Souplex said:
Many Atheists claim that they don't worship god because there is no argument for or against it. (In reality they all just worship Athe the incarnation of nothingness which seeks to render everything as nothingness) However, some people argue that if the premises are true then the outcome is true. Descartes came up with a fairly simple reasoning for the existence of a perfect being. "A cause cannot create an effect greater than itself therefore somewhere down the line there had to be a perfect being" I ask all you atheists and agnostics to try and find a hole in this logic.
Since there is so much of flame-baiting going on over your pointless joke (one in bad taste), I'll answer your question:
"A cause cannot create an effect greater than itself" If we accept this as a premise, then the conclusion is still false when applied to the universe. You see, this says nothing of natural causes, they do not create anything and we see nature go from simple the complex by itself all the time.
Descartes was arguing for a God Creator. Certainly, in that sense it is an interesting and an accurate description. Certainly no craftsman can create something that works yet which they do not understand. The 'creator' is by necessity more complex than the 'created'. Yet arguing for a perfect being on a basis of a clearly imperfect universe is a non-sequitur. The answer just might be a lesser degree of imperfection.
Also, this is essentially a First-cause argument (or an Uncaused cause) and thus suffers from all the same loopholes and trappings of such. For example, where did this perfect being come from? If it did not have to be created, why does the universe have to be created?
This can be restated as a reductio ad absurdum:
1. Premise: every event has a cause.
2. Premise: there can be no infinite regress.
3. Premise: there exists some event e0.
4. From (1) and (3), it follows that e0 has a cause e1, which in turn has a cause e2, and so on, in an infinite regress.
5. From (2) we know that there can be no infinite regress, which contradicts (4).
6. Therefore, at least one of the premises must be false.
If we reject premise 1, that every event has a cause, then there must be at least one uncaused cause. Yet this cause might, by the virtue of this argument, be anything from the vacuum of space to quatum fluctuation to Thor swinging his hammer.
So, even if we assume this argument to prove that there must be a first cause, we still have no knowledge of what the actual cause was. To suppose this was a creator of some kind is a logically unfounded leap of faith.
Also, we have zero evidence that anything was in fact created at all.
Now then, as for the premise itself: no evidence is given to support this claim. This is made entirely on pholosophical basis and as such is not perfectly analoguous to the real world in and of itself.
Secondly, we know things happen without cause all the time. In fact, current theories of physics allow for as much as 10^-43 grams worth of energy to come to being ex nihilo. As in, something from nothing. Or not, since no such thing as nothing
can exist as far as we know it. Space-time is something, you see. So, no cause leads to an effect. The effect is thus greater than the cause as something is more than nothing.
Thirdly, basic nuclear chemistry shows this to be false. Let us take a speeding neutron as the cause. Let the effect be a nuclear explosion. Effect is greater than the cause. 'Nuff said.
So summa summarum: The analogy made by Descartes fails. There is no evidence for the premise. There is evidence againts the premise. Descartes argument contains a non-sequitur. And there is the underlying unsupported assumption that something was created.
