Professor's Proposition: Only Two Logical Choices

[Mister Agenda]

Yes, it would seem that every atheist has that arrow in his quiver: that every argument from authority is a logical fallacy.

Not every argument from authority is a logical fallacy. If the authority is an authority in the specific field for which it is being appealed to, the appeal can be sound. For instance: Einstein on relativity, sound. Einstein on religion, fallacy.

And yet, you don't do that.

Unlike you, we understand when an appeal to authority is sound and when it is unsound. There is perhaps no other single trait that more distinguishes a freethinker.

But at the same time, you blast away at Christians who rely on a book called the Bible for authority that there is a God.

Generally, we don't seek out Christians to bug. We tend to respond when anyone says something stupid, not just Christians.

In what way are you better than we are?

I wouldn't claim to be better than all Christians in any way, and I can't speak for all atheists. I'm better than you personally on many levels, not least of which is that I care more about what is true than on preserving my current position.

And what makes the Bible less reliable than all the books you rely on?

Lack of independent corroboration of its most crucial claims and reality claims consistent with Near Eastern ancients (who had no way of knowing that the earth is not flat and is not orbited by the sun, for instance) rather than writers in contact with an omniscient being. It gets some history right though, which we know because of corroboration with other sources. On its supernatural claims there is no outside confirmation at all.

Factual errors, you can pick on, but don't all authors introduce errors into their books?

Every time I read a newspaper article about an event I know about, I see that the article is rife with errors.

Imperfect beings perpetuate imperfection. What would one expect a perfect being to perpetuate? Would a perfect and omnipotent being be undone by the limitations of its medium? Would a perfect and omnipotent being need excuses made for the errors in its texts?

But that doesn't mean the event described didn't happen.

It does mean your source of information about the event is incomplete and/or distorted.

If you're going to toss out the Bible than you have to ask yourself what DID happen to the Israelites all those thousands of years. Was everything the Jews wrote about themselves a LIE?

And if it was all a LIE what was the motive to make up all those lies?

Everything the Jews wrote about themselves was at the end of many generations of 'Chinese whispers'. You couldn't get a long story passed down to your great-great-grandchildren unaltered by purely oral means if their lives depended on it. However, one actual lie was the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus, which archaeology (by Jews) says never happened. The motivation was to comfort the Hebrews under Babylonian captivity: 'if you think things are bad now, just look what we had to go through in Egypt!'

Let's face it, the atheist position requires a lot of faith.

Our position is that you haven't given us a good enough reason to believe you.

You have to believe that the entire Bible is one lie after another and none of it never happened and a bunch of Jews got together one day and cooked up a bunch of lies to fool the world.

All we have to believe is that it is just like the scriptures of other ancient cultures: some real history mixed up with legends and myths.

Parts of the Iliad are true. Troy really existed. Do you think parts of it being verifiably true means that the Trojan war was started because of a beauty contest between three goddesses? Do you believe Achilles was invulnerable except for his heel because his mother dipped him in the River Styx? If not, you should be able to understand how and why we can reject the parts of the Bible that sound like myth, accept the parts that have been corroborated, and reserve judgement on what's plausible but unconfirmed.