Benevolent Creator God?

[The Grand Nudger]

Still muttering cantrips at us, eh?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Not to mention the number of absurd threats is potentially infinite and I couldn't worry about all of them if I tried.

Have you ever heard about Pascal's Mugging? It's a thought experiment that shows the faulty thinking involved in Pascal's Wager-ish type stuff. For me, it was the final nail in the coffin for Pascal's Wager.

Pascal’s Mugging always puts me in mind of an old joke about Queen Victoria. One of her courtiers asked if she would sell herself to a man for £1 000 000. After some hemming and hawing, HRM admits, ‘Well, possibly. Dependent, of course, on the circumstances and in a good cause.’

‘Very well. Would you sell yourself to a man for £2?’

‘Certainly not! Do you think We are a common slattern?’

‘We’ve already determined that, Majesty. Now, we are simply determining your market price’

Boru

[Spongebob]

Appeal to religious diversity -invalid objection. One isn't punished by a just God for getting a wrong answer, but for dishonestly dimissing all answers, by pretending they are all of the same credibility. 

That there are conflicting accounts of God and how to worship him doesn't mean they are all false. And some claims about God are more compelling than others. Christianity and Judaism, for example, are a non-starter since the words of Moses/Jesus are lost, and the Q source is unavailable, even its existence is a matter of debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

Mormonism for example is a subset of christianity, a subset of an invalid claim is a fortiori invalid. This leaves you with one possible abrahamic religion: Islam. There isn't much debate about the preservation of the Qur'an, unlike the Bible.

OK, I'm not all that educated on Islam, so you could be telling the truth about that religion though I doubt it, but Judaism and Christianity most certainly do not tolerate "other gods".  If you don't believe me, just Google it.  There's absolutely no doubt about this question and I'm a ex-Christian myself.  For the thousands of other deities out there who don't care about which god you worship, it hardly makes any difference.  Most of those deities don't profess love of humans and don't demand humans worship them to get rewards in the afterlife.  Some of them require other behaviors, such as fighting bravely in the case of Odin.  The point is if I decide that Wicca is the "True" religion and decide to follow it, I am damned by at least Christianity and Judaism and my guess is Islam as well based on what I know of it.  So my point still stands, just believing there is a "god" isn't enough, you have to determine which is the "True" god or you could still be screwed.

That there are conflicting accounts of God and how to worship him doesn't mean they are all false. And some claims about God are more compelling than others. Christianity and Judaism, for example, are a non-starter since the words of Moses/Jesus are lost, and the Q source is unavailable, even its existence is a matter of debate.

This isn't what I said.  I said that just believing in god isn't enough, I'm required to choose the "True" god.  Yes, some claims about "god" are more compelling than others.  Some are rather silly while others are somewhat reasonable.  But really none are convincing to someone who is skeptical and wants objective evidence.  And I agree that the Bible/Torah both have a questionable history and can't be taken as anything other than ancient stories that evolved over time.

Mormonism for example is a subset of christianity, a subset of an invalid claim is a fortiori invalid. This leaves you with one possible abrahamic religion: Islam. There isn't much debate about the preservation of the Qur'an, unlike the Bible.

I agree with you on the first part, but then you make this completely unsupported claim after that.  Just because Christianity and Mormonism are nonsense doesn't raise Islam to anything more than that.  The Q is just as much a human spun tale as Mathew, Mark, Luke and John.

The existence of a first cause can be definitively established, you can find extensive literature about infinite regress and why there can't be an infinite chain of actual casuses. There are also arguments for why this first cause is personal (along the lines of : creating something instead of nothing entails that this cause decided to create it, and decision-making involves a personal agent). 

Yeah, I've read about a dozen books on the ontological argument and the cosmological argument.  Guess what, they are still just arguments.

Actually, the difficulty is not to identify the "right" religion, but proving that this personal God must be just and omnibenevolent -there is nothing we can do about a malevolent God. To achieve that, one can appeal to the fine-tuning of the universe and the fact that it's governed by physical laws, making it (vastly) more probable than not that God doesn't leave things  - let alone people - without some kind of law or guidance.

