Are Atheists using Intellectually Dishonest Arguments?

[SteveII]

I don't believe in universalism. I believe, based on the OT examples I listed as well as passages like:


that God gives people special information and then judges people's hearts according to the information they have and what they did with it. This would apply to anyone anywhere at any times--including Chinese and aboriginal Australians. That does not mean that sincere adherence to some other religion can get you into heaven. It has to do with an internal specific response to God as he makes a truth or truths known to a person. This also means when you have heard and understand the Christian gospel message, your response to that specific truth is what you will be judged on--it being the most complete of all the truths that God could show you. The Catholic's have the doctrine of Invincible Ignorance which amounts to the same thing. 

It is clear in the OT and the NT that God's work in Israel was not because he liked Israel--it was because he chose them as the vehicle to bring about the salvation of the world. That was the promise to Abraham from the beginning (Genesis 16:16 and following) and was reiterated several times along the way. His special relationship with them was a result of having to preserve a people, tradition, and religious philosophy/foundation long enough to get the conditions he wanted for the events of the NT.

I hear you, Steve. And I understand that you reject universalism. I don't actually know too much about universalism except that it comes in many flavors--for instance, one particular brand of it is basically Christian and involves the belief that anyone can be "saved" regardless of their faith. What I was speaking of was pluralism. It is one of three categories of idea. Now granted, there seems to be some overlap between pluralism and universalism, but universalism itself may be expressed by something else called inclusivism. Whereas inclusivism states that people of other faiths are saved through Christ, pluralism asserts that Christ is but one expression of a manifold God.

Exclusivism is the theological position that holds to the finality of the Christian faith in Christ. The finality of Christ means that there is no salvation in non-Christian religions.

Inclusivism is the belief that God is present in non-Christian religions to save adherents through Christ. The inclusivist view has given rise to the concept of the anonymous Christian by which is understood an adherent of a particular religion whom God saves through Christ, but who personally neither knows the Christ of the Bible nor has converted to Biblical Christianity.

Pluralism is basically the belief that the world religions are true and equally valid in their communication of the truth about God, the world, and salvation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_religions

I would say my view would be characterized as Inclusivism. 

My issue isn't with the attitude of the believer--(a tolerant attitude is nice, but it isn't the point of concern here). It's about the plausibility of a truly universal God. Of course the Jews are going to write in their holy texts that Yahweh is the one universal God, and that they are the one God's chosen people.

But how did Yahweh decide to transmit messages of his divinity? By "inspiring" different sages and scribes. There is a little bit of murkiness and mystery going on there. After all, couldn't Yahweh have just inscribed it on the moon that he is the one true God? But he didn't.

It stands to reason there is only one correct concept of God. It also stands to reason that if the redemption of mankind through Christs is the single most important event in the history of the world, groundwork for that has to be laid for centuries or more. Concepts have to be understood and critical mass has to be built. This kind of continues in my comments below.

I've heard theists claim that there is a "divine sense" in human beings. I recently read a book by William James where he argues that God is perhaps perceptible to human sensibility... though this divine perception is somewhat ineffable.

It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.

https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/williams_1902.pdf

Don't Christians report being able to "feel the presence" of God? In your estimations, don't these feelings refer to something real (at least sometimes)?

It is obvious that we are somehow wired to believe in God/higher power/supernatural/purpose/destiny etc. I think it is in this general context that William James is referring. When talking about Christians and the phrase "feel the presence" of God, you are no longer talking about a generic feeling--you are talking about the result of a personal relationship with the God through the Holy Spirit. This seems to be a logical progression from general to specific.

This progression also begins to deal with arguments about the Hiddenness of God. A typical atheist argument is that God would make a better case for himself. But isn't that just something akin to: God is hidden from me, therefore God is hidden from everybody, therefore God doesn't exist?

Now for the big question: If Jews and Christians can feel the presence of God and write about their experiences of divinity and see divinity working in the world, what's to stop an ancient Indian Hindu from doing the same thing? Just because some authors in the OT (like "not Moses") differentiated Yahweh from other gods worshipped in the region, does this mean that some Hindus don't follow the One True God™?

Remember that my initial charge against Yahweh was that he was finite. If this is indeed untrue, how do you know that God didn't communicate with people of other cultures? Let me put it this way: what if pluralism is true, and the Hindu Brahman actually is the same figure as Yahweh? It's just that the authors of the OT didn't know that Yahweh takes manifold forms... what then? It strikes me odd that a humble believer would actually know that the Jewish scriptures are the only true scriptures. After all, when you talk to believers, they cite as proof things like answered prayers. Why couldn't a universal God of the pluralist type answer prayers?

Even assuming God exists, there's nothing proving that he is exclusively spoken of in one set of religious texts. How is it plausible that a truly universal God would reveal himself by such finite and particular means? You see my problem right? On the one side, Yahweh truly is a finite god, the tribal god of the Israelites, as I said before. And if Yahweh truly is universal, it is rather implausible that he would communicate with only one people in one narrow epoch of history.

It seems to me that most theists believe in a set of texts first, and God second.

Pluralism cannot be true because most religions make implicit and explicit claims of exclusivity. For example, if the Christians are right, then mankind's state is in need of repair that is beyond our ability. That is either true or not true. It cannot be true for one group and not for another group. Specifically, I think if you examined all religions in detail, most don't hang together very long--they just don't line up with reality in even a general sense. On the other end of that spectrum, I think Christianity is the most thoroughly-defined and evidenced religion in the world. 

As far as "text first, and God second" I think that is a simple restatement of the factors of being brought up in a religion. Of course you would have technical knowledge before you have experiential knowledge. I think it would be the other way around in an adult convert. They would start with a sense of God and investigate until they found a compelling framework to make sense of that feeling.