Instigator / Pro
6
1417
rating
27
debates
24.07%
won
Topic
#3445

There is only 1 god.

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
0
6
Better sources
2
4
Better legibility
2
2
Better conduct
2
2

After 2 votes and with 8 points ahead, the winner is...

RationalMadman
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
3
Time for argument
One day
Max argument characters
15,000
Voting period
One week
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
14
1702
rating
574
debates
67.86%
won
Description

Rules:

Pro: Has to defend the monotheist position

Con: Has to defend a polytheist/henotheist position. Con can be a polytheist, henotheist, pluralist, or something similar.

both:

* do not commit these fallacies: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
* Follow website TOS
* The rules will apply equally to both pro and cons.

Round 1
Pro
#1
Argument 1: Let me first start with something I call the 2 gods paradox. It is a paradox showing the problem with having more than 1 omnipotent being:

So lets say there are 2 gods, each one equally infinite in power(omnipotent) and capable of doing whatever they will. So one day they have a disagreement, one god wants to do something  - let's say he wants to create pink elephants - but the other god doesn't want to make pink elephants. So the other god can will to curse the other god to make him incapable of creating pink elephants, but the same god who was cursed can will himself out of the curse(and he does). So then the anti pink elephant god curses the pro pink elephant god with the same curse as before along with another curse that takes away all his powers, makes him unable to will to get his powers back, and turns him into a pink elephant. 

The 2 gods are both all powerful and infinitely powered and capable of doing anything, but one was capable of dismantling the other's power, which causes a paradox.


Argument 2: Also all of the elements usually represented by different gods in a polytheistic religion are highly interconnected and ultimately based on the same subatomic particles. If everything is interconnected, then there can be a god for everything, and that god of everything is very similar to the monotheistic god.

argument 3: Having one god instead of multiple gods is in accordance to Occam's razor - which states that you should not multiply causes beyond necessity.

Con
#2
I'll start off with negating Pro's case before constructive due to the conciseness of Pro's case, I feel this works best as an intuitive structure for voters/readers to follow.

==
Occam's razor is self-defeated via this debate description's premise.
This debate is not what the title says, it is instead that if we irrationally assume there has to be a god, then it is certainly case that it is only one. Conversely, if we followed Occam's Razor, this debate would be able to be attacked by the atheistic and/or agnostic Kritik that Pro cannot prove the unnecessary god itself as real. To further negate Occam's Razor as a valid premise for Pro to attack Con, let's see that to presume a god as logically necessitated is to presume the god as needing a god entity to have created itself in the first place, making the infinite loop support Con via Occam's Razor, not Pro.

==
Note: A YouTube Video is not a valid reference to back an argument up and anybody watching it should negate its contents in their votes, it is up to Pro to fully justify via the contents of the video.
==

The absolutely irrational Premise 2 of Pro is to be negated on sheer lack of any logic connecting each point to the other(s).

 all of the elements usually represented by different gods in a polytheistic religion are highly interconnected and ultimately based on the same subatomic particles. 
There is no element of polytheistic gods that I as Con will purport that relies on particles, the gods are metaphysical and were there before and after particle creation, they are essentially auras and souls that can pass through reality's spacetime fabric with ease. Pro has to provide the lore which requires the God to be made up of atoms or similar particles in order to then Kritik like this.

 If everything is interconnected, then there can be a god for everything, and that god of everything is very similar to the monotheistic god.
Can be and is are two very different things. This is arguing that there can happen to be 1 god, not that there is only 1. This actually works backwards against Pro.

Pro's case is asserting that 1 god is necessitated and that multiple gods are absurd but this very part of his Premise 2 enables Con to back-funnel the equation of equal likelihood to state that Pro has just conceded that 1 god is equally absurd and likely to multiple, pushing very hard back on other notions Pro is laying out regarding absurdity and likelihood.

==

The 2 gods paradox... Is dependent on what 'god' is defined as, it is an illegitimate truism-oriented semantic play not a rational one.

The first premise of Pro relies on us adhering to a definition of 'god' that makes all demigods and god entities involved in the reality as infinitely ancient, powerful and invulnerable to the effect of the other's powers. Of course this would be paradoxical but that is because that definition of 'god' is specific to the Abrahamic religions that are all monotheistic.

