Common Arguments for the Existence of God

These are just notes I have made while studying arguments for the existence of a god. They do not of themselves necessarily prove the existence of the Christian God which is why arguments for Scripture and such are useful. This is mostly meant as a place I can come back to when evangelizing to refresh on things I may have forgotten.

cosmological argument:
1. There must be some explanation for why stuff exists

A devout atheist might bite the bullet and deny this, but any reasonable person is going to acknowledge that there has to be an explanation for why stuff exists. One of the consequences of denying this is that it makes science useless as science relies on the presupposition that everything has an explanation. Also, atheists usually deny things like miracles, but if there doesn't have to be explanations for things, why deny miracles?

2. The explanation can either be that physical stuff must exist or that something else made it exist
3.  The explanation is not that physical stuff must exist

It just seems silly that it is literally impossible for stuff to not have existed. This statement relies on a person's intuition and is probably the weakest, someone might just say that there is some physical thing that is eternal and just must exist.

4. Therefore something else made stuff exist
5. This something else must be non-physical, incredibly powerful, intelligent and imaginative, necessarily existing, & continually involved in continuing to cause stuff to exist.

moral law argument
1. There is an objective, eternal, universal moral law

Sub-arguments: 1.

1. If ethics is subjective, then we should expect people to recognize that actions which they are inclined to think of as "wrong" are only wrong from their point of view.2. But invariably, people view wrongs against themselves as actions that are really wrong.3. Therefore moral values are objective and not subjective.

2. 

1. If morality were a subjective matter, we would expect to find sizable differences of fundamental principles amongst moral codes.2. But there is, in general, agreement concerning fundamental principles amongst moral codes.3. Therefore, morality is objective rather than subjective.Yes, there are differences in moral codes. However, some differences in moral codes can be explained in terms of differences about the facts.

3.

1. If moral values are subjective, then moral codes cannot improve, since there is no objective standard by which to judge one code better than another.2. But the work of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks shows that moral codes can be made more just3. Therefore, moral values are objective rather than subjective. 

2. Laws come from lawgivers.
3. Therefore, there must exist an eternal moral Lawgiver who stands above all men. 

If there is no God than:

Morality is merely a trait selected blindly by chance evolutionary progress.

Morality is an illusion that we pull over our eyes to stave off the true nature of our existence: unknowable, meaningless, extremely fleeting, and forgotten.

All sensations of meaning, love, and beauty are the desperate paroxysms of agonized, highly self-aware biomechanical robots, like us.

We’re dying. We’re about to disappear from all hope. All memory. We are atomic accidents.

I find this worldview to be too horrible to imagine.

P.S. there are also the popular ontological & teleological arguments which I find either not as strong or too complicated to use in standard witnessing opportunities and have not bothered to study in depth.

Choosing a Candidate

I have, through recent conversations with a friend of mine, come to realize that I don't know nearly as much about politics as I at one time thought. What I mean is that I cannot give a watertight argument against liberal economic policies, against libertarian political philosophy, etc.

Actually, most people are like me, very few are politically knowledgable enough to feel absolutely sure in their economically political beliefs. For example, a good friend of mine, a man who is a very morally conservative person, is currently a Bernie Sanders supporter. I struggled for a significant amount of time trying to figure out how someone who is clearly a Born Again Christian with conservative theology could support a self-proclaimed godless person like Bernie.

I now believe it is the result of having wrong priorities when evaluating candidates. 

My good friend, while being conservative on moral issues, is fairly centerist/liberal on economic issues. He likes some of Bernie's ideas about income inequality and campaign finance reform. Now, I'm not going to discuss the merits or lack thereof of those types of policies in this post; I want to concern myself with whether or not they should even be a priority to the Christian voter. There's an old saying, "It's the economy, stupid!" But is that really true?

I want to present the idea that there are certain beliefs which, no matter how great a candidate is otherwise, disqualify him from our votes. For example, we can all agree that even if a candidate was absolutely perfect on every other issue, we could not support him if he thought we should bring back slavery, or something of that nature, right? There are some beliefs that are so basic that they are non-negotiable. 

I want you to get this so I will say it again:

Some Ideas are So Important that We Cannot Support Candidates Who are Wrong About Them

I think the first thing we should do when evaluating the field is to look at which candidates are preemptively disqualified because of crazy/horrible/disgusting/evil positions on certain basic issues. 

One of the issues that is non-negotiable is abortion. Any candidate that supports a woman's right to murder her child cannot receive support from Christian individuals. This is so basic. 

Another one of these issues might be gay marriage. I'm not as certain that this is disqualifying but it is definitely important. I would struggle to support any candidate that defies God's command concerning marriage. 

Now, many issues that most conservatives consider extremely important are actually secondary. For example, gun control. Conservatives get so fired up about something that is not a morally imperative issue. The Bible never commands governments to allow their citizens to bear arms, at least as far as I know. Now I'm not saying that gun control is not an important issue, but I am saying that many conservatives place it above what are actually, in God's eyes, the most important issues. 

Other issues that are not immediately disqualifying are : social security, Medicare, Medicaid, obamacare, military funding, state's rights, and that's just off the top of my head. Now again, each of these issues is important, and I'm not saying we shouldn't take them into account when choosing who to support, but I am saying that we should have already gone through to see who we cannot support before we get to these issues. 

This is the argument I will present to my friend. I will not try to convince him of the falsehood of Bernie's economic ideas because the issues at hand are too complicated for me to truly understand and it would be almost impossible to change someone's opinion about them anyway. But I will try to show him that even if the rest of Bernie's policies are good, it is untenable to support a candidate with a moral compass so directly supposed to the God of the Bible.