RE: Debate with a Christian
March 6, 2014 at 5:58 pm
(This post was last modified: March 6, 2014 at 5:59 pm by discipulus.)
(March 6, 2014 at 5:06 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: Ok, proceed with your question that you wish to debate.
You have stated:
(March 6, 2014 at 5:06 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: ...the Bible is not credible proof of a god's existence.
Two questions and a statement regarding the above:
1. How are you using the word "credible" in the above statement. What is your understanding of the term?
2. How are you using the word "proof" in the above statement. What is your understanding of the term?
3. If we agree on a debate topic, we will be not be discussing "a god", but rather the God of the Bible. To be specific I will use a portion of a wikipedia article to make this clear. In Christianity, God is the eternal being who created and preserves the world. Christians believe God to be both transcendent (wholly independent of, and removed from, the material universe) and immanent (involved in the world). Christian teachings of the immanence and involvement of God and his love for humanity exclude the belief that God is of the same substance as the created universe but accept that God incarnated as a man.
Early Christian views of God were expressed in the Pauline Epistles and the early creeds which proclaimed one God and the divinity of Jesus almost in the same breath, as in 1 Corinthians (8:5-6): "For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many 'gods' and many 'lords'), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live."
So if we agree on a topic and that topic has anything to do with God, then it needs to be understood that we have a specific concept of God in mind, i.e. the concept of God as presented above.