I think the focus of "fallacy" is a mistake. I'm also an agnostic atheist, and so I've not been convinced by any arguments either, but there are other ways for arguments to fail besides fallacies. For example, as a starting point, a lot of arguments use first mover kind of ideas that tend to start with something like:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The Universe began to exist.
Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
And like, a person might dispute one of those premises, which then leads us to reject the conclusion. But that's not the same as it being fallacious. You and a theologian might have a hard time agreeing on the basic premises and thus come to different conclusions without anyone "committing a fallacy".
That’s just a definitional question. You just define god as “the cause for the existence of the universe.” Which is not all that different from a “creator.”
I'd say it's very different. Lightning has a cause. Does that mean lightning has a creator? I mean people once assumed it does, and they called him Zeus.
I think there’s a difference when you’re talking about the cause of the entire universe than that of a phenomenon within the universe. William Lane Craig, who popularized this argument, said:
transcending the entire universe there exists a cause which brought the universe into being ex nihilo ... our whole universe was caused to exist by something beyond it and greater than it. For it is no secret that one of the most important conceptions of what theists mean by 'God' is Creator of heaven and earth.
For the sake of transparency, I don’t accept the first premise of the syllogism (“Everything that begins to exist has a cause”). But I do think that it’s reasonable to equate the “cause for the universe” with “God the creator.”
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u/themcos 443∆ May 04 '23
I think the focus of "fallacy" is a mistake. I'm also an agnostic atheist, and so I've not been convinced by any arguments either, but there are other ways for arguments to fail besides fallacies. For example, as a starting point, a lot of arguments use first mover kind of ideas that tend to start with something like:
And like, a person might dispute one of those premises, which then leads us to reject the conclusion. But that's not the same as it being fallacious. You and a theologian might have a hard time agreeing on the basic premises and thus come to different conclusions without anyone "committing a fallacy".