Your logic here is nonsense.  The fine tuning argument is a specific argument for an omnipotent god.  It does not support the existence of a benevolent god.  A malevolent god could just as logically fine tuned the universe to allow for intelligent life so it could enjoy torturing said life.

The difference is, I am not an atheist. If I accept some version of God (the theistic God as described in Islam), I don't need to check the rest of the possible versions, because any two religions are mutually exclusive.

YES, YOU DO!  That's the point.  If you accept that Allah is the one true god, but it turns out you are wrong and it's actually Yahweh, you are screwed.  Note:  You have not in any way demonstrated that Islam is the true religion but Christianity or Judaism is not.

Think of it like this : you have 50 closed doors in front of you, only one door contains some prize. Let's say you open 13 doors randomly and none of them contain the prize, but the 14th does. It's clear that there is no need to check to remaining 36 doors, but checking the 14 doors in the beginning was absolutely necessary...

Uh, how did you determine the 14th door was the right one?  What gave it away?  What is his beard?



You are failing on the these basic points:

1)  Does god exist?  Neither you nor any other human being has demonstrated the answer to this question.  Arguments abound, but evidence does not and thus we have only arguments based on flimsy logic.

2)  If god was ever truly demonstrated to exist (and it has not), you MUST now demonstrate the nature of this god, meaning what it wants us to do.  This cannot be done until #1 is complete.

3)  Therefore, If I choose any god of the thousands available to me and I get it wrong, I could end up being punished forever if the "true" god does that sort of thing.  That's assuming any god exists.  If no god exists, which should be the default position, then my religious beliefs will have no affect on the afterlife, only on how I behave while I'm alive.

You have not established any logical argument that penetrates these stated facts.

Why did you rule out all the religious claims that you didn't bother to check? Unless you have some very good reason for dismissing each, your position is dishonest.

This question was directed at Astreja, but I just couldn't resist.  So, earlier you said you had 50 "doors" to check and you got it right on the 13th try, so you stopped there.  These were your specific words.  You stated that you somehow KNEW you got it right on the 13th try, but you didn't bother to check the rest.  So how could you know for sure?  You can't.  Now you are criticizing Astreja for not continuing to check all the doors?  That is called hypocrisy.

But the full answer to this question is that spending one's entire life experiencing all the known religious modalities is not reasonable.  It would take an entire lifespan to fully research every religion known to man.  I spent 20+ years as a Christian and it took me another 10 to decide it was nonsense.  I just can't do that with all the other religions.  The reasonable approach is to study a few religions and apply as much logic and reason as you can.  If your conclusion is that these are all nonsense, then it's reasonable to conclude that the rest probably are as well.  And the atheist keeps an open mind, unlike every religious person on the planet.  If some new messiah appears, I can always consider it, but the Muslim, Christian, Hindu, whatever, will just reject it because it isn't "their" religion, which just happens to be the right one.

[R00tKiT]

It seems you got stuck on my usage of the term "delusional". Remember that I left it as a range of attitudes, delusional being the most charitable one.
And you're right, I was careless with my words. I meant "dismiss prophets as likely delusional (at best), or charlatans (at worst)."

It is my impression, drawn mostly from archaeology, that mankind has been believing in the divine for a longer time than any prophet's existence... at least, any prophet that we know of, given the requirement of writing.

My case for assuming that claims about religious experiences arise from some psychopathology comes from the simple observation that psychopathologies lead to religious experiences, heck, even drug induced mental states lead to such experiences.
Look at this https://www.sciencealert.com/psychedelic...xperiences:

Well, it's definitely true that the brain in an altered state can produce religious experiences. But, again, you seem to miss a critical point I insisted upon before : any experience has a corresponding brain state. Think about it, any experience. Even the experience that would come from God necessarily corresponds to some brain state. And let's say this state is diagnosed as pathological since it deviates from the normal functioning of the brain and somehow resembles some well-known mental illness (and let's not forget a possible bias against mysticism/religion in psychological studies), then it's clear that we have a problem: we're trying to explain away divine revelation by simple nomenclature, we simply think that, if experience x resembles pathology p, then x is not from God.. dubious argument...

