(June 30, 2015 at 11:52 am)KevinM1 Wrote:(June 29, 2015 at 3:47 pm)SteveII Wrote: Your perception is that Christianity is a house of cards and all you have to do is poke at a few of them and it all comes crashing down. You are wrong. If God exists, it is not a house of cards. Rather a well-defined system of doctrines that do not contradict each other--doctrines that have been hashed out for 2 millennium now. I don't know if your understanding of this system is so poor that you think it is weak or you are so sure God does not exist that it is all for naught.
The doctrine has been 'hashed out' primarily by people already believing in it. The length of time it's been examined doesn't really mean anything if it's primarily based on baseless assertion. That it is still up for debate after all this time really only highlights how spurious its claims really are. If there were even a nugget of truth in them, one would think that Christianity would be gaining acceptance in the world rather than steadily losing it. Instead, its only gains are in places with poor education, like Africa. Why do you suppose that is?
Who else would hash out systematic theology but the people who believed in it? I am assuming you think that the existence of God is the "baseless assertion". That is your opinion. There are plenty of arguments and evidence of God--you chose to exclude or ignore them as a group while others find them, as a group, sufficient. You cannot disprove it, so the fact remains, if God exists, Christianity is the best framework to explain the data we have.
Your conclusion that "if there were even a nugget of truth...Christianity would be gaining" will require an explanation why it has 70% penetration in the US and 33% of the world. One does not follow from the other.
