Debate with a Christian

[discipulus]

Hardly. It serves to demonstrate that your reasoning, without corroborating evidence from reality (and sorry, anecdotal testimonials do not constitute as reliable sources for determining the deeper principle underlying the specific claims), is insufficient in reaching the conclusions you do.

Your response in no way either undercuts or rebuts my assertion that certainty is an impossible standard to meet and therefore an unreasonable expectation to have regarding the demonstration of the existence of God.

But since you have stated something that Deidre seems to agree with I will interact with it.

You seem to think that our debate is going to be revolving around a topic that is subject to the scientific method. Clearly this is incorrect. We are dealing with the accounts of historical events, i.e non-repeatable events that happened at some point in the past and not subject to direct observation and experimentation and therefore attempting to argue that we must extrapolate scientific methodology onto historiography is simply unjustified. Historiographers do not use the scientific method to determine whether or not historical accounts are reliable my friend which is what it seems to me that you are implying we should do.

When you dismiss anecdotal testimony as an "unreliable source for determining the deeper principle underlying the specific claims", it is clear that you are treating this matter with the scientific method in mind, not the historical method. This is indicative of a misconstrual of the historical method and such an understanding is simply incorrect.

Historians rely on anecdotal testimony quite frequently in determining the reliability of historical accounts. In fact, an anecdote is “the narration of a singular event,” a historeme or “the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact.” - From Joel Fineman's work published in The New Historicism, Ed. H. Aram Veeser(New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49-76, p. 56.

So it is clear from the above that you misconstrue not only the nature of an anecdote but how it correlates with respect to the historical methods of investigation utilized by contemporary historians. You dismiss the gospel accounts based on the fact that they are anecdotal testimony, a point which you have not even proven, but not only that, you incorrectly reason that therefore, these accounts are not reliable. This conclusion as I have demonstrated is simply incorrect.

Shifting from absolute certainty, which no one can offer, to reasonable certainty (which hopefully Deidre meant), does not help you at all.

What in the world is "reasonable certainty" intended to signify? In the case of syllogisms, nothing like "reasonable certainty" (how that is different from "certainty" has yet to be demonstrated by you) is even attempted. Rather, in a philosophical argument for the existence of God, the premises are sought to be shown to be more plausible than their negation. If this is achieved and the conclusion follows from the premises by the rules of logic then the argument is proven, but nothing like reasonable certainty is required here.

In fact, moving from absolute certainty to "more plausible" or "more probable" helps me a great deal. It justifiably relieves me of the burden of having to do the impossible i.e. prove God exists with certainty!

It is a demand that Christianity cannot even meet on the mere basis of the New Testament writings and subsequent "Christian" experiences (otherwise all other faiths would pass your "critique").

You are right. Christianity cannot be proven to be true with certainty. Does it follow that therefore all other faiths pass my "critique"? Not at all! At most what follows is that no religious truth claims can be proven with certainty, but this in no way discourages me! For what secular truth claims can be proven with certainty???????

What can you prove to be true with certainty Pickup_shonuff?

Just because I cannot demonstrate to you that Christianity is true with certainty, it does not follow that I must accept all religious truth claims as true!!! Nor does it follow that Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead on the Sunday morning following His crucifixion. Nor does it follow that God does not exist.

You make the same mistake as others here have when you equate certainty with knowledge.

A conclusion can be reached that is logically sound but unless it explains something that is corroborated by objective experimental evidence, it is nothing more than conjecture or semantics.

The phrase "objective experimental evidence" is an indication that you still think we are dealing with some sort of science experiment. The reliability of the gospels is not determined via the scientific method but rather via contemporary historiographical methodology.

What he/she should have said is that there is not any experiential or experimental evidence that demands attribution to God,

There does not need to be. Science has no place in this discussion. We are talking about historical method, not scientific method.

and coupled with many aspects of faith itself and the specific claims regarding the Christian conception of God, there's plenty of evidence and reason against it, including the sheer inconsistency contained within biblical theology.

Then Deidre will be responsible for supplying this "evidence and reason against Christianity" specifically regarding the gospels in the debate.

With regards to inconsistencies within Christian theology, this is immaterial to whether or not the gospels are reliable ancient biographies of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and as such is a red herring.

Not to the point of Solipsism at least, but certainly we should be total skeptics with regards to the paranormal, supernatural, "non-physical." Why? Because they cannot all be true--probability alone tells us that any particular miracle/God claim, as incredible as it is and not grounded in sufficient evidence (again, testimony that is not objectively substantiated or scrutinized is not evidence), is wrong.

It seems to me you do not understand how the historical method and the scientific method differ. Nor does it seem to me that you are aware that each discipline operates in its own specific domain.