The truth is, it's extremely difficult to diagnose a man who lived 14 centuries ago. There is an article I found months ago trying to do just that, providing an objective diagnosis to Muhammad's inspirational spells (i.e. the Qur'an) based on existing knowledge, authored by a practicing physician:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/793843/
(You can access the full article using sci-hub for example, I am not sure if the forum's policy allows me to provide a direct illegal link)

The author concludes that complex partial seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy would be a possible diagnosis if we have to make one. He however provides many reasons to doubt this diagnosis, one of them being that Muhammad didn't experience any mental or physical deterioration as a result of the states of revelation we're trying to explain.

In the same article, he gives a simple refutation to the claim that Muhammad is a charlatan/manipulator : "It seems unlikely that followers intelligent enough to guide the expansion of Islam over thousands of miles and convert millions of people could be inspired by a clever manipulator"

And this is also true about other founders of religious movements. It's difficult for me to say that Joseph Smith, for example, was a full-blown manipulator. But his production (the Book of Mormon) seems to be plagiarized from the OT/NT, it could be that Joseph Smith was so well acquainted with the Bible that his religious experience(his subconscious at work) was more or less some fresh and passionate way to present christianity, but no genuinely new material. Muhammad PBUH, on the other hand, departed from the current doctrine of  christianity/judaism , and provided a comprehensive account of all the prophets' messages through history: they were simply all Muslims -in the sense that they all submitted to God. The majority of people who convert to Islam are impressed by this exact narrative, in addition to Islam's uncompromising monotheism.

That is not how it works.
Since the religious explanations likely came about through the musings of people at a time when mankind had no sophistication to properly explain them, as soon as an accurate enough natural explanation is provided, this one must supersede the religious one.

Of course, I'm well aware that the religious people will cling to their explanations for as long as they can. Such is their power! But it doesn't make them true, nor worthy of consideration by anyone who considers themselves to be rational.

Why do you think natural explanations must supersede the religious explanations, why can't they simply coexist ??

Some manifestation of God in this universe could very well be through natural means, and if we manage somehow to figure out some natural explanation of religious experiences, that simply doesn't mean they are not from God... it's a non-sequitur.

Indeed it could be that the whole Universe was created by some entity.
Should we call that an extraterrestrial?... nah, that applies to beings from other planets still within this Universe.
Shall we call it then an extrauniversal? Still would be a natural being, I'd say. It would probably be impossible to ascertain its existence from within the Universe, so that would still render the psychopathological explanation for religious experiences more likely than the creator actually passing on a message.
Thinking about it... this entity would have generated a whole Universe where 95% of it is dark matter/energy. 5% is matter/energy of the kind that we interact with... and that "observable Universe" is already massive enough to dwarf this planet to a place of insignificance... and that entity would somehow be interested in creating a place just for us, humans. A place that required a few nudges along its way, otherwise, there would now be intelligent reptiles instead of primates, maybe.  But this extrauniversal entity decided that the intelligent ones would be primates and that they would evolve in such a way as to develop an intuition of belief so as to allow them to more readily accept the idea that it exists.
Not only that, but, in its benevolence towards this human species, it decides to communicate certain truths.
However, the communication is made with only a few individuals in a small corner of the globe, restricted to a few certain eras, all in weird and hidden ways (top of mount Sinai, cave in Mount Hira...)

Makes total sense, right?
It's not impossible, I'll give you that.
But come on, it is far fetched!

To my mind, it is far more likely that these people who became prophets were already embedded in a religious culture and simply took it a step further - either due to some psychopathology, or through cunning artifice, or some mix of both. I'm pretty confident that these phenomena, these cults, these religions, aren't made by a single person - they require a following.

You mentioned something I encounter here very frequently: our planet is so tiny and unsignificant that a God shouldn't care about it..... I mean.. really? If this God exists, then he's obviously the one who wanted this tiny planet to exist, and we know that the tiniest things in the universe contain marvellous aspects of complexity and harmony (DNA in a biological cell, the behavior of subatomic particles, etc.) that even one molecule of matter deserves to be called miraculous in some sense. 

