(April 16, 2014 at 11:13 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote: And bad reasons for rejecting something does not give you anything like the intellectual high ground. Surely it shouldn't be too hard to unveal the best apologists have if it's all bullshit?


Ah, the day I have to defend apologists and apologetics from [presumably] an atheist. Irony?

MFM,
Brian's reasoning for rejecting apologetics is sound and you are coming across as someone who is arguing for the sake of arguing. My explanation might be too simple for you to understand.

Apologetics ostensibly are making the case or rely on the proposition that God exists; a claim made without evidence in support. It makes no difference what the argument is, without evidence the idea of God can be dismissed as a serious existential claim.

You also seem to suggest that it is my responsibility to unveil/unravel every apologetic before I can claim it's bullshit (your intellectual high ground comment makes little sense otherwise). If anybody were to present bonafide evidence for the existence of God it would be front page news everywhere, with heretofore unscientific Christians screaming the loudest in support. Your intellectual high ground barb dissolves into you having to support the idea that Brian, myself, and others like us must individually pour through every apologetic because there's a chance that one exists, as elusive as the God it claims, that hasn't been properly vetted.

I also don't have to entertain and dismiss every account of close encounters to make the reasonable assertion that extra terrestrial visitation of the Earth is bullshit.

(April 17, 2014 at 6:06 am)Cato Wrote: MFM,
Brian's reasoning for rejecting apologetics is sound and you are coming across as someone who is arguing for the sake of arguing. My explanation might be too simple for you to understand.

I disagree. His argument came down to "they're not science books" and "they're false", the former of which is trivially true and the latter of which is just an assertion. I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing.

Quote:Apologetics ostensibly are making the case or rely on the proposition that God exists; a claim made without evidence in support. It makes no difference what the argument is, without evidence the idea of God can be dismissed as a serious existential claim.

Are you kidding me? The whole point of apologetics is to provide evidence for God. Further, arguments ARE evidence, which apologists DO provide in addition to argumentation. An obvious example is cosmic fine-tuning, which when put in a probabilistic argument for theism is a fairly strong argument. It clearly moves from empirical evidence (which you seem to think is the only kind of evidence) to the conclusion that the best explanation of that evidence is that of design.

Quote:You also seem to suggest that it is my responsibility to unveil/unravel every apologetic before I can claim it's bullshit (your intellectual high ground comment makes little sense otherwise). If anybody were to present bonafide evidence for the existence of God it would be front page news everywhere, with heretofore unscientific Christians screaming the loudest in support. Your intellectual high ground barb dissolves into you having to support the idea that Brian, myself, and others like us must individually pour through every apologetic because there's a chance that one exists, as elusive as the God it claims, that hasn't been properly vetted.

Unlike Brian, my belief isn't that apologetics books are wrong before I've read them, nor do I claim that apologists already know God doesn't exist. That's a claim with a high burden to meet.
And of course apologists present evidence for God's existence. However, most theists don't really care much about apologetics because they already believe in God and don't tend to put themselves in places where they have to give a rational defense of their beliefs, so they feel they have no need for apologetics.

Now, the reason I don't need to go to his position is because I do in fact read apologetics books and have good reasons for doubting the arguments therein. An uncritical rejection of apologetics books by claims of them "not presenting evidence for God" is straightforwardly false.

Quote:I also don't have to entertain and dismiss every account of close encounters to make the reasonable assertion that extra terrestrial visitation of the Earth is bullshit.

Which happens to be because ypu have other good reasons for doubting their claims. If you didn't have those reasons and simply rejected them as wrong from the outset, your own rejection of their claims would be no more rational than their acceptance of those claims.

Quote:Respectable books on apologetics?

Apologetics is inherently disreputable.

As someone may have said earlier, the problem is one of epistemology - how do you know what you know?

All theistic "knowledge" comes from logic or revelation, but none from direct observation. Stories on stories over the centuries.

As far as I know, all arguments for gods have been soundly refuted - ontological, design, first cause - you name it, it's been refuted.

I would look at your question the other way - why accept something as truth when its tenets have so roundly been trounced? The very basis of "knowing" in theism is plain wrong.

(April 16, 2014 at 5:50 am)Sinbad Wrote: If you're into audio, Foundations: An Overview of Systematic Theology - R.C.Sproul.
23 hours of apologetic bullshit

Did you actually listen to all 23 hours of that may I ask?

Mind you I actually did mentally torture myself once by watching two fundamentalist Christian documentaries.

These were Hell's Bells: The Dangers of Rock and Roll and Hell’s Bells 2: The Power and Spirit of Popular Music.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884089/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949839/

Anyway I have yet to encounter any Christian apologetics which does not commit some logical fallacy or another. Since in my opinion all serious Christian apologetics depends on arguing that the Gospels are historically accurate. Because if somebody can argue without committing logical fallacies a god exists, that does not prove automatically that the claims of the Christianity are true.

Therefore as I stated earlier, Christian apologetics is dependant arguing that the Gospels are historically accurate which automatically leads to committing logical (quite blatant ones at that) fallacies.

MFM,
I apologize for not having the time to address each point, but wanted to quickly comment on something. You seem to be ok with dismissing claims when there is sufficient other reasons to reject them. You also come across as assuming that we don’t have sufficient other reasons to reject apologist arguments without thoroughly addressing each claim.

Let’s take the fine tuning argument (FTA) that you claim is compelling to some extent. I’ll just quickly list some problems I have with the argument in no particular order:

- FTA assumes that the physical constants of our current cosmological model could be different. I have never heard a reasonable explanation of why this is anything more than conjecture.
- Even if they could be different there is no understanding of the mechanism. This means there is no logical limitation on the values that they can hold resulting in an infinite set. This alone makes any probabilistic based argument irrelevant.
- Multiverse arguments are sometimes presented, but I think this hinders the god claim. If I have an infinite number of universes all with different physical properties I don’t need god to have one that supports life as we know it.
- Our special universe has a tremendous amount of empty space. Bad engineering that isn’t necessary. Why wouldn’t a fine tuner just create Earth with one sun if the fine tuning had us in mind?
- The finely tuned process of creating the chemistry that is the basis of our life is woefully inefficient.
- Many make the FTA with our particular species in mind. We can’t inhabit most of our planet. Without very special precautions we die instantly if we leave it.
- The abundance of stars and black holes suggests our universe was finely tuned for them, not us.
- If we consider all the things we don’t yet know about our universe it is somewhat remarkable to me that apologists will hang their hat on the little we do know as an occupation for their god.
- At most the FTA gets us a deity responsible for the Big Bang. There is absolutely no way to get from there to characteristics of anyone’s particular supernatural pet.

The FTA is essentially an argument from ignorance. It’s simply a rationalization; as I said before it’s just an attempt to find a purpose for god. The FTA does nothing to help explain the universe.