Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

Until there's credible evidence for the existence of the deity, it's rather premature to say that the alleged deity did anything at all.

Until you open your mind to types of evidence other than empirical observation, there is nothing to discuss further relatively to the God question. We all agree, theists and atheists alike, that there is no direct empirical evidence of any supernatural being whatsoever, namely because the distinction natural/supernatural is a meaningless one that somewhat begs the atheist position.

Empirical data can only serve as a premise in a posteriori arguments for God's existence -which you are, sadly, allergic to.

But what if there never was a prize?  If I've checked behind 10 doors and found nothing, and also think that the alleged prize sounds rather silly, I'm not going to open another 40 doors - I'm just going to shrug and walk away.

Now that wasn't a very clever question. The 50 doors example is a hypothetical, where we assume there is one unique prize behind one door. I tried to make it as simple as possible: before the player finds the prize, he is justified in randomly opening doors, but once he stumbles upon the door with the prize, it's stupid to continue checking doors -because we assumed(those are the rules of the game) that there is only one prize and he already found it.

Similarly, until an agnostic finds some plausible answer, he should keep checking doors(religions), but once he finds some answer (valid or not), he doesn't have to keep looking into other religions, at least not until he figures out what's wrong with his current belief. -doing otherwise is unnecessary and tiresome multitasking.

Stories about miracles are a dime a dozen and only compelling to people who already think the stories are true...but I suspect you understand that already.

We're lucky we have the Qur'an as a miracle then, isn't it? In Islamic theology, there is this distinction between temporal and permanent miracles (I hope I translated that accurately). Moses's staff turning into a snake is clearly a temporal miracle, it only warrants belief for those who saw it. The Qur'an, however, is considered to be a permanent miracle, that is, a miracle that doesn't end with the prophet's death.

I will save you some time and point out that what's miraculous in the Qur'an is not linguistic merit, nor foreknowledge, even though there are many proponents to both these points of views. The actual challenge made by the Qur'an is relative to its theological content. The Qur'an itself declares this:

Say, "Then bring a scripture from Allāh which is more guiding than either of them that I may follow it, if you should be truthful." [28:49]

Notice how the verse doesn't say more rhetorically beautiful, more scientific, etc. It clearly mentions guidance as the hallmark of the Qur'an's divinity. One just can't suddenly start preaching monotheism and correct major doctrines in christianity and judaism after spending 40 years surrounded by the shadows of tribalism, illiteracy and arabian polytheism.

All this is a vast subject, one has to carefully study pre-Islamic Arabia to understand why Muhammad can't be the author of the Qur'an. And while doing so, you should always keep in mind that he lived 40 years with the people he later preached Islam to and even waged war against.

A possible objection is to say that this amount to an argument from incredulity or ignorance, along the lines of  "We don't know the Qur'an's source therefore God"... Well, not really a valid objection, for a couple of reasons:

1) We are already assuming God's existence(with some desirable properties) when we are discussing prophets and miracles. And because of that, we have an additional constraint: God won't let someone spread a message in his name and be as successful and believable as Muhammad was. Objecting on the grounds of religious diversity won't help you here, Muslims already acknowledge that elements of Judaism, christianity, and other eastern religions are the remnants of prophetic messages that were divinely inspired. People's free will and their ability to corrupt the prophets' message takes care of the rest.

2) Any position imaginable is vulnerable to incredulity -it's really inevitable simply due to our sentience and incomplete apprehension of reality. If you leave your dog with a portion of meat, lock your house and go for a walk, come back and have trouble finding the meat. It's clear what the conclusion is, your dog is responsible. Here, in this example, one can simply say: you can't imagine another cause of the meat's disappearance, you can't just conclude the dog ate it -incredulity. You can easily see how asinine that would be, a dog is the best explanation of the data at hand, that's it, no need for half-baked hypotheticals.

Similary, the best explanation of (Islam's theological content+various elements of Muhammad's biography+the Qur'an's open challenge explained above, that went unanswered+LOTS of other stuff) WHILE assuming God's existence (again, with some desirable properties) is that Muhammad was divinely inspired. This is, very roughly speaking, our argument.

And the additional additional assumption that revelation is the only way a benevolent ominpotent being can order the universe the way they want. I'm willing to venture out on the limb of accepting that the reality we can observe is actually real, and in that reality natural causes easily account for maternal instincts. All of those arguments from literature are fatally flawed, logically speaking.

As I just explained to @Astreja above, the label "natural causes" as opposed to supernatural cause is a very slippery one. WE ALL KNOW that natural causes can account for materinal instincts, that still doesn't preclude a supernatural intent behind the whole natural process. You can apply the latter sentence in bold to any objection you have to theism on the grounds of "we have natural explanations". You either say a creator of this world(including the natural causes) exists and the content of his creation informs us of his properties, or you don't. What you can't do is to draw this empty distinction between natural causation and supernatural causation as if you have any way to distinguish between the two. 

So, until you adjust your objections above, I suggest you pay a bit more of respect to the fatally flawed literature.