Willaim Craig: Evil is proof that God exists.

[EGross]

So does Evil prove the existance of God? After all, in Isaiah the prophet wrote God saying "Manifestor of light and and maker of darkness, maker of peace and manifestor of evil. I am the God who does all these things." (from memory).

1 - There is NO proof that Isaiah was a real person either
http://freethought.mbdojo.com/archeology.html
Archeology has shown that most of the claims of the Old Testament do not agree with the reality of the ancient times they claimed to have been in.

2 - THAT it is claimed in a book of fairy tales that something said was from a god - is suspect - since the book itself is suspect.

3 -THE really FUNNY thing you did - is the most circular reasoning you have used to date. YOU used a quote in the bible -= supposedly from god - to prove that god exists - I exist because I say so - HA HA

Actually, I used a source from the believer point of view, not my own, to show the cricular logic of such a belief, that it is perfectly valid to claim, on the one hand, as believers do, that God is the source of Evil, and use "Evil proves that there is a God."

However, from the non-believing position that I share, it is a foreign way of presenting proof that there is a God.

As to the authenticity of those books, I agree fully with you. The authorship has always been suspect, including from the founders of Rabbinical Judaism.

I will quote from their own works.

According to the Talmud (Mesechet Bava Batra 15a) even the sages admitted that some writings assigned to one were really written by another. Some are attributed to the mysterious "Men of the Great Assembly", for which there is no common understanding of the term, and some to other writers. Here is a snippet after writing that David wrote all of the Psalms, including those with the names of others (the superscriptions were a later addition):

Hezekiah and his colleagues wrote Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. The Men of the Great Assembly wrote: Ezekiel, Trei Aser (the Twelve Minor Prophets), Daniel and Megilla Esther.

There are then arguments as to how can you possible assign Joshua, or Samuel for example, as being the authors of those books when Samuel dies less than halfway through his book, and Joshua dies in his (not to mention that Moses dies in his, so who finished it?)

There were also those on that same page who said that Job never existed, and they argue that point to death, but they do agree that they don't know when it was written, or by whom.

What they are getting at in this 3+ page argument is that there really is no certainty who wrote a good portion of the Tanach, and if you cannot be certain of authorship, as a religious person who holds these books sacred, you have to have the faith that whoever did, had the authority to do so.

Whoever they were. And that is not a comfortable position in which to be.