The definition of 'god' that Con will be using is:

spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being

one of several deities, especially a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs. Compare goddess (def. 1).
an image of a deity; an idol.
any deified person or object.
a nebulous powerful force imagined to be responsible for one's fate

There is no way for Pro to assert the monotheistic definition of 'god' and parameters for god's powers in this debate, that is abusive semantics and absolutely against the dynamic of debating the topic which the description lays out. Pro did not define 'god' in the debate description' but made it clear this debate opens up polytheism to be viable, meaning the only definitions of 'god' available should include ones that don't render Con's side paradoxical, which I have just provided for us.

==
I will write my whole case as an essay

Contention 1: No clear morality in reality
Contention 2: Physics implies randomness at core of reality with organisation as we 'zoom out' of quantum level
Contention 3: Combining contenions 1 and 2 a as well psychology/psychiatry imply that if there is a singular God, he/she/it suffers from dissociative identity disorder.
As Con, I would like to take note that reality does not seem structured on any moral code whatsoever and if it is, it appears to be multiple colliding with each other. In fact, even Christianity and Islam have the 'devil' (or 'iblis') character in them which is somehow able to defy the moral code and agenda that this supposedly monotheistic all-encompassing 'God' or 'Allah' has in mind for reality. The dynamic between Satan/Iblis and God/Allah is not directly akin to that of equal gods and their underling demigods but there are certainly parallels. Therefore, as Con I assert that the scapegoat of the Devil and 'god is testing us in ways we cannot imagine' to justify each and every way that reality seems to defy a morally concerned god-entity which monotheists use is simply a crutch they use to avoid the more likely explanation; multiple gods with varying agendas at play.

It would make sense how one or multiple gods are perhaps concerned with saving life while others are concerned with balancing them out via destroying it, this fits very nicely in with the dual nature of entropy at the core of reality. In fact, it's not just about entropy having core particles be in 2 places at once or come in and out of existence, it is the fact that reality at its core appears random as opposed to strictly stratified yet outside of the core, quantum level it appears to follow consistent laws, such as Newton's. What I am going to explain will come after the science introduction.

Generally, entropy is defined as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system. This concept was introduced by a German physicist named Rudolf Clausius in the year 1850.
Apart from the general definition, there are several definitions that one can find for this concept. The two definitions of entropy that we will look at on this page are the thermodynamic definition and the statistical definition.

From a thermodynamics viewpoint of entropy, we do not consider the microscopic details of a system. Instead, entropy is used to describe the behaviour of a system in terms of thermodynamic properties such as temperature, pressure, entropy, and heat capacity. This thermodynamic description took into consideration the state of equilibrium of the systems.
Meanwhile, the statistical definition which was developed at a later stage focused on the thermodynamic properties which were defined in terms of the statistics of the molecular motions of a system. Entropy is a measure of the molecular disorder.

Other popular interpretations of entropy are as follows;
    • If we talk about quantum statistical mechanics, Von Neumann extended the notion of entropy to the quantum domain by means of the density matrix.
    • While discussing the information theory, it is a measure of the efficiency of a system in transmitting a signal or the loss of information in a transmitted signal.
    • When it comes to dynamical systems, entropy defines the growing complexity of a dynamical system. It also quantifies the average flow of information per unit of time.
    • Sociology states that entropy is the social decline or natural decay of structure (such as law, organization, and convention) in a social system.
    • In cosmology, entropy is described as a hypothetical tendency of the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity. It states that the matter should be at a uniform temperature.
In any case, today the term entropy is used in many other sciences very much distant from physics or mathematics and we must say that it no longer maintains its rigorous quantitative character.

Now, I will explain the duality at play and what this implies for the controllers (I assert) or single controller (Pro asserts) in charge of reality.

For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple. It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic. He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles.

But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality. Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe. But does the simple experiment really make such a case?

In the modern quantum form, Young’s experiment involves beaming individual particles of light or matter at two slits or openings cut into an otherwise opaque barrier. On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles (say, a photographic plate in the case of photons). Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit. 

They don’t. Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark. These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap. When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference (bright bands), and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference (darkness).

But there’s only one photon going through the apparatus at any one time. It’s as if each photon is going through both slits at once and interfering with itself. This doesn’t make classical sense.

What that article tells is that at the core or quantum level of reality things are much further from common sense and rational rules. To further highlight this, I'd like to not focus specifically on entropy but on quarks and what they mean and are:
Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.