Another telling example that comes to mind: everybody agrees that something like a microprocessor is a very impressive product of technological advancements. It required very advanced understanding of matter to design it. It would be really stupid if someone says: why should some tiny chip matter at all or mean something... this tiny chip is evidence of the human designer. Making an analogy with God and the universe is of course a big subject, but I think it's disingenuous to say it's not a compelling argument at all..
And let's satisfy the atheists' request, let's say God simply doesn't care about Earth let alone people. By the same token, God shouldn't care either about the Milky Way, too small compared to the rest of the universe, etc. you can see that we can't go anywhere with this argument.. it's vacuous because, simply put, size is not a relevant criterion ...

You say it's possible that religions may be the product of many people... In the case of Islam, it's really hard to defend this idea, the beginning of Muhammad's religious experience and how it evolved is well-known, he started the religion alone and was the sole author of the Qur'an. It's true that its compilation in a written form came some time later, but this is completely irrelevant, oral transmission was well-established in Arabia, and that's how the Qur'an came about and was preserved, too many people learnt it directly from Muhammad's recitations and many parts of it were even written on parchment during the prophet's lifetime. Many orientalists (Non-muslim western scholars who study Islam and the Muslim world) have no problem admitting it was preserved.

If such a god capable of communicating with us exists, then why would that communication have been allowed to be mangled by whoever wrote those books?

Well, a Muslim apologist will tell you just the opposite: that Muhammad preserved God's message verbatim. I submit that it's inaccessible to us to verify no mangling happened when Muhammad received his revelation from the angel Gabriel (according to Muslim belief), but here's another way to argue for it: God made sure the revelations were received accurately. Surely, an omnibenevolent God will not allow his message to be corrupted in the first step of transmission (i.e. the prophet receiving it). The corruption of previous messages (Like Jesus's, Moses's, ...) was a result of his followers' free will, and their ability to corrupt any message, including the divine message. 

All this is of course far-fetched for someone who is not convinced a God exists. But under the assumption that a benevolent God exists (and therefore, by definition of benevolence, would not leave us astray) it's definitely possible to make a case for Muhammad's religion being divine. Or, to put it more forcefully, a benevolent God must have communicated with us.

Whatever Muhammad got right in the Qur'an was probably a product of the current knowledge at the time. I mean, it doesn't say anything about magnetism, nor Doppler effect, does it? crystallography? semiconductors?

And do you think it would make sense if Muhammad actually mentioned technical terms like "Doppler effect" 14 centuries ago, before Doppler was even born....? His companions would surely think his message is unintelligible. 
A message from God that was transmitted 14 centuries ago must also be intelligble to people who lived 14 centuries ago, a trivial point but a frequently forgotten one, especially when we allow our imagination to go too far on what a divine book should look like. 

An additional problem with a divine book containing technical details of modern science: not all people are equipped to understand physics. I mean.. even if you give a very detailed explanation of some phenomenon, say, time dilation in special relativity, people can easily get confused. Why would a divine book meant to instruct people on how to live a meaningful spiritual life delve into highly non trivial natural phenomena? Add that to the fact that modern physics requires really hardcore math, unless one dedicates themselves to a decade of focused study, there is no way to even talk properly about things like riemannian manifolds, metric tensors, etc. all of which are involved in einstein's theory of gravity.

[Astreja]

your perspective... but at least you've been enjoined. Why go there?

Why not? It's not as if your imaginary friend poses any actual threat to me, and it's enjoyable to deconstruct the Christian worldview and point out its absurdities.

[pocaracas]

It seems you got stuck on my usage of the term "delusional". Remember that I left it as a range of attitudes, delusional being the most charitable one.
And you're right, I was careless with my words. I meant "dismiss prophets as likely delusional (at best), or charlatans (at worst)."

It is my impression, drawn mostly from archaeology, that mankind has been believing in the divine for a longer time than any prophet's existence... at least, any prophet that we know of, given the requirement of writing.

