A god as powerful and knowledgeable as the one who created the universe could not have simply come from nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. There must have been an earlier and even more powerful creator who created god.
You don’t believe me? Well, that’s your right, but I have faith in god’s creator. This faith sustains me, and you cannot argue it away no matter how much reason or evidence you present.
There’s really no difference between the approach here and the tactics many religious arguments follow. Debunk the above argument for the existence of a creator for god, and you debunk the one for god as well.
Most will retort that God needs no creator. He’s always been because his existence is philosophically “necessary”. How would you answer?
I also debunk the argument from necessity in the book:
1. If we can only observe or experience contingent things that can either exist or not exist within the framework of nature, or the known universe, then trying to explain the framework itself based on things that are contained within it is a composition fallacy. This is when you claim something is true for the whole (or the framework) based on the fact that it’s true for some parts, or even every part, of the whole. For example, atoms aren’t living things, but that doesn’t mean that nothing made of atoms can be a living thing.
2. This argument essentially constructs a rhetorical floating roof and then concludes that a roof cannot float on its own, that it’s contingent and that it therefore depends on necessary supporting walls. But this is no more than a word game. The contingent premise was simply asserted out of nothing. And the supposedly necessary conclusion to support said premise is only necessary if one is inclined to accept the baseless premise in the first place. It’s just a thought experiment, a dialectical sleight of hand. There’s no actual substance, let alone empirical evidence, here to support such a gigantic conclusion about the origin of the universe. God is an invalid conclusion to a baseless premise.
3. Even if the argument were sound (which it isn’t), it would still not lead to a conclusion about a necessary being, let alone about a single supernatural deity. There could just as easily be multiple deities, or a non-deity necessary thing. Leaping to the conclusion that there must be a single personal deity is exactly that—a leap, or in other words, a non sequitur conclusion.
Claiming a god is a presumption.
Those who make the claim still must prove their claim.