Addendum: Chad's (failed) attempt to re-work the Suicide Argument.

Elliott had a go at re-working the Suicide Argument in order to make it ‘airtight’; I just hope he doesn’t try to float it anywhere! I had to offer one last lesson before I withdraw into Academia. Here’s the argument itself and my very brief breakdown of its primary flaws.

The Suicide Argument 

P1: Atheists have to accept that all moral values are subjective

P2: If all moral values are subjective, then no action is objectively wrong

P3: If no action is objectively wrong, then abolishing atheism all together (sic) is not objectively wrong

C: Atheism is self-defeating

Well, Elliott; this will be my last foray into your strange, sad little world for a while; my formal study period begins today, so I will be far too busy earning my PhD to be bothered shooting one silly little fish in his tiny barrel. I do hope you've gained something from these lessons; it appears so, as you have been modifying your arguments somewhat. 

I'm sorry I never got around to a proper breakdown of the Suicide Argument, as I said I would; I just had lots of better things to do and it slipped my mind. I see you've been tweaking at it; unfortunately, it's not particularly successful. Your re-working of the Suicide Argument is a valiant attempt to clean up a pretty messy trash-pile, and to a small extent it succeeds; the error you noticed (or maybe you should just ‘fess up to having it pointed out to you) has been dealt with.

Unfortunately, you are still left with P1’s attempt to force a false dichotomy on Atheists.

P1: Atheists have to accept that all moral values are subjective.

 It is simply NOT TRUE that Atheists “have to accept that all moral values are subjective”. Atheists could use a range of potential origins for an objective morality that are logically sound but that do not require a god:

1. Programming by aliens (one of your favorites there)
2. Imprinting from an alternate reality (multiple universe theory there – I know you don’t like that one, but it IS logically possible)
3. The non-deistic, impersonal, natural force that spontaneously caused this Universe (the third option you refuse to acknowledge, even though it does not violate either of the “illogical” alternatives you offer to the deistic theory in the Elliott Argument) imprinted a survival modality on the fabric of space-time which we perceive as an objective moral code.

I could go on, but the list is pretty much endless.

As I have just shown that P1 is NOT TRUE – and if you know logical argumentation as well as you claim – you will realise that this makes P1 unsound.

P2 and P3 are both logically sound as far as they go, but as they rely entirely on the soundness of P1, they fail because it fails.

The conclusion is also something of an aberration; it doesn't actually follow from the premises. It’s unfortunately typical of your form of argument structure that you seem to dream up a ‘conclusion’ and then write premises that you think support it. MAJOR FAIL there, Elliott.

Once again, you have presented an ‘argument’ which is actually not one; in order to reach the conclusion as written, you would have to introduce at least one and probably more branches to the argument, which would probably make it far too complex and convoluted to hold up. You will have to do a lot more work on this one to get it even close to being a sound argument, I’m afraid, but keep up the effort. If nothing else, you are giving a lot of people on the internet some great laughs.

So long, ‘champ’; I’ll pop in and see how you’re doing from time to time.