{"id":893,"date":"2009-07-22T16:00:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-23T00:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/?p=893"},"modified":"2009-07-19T12:40:38","modified_gmt":"2009-07-19T20:40:38","slug":"disproof-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/disproof-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Disproof of God"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s pretty easy to prove that God didn&#8217;t create the universe, given just a couple of very uncontroversial postulates and the definitions of the words &#8220;universe&#8221; and &#8220;God&#8221; as most people understand them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Define the causal closure of a point in space-time X to be X plus the causal closure of any points that could influence X or be influenced by it.<br \/>\nDefine the universe (which we&#8217;ll also call the &#8220;L-universe&#8221;) as the causal closure of planet Earth as it is today. (If you dislike the use of &#8220;planet Earth&#8221; or &#8220;as it is today&#8221; in this proof, you can substitute it for some other subset of the universe that is alleged to be created by God.)<\/li>\n<li>Postulate that if A created B then A influenced B. This is a pretty trivial postulate &#8211; creation of something is obviously a kind of influence over that thing.<\/li>\n<li>Postulate that creators cannot create themselves. This is also pretty trivial &#8211; the concept of creation of an X implies that there is a time before the X exists and a time after which X exists. The creator of X must exist in both of these times, but the creation can only exist in the latter.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Suppose that the universe was created by God.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This implies that planet Earth was created by God (planet Earth is part of the universe).<\/li>\n<li>This implies that God influenced planet Earth (creation is a sort of influence).<\/li>\n<li>This implies that God is in the causal closure of planet Earth (definition of causal closure).<\/li>\n<li>This implies that God is part of the universe (definition of universe).<\/li>\n<li>This implies that God could not have created the universe (creators are not part of their creations).<\/li>\n<li>Which is a contradiction. Therefore, the universe did not have a creator.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is a formalization of the common &#8220;If God created the universe, who created God?&#8221; argument but sidesteps the possibility of a creatorless God or a God created by another God by including all such Gods in the larger L-universe.<\/p>\n<p>This suggests that to believe in God, one must have a different definition of &#8220;universe&#8221; (call it &#8220;S-universe&#8221;) which is a subset of the &#8220;L-universe&#8221;. This brings us to the real value of this proof &#8211; any argument for the existence of God that doesn&#8217;t distinguish between the L-universe and the S-universe must be invalid, because to be true it would have to apply to the S-universe (for which there can be a God) but not to the L-universe (for which we have already seen that there isn&#8217;t). Some examples of such arguments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We don&#8217;t know how the universe was created, so let&#8217;s just define God to be whatever created the universe.<\/li>\n<li>The universe seems well suited to our needs.<\/li>\n<li>Anything of sufficient complexity must have had an intelligent creator.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s pretty easy to prove that God didn&#8217;t create the universe, given just a couple of very uncontroversial postulates and the definitions of the words &#8220;universe&#8221; and &#8220;God&#8221; as most people understand them. Define the causal closure of a point in space-time X to be X plus the causal closure of any points that could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}