But while the virtual particles are briefly part of our world they can interact with other particles, and that leads to a number of tests of the quantum-mechanical predictions about virtual particles. The first test was understood in the late 1940s. In a hydrogen atom an electron and a proton are bound together by photons (the quanta of the electromagnetic field). Every photon will spend some time as a virtual electron plus its antiparticle, the virtual positron, since this is allowed by quantum mechanics as described above. The hydrogen atom has two energy levels that coincidentally seem to have the same energy. But when the atom is in one of those levels it interacts differently with the virtual electron and positron than when it is in the other, so their energies are shifted a tiny bit because of those interactions. That shift was measured by Willis Lamb and the Lamb shift was born, for which a Nobel Prize was eventually awarded.

Quarks are particles much like electrons, but different in that they also interact via the strong force. Two of the lighter quarks, the so-called "up" and "down" quarks, bind together to make up protons and neutrons. The "top" quark is the heaviest of the six types of quarks. In the early 1990s it had been predicted to exist but had not been directly seen in any experiment. At the LEP collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, millions of Z bosons--the particles that mediate neutral weak interactions--were produced and their mass was very accurately measured. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the mass of the Z boson, but the measured value differed a little. This small difference could be explained in terms of the time the Z spent as a virtual top quark if such a top quark had a certain mass. When the top quark mass was directly measured a few years later at the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, the value agreed with that obtained from the virtual particle analysis, providing a dramatic test of our understanding of virtual particles.

If particles at the core of our reality are able to behave in two contradictory ways at once, even be in 2 places at once and defy laws that Newton suggested for reality, it similarly links to lack of morality in our reality. Rapists and frauds can thrive while the honest victims perish and suffer, even killing themselves due to the debt. There very blatantly is something wrong with our reality if it is a monotheistic God with a moral code... What if it isn't? I say it's unlikely it is.

The same God preaching about saving lives and being kind to thy neighbour is not likely to be making storms, having infants die or suffer to unbearable diseases and domestic abuse or neglect without setting things right.

Asingle God would need to be having multiple personalities in order to justify reality...

Round 2
Pro
#3
Your definition:
spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being
nothing too shabby about this definition, but I will move on.

There are 2 kinds of gods:

The big "G" God: the monotheistic concept of God, a maximally great being which is all powerful, all knowing, all benevolent. The 2 gods paradox is supposed to show why there can't be more than 1 big G gods.

the little "g" god: the polytheistic concept of god. There are many gods, with various powers. They are usually not omnipotent. 

Okay let's get an argument for God's existence, let's use saint Anselm's argument. And instead of God, let's use a polytheistic god like Thor:

trivia: 
 
*A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. 

Thor being put to the Anselm test:

1. It is possible that Thor exists: Who is Thor? Well Thor is the Norse god of lightning. Thor is son of Odin. Thor wields a hammer named Mjolnir. Thor uses Mjolnir to strike giants. And at Ragnarok he will defeat the serpent Jörmungandr who encircles the world. Like many Norse gods, Thor can die.

links:

2. Thor exists in some possible world: This is true, there is nothing too logically incoherent about Thor to not be able to exist in some possible world,

3. If Thor exists in some possible world then it exists in every possible world: If Thor existed in every possible world, then Thor would not be able to be born or die, Thor is son of Odin, before Odin Thor couldn't have existed. Thor can't exist in every possible world because he is not omnipotent nor omnipresent and can die.  4-6 could be true if 3 was true.
 
4. If Thor exists in every possible world then Thor exists in the actual world: 
5. Thor exists in the actual world:
6. Therefore Thor exists.

what kind of proof will you need for Thor? Well:

  • You have to prove that there is a man in the sky riding a chariot pulled by 2 goats.
  • You have to prove that this humanoid wields a magical lightning hammer.
  • You have to prove that this humanoid wields a magical belt that doubles this man's strength.
  • You have to prove that lightning is caused by this man.
  • You have to prove that there is a giant snake that encircles the globe.
  • You have to prove that there are giants that this man attacks with his hammer.
  • You have to prove that the hammer has the ability to return and never miss when this man throws it.

  • If you want to go further you have to prove that there is a giant cosmic tree that holds the earth on one branch, the underworlds on other branches, and the heavens on others.
  • You have to prove that Odin exists.
  • You have to prove that  a race of godlike giants exist.
So is there evidence for such a being or anything here? Of course not.

