My Inquiry

[FatAndFaithless]

Geez, talk about jumping the shark. Where in those Roman reports does it say he performed miracles?

[abaris]

Right, my bad. I can't reference the Bible here. But Roman reports state that He was called the Messiah, which we can take to mean that He did indeed exist and evidently performed wonders for people to start calling Him Messiah and to later go through persecution and martyrdom for Him.

Read what Tacitus really said. Messiah isn't the word he used, but christos or chrestos. And as for Josephus, half of what he supposedly wrote is a known forgery. And both of them didn't include the walking on water or raising the dead part. That's exclusively bible.

That's Tacitus

Christus, the founder of the name, was Put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign Of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time Broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief Originated, but through the city of Rome also, where all things Hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their Center and become popular

[Pyrrho]

Mmmmm. All these logical fallacies make my head hurt.

So I see we've landed on the subject of the teleological argument, which evidently I used. I'm looking into the fallacies of it and I can't find any notable examples of them. I ran across this website, and the main point that it makes is that the world is not perfect because of all the suffering that goes on. In truth, the world was made perfectly until man corrupted it. Man is not perfect because God gave him free will, etc. Can you guys give me any other links to different arguments?

The "free will" defense for the problem of evil is ridiculous.  When people ask, why is there evil in the world?, many times, theists say it is because of free will (never mind the fact that free will does not explain earthquakes, diseases, etc., etc., etc.).  If free will causes evil, then either there is evil in heaven, or there is no free will in heaven.  If people have free will in heaven and there is no evil in heaven, then having free will does not explain evil here and now.  Basically, a lot of Christians have inconsistent gibberish that they believe, or they would not say the idiotic things they say.

So, why is there evil in the world, if there is a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent?  Or do you deny that there is such a god, that god is really not accurately described that way?

If God is omniscient, he would have known how things would have gone.  In fact, the Bible story actually requires man to "go bad."

1) What the hell is God except something defined to fit a role in a gap of knowledge?

2) Why should I care if there is/was one?

1) God is the creator of the Universe. True, there is no concrete, visible proof of this, but it's the belief that I follow.

So you admit that you are believing things for no good reason.  That is a problem.  Why don't you believe that there is an invisible dragon under your bed?  Or do you?  After all, you have no good reason to believe that, either.

My God is also a loving, amazing God who bestows mercy and grace upon his children.

That is a steaming pile of shit.  Do you believe in hell?  If so, you believe in an evil torturer god.  Also, even without hell, god presently does not stop children from dying of hunger and thirst, does not stop them from burning alive in house fires, etc.  Yet if god were omnipotent, god could effortlessly stop all of those things from ever happening.  That is a cold, evil brute you are worshipping.

2) That brings Jesus into the equation. Jesus died for our sins on a cross, allowing us to make it into a Heaven and spend eternity with him.

That is a silly story.  Why would a good god require someone to suffer and die, instead of just forgiving them?  Is your god incapable of simple forgiveness?  Does your god require pain and suffering?  Is your god displeased if there is no pain and suffering, so he must create it to be happy?

Really, you worship a totally evil bastard.  (Of course, a non-existent totally evil bastard, but a totally evil bastard none the less.)

[Napoléon]

Hello all! I was scrolling through the Internet tonight and I got on the topic of the existence of God, and ended up stumbling across this site. I'm currently looking for any evidence I can find that God does/does not exist (I'm a Christian), so it would be awesome if you guys would post your best rebuttals against the existence of God here for me to look at. I realize that sometimes I only see one side of an argument so I would like to put this out to you guys so I can see this argument over the existence of God from both sides. Thanks!

My argument for god's none existence?

Don't need one. I'm not the one making the claim.

[robvalue]

There is some evidence for a possible historical Jesus normal human man, yes. There is not evidence for a supernatural God-man. The Jesus character as portrayed in the bible is mostly a myth, possibly with real roots. Even if he actually did every non-supernatural thing in the bible, there's no reason to believe he did the supernatural crazy stuff. You wouldn't believe such things from any other book, now would you?

If you just believe it because it's written down, we have a problem

[Simon Moon]

Alright. So it seems most of the arguments I am getting right now are something along the lines of "we have no proof that God exists, therefore he must not exist." I can rebutt that with "we have no proof that God does not exist, therefore he must exist," but that's past the point. I'd like to present to you guys my argument for the existence of God and see what you guys respond with (so far I have not been able to come up with any rebuttal for it.) Please look at this with the open mind that I will look at your rebuttals with

I believe that God exists because of the complexity of the universe. In my opinion, there is absolutely no way this could have all happened by chance. It honestly feels like way too many coincidences to result in the universe we know today.

