On materialistic creationism being supposedly more reasonable than personalistic creationism

Well, first of all *****, you are hitting the nail right on the proverbial head. Let me see if I can help you to flesh out some arguments and to identify the inconsistencies in your friends accusation against Theism as a superior mode of interpretation.

As to materialistic creationism being supposedly more reasonable than personalistic creationism:

There is nothing that we have any experience of, either existentially or scientifically, that provokes changes in matter in an unchanging state, except for intentional willed activity. If your atheist friend wants to posit something else, let him be the one to pony up with the theory so that we can all breathe a sigh of relief and call it religion.

Second, his definitions of time and space are non-scientific and highly speculative; certainly his own definitions and not something endorsed by the scientific community and thus by the standards of his own theoretical bias, false. If “space” is simply the distance between objects, as he defines it, how then can it be “affected” by an object’s mass? Nonsense on stilts. Space-time does not admit these kinds of reductionism.

As for how can the immaterial have an effect upon the material, that is not the question. The question was how one can explain change in a non-inertial motionless unliving intemperate “singularity” (which is a nonsense term if we’ve ever heard one). Your friend is using the old tactic of trying to shift the burden of proof; he does not want to answer so he asks you another hard question that is not to the point; he has made a statement and now in the light of the complete inability of the claim to justify itself or be justified by any of the evidence, instead of answering his insoluble problem he asks you to answer another riddle that will still, even if answered, not provide him with an answer to his dilemma. Do not allow for diversion as it is unethical.

If one wishes to be obtuse one can say that the actions of a personal “will” being a better explanation of the ultimate cause of the universe is a “the most ridiculous naked assertion”… blah blah blah… but really, experience with personal wills of myriad varying descriptions is one of the most common human experiences, and so, obvious and rudimentary, while experiences of the 1st billionth of a nano-second of the universe and categorical descriptions of the forces at work there are entirely absent from human experience, and for the most part the realm of imagination, hearsay, and creative writing. It is a creation myth for the self interpretation of the one’s who posit it.

Now one might say the Christian version is also myth, well… mabye so, but it would still be myth rooted in a vast network of observable human experiences and not a piecemeal hypothesis about the world based upon intuition, imagination, and merely theoretical axioms that are chosen more than observed. For the most part the materialistic creationist’s theory is rooted in the human interpretation of “un-observables”;things that can’t be seen, touched, or tasted; things that have not been experienced and cannot be experienced. In short, it is imaginary. It is a human’s eye best guess at how a tiny sentient being almost completely blind to a posited actual event should choose to interpret that event apart from anything but arguments from current effects to hypothetical causes from within the scope of our current admittedly mediocre understanding of the nature of the universe now.

The argument is, if we now think the universe might be like “this”, then we should think the universe was once like “that”, all things being equal. But if one finds little reason to think that we really do understand the universe “now” and the constant flux of scientific theory and interpretation bear this out, then what great confidence should we have as to that we understand the universe “then” when then is even farther from the limited scope of our current apprehension? This is the kind of question that tends to make the most thoughtful scientific minds into, at worst, agnostics. Atheism is thought to be from outside of the scientific tool box.

Now, that it is imagination, does not mean that it might not be true. People can imagine things that are true just as they can imagine things that are false. But when we are talking about something as fundamental as the Cause of the universe, answers should be grounded in reason and experience. That’s all we ask. That we can make up an answer is not sufficient for it to be an answer. Even if the scientific method can get you to the beginning of the universe, it cannot get you behind it. All theories that do are penultimately religious.

The Impersonal Cause of the universe is not something that any efforts through the scientific method either can or do, “prove”. It is a fundamental posit; an axiom; a bias; and any evidence to the contrary will not be admitted by those that hold to it with a zealous fervor, which shows that the axiom is indeed not science at all but… choice.

True scientific methodology understands its limitations and that certain kinds of knowing are outside its purview. Everything can’t be understood by examining little balls in space and the way they bounce off each other. The idea that it can is not science, it is religion in a lab coat. Of course the activity of an intelligent will is the most obvious explanation for the existence of the universe, because it is the most obvious explanation for just about anything with regard to activities that seem to happen on their own, like drinking coffee, or thinking eternally true thoughts. Materialism, even if true, would make itself quite meaningless. Even pantheism is a more reasonable interpretation that materialism because material cannot justify materialism as a philosophy of life, but I would think Christianity better still, and we have history on our side.

All the best,

Neiswonger