My case for assuming that claims about religious experiences arise from some psychopathology comes from the simple observation that psychopathologies lead to religious experiences, heck, even drug induced mental states lead to such experiences.
Look at this https://www.sciencealert.com/psychedelic...xperiences:

Well, it's definitely true that the brain in an altered state can produce religious experiences. But, again, you seem to miss a critical point I insisted upon before : any experience has a corresponding brain state. Think about it, any experience. Even the experience that would come from God necessarily corresponds to some brain state.

Oh boy... You really are hung up on certain ideas that have been sold to you.

An Experience that would come from God would be external to the person, to the person's mind and hence would be registered as any other external stimuli.
A delusion, hallucination, vivid dream or equivalent would necessarily come from within the person's own mind.
That's the meaning of "altered state" being used here. But you seem to be deliberately missing that notion for some god brownie points or something...

The truth is, it's extremely difficult to diagnose a man who lived 14 centuries ago.

That is true. That's why I don't even try, I wave it away.
But what would we nowadays say of someone claiming what he claimed? What would we say of someone like Moses?

And this is also true about other founders of religious movements. It's difficult for me to say that Joseph Smith, for example, was a full-blown manipulator. But his production (the Book of Mormon) seems to be plagiarized from the OT/NT, it could be that Joseph Smith was so well acquainted with the Bible that his religious experience(his subconscious at work) was more or less some fresh and passionate way to present christianity, but no genuinely new material. Muhammad PBUH, on the other hand, departed from the current doctrine of  christianity/judaism , and provided a comprehensive account of all the prophets' messages through history: they were simply all Muslims -in the sense that they all submitted to God. The majority of people who convert to Islam are impressed by this exact narrative, in addition to Islam's uncompromising monotheism.

Mo had extra inspiration, that much can't be argued. He did stem from a place where more than Judaism was available. You had the Egyptians to the West, Judaism/Christianity to the north, the flailing Romans to the North east along with some Greek influences, the Indians from the East and a bit of Chinese/Buddhism  from the North East. He had so much at his disposal.

That is not how it works.
Since the religious explanations likely came about through the musings of people at a time when mankind had no sophistication to properly explain them, as soon as an accurate enough natural explanation is provided, this one must supersede the religious one.

Of course, I'm well aware that the religious people will cling to their explanations for as long as they can. Such is their power! But it doesn't make them true, nor worthy of consideration by anyone who considers themselves to be rational.

Why do you think natural explanations must supersede the religious explanations, why can't they simply coexist ??

Some manifestation of God in this universe could very well be through natural means, and if we manage somehow to figure out some natural explanation of religious experiences, that simply doesn't mean they are not from God... it's a non-sequitur.

Then how do you propose one discerns natural events from divine ones?
Is it "Mister so-and-so said so"?
Remember that, in navigating this world, we must be aware that many "misters so-and-so" are lying, and many are mistakenly certain of what they claim. We can't just accept any claim from anyone, regardless of how charismatic that person may be.

Indeed it could be that the whole Universe was created by some entity.
Should we call that an extraterrestrial?... nah, that applies to beings from other planets still within this Universe.
Shall we call it then an extrauniversal? Still would be a natural being, I'd say. It would probably be impossible to ascertain its existence from within the Universe, so that would still render the psychopathological explanation for religious experiences more likely than the creator actually passing on a message.
Thinking about it... this entity would have generated a whole Universe where 95% of it is dark matter/energy. 5% is matter/energy of the kind that we interact with... and that "observable Universe" is already massive enough to dwarf this planet to a place of insignificance... and that entity would somehow be interested in creating a place just for us, humans. A place that required a few nudges along its way, otherwise, there would now be intelligent reptiles instead of primates, maybe.  But this extrauniversal entity decided that the intelligent ones would be primates and that they would evolve in such a way as to develop an intuition of belief so as to allow them to more readily accept the idea that it exists.
Not only that, but, in its benevolence towards this human species, it decides to communicate certain truths.
However, the communication is made with only a few individuals in a small corner of the globe, restricted to a few certain eras, all in weird and hidden ways (top of mount Sinai, cave in Mount Hira...)

