Reply #7: ...and fails miserably. [View All]

[gcomeau]

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

Or in other words... Hart is incensed that these people are dealing with the concept of God believed in by 99% of everyday average believers on the street instead of the concept of God believed in by philosophers like Hart.

Tell you what, wheh Hart gets the average beliver thinking of God in the terms he does, then he can bitch about atheists not focusing their attention on his definition of God. I have yet, however, to encounter ANY person who believes in God who is closer to Hart in their definition of that entity than they are to the definition he is disparaging here who wasn't a philosophy major or something of the like.

So if he has an issue with that definition, I suggest he focus his attention on getting his own house in order first.

To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

First of all, light IS illumination. So yes, if you want to say what caused illumination you have to at least say what generated the damn light.

Second of all, the infinite regress objection is raised in response to theist arguments that do exactly what Hart is complaining about atheists supposedly doing here. I actually just had an argument with some genius YESTERDAY who said that evolution was an insufficient explanation for the origins of biological diversity on earth because it failed to explain where the matter in the universe came from, therefore God has to be used as an ultimate explanation.

It is 100% legitimate to respond to that by pointing out that you haven't explained where God came from either, you just inserted it as a first cause, defined it to be the ultimate one, and begged out of any further explanation as if you had sufficiently accounted for the origins of the universe by assignging the name "God" to that origin whether you could describe or explain it in any way whatsoever or not... and without having ANY other justification for inserting God as a cause in the first place besides there being a blank space in your mind way back at the origins of the universe that you think should be filled by *something* so you just arbitrarily plugged God into it.