So how well does Thor score on the test? Super badly. How well does God score on the test? usually very well.

Try to use any of the arguments for God on any other polytheistic god and it would be illogical.

you: 

If particles at the core of our reality are able to behave in two contradictory ways at once, even be in 2 places at once and defy laws that Newton suggested for reality, it similarly links to lack of morality in our reality. Rapists and frauds can thrive while the honest victims perish and suffer, even killing themselves due to the debt. There very blatantly is something wrong with our reality if it is a monotheistic God with a moral code... What if it isn't? I say it's unlikely it is.

The same God preaching about saving lives and being kind to thy neighbour is not likely to be making storms, having infants die or suffer to unbearable diseases and domestic abuse or neglect without setting things right.

A single God would need to be having multiple personalities in order to justify reality...


Ah yes the problem of evil. How many times will I have to hear this song and dance again? But anyways here's a bunch of theodicies, choose your favorite:

* God loves us so much that he gave us the gift of free will, the original 2 humans - Adam and Eve - misused this free will to listen to the demonic serpent and ate the forbidden fruit. Because they bit the fruit the totality of all evil, sin, death, and suffering leaked onto the world.

* This world is just preparation for heaven. Heaven is a place were no evil, death, or suffering exists. There is free will in heaven, but the reason sin can't happen over there is the same reason you no longer put everything in your mouth like when you were a baby - you know better than to do so. 

* The Augustinian theodicy holds that God chose to give people free will, and people freely chose to do evil; the evil that we suffer is a consequence of that.

* The Irenaean theodicy holds that the evil that we suffer is purgative, that is, we suffer in order that through suffering we might be cleansed of sin and attain to greater holiness. A good example would be getting a vaccine, when the vaccine is put into your skin it hurts. Afterwards your arm might be weak. But ultimately you got protected against a certain pathogen.

* The  theodicy in the book of Job holds that we shouldn't expect to be able to understand God's calculus since it is based on the divine omniscience, and we wouldn't be able to render just judgment anyway even if we did know it since we ourselves are so immoral; but we can and should believe what God has revealed, which is that He desires our ultimate good and not our ultimate harm, He knows what He is doing, He is able to help us, and we need to trust Him.
An analogy might be if my dog ate bees after I told her not to, and now her mouth hurts. Is it true that it's her own fault for not listening to me? Yes. Is it going to hurt when I have to touch it to put medicine on it? Yes. But really, the most important thing for her to know is that I am here to help her, and she needs to trust me. She may not understand why her mouth hurts, she may not understand why I am touching it and making it hurt more, but she does understand that I am her human, I know more than her, and I love her. That's what she needs to know.

* The problem of evil is always presented as an appeal to emotion. Descriptions of genocide and rape and murder and all the evils of man tugs on your emotions. Too bad it doesn't tug into your logic. The horrors of the holocaust prove the bible in showing how depraved man is inherently. Even more evil proves that Satan exists. 










Con
#4
I am going to largely ignore Pro's Round 2 because no part at all covers why there is only 1 god, instead Pro explains why there could possibly be 1 God and why Pro has particular personal issue with the complexity involved in polytheistic mechanics of gods such as Thor needing to interact with the general Greek god paradigm but I didn't say I support Spartan/Athenian depictions of Gods.

I will cover what I said in Round 1 and prove that it isn't an appeal to emotion.

Pro glosses entirely over the physics issue. Reality has actual randomness and conflicting events at the quantum level, why would a singular stratifying organiser be making randomness appear? There shouldn't be chaos and randomness unless multiple controlling parties are conflicting and interacting in ways that do not have an organised manner (the only alternative is the singular god has many personalities which is not an intuitive approach at all).