Makes total sense, right?
It's not impossible, I'll give you that.
But come on, it is far fetched!

To my mind, it is far more likely that these people who became prophets were already embedded in a religious culture and simply took it a step further - either due to some psychopathology, or through cunning artifice, or some mix of both. I'm pretty confident that these phenomena, these cults, these religions, aren't made by a single person - they require a following.

You mentioned something I encounter here very frequently: our planet is so tiny and unsignificant that a God shouldn't care about it..... I mean.. really? If this God exists, then he's obviously the one who wanted this tiny planet to exist, and we know that the tiniest things in the universe contain marvellous aspects of complexity and harmony (DNA in a biological cell, the behavior of subatomic particles, etc.) that even one molecule of matter deserves to be called miraculous in some sense. 

First, If the creator entity god exists, it's not a given that it would care about this tiny planet. It is entirely conceivable that many similar planets exist dotted around the Universe with equivalent life forms.
Second, yes, both the astronomical and the microscopical worlds are fascinating, but they are still just physical systems doing what physical systems do. No miracles.

And let's satisfy the atheists' request, let's say God simply doesn't care about Earth let alone people. By the same token, God shouldn't care either about the Milky Way, too small compared to the rest of the universe, etc. you can see that we can't go anywhere with this argument.. it's vacuous because, simply put, size is not a relevant criterion ...

No, size is not very relevant. But it does speak as to the creator's priorities.
If the purpose is to have this planet be somehow important, then why bother with the rest?
All the stars we see in the night sky are from our galaxy, heck, they are from our corner of the galaxy. Why bother with creating a Universe with as many galaxies as we have stars in this galaxy alone if it's only for the benefit of humanity?
For us to wonder and marvel at the extreme power required? That would not have been an issue 14 centuries ago.
It makes more sense to think that we are not special, even if there is a creator god.

You say it's possible that religions may be the product of many people... In the case of Islam, it's really hard to defend this idea, the beginning of Muhammad's religious experience and how it evolved is well-known, he started the religion alone and was the sole author of the Qur'an. It's true that its compilation in a written form came some time later, but this is completely irrelevant, oral transmission was well-established in Arabia, and that's how the Qur'an came about and was preserved, too many people learnt it directly from Muhammad's recitations and many parts of it were even written on parchment during the prophet's lifetime. Many orientalists (Non-muslim western scholars who study Islam and the Muslim world) have no problem admitting it was preserved.

I said before that these things aren't the product of one person alone, but I believe I failed to properly convey my idea.
These things, such as Islam, arise because there is a following, a bunch of people who follow those ideas that, in the case of Islam, were allegedly spoken by Mo himself and Mo alone. Same concept as the disciples of Christ, same with the disciples of Socrates, etc.
Of course they come from a cultural position where the ideas were already accepted by that group and, probably, by the majority of the people in the region.
It would be easy to compile a group of things that these people already agreed with and would wish to see spread all over the land, whether or not they were spoken by a particular man is irrelevant. It is a given that this leader would be in agreement (at least the rest of them would think so).

If such a god capable of communicating with us exists, then why would that communication have been allowed to be mangled by whoever wrote those books?

Well, a Muslim apologist will tell you just the opposite: that Muhammad preserved God's message verbatim. I submit that it's inaccessible to us to verify no mangling happened when Muhammad received his revelation from the angel Gabriel (according to Muslim belief), but here's another way to argue for it: God made sure the revelations were received accurately. Surely, an omnibenevolent God will not allow his message to be corrupted in the first step of transmission (i.e. the prophet receiving it). The corruption of previous messages (Like Jesus's, Moses's, ...) was a result of his followers' free will, and their ability to corrupt any message, including the divine message. 

All this is of course far-fetched for someone who is not convinced a God exists. But under the assumption that a benevolent God exists (and therefore, by definition of benevolence, would not leave us astray) it's definitely possible to make a case for Muhammad's religion being divine. Or, to put it more forcefully, a benevolent God must have communicated with us.

