(November 15, 2010 at 3:51 pm)coffeeveritas Wrote: First of all I begin with the viewpoint that all I'm interested in is the truth. If it's not true, why would I waste my time believing it? As I outlined I believe in what I can see as being the most true at every level.Truth has various meanings, subjectively and objectively, for the sake of the argument I'm going to assume you are inferring the criteria of truth within epistemology to test claims and statements to see whether or not they stand up.
Secondly, I see no reason to assume there is no God beforehand.
What you're doing here is not investigating or verifying the god claims' logical coherency or rational soundness, actually, you're not even attempting critical thinking at all here - all you've shown here is the overwhelming contradiction of your two positions that can be humorously summarised as "I'm going to test everything but God!" which I'm sorry to inform you is nothing more than special pleading.
Quote:The physical universe we live in exists, but that doesn't tell us anything either way right off the bat.Nonsense, it tells us is what manifests, what is real i.e. demonstrable. You are deliberately being skeptical about what we know and understand about reality in order to strengthen your half-arsed argument for god which is counterintuitive. We can test all kinds of claims about the universe, for example, we know from current observations and measurements the distant planetoid 90377 Sedna takes around 11,809 years to complete one orbit. Did the "Holy Spirit inspired Gospels" teach you that? Nope.
Quote:How do we know this isn't the kind of universe a Creator would create? What other universe are we comparing it to?Hooray for begging the question, unfortunately if you'd done some proper research you'd appreciate there's no extraordinary evidence for any extraordinary deity and natural phenomena often have a valid-working natural godless explanation to them.
Quote:So my basic approach to everything is: always seek the truth in its most complete form and hold all views equal until proven otherwise (as in belief in God vs. Naturalism).That is the most *asinine* statement of a brain fart I've heard all month. You've unwittingly put yourself in the most dire of positions where you have no choice but to accept every claim there is without sufficient evidence, all simply because they can't be disproved (who needs confirmers right?), every single nonsensical argument, every single god or gods claim there is, and consequently you are going to hold all kinds of contradictory positions.
Quote:Because I see Christianity to be the most true thing in explaining the story of man and the universe, giving purpose in life, and making logical sense out of existence, as well as having a subjective experience of God and His positive effects on my life, I am inclined to believe that Christianity must in some way be true.You may be justified in thinking Christianity as true, however no one else can be justified by your testimonial evidence, or rather, your display of egocentricity. So you basically believe because you find life to be currently pleasurable? Well, I'm happy for you, but tragically how you "feel about reality" has no bearing on what it actually is, what is real, what is true.
All you've demonstrated to me thus far is that...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I05JAL9MB-Y