(May 13, 2016 at 1:01 pm)SteveII Wrote: ... no one is using the KCA alone to prove God's existence. There are additional reasons to think that God exists.
Natural Theology:
- Cosmological Argument from Contingency
- Basis for Moral Absolutes
- Teleological Argument from Fine Tuning
- The Ontological Argument
These are all total failures. I don't want to hijack this thread, but if you'd like a new thread on whichever one of these you think is strongest (or on all of them, but one at a time) then I'll be happy to explain what's wrong with them.
Quote:Revealed Theology:
- The OT
- The NT
- Miracles
The OT is shot thru with absurdities, atrocities, and self-contradictions.
The NT likewise, I assume.
I assume that miracles are all lies or delusions, and that whatever you think is proven by your miracles is just as strongly disproven by other miracles.
None of these seems to me even slightly persuasive.
Quote:Individual's personal experience
A friend of mine said she experienced god. She felt/knew his presence. That's how she knows that trinitarian doctrine is wrong. She essentially met god, and it was only one person, not three.
This is, I assume, the quality of argument we get based on personal experience. If we accept personal experience as proof, then we wind up believing contradictory things, both A and not-A, both trinity and not trinity.
The only way to reach a conclusion based on these subjective events is to cherry pick them, relying on the stories that seem to confirm whatever it is that you want to believe.
Quote:While you may debate as to how much evidence each gives, they mostly stand or fall together so if someone wants to say there is no proof for God, you would have to dismantle all of them to support that statement.
I'm happy to start. I think it should be in a new thread. I enjoy the first group of arguments, natural theology, so I'd greatly prefer to start there.
Quote: I am sure there are some people here who think they can do that, but what it really comes down to is that it takes an extremely high level of skepticism to deny all of them.
No, I disagree. I think that reasonable and open-minded people will reject all of those arguments based on their obvious unsoundness. I think only motivated believers--those who have a belief they desperately want to believe is justified--can think these arguments are reasonable.
Quote: At that level of skepticism, you have to start asking if it possible to believe in anything.
That's a familiar argument. I frequently use it myself, but aimed the other direction. The arguments you list are patently flawed. It doesn't take any great skepticism to dismiss them. It takes only logic.
Quote:OR, is it more often the case that non-belief is a result of an emotional response...perhaps because suffering exists or some related objection?
The existence of suffering makes a specific type of god (tri-omni: omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) impossible. But that isn't why we disbelieve in gods generally. As a general rule, we don't believe in gods for the same reason we don't believe in Santa Clause. Gods are implausible. When they aren't actually impossible (like the tri-omni god who coexists with suffering, or the omnipotent god who can't defeat iron chariots) they are extraordinarily unlikely (like the god who flies by throwing a hammer so hard that it pulls him wherever he wants to go, or the god who was born twice, once from her father's forehead).
If I say I can walk on water and change water into wine and raise people from the dead, you won't believe me. And your nonbelief will be entirely reasonable. So I don't believe you when you tell the same stories, and my nonbelief is equally reasonable.
That's not evidence of "an extremely high level of skepticism." It's just how rational minds work.
[/quote]