Satan Disproves Christianity

[John V]

Actually, I'm trying to show you that whatever testimony your holy book has can't be the reason you believe in your religion, because other religions have holy books too, and you don't believe any of those. They're all making claims in the same format with the same level of evidence backing them;

No, I've been pointing out differences in level of evidence.

the thing I'm asking is why this one book is the one you've chosen, and that has nothing to do with what's actually in the book, because the events described in a book do not testify to the reality of those events.

That's ridiculous. Most of what we know, we know from testimony, and a lot of that from books. Your position will boil down to a materialist philosophy. You presumably think it's OK to believe in many non-religious things after reading books about them.

This has been the whole point of the thought experiment about the gnomes; to get you to see that there are plenty of claims that you don't believe, despite having the same amount of evidence, and to ask yourself why it is that you'll believe one but not the other.

There you go with same amount of evidence again, after we've discussed this repeatedly. No, an admittedly made-up claim is not supported as well as claims that purport to be true. A book from the biography section is more likely to accurately reflect reality than a book from the fiction section.

And Spiderman can do whatever a spider can. A thing being written in a book does not make it true.

Sure - but some books are more likely to be true than others, and we can compare books in this regard based on stated intent of the author and other factors.

And human sacrifices willingly died for their ancient gods, I'm sure. Again, someone being convinced that something is true enough to get themselves hurt over it doesn't make it so. People hallucinate themselves off the edge of buildings all the time.

And again, it provides better support than people who quickly recant and admit they just made stuff up.

Assuming you can trust everything that's written in either book...

Working with the information we have available...