For those of us who are Atheists here, I thought to ask whether any of you can provide a philosophical argument that demonstrates the impossibility of God. That is to say, not simply "the lack of evidence for God", but the logical impossibility.
Come, we must have some strong atheists and non-agnostics here, so I expect you to come out of the woodwork and show us where the Theists are wrong.
This ought to be interesting.
Copied and pasted from an older post, a logical refutation of the existence of one type of god.
Disproof of God
Preface:
If you are hoping for an easy summation, I hate to disappoint. What follows is something more complex than that. It will take some time and effort for the reader to fully understand all of the key points, and to move past the reflexive and obvious objections to understand why they do not work. I have dwelt on many of these concepts for years, and even now I often find them slippery in my grasp. I apologize that so much of the following is definitions and examples, but that is necessary. The actual proof is so simple it can be said in a sentence, but it will only make sense if you understand the difficult definition of some seemingly simple words.
Disclaimer:
This proof will not change your mind about the existence or non-existence of a higher diety. No such proof exists. Not because disproof of any given god is impossible, quite the contrary. Rather, it is because the belief in something so powerful is not budged in an instant. If you believe in a god, you do so despite an overwhelming lack of evidence, and in the face of billions of shards of data pointing to there not needing to be one. You are most likely already able to dismiss the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, and the like. Ignoring this proof will not be any harder for you.
Likewise, if you already doubt god’s existence, you do so for very powerful and convincing reasons, and do not require further proof.
Can God be Disproven?
This proof is not intended to change people’s minds about god, but rather to show that such a proof is possible. Of course, many such a proof can be made regarding other belief systems. For instance, one could march up to the peak of Mt. Olympus and see for themselves that no Temple of Zeus exists. They could peer through a filtered telescope and notice that the sun is most certainly not a flaming chariot being pulled through the sky. They could look at seismographs and see quite clearly that the concept of Hades, and its supposed location, are flawed. Given the right claims, anything is disprovable. Years of theists saying the opposite does not make it so, just as similar convictions did not make those poor women witches, or the sun travel around the Earth.
The tricky part is the fact that a disproof requires a claim. Since religion is a personal affair, no two sets of claims about god are consistent., which is why disproof is rarely even attempted. The key, then, is to find commonalities within a religion that a large portion of the theistic system rests on. Taking these as your premises can encompass the widest portion of the system as possible.
This modularity of theistic systems is how they survive major scientific upheavals. When the Ptolmeic system is supplanted by the Copernican, the future generations of believers just modify their personal beliefs so that cosmology is thought to be unimportant to their faith. This, despite the fact that previous generations of the same faith thought that cosmology was one of the grandest testaments to their beliefs. The same has been true for evolution, the age of the Earth, and the non-historical nature of the Flood, to name a few. Nowadays, many good Christians side with scientists, but maintain their faith. That is why another discussion regarding these tired arguments will not be a part of this proof. Time and time again, the progress of human understanding pushes the gods out of their frameworks, and the adopters have to erect a smaller abode for them to reside in. I have no interest in the bricks, and wish to look at the oft-neglected foundations.
The Premises:
I am primarily interested in Christianity, but the premises I use are amazingly adaptable to nearly all theistic systems. They are, simply:
1. God is a conscious, thinking being.
2. God is eternal.
3. God created the universe.
Time:
Now that I have teased you with the premises, I have to immediately back away from the proof again and get very dirty with some difficult concepts. First off, we need a near-complete understanding of Time. This may seem trivial, after all, we all use concepts of time every day. We seem so familiar with what time is. The truth of the matter, though, is that most people do not know how to define time, explain time, or even track down an adequate definition of time.
Most people, when asked to define Time, will use a circular definition. They will say that Time is a measurement of how long something takes to transpire. Or a subunit of the time it takes for the Earth to make a full rotation. Anything which uses the predicate to refer back to the subject. Even a few dictionaries make this blunder. The American Heritage Dictionary gets it mostly right, but hardly make the concept understandable. They say that time is “a nonspatial linear continuum in which events occur in an apparently irreversible succession.” Not bad. Not clear, but not bad.