Take a chromosome. Those seem pretty small and unimportant; I mean, we only have 46 of them. But our 46 chromosomes have about 6x10^9 base pairs in them, totaling up for an information storage of 1.5 gigabytes of data. It also happens that these 6 billion base pairs are perfectly lined up so that we come out as a unique living creature. Just one chromosome pair being off of the 6 billion can give genetic diseases, so if there is no God, why are there so few errors in the chromosome pairing? Shouldn't we have so many errors from the random creation of humans that we are born completely messed up?

You could also take a look at the Earth and, namely, it's position in the Universe. We are perfectly positioned, both by axis of rotation and distance from the Sun, so that we have just enough heat to be comfortable but not contract heat stroke by walking outside and just enough cold to be comfortable but not catch hypothermia or frostbite upon leaving the house. The Earth even has an elliptical orbit that leads to the seasons being created, which seems like an extremely delicate balance to be randomly created.

What about life itself? And not even life, but all the things that come with it- conscience, emotions, etc. We don't have a scientific explanation I know of that can explain the "little voice inside your head." So if there is not a God, what is our explanation for this? How was life first created? And if it was created from biological slime, why haven't we been able to reproduce that?

I've got a few more like this I could put together if anyone wanted. Any and all rebuttals are appreciated!

Basically, all this is, is one big argument from ignorance fallacy.

What you are saying is, that since you are unable to explain DNA, the complexity of the universe, or whatever, you fill in that unknown with "god did it" as an explanation. 

But in reality, you haven't really explained anything. Explaining a mystery (life, the universe, etc) with a bigger mystery (a deity) has no explanatory power.

You are taking your ignorance and placing it on a pedestal and calling it 'God'. Congratulations. 


[/quote]

[Minimalist]

But Roman reports state that He was called the Messiah

And, pray tell....WHERE are these "Roman reports?"


(This should be good!)

[Longhorn]

I beat yalls to it~ *victory dance*

It's just my luck that TWO SECONDS before I leave somebody starts a discussion -_-

[25point81]

Erm, you jumped pretty fast from "creator" to "Jesus" there. Why on earth would you think a story book character just happens to be God?

Why do you say story book character? Jesus raised people from the dead, walked on water, etc. There's even recorded proof of his existence. I would say look at some of the books of the Bible, but I can't use that here, so check out this. To take a few excerpts from it: 

The Christ myth theory is the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels. This theory has very little support among scholars. The theory enjoyed brief popularity in the Soviet Union, where it was supported by Sergey Kovalev, Alexander Kazhdan, Abram Ranovich, Nikolai Rumyantsev, Robert Wipper and . Later, however, several scholars, including Kazhdan, had retracted their views about mythical Jesus and by the end of the 1980s the support for the theory became almost non-existent in Soviet academia.

There is no evidence today that the existence of Jesus was ever denied in antiquity by those who opposed Christianity.

Non-Christian sources used to study and establish the historicity of Jesus include Jewish sources such as Josephus, and Roman sources such as Tacitus. The sources are compared to Christian sources such as the Pauline Letters and the , and are usually independent of each other (e.g. Jewish sources do not draw upon Roman sources), and similarities and differences between them are used in the authentication process.

There's two references to 'jesus' by Josphus (93/94 AD) - that's 61 & 62 years after jesus supposedly died.  At best then, Josephus was a secondary source because he was not contemporary with jesus.  What Josephus didn't tell us what his primary source was.  Also, Josephus didn't write swathes of pros about jesus.  It was the odd line.  In addition, one of the Josephus texts relating to jesus has been shown to be an early christian insert.  The second is also under some dispute.  What's also interesting is that Josephus lived < 30 minutes walk from where jesus was supposed to have lived.  Yet, he never mentions this.  Why not?

Tacitus referred to the crucifixion of jesus in AD 116.  That's 83 years after jesus supposedly died.  Again, at best, Tacitus was a secondary source because he was not contemporary with jesus.  What Tacitus didn't tell us what his primary source was.  Also, Tacitus didn't write swathes of pros about jesus. 

In total then, outside of the bible, these are the only 3 non-christian sources of proof of the historicity of jesus.

Once, most historians were assured of jesus' existence.  The work performed by Carrier, especially, puts jesus' existence in major doubt.  If jesus disappears from history, then it's game over, or as near as.

Just me view, is all.

[Alex K]

As others have said, it is very easy to demonstrate that accepting the existence of things solely on the basis that they have not been or cannot be disproven, is a nonsensical strategy which leads you to believe loads of garbage.