the minority here in approving of this one. Consider that religion has a long history of withdrawing against the advance of science, from old animist beliefs in spirits acting behind every unexplained event, giving way to Greek scientific enlightenment that yet persisted in believing that lightning was thrown by the gods, to today, where the last frontiers of religion are pretty much The Beginning (the birth of the universe) and The End (what happens when we die). It's a valid observation that, if science answered or overcame these final enigmas, then there'd be no room left for religion in our worldview.

I neither see this as an impossible task, nor as just another exercise in irreducible complexity. We don't know what science will reveal in the years to come, and it may well completely undermine our understanding of cause/effect in such a way as to present a wholly self-contained explanation of the universe. I don't think it's disingenuous to present this potential explanation as one way to completely disprove religion.

2. Proof that all miracle claims are false.

This is an impossible task, and should be reworded. Andrew, if you're reading this, note that none of the atheist scenarios for conversion are logically impossible. There will always be new miracles, and for many of them, there is nothing to 'prove' false. Take that famous Virgin Mary apparition in the piece of toast. I'm not saying all, or even most, Christians ascribe this to a higher power, but it's still a "miracle claim" that cannot, under any circumstances, be proven false. The only secular explanation is that it was just dumb luck (combined with a healthy dose of pareidolia), and it's impossible to prove that. No fair stacking the deck against us! ;)

As an alternative, what about changing this to "2. Scientific proofs that dramatically undermine the vast majority of significant, credible miracle claims." This is still quite difficult, but possible. It would establish a precedent, at least, demonstrating the ease with which very convincing 'miracles' can have mundane explanations, and would seriously strip miracles of their faith-building power.

3. Proof that every religion is false.

You said yourself that this is a "tall order;" for the same reasons as #2, it's actually an impossible order. I'm actually going to defend theism a bit and say that this shouldn't persuade you that there is no God. Just because religions are wrong doesn't mean that there isn't a higher power; it just means human beings have an imperfect understanding of him.

I think this represents a flaw in theistic reasoning that should be evident from a brief thought experiment. Say I show you a black box. Inside are a thousand different claims about the universe written on pieces of paper. You read them all, and find that a few hundred are easily disproved while the rest can't even be tested or verified in any way. You do notice a few things about these untestable ones: First, they all contradict each other. Second, the vast majority of them aren't believed by anyone anymore, despite being indistinguishable from the remaining minority that are.

The box represents Faith, and its contents are all the religions that have come and gone during our development as humans (of which only a vanishingly small fraction are still believed today). Your #3 basically demands that, in order to dismiss the box as a whole, every single piece of paper it contains must be individually discredited. It implies that, even if the one you currently believe is proven wrong, you'll just hop to one that hasn't yet been disproved. If 999 of the pieces of paper are shown to be false, you will doggedly adhere to the truth of that final scrap until it, too, is refuted. From the perspective of the box-filled-with-paper, is that a fair way to approach the question of whether or not to trust it?

4. Aliens that admit to making up religion.

I think this one's brilliant. Can it be extended, perhaps? What if a very advanced race had once believed in religion (of which none bore any resemblance to our religions), but outgrew it and had developed their civilization into an atheistic utopia? If there had been no rapture, no second coming, no apocalypse, and they'd built a genuine Heaven-on-Planet-X? If they were clearly sentient in the human sense, clearly very intelligent, cultured and possessed of an ironclad and virtuous morality?

5. Proof that Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

I think this one is very valid, and would presumptuously remind the atheists that these aren't demands of us but simply a list of 'if this happened, then I'd stop believing' hypotheticals. Surely we aren't expecting theists to conjure up an alien society of believers, and so neither is this theist expecting us to actually accomplish #5. As long as it's logically possible, then it's fine by me! Imagine if Cameron's Jesus Christ documentary hadn't been so effectively discredited; what if he really had found the remains of Jesus Christ and his Earthly family? An honest Christian, whose faith is based on the Assumption of Christ, would have a real problem with that and I think this is a fair avenue to disbelief.

A question for Andrew: What if an ancient text was found and carbon dated to the first century, ostensibly written by one of the apostles of whom we never hear about (e.g. Philip), and which contained a first-hand account of a conspiracy to fake Jesus' resurrection?