Saturday, May 08, 2010

Much ado about Something

I have long said that if there were no God, it wouldn't be necessary for atheists to try to disprove His existence.

I like the way Jack Kinsella puts it. He says that if you speak of the things of God to a sceptic, one of the first things he will do is to challenge you to prove that God exists in the first place.

And he says that is the wrong way round: because if there is no Creator, then we came from nothing - and the one thing we know does NOT exist in the physical world is nothing. Nothing, you see, is the absence of something.

We live in a material universe. . . But the entire argument from the point of atheism is that nothing - which cannot exist in a material universe - is responsible for the existence of the material universe. . .

A sceptic cannot prove God does not exist, because that demands proving a negative. God could exist, therefore it cannot be proved He does not. Conversely, nothing cannot exist, a philosophical, scientific and logical principle long established to be true. . .

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good" (Psalms 14:1). The sceptic's blanket statement that God does not exist stands as sufficient testimony to the truth of the Psalmist's words. So do all of the sceptic's arguments, when broken down into their component parts.

To begin with, none of them are in support of their own position, to wit, "
nothing is responsible for creation." They can neither defend nor explain the existence of "nothing." Instead, the sceptic's argument MUST come in the form of an attack on Something, to wit, a Creator God. . .

Make no mistake, they also believe in God in some sense, or logically, there would be nothing on which to base the discussion. They just don't want to believe and they are seeking justification for that disbelief.

The atheist needs to sucker you into the positive position of proving God exists, because he cannot prove the negative proposition. . . The sceptic's argument doesn't offer alternative answers - it only raises questions in the hope you can't answer them either. . .

There are libraries full of books attempting to prove the existence of God or to argue against the existence of God. There aren't very many books that attempt to prove the existence of nothing.

The very concept of nothing is something. Since the concept of nothing is itself something, the existence of nothing is therefore disqualified. . .

Does God exist? Well, if He didn't, there would be nothing to debate. And nobody debates about nothing.

Isn't that something?

You can read the whole thing right here.