Here is how I define time: Time is a measure of the change in state of a system. An example will make this more clear. Imagine a universe in which there only exists a single sphere. The sphere is not made up of constituent particles, it is a solid, it is featureless, it is perfectly round. There is nothing else in the universe, not even you, as an observer. The odd thing about this system is that there is no Time in this system. The sphere could be hurtling through the vacuum at extraordinary speeds and you would never know. It could be rotating a thousand miles an hour, and there would be no reference from which to tell. This is a system in which the state can never change. Any “moment” would be indistinguishable from any other. There would be no way to keep up with “when” things were doing something, or not doing something else. It isn’t just a fancy wording, or a game of semantics, to say that this system does not have time. That is the reality of the situation, in this system, time does not exist.
Now, add a second sphere. Now, any motion of one sphere, be it linear, orbital, revolutionary, etc… will be apparent due to the relative state of the other sphere. Now we have a system where time exists, and we can clearly see why time exists, and what time is. All it is, remember, “is a measure of the change in state of a system”. It doesn’t matter if we call units of time a particular thing, or even if we pretend that time has units. All that matters is that we have some way of talking about the state of the system as it is during the talking (present), how it was when we measured the state of the system earlier (past), and what we predict will be an upcoming state (future). We could now be able to see that one ball is getting closer to another ball. This sentence, if you look over it, includes a knowledge all the concepts here described. Change, present, past, and future.
It also bears mentioning that a system can never truly be in the exact same state as before, as far as time is concerned. This is why time travel is not possible, despite the cravings of many intelligent physicists and popular science magazines. Their confusion comes from a lifetime of playing with ‘t’ in equations, but no deep understanding of what Time denotes. Even if a system were put into a former state, with absolute perfection, it would merely be noted as the “second” occurrence of such a state. With the two spheres, let us suppose that one rotates around the other. After one full rotation, we would not say that we are back in the past, that would deny the fact that a rotation has occurred. Instead, we say that this is the beginning of a second rotation. The reason is simple, there is no guarantee that the system will progress the same way it did last time.
These are the basics. I leave out the fact that time is affected by gravity (
time runs slower the greater the gravitational influence, such as being closer to the center of the Earth) and velocity. I also ignore the fact that time and space are dependent on one-another (
in baseball, a pop-fly has its trajectory and time aloft intertwined to the point that a knowledge of one provides the answer to the other. They cannot be teased apart). The relativistic properties of time are also left out. All of these are fascinating, but not needed for the proof and would not alter it in either way.
Timeline:
On the left you have a god’s past infinity. To the right you have the god’s future eternity. In the center you have the moment that god created the universe. Contained in this simple image is all three of our premises. God is eternal, he is thinking (
which is obvious from the fact that…), he created the universe. To the left of the creation event is an infinite number of discrete states of the god’s existence. To the right is the eternal future of god (
and his creation, including our souls, but that is material outside of our simple premises, just something to keep in mind for descriptive purposes).
Infinity:
Now… we are very close to stating the proof, but first, we need to understand this new concept of infinity. Many mathematicians contend that the concept can not be visualized, which I tend to agree with. However, it is a very useful concept that has grown in power over the last century. I will not bore you with the details of how some infinities are larger than other infinities, you may delve as deep into such issues as you like. For our purposes, it is important to note that an infinite number of states are countless. They go on forever. This is a necessary feature of most deities, in that they have existed forever, avoiding the problem of the creator needing its own creator, and so on.
If you have absorbed the lesson of what TIME denotes, you will be able to understand an interesting feature of infinity that directly impacts the proof: Infinite time does not correspond to a measure of elapsed units of time so much as it describes an infinite number of states in a system. This means that it is pointless to say that a god sat around, immobile and unthinking for an infinite number of “years”, and then just ~POP~ decided to create the universe. As we saw with the concept of time, and unthinking and immobile god is a singular state, time does not exist in such a system, not because man invented this, it is because that is what time is. If god’s first action was the creation of the universe, then god’s existence can not be said to be eternal.
And that is the key here. Remember our premises. God is stated, by most theistic systems, to be eternal. This is the way that religions get around our incorrect notions of causality in order to form a cosmological synthesis, a creation story. But… as we are about to see… it doesn’t work. You can’t have it all.
