(March 12, 2015 at 3:54 pm)Pizz-atheist Wrote: Does anyone here know of any debates where a deist debates a Christian, especially debating the Bible being inspired by a god?
Sorry I didn't see this until now.
I had a bizarre run in with one Christian on this forum who unabashedly tried to use the "Problem of Evil". I say "bizarre" because of the sheer double-think involved.
His/her argument was that Nature's God would have to be a monster for creating a universe without the intent to eliminate evil and suffering from it. This would be an interesting debate if he or she had been an atheist. What moral obligations would a creator have for eliminating suffering from the creation? Would a god of limited power or limited awareness still be morally accountable? I might actually like to wrestle with that challenge as an exercise in moral philosophy.
But no, this was not an atheist I was debating but a Christian. His/her god was omnipotent, was omniscient and not only able to emotionally relate to humans but desires a personal relationship with us. So how does the problem of evil work out with his/her god? Well, free will, of course. So your god gets a free pass because of free will (a highly dubious defense but let that go) but that defense doesn't apply to anyone else's god?
The double-think was mind-numbing. I'm used to special pleading from the religious but that was beyond my expectations.
Other Islamo-Christian criticisms of deism run along the lines of the straw man definition that "God created and then 'abandoned' the universe", following with "how can a god abandon what it created?" An argument along that lines is currently being discussed on another thread of Mystic Knight's.
My clarification in response is that deism simply acknowledges the scale of the universe which makes the personal god near inconceivable. The personal god makes more sense if the universe were just our planet or even our solar system. In reality, we are a pale blue dot (footnote Carl Sagan) in the vast ocean of space. We only arrived on the scene some 100 thousand years ago. We are but a tiny portion of Creation both in terms of time and space. If God exists, we must be one of a great many projects, and that's assuming intelligent life is the objective.
God having a personal relationship with me would be like a biologist having a personal relationship with a bacteria cell cultivated in a petri dish. It's a matter of scale. How could God even be aware of me, never mind desire my love?
Atheist Forums Hall of Shame:
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
