(March 23, 2021 at 11:29 am)Klorophyll Wrote: Hi there,
The following verse in the Qur'an is probably the best response a theist can have to any atheist objection, it's actually the response God will give to those who denied his worship knowingly, and decided, instead, to spend their time making fun of believers:
(23:109), "Indeed, there was a group of My servants who used to pray, ‘Our Lord! We have believed, so forgive us and have mercy on us, for You are the best of those who show mercy,’ but you were ˹so busy˺ making fun of them that it made you forget My remembrance. And you used to laugh at them."
It conveys a very powerful idea: There exists a group of servants of god/believers who chose to worship God and beg him for forgiveness despite all the obstacles non-believers use to overemphasize, like the existence of evil and suffering, hiddenness of God, the absence of empirical evidence, etc.
Therefore :
There is a group of servants of God who are well aware of the amount of suffering in this world, but didn't find it to be an obstacle to belief.
There is a group of servants of God who are aware of the hiddenness of God, but didn't find it to be an obstacle to beleif.
More generally : For any objection O to theism, there exists a group of servants who reconciled O with theism.
This simple fact poses a very serious problem for atheism, it's not really an argumentum ad populum or from authority, because we're not arguing from the mere existence of these servants, but from the high probability that they managed to reconcile a given objection O to theism, with theism, if such a reconciliation is possible, then all the problems mentioned like hiddeness, evil, etc. have absolutely zero argumentative force, they don't help the atheist support his position at all because of the mere possibility of reconciliation.
We already know that no objection ever presented to theism is conclusive (proves the non-existence of God), we also have additional compelling arguments for God's existence, like fine-tuning, AND we can reconciliate between any objection O and theism : these three facts together are enough to completely reject atheism as an acceptable worldview.
All this demonstrates is that people believe things for bad reasons. We already knew that.
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.
