[Serious] Fallacies & Strategies

[Neo-Scholastic]

Yes, a theist believes God is real, that's what the word theist means...

An atheist asking a theist for empirical evidence of the divine, for example, has already committed a category mistake.

A god who intervenes in the world may intervene simply by means of natural laws, and a naturalist will obviously be content with these as the final explanation.. All the misconceptions with regards to this crucial issue arise from an unwarranted assumption: that god's intervention should be solely through miracles and jaw-dropping events.

An atheist asking for evidence of God is a bit like a presentist asking for proof that the past is real. The presentest will say of anything you show them from fossils to documents are all in the present now. Is the past real? The past is just a current memory; the future is just a current hope, right? What is at stake is the notion that there can be modes of being that fall into different ontological categories, just as the past is modally different from the present.

I would invite my atheist friends to consider the idea that to consistantly apply the category error by which they dismiss the existence of God (by putting Him in the same category as one type of being among other beings),...by applying the standard that there is only one way to be real to the issue of time, i.e. a single ontological category, how could they consider the the past real in any meaningful sense.

The same could perhaps be said about holes. IMHO holes are real in a meaningful sense. They are numerable. They have size and shape. Etc. Their being may be contingent, but it is a type of being none the less.

It seems to me that inisting there is only one category of being that counts as real is similar to the "excluded middle", i.e. that the one true way to be real exhausts all the ways something can be real. IMHO the tooth fairy comparision commits one to a very narrow and limited ontology.