I came across some older posts I put on this video a while ago. The posts seems to be hidden on the video, unless logged in as myself. Probably flagged down by someone or perhaps just a case of YT highjinks.
However I felt it may be worth recording the posts here, for my own reference.
7 min: A misrepresentation of atheism. "absolute denial...deliberate dogmatic denial of the existence of god." Well no. Nor does it mean denial of all supernatural things, although many who call themselves atheists do reject related claims that are supernatural. This however is in addition to atheism, not atheism. There are atheists that can believe in souls and afterlives or karma or whatever and still reject god claims. The idea of denial is also not dogmatic, but conditional on evidence for many atheists. Saying atheism is dogmatic is internally inconsistent, as it is the rejection of a claim not a claim in itself. A rejection of a claim cannot be dogmatic anymore than a bachelor can be married. Definitions of dogma include 'Dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.' & ' a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted' There is no tenets to atheism, no creed, no dogma and no authority to provide it. Only the base definition "a lack of belief in god" is required to be adhered to to be classed as an atheist. Just like not being married is required to be called a bachelor. IF that is considered dogmatic then all words are. Cosmological disproof - Way to misrepresent the argument on both sides. The first cause argument is a theological argument for god, not an atheist one, and all atheists do is query the premises of it, and the related arguments of design. 1. Not everything has a cause even in our universe. e.g.: Quantum fluctuations have no cause as far as anyone can tell. 2. Before this universe exists (and therefore time and space), we cannot know what way causation works because we do not know anything about that event yet. Therefore it is a compositional fallacy to use the first cause as a premise for god and it can also be argued that it is a god of the gaps argument. 3. "What created god" is not circular, it addresses the design argument which states that complex beings must need a designer more complex to exist (in opposition to nature creating complexity from simple beginnings or ex nihilo.) Since this is used by theists, they cannot then say that the ultimate designer does not need a designer. This is a special pleading fallacy. You basically make god a unique entity that breaks the rules of your own argument. 4. There is no reason to not have created gods, history and myth are full of them, including some very early sects of christianity that thought the old testament god was a flawed created god and the NT god was the true god. Zeus was the child of Chronos for instance. 5. If using occoms razer to avoid infinite regression (which is why the uncreated claim exists in the first place) then it makes MORE sense to simply say that the universe always existed. I am not referring to the steady state theory, but if the BBT deals with all time, then that actually does mean that the event was before all time and therefore the universe did ALWAYS (in all time) exist in some form. There was no 'before' to discuss. 6. Finally the claim is an assertion, and on reflection on points 1 to 5, a poor one. If someone says a god is uncreated, that alone is not sufficient to prove it so. Just because it is philosophically tidy in the eyes of apologetics does not mean it is a sound argument.
OK, at 18 minute mark, the design argument is brought up, however 'purpose' can have many meanings, as the Greeks like Aristotle demonstrated. He posited 4 different types of 'purpose' but the last one (meaningful purpose) is the one that is used by the design argument. This is a classic equivocation fallacy. Since there are many 'purposes' for things that does not mean those purposes are equal or equivalent. The meaningful purpose is subjective and externally added to natural objects or events, they are not inherent to the objects or events themselves. E.g.: flowers need water to live and this was provided as a meaningful (4th) purpose for rain. However this is a subjective externally imposed meaning by the observer. The other three purposes include the formal purpose and inherent purpose (I cannot recall the third type). These can be summed up in the water cycle in terms of water rising as vapour (getting to the sky), clumping into larger water droplets and falling to the earth due to gravity. These three purposes have NOTHING to do with design's use of 'purpose'. These are the 'how' part of nature. The 4th one is often classified as the 'why' purpose. But this is a misapplication of the 'why' principle. Sometimes the how purposes are all that exist in nature. The why purpose is superfluous. Using that 4th purpose was why people thought Zeus was behind lightening in the sky or used,by Muslims, to explain falling meteorites as missiles used by Allah to hit Jinn so they cannot reach heaven. Using man made objects (like a shirt) in this argument is a version of the watchmaker argument and that fails because to recognise design, you do not use complexity as a criteria, but contrast it with natural objects. Therefore you cannot extend that analysis to INCLUDE natural objects as you then have nothing left to contrast design with and the term becomes meaningless. Its a bit like saying blue is also red and yellow. You are left with nothing useful. The last part of his comments are simply all over the place. The idea of order and chaos is a oversimplification and misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics. The universe can wind down (increase in entropy or unusable energy) but it is not a flat or uniform event. As with all matter, energy can clump and locally reverse entropy while overall entropy continues to increase. The Sun allows for this reversal or stalling of entropy on earth through living things. Eventually the sun and all things will dies and ultimate entropy will win out. Evolution (I hope he is not going to start denying this occurs later in his arguments) gives rise to complexity without intelligent design due to natural selection primarily. That is why natural selection was such a ground breaking addition to the theory of evolution. It allows for undirected selection to occur naturally in organisms. Finally the statement at the end of that segment is also a fallacy. An atheist DOES NOT hold the burden of proof for knowing how everything occurs. If asked such questions an atheist can simply say "I don't know" and the theist is still responsible for providing evidence for his or her claims that a god exists. Otherwise you are simply falling into the god of the gaps argument. "IF you cannot supply me with a better explanation then my guess wins by default." No, that is not how reason or logic works.
The moral argument - at 23 min mark the speaker is lying or misinformed. Of course atheists have answers for how we have morality. Do you seriously think the millions of atheists in the world do not consider the question of why we are moral beings? Seriously. It is one thing to disagree with our viewpoints, it is quite another to flat out deny we have any replies at all. Morality has its roots in our desire for self preservation, and our social contract with each other as social animals. This morality can be seen in studies of other primates and even some non-primates too. A sense of unfairness or compassion has been demonstrated in lab tests with primates and even mice. This is obvious if you simply think about any successful society and it's requirements. Those societies that considered murder and theft OK among their in-group could not compete with a trusting and supportive society. Also there are individuals that are born without empathy, which flies in the face of a designer that imbues a moral code in their creations. Morality is situationally based. and the speakers assertions that murder, lying and theft are UNIVERSALLY accepted as bad is FALSE. There are situations when lying is good (think Anne Frank). Theft is also a very conflicted stance (depending on the greater good, e.g.: steal an apple to survive starvation). We redefine murder too, allowing for execution of extremely dangerous criminals in some cases, abortion where the baby is found to be a danger to the mother's survival and its own life is terminal too, self defense, assisted suicide of terminally ill patents, etc. The speaker is grossly oversimplifying a very complex topic to get his viewpoint across and it does a disservice to his listeners as they will find the advice useless in discussions with any informed atheist. As far as a moral giver is concerned, most religions, certainly the Abrahamic ones, have conflicting moral guidelines. This raises the question of credibility of transmission of knowledge to theists of these proposed objective morals. That is a huge minefield of problems for theists that is rarely if ever coherently addressed in my experience. This and many more rebuttals to the moral argument exist among atheists. I would also mention that, like before, simply shifting the burden of proof unto atheists is not going to impress us. Just as with the design argument, the speaker is saying that Christians should defend their faith with atheists by saying atheists must have all the answers or the Christians win by default. So far ZERO evidence for god has been provided.