Pro says that the issue with morality in reality is an appeal to emotion but it isn't and in fact saying 'god gave you your free will' is a form of appealing to emotion to evoke gratefulness in order to win the debate. The fact is that a singular god should have ensured only one true religion made it in our species and that there is a clear moral code throughout. Instead, what nature is in our planet and in general space is a place full of contradictory, conflicting ideas of morality. You have rape, predatory species mercilessly picking on the weaker prey ones and a reality full of death, carnage, erosion and perpetual chaos/change. These all seem to fit what would happen if there were a chaotic group in charge each with their own powers and unable to fully stop the others getting their way. Some want the carnage and despair, others want the unity, love and hope that us more complex species can experience (humans most of all). It also is interesting that within our ecosystem, humans are both the most capable of ruthlessness and merciful assistance, implying that at the apex of our own reality are being with varying agendas capable of the highest good and evil. 
Round 3
Pro
#5
you:

"I am going to largely ignore Pro's Round 2 because no part at all covers why there is only 1 god, instead Pro explains why there could possibly be 1 God and why Pro has particular personal issue with the complexity involved in polytheistic mechanics of gods such as Thor needing to interact with the general Greek god paradigm but I didn't say I support Spartan/Athenian depictions of Gods."

my response: Ah yes, a classic ad hominem, instead of refuting my arguments. What I was saying is that most polytheistic gods require different kinds of evidence than the monotheistic God. Trying to prove zeus or Thor or the grand majority of polytheistic gods is like trying to prove the existence of the easter bunny. They both require very specific evidence that a humanoid exists which does similar things to them.


you: "I will cover what I said in Round 1 and prove that it isn't an appeal to emotion."

my response: you only refuted a small part of the whole argument. I also gave you 4 theodicies so that you can test:

1. This world is just preparation for heaven. Heaven is a place were no evil, death, or suffering exists. There is free will in heaven, but the reason sin can't happen over there is the same reason you no longer put everything in your mouth like when you were a baby - you know better than to do so.

2. The famous Augustinian prophecy aka the free will theodicy which states that God chose to give people free will, and people freely chose to do evil; the evil that we suffer is a consequence of that.

3.The Irenaean theodicy holds that the evil that we suffer happens to make us better people afterwards.

* This argument can be compared to taking a vaccine, it hurts will you take it, but afterwards you get immunized to a specific pathogen.

4. The theodicy in the book of Job which states that humans are too limited in intelligence, wisdom, and perception to truly know the whole array of reasons why God does anything.

Con
#6
 Trying to prove zeus or Thor or the grand majority of polytheistic gods is like trying to prove the existence of the easter bunny. They both require very specific evidence that a humanoid exists which does similar things to them.
Same with your own God. That is why I didn't bother to address it, it's a non sequitur, gods are beyond physical proof unless they choose to make themselves obvious. Thor is more obvious than your own god as lightning and thunder are signs of Thor, if we really want to play that game...

Zeus is from an opposing religion to the one with Odin and Thor, so for Zeus to be real, Thor has to be false and vice versa. I am not sure what makes Zeus harder to prove than a monotheistic God, nor have you made clear in any way how it is so.

1. This world is just preparation for heaven. Heaven is a place were no evil, death, or suffering exists. There is free will in heaven, but the reason sin can't happen over there is the same reason you no longer put everything in your mouth like when you were a baby - you know better than to do so.
In your opinion. Nothing about or reality implies eternal reward or eternal punishment are just or anything to do with how we operate. There is also no clear strict or unified moral code throughout reality.

2. The famous Augustinian prophecy aka the free will theodicy which states that God chose to give people free will, and people freely chose to do evil; the evil that we suffer is a consequence of that.
So what? This God knowingly and willingly enabled us to do evil, whether we 'choose' to or not, God made the brains and such that led to it. God at the moment of all rapes, murders, thefts and 'evils' has the power to stop it in a singular god scenario, this Allah or God is choosing to enable them to occur. Instead, in polytheistic variations, the gods who'd rather it doesn't happen can't necessarily stop the gods interested in letting/making it happen.

3.The Irenaean theodicy holds that the evil that we suffer happens to make us better people afterwards.
That would/could be just as true in a monotheistic and polytheistic reality, it has zero bearing on this debate.

* This argument can be compared to taking a vaccine, it hurts will you take it, but afterwards you get immunized to a specific pathogen.
And has no bearing on the debate at all.

4. The theodicy in the book of Job which states that humans are too limited in intelligence, wisdom, and perception to truly know the whole array of reasons why God does anything.
Then you are too limited in intelligence, wisdom an dperception to truly know the god is really good, as well as real. That is also why we have Allah, Jewish God and Christian God (with many denominations in each), we have no clue really. Seems like the answer may be multiple gods and we're all grasping certain personas in the polytheistic system.

I rest my case.