Proof:
If you look at the timeline, you can see the disproof of god for yourself. You see, we commonly make the mistake of looking at the Creation moment, and imagining an infinite number of states-of-being stretching off to the left, back to god’s “earliest” moments, and off into infinity. However, the fallacy here is that the arrow of time does not flow this way, which is why we normally do not see the paradox. We are making an easy mistake of approaching the past from the present. We see the creation of the universe around us, so we know that it happened, so we start our visualization from there. When we do this, we do not see the paradox.
The paradox, and refutation of god based on our premises is seen if we instead place ourselves at one of god’s “earliest” states. (
I put “earliest” in parenthesis because it is an aid to understanding, I am fully aware that such a concept makes no sense when speaking of infinities). From ANY of these “earliest” states-of-being, a god would need to then progress through an INFINITE NUMBER OF SUBSEQUENT STATES BEFORE REACHING THE CREATION EVENT. (
when I all-cap, it is always for stress, never for loudness). It can’t happen. And you can’t whisk it away with the “lord works in mysterious ways” cop-out. For a god to be eternal, it occupied an infinite number of states before it created the universe. From any “early”, theoretical state, the god could not get to the creation point.
The only way to resolve this crisis is to remove one of the three premises, but let’s see what problems each solution creates.
Solutions:
If god is not eternal, there is no problem. God comes into being, goes through some number of states, creates the universe, and continues to exist forever. There is no problem here because we are not saying what god will do AFTER he exists forever (
again, the paradox practically screams at you in this direction, doesn’t it?). Here’s the rub: What caused god to just pop into being? If things as complex as a god can pop into being, why not the universe, instead? If something created god, then the paradox moves to that deity, and you have resolved nothing. The eternal-ness of a god is thus evident, and you can see why it is picked as one of the three premises.
If god is not thinking, there is no problem. In this case, god can be thought of as the natural state of an eternal void, or an eternal fabric of energy or matter. This escapes the paradox because it removes the creation event altogether. Here you can see how closely tied together the creation event and god’s consciousness are. (
For years, I thought that the two could be combined, and that the premise of god being a conscious being wasn’t even needed, and that the paradox could rest on just two premises. This is logically true, but the premise of god’s conscious really aids in the understanding of the proof.) Why does the creation event get removed if god is not thinking? Because there is no outside causality from which to get everything around us. If it is a random occurrence, it is random within some framework, which should all be thought of as a consistent set. What this means is that the creation of our universe could have come from a random (
read: non-thinking) event, but that just means that our universe is a subset of something larger. And besides, without a conscious deity, you do not have a religion. It would be like saying that this disproof of god is not accurate because god does not exist. Quite circular, and the reason that I find this premise necessary. In order to prove there is a problem with the concept of a god, we have to first assume that there IS one. It is a built-in premise that I just like to state explicitly.
If god did not create the universe, there is no problem. This is the most interesting solution by far. Oddly, there can be a universe, and a god within it, but there can not be any causality between the two. If god and the universe are both eternal, they can both have gone through an infinite number of discrete states leading up to the present. This comes from work done with infinities of the same size by Georg Cantor. For every state of the universe, you could have a one-to-one correspondence with a state-of-being for a god. What you can not have is a god, with no universe, going through an infinite number of states in order to get to the creation of a universe. The thing about this resolution is that it is the only one that truly saves the concept of an eternal, thinking deity. But it does so by denying that it had anything to do with the creation of the universe, so what have you saved? Something that is not necessary for the operating of the universe, so just as imaginary as a pink, flying, elephant.
It is interesting to play with these resolutions to notice how any two can be true, but not all three, and the natural conclusions arrived at in each situation. I contend that most modern religions rely, on a very basic level, on the synthesis of these three premises. And it is obvious why they can not all be true at the same time. This proof is just as simple as the paradox of god not making a rock so heavy he can’t lift it, but not as easy to get around because it deals with his existence, his eternalness, and his ability to create the universe around us. The reason that this proof takes some explaining, and requires some effort from the reader, is because the concepts within it are more difficult to grasp that the weight, and lifting, of a rock.
Final Note:
There are very common complaints registered by theists when they first encounter this proof, and I have, over the years, heard them all I suppose. I thought about listing them, and providing the fallacy of each, but this is long-winded enough, and I would rather go through that process anew, but in writing this time. For that reason I welcome all replies, no matter how reactionary and poorly reasoned they may be.