You think?
I believe you missed my argument where the fact that there are multiple religions, multiple prophets, heck, the fact that such a thing as a prophet is how the divine creator decided to communicate with humanity is the clue to the non-benevolence of this creator entity. It's a clue when you combine it with the obvious result in human history.

I'm not saying there was any mangling by the supposed recipient of the message, it's what comes after, the interpretations.
If the message was so perfectly preserved, how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims? The message got mangled and these two factions appeared and have most certainly generated suffering simply due to that.
You may dismiss this as "free will", but I submit that the benevolent creator would, in its infinite wisdom, account for that and proceed accordingly.

I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one... certainly not the most benevolent one.
I present a simple, yet, in my opinion, far better way to pass on the message: communicate with every intelligent being on the planet (and other planets with intelligent life in the Universe).

At this stage, all theists I've discussed with will point out again "free will". My solution inhibits it by having god present itself to everyone, thus excluding any possibility for the individual to reject belief.
As someone who posits no value on belief, I don't see a problem in this.
I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that a creator entity who desires humanity to behave in a certain way, within its characteristic free will, would not care whether those humans believe it to exist or not, but would care about passing on a message in a way that all (or most, not to exclude people with actual mental disorders) would acknowledge and accept. Clearly, if we accept that communication was achieved for a few prophets, the creator entity can do it for anyone... unless there is some limitation from its side.

Whatever Muhammad got right in the Qur'an was probably a product of the current knowledge at the time. I mean, it doesn't say anything about magnetism, nor Doppler effect, does it? crystallography? semiconductors?

And do you think it would make sense if Muhammad actually mentioned technical terms like "Doppler effect" 14 centuries ago, before Doppler was even born....? His companions would surely think his message is unintelligible. 
A message from God that was transmitted 14 centuries ago must also be intelligble to people who lived 14 centuries ago, a trivial point but a frequently forgotten one, especially when we allow our imagination to go too far on what a divine book should look like. 

An additional problem with a divine book containing technical details of modern science: not all people are equipped to understand physics. I mean.. even if you give a very detailed explanation of some phenomenon, say, time dilation in special relativity, people can easily get confused. Why would a divine book meant to instruct people on how to live a meaningful spiritual life delve into highly non trivial natural phenomena? Add that to the fact that modern physics requires really hardcore math, unless one dedicates themselves to a decade of focused study, there is no way to even talk properly about things like riemannian manifolds, metric tensors, etc. all of which are involved in einstein's theory of gravity.

So... what does it matter if the guy said that the pharaoh was claiming to be a god?
What does it matter if he describes certain anatomy details that are somewhat accurate?
What does it matter that he gets things right?

It matters, because the things he got right, and that people seem so amazed because they think these are things that were unknown to mankind, were actually things known by some scholars well before Muhammad was born. They may have not been widespread knowledge, but they were available knowledge.
And that is why we don't see anything about knowledge that would come afterwards like those I mentioned, or many others.
This renders the sayings of Muhammad rather mundane... as one would expect if he was just a person with no access to anything beyond.

[R00tKiT]

We're still dealing in finite actions and finite sentences in the case of murder.

I will not yield on this point:  I consider eternal punishment to be the quintessence of pure evil, and I will not worship any deity that allows such a place as hell to exist and that refuses to liberate sentient beings from hell.  In my opinion, it is the ultimate deal-breaker.

And you think a murderer should enjoy ever-lasting happiness once the finite sentence is over? What about serial killers, or people who carry out genocides taking millions of lives, millions. What kind of finite sentence will account for the Holocaust, the cambodian genocide, and other unimaginably horrific episodes of human history? Do you think a benevolent God should put Hitler in heaven after some extended period of punishment, for example?

And actually, your stance against the existence of hell is completely irrational. If we tell someone that jumping out of a window from the 8th floor of a building will cause instant death, that doesn't make gravity an immoral thing or something a benevolent God wouldn't create, we're simply telling them the way it is. Similarly, God asked people to do very very simple things: not to dishonestly reject his message, not to murder people, etc. But people go ahead and do these things, knowing that hell is the consequence, why should they object to it ? God is omnipotent, after all. Sentient being simply can't object to anything an omnipotent being does.

