Pull up a chair

[Wyrd of Gawd]

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How easily you “free” thinkers avoid challenges to your atheistic worldview by falling back on your irrelevant clichés. Let’s count those made since my last post, shall we?

1) There is no evidence. For general revelation, the whole of reality is the evidence from which we deduce a basic understanding of the Divine. For special revelation, the various artifacts, and accounts serve as the subjects for interpretation and dispute. Asserting that there is no evidence is simply wrong. The only questions are whether the evidence applies and how strong that evidence is.

2) You assume the conclusion in advanceEvery hypothesis is an advanced conclusion for which you test. Positing divine action in the beginning is no guarantee of the final interpretation. Some miracles prove to be naturally occurring or fraudulent. That is not to say that some believers search for and cling to anything they feel supports their hope. This fault also applies to atheists that instantly dismiss any supernatural claim because it does not fit within a naturalistic paradigm.

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3) The original Christians weren’t very bright, i.e “primitive goatherders”.Clearly some members of the early Christian community were highly literate and educated, a rarity for the times, since they produced written accounts. Anyone that argues that Saint Paul wasn’t very bright cannot be taken seriously.

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4) The many ‘conflicting’ religious traditions proves they are all bullshit.There is some truth to this, but not much. For nearly all major religions and the late pagan ones, the results of general revelation are overall consistent. Moreover, the mystical traditions within each religion tend to converge on key concepts, like Huxley’s “perennial philosophy”. With respect to special revelation my own denomination is very ecumenical, focusing on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. What people do with their beliefs is much more important than the beliefs themselves. An atheist that rails against “In God We Trust” is being every bit as much of an asshole as a loudmouthed bible-thumper.

5) Religious believers resort to special pleading.It is not special pleading to approach something according to the nature of the thing under consideration. When it comes to God, He is not just another thing within a world of things, but is the One that serves as the very basis for and unity of the plurality.

Please. Atheist twaddle is SO annoying.

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Paul claimed that he was a genius and if he wrote what's attributed to him he was. After all, he convinced billions of people that his hallucinations were real. So we can state that Paul was a genius but the question is why are those billions of other people are such dummies? If a person walked up to you with a similar story today would you believe that he's being truthful? If so the Nigerian scammers would love to meet you and con you out of all of your money.

[DarkHorse]

Oh, I love those Nigerian scammers. They get smarter each year it seems. Good thing I do too, or I would have been in a lot of trouble by now.

[Rampant.A.I.]

I didn't think Chad was intending that you abandon your world view without reason. His objection is to the tired and illogical clichés that people insist on repeating without any intention of supporting what they're saying. If you have any original thoughts, great, let's hear them. Anything else is annoying spam.

Wow, so you figured out you posting MO finally. Congrats, now you just need to work on those projection issues.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The whole of reality proves that reality exists, nothing more…it proves nothing about the existence of any god.

Not so. Given certain features of reality you can deduce universal principles operating throughout the whole. Are you saying that it is impossible to gain knowledge of divine attributes if they indeed manifest?

… you are happier with the statements: 1/ The evidence presented is not applicable and, 2/ The evidence is weak. OK - I'm happy with that - how does it help your case exactly?

Because that is the honest way to stating objections to the existence of god/gods.

… we are dealing with something that by its nature is not provable assuming God exists will never yield a negative answer as it is impossible to prove a negative.

That’s not universally true. If I say there is not a fly in my ointment, I can look to see that indeed, the ointment is fly-free. You just need to set a small enough parameter. In the case of God, that task is not practical.

…thoseof differing beliefs to go to war on a regular basis…often-times those wars are between different factions of the same religion.

I see these conflicts as largely political. Tyrants often use religion to justify political ends.

… Special pleading does come in where Christians (and others) attempt to come up with logical proofs of their faith citing all encompassing rules which handily bypass their creator.

I am not clear about what you mean to say and not sure what you mean by “all encompassing rules”. Anyone can see that some basic facts about reality apply universally to all sensible beings. Someone reasonable also believes that mental properties are real phenomena. Such facts can serve as the basis for finding their various causes. If those causes share attributes commonly assigned to the divine then so be it.

…when confronted with what seems to an atheist to be very strange claims you find our responses to be cliche. How is that avoiding a challenge to our worldview.

If by strange you mean unfamiliar, then I agree. I object to hand-waving dismissals of nuanced philosophical ideas just because they concern things beyond the scope of naturalism.

…you are making the claim that there is a case for belief in the biblical God but I don't understand anything that has been put forward to make that case.

Not on this thread. It started out with an epistemological discussion of faith. In keeping with the topic, I did not insert any of thoughts about the existence of God on this thread. I present those notions elsewhere.

…I don't start with god belief…

You understand that I formerly held strongly atheistic views. I also did not start with god belief, but gradually moved to faith after struggling with specific problems of philosophy of mind. More recently, I have been very curious about ontology and found theist approaches address more phenomena with greater consistency than various types of ontological naturalism. I find it offensive and disheartening that some of the members above insist that I presuppose the existence of God and use sophism to justify an irrational conviction.

…from what you say is that you very earnestly believe what you say and you believe others should too. That isn't working.

. I do not feel the need to convince others. People must reach their own conclusions. Nevertheless, if any atheist incidentally came to faith in Christ after reflecting on my posts, I would enjoy having unintentionally fulfilled my Great Commission duty.

…I don't feel the need to degrade your worldview but neither am I tempted to make it mine. I don't feel the need for you to abandon your belief in gods. Why can't you just accept the diversity of our points of view and let it go at that?

Because that wouldn’t be very fun. Vigorous debate under the pretense of persuasion makes for more interesting discussions. Some friendly taunting is fine. I’m sorry you think it neighborly. Too often people start to act like asses, myself included. Hopefully, you view those times as momentary lapses