Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[SteveII]

The nature of God cannot change...

How do you know? His personality undergoes a fundamental change between old and new testament so your bible suggests otherwise.

Of course, your argument is built upon a weak foundation of assumptions starting with "God exists". You then not only assume to speak for God, you assume to know everything there is to know about him. He's all-powerful, all-knowing, good, the arbiter of moral values, incapable of suspending the laws of logic but capable of performing miracles, capable of creating the universe, apparently incapable of changing his mind.... etc etc etc.

If you could show us something more than "the bible says" and "personal experience(s)" you might, just might, have the basis of an argument.

God's personality does not change between the Old and New Testament. Please provide examples.

I have not used the Bible nor personal experiences in any of my arguments.

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Some of you were right to criticize my formation of the moral argument. If should have been formed like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

1. If naturalism is true and God does not exist, then our morals are a product of evolution. Evolution cannot provide for us a set of values that are true for all times. With naturalism, at some point in the past, basic survival would be at odds with many of our morals today (killing, harming others, personal freedoms, equality, taking care of the elderly, etc.). So, naturalism gives us relative values.

2. Most of us believe that objective values do exist. It is right/good to take care of one's parents into their old age and realize even 100,000 years ago it would still have been the right thing to do and 100,000 years in the future, it will still be the right thing to do. Killing young children has been and will forever be morally wrong. We all intrinsically know when something is just plain wrong--even if a million people are doing it.

3. Since naturalism cannot provide for objective moral values, some other source must exist. God is the most plausible source.

The slaughter of the Canaanites has been brought up as an argument against God being a source of moral values. If you are really interested in the Christian perspective on this, read this article: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaughter...canaanites.

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The nature of God cannot change and to say that omnipotence somehow suspends the laws of logic is silly.

Omnipotence literally means "can do anything." Just calling the problems this raises in a being possessing an attribute of omnipotence doesn't mean that the person pointing out that problem is being silly, it means that the supposed god is silly at a conceptual level. You're laying the blame at the wrong feet here.

I guess the question is: does the word "anything" included logical impossibilities. Is a four-sided triangle a thing that can be actualized? I would argue that a four-sided triangle is not a thing and does not fall into the category of "anything".