You say, "I consider eternal punishment to be the quintessence of pure evil". Well, those who are entitled to eternal punishment have committed pure evil themselves, no theist is telling you that hell is a pleasurable outcome, either.. many people are capable of malevolence, they are capable of inflicting huge amounts of suffering to one another, why do you think these people deserve anything other than pure evil?

And if you still don't accept anything above, you can think of it this way: what would you wish to someone (I am really asking you for your personal opinion this time) who causes great harm to someone you care about? What would you think of a deity who allows this person to enjoy anything in an afterlife? What would you think of a deity who would reward serial killers, rapists, people who sell children for sexual purposes or to steal their organs....?
A possible objection is to say, a deity could simply make them cease to exist instead of torturing them. Not really a solution, either, because it doesn't cancel out the injustice. If we make a mass murderer cease to exist as a punishment then, at best, we canceled out the unjust murder of one person, what about the other thousands who died unfairly? This is a very simple example to give you a rough idea... 

And how do you know which ones I checked and didn't check?  Name them.

So far, every religious claim that I've examined has failed the believability test.  Every single one.  If the same thing keeps happening, why should I waste any more time on it?  I have more important things to do.

Well, actually, you can't say that to a theist, here is why: the theist picked some answer which they believe represents the ultimate truth, they don't need to check the rest of the answers. As I said to Spongebob before, imagine you have a row of 50 doors in front of you, only one door contains a prize and all other doors are dead ends, and you are allowed to open as many doors as you want (everybody gets the prize in the end), then what you would you is to randomly pick doors and open them, you may start by opening door 3 for example, you find it empty, then you open door 5, also empty, you keep going, until you open the door 17 for example, bingo, you find the prize.

Now, do you think it makes sense to keep opening doors after you found the prize (the only prize that exists) ? Clearly, it's really stupid to do so, you know beforehand that all the remaining doors don't contain anything. It's also clear that, before you found the prize, it was necessary to keep checking doors, and unless you exhaust all the doors, you can't say there is no prize.

Similarly, a person checks religious claims then finds some compelling claim that provides good reasons for its validity, they go for this claim and embrace religion x. Well, that's it. Religion x tells him all other religions are factually wrong. He found the prize, no need to check the remaining doors. He can be wrong, of course, but until he's presented with a very good reason to doubt the validity of x, he doesn't need to check other religions, that would clearly be meaningless.

[zwanzig]

I don't mean to derail but this

And this is also true about other founders of religious movements. It's difficult for me to say that Joseph Smith, for example, was a full-blown manipulator. But his production (the Book of Mormon) seems to be plagiarized from the OT/NT, it could be that Joseph Smith was so well acquainted with the Bible that his religious experience(his subconscious at work) was more or less some fresh and passionate way to present christianity, but no genuinely new material.

Is not the truth. It's difficult for you to say it because you don't know what you're talking about.

Joseph Smith was a conman who came from a family of con artists. Before he was a "prophet" he was using the seer stone(the very same he supposedly used to translate the BoM) to scry for buried treasure in the countryside of New York and New Jersey. The scam goes like so: you find some land and the mark that owns it. Then you place something there beforehand, like a feather or a piece of metal, underground a little ways. Then you convince your mark that you saw some treasure protected by spirits on his property. You get some sort of deposit or payment beforehand and then set up a time and place to find the treasure. You gotta kill a goat on the spot, shedding its blood, to bind the spirit(theatrics). Then while the seer keeps an eye on the treasure underground, the mark and whatever men you've hired to dig, start to dig. They find something! A feather! Or a chunk of metal! Hoo-boy! We're cookin' now! Gonna get tha treasure! Keep digging. Then, oh no! What's this? The seer says something has gone wrong. The guardian spirit that is protecting the treasure has broken free of its binding somehow! And now it is sinking through the earth with the treasure! Oh, gosh darn! that treasure sure is slippery.

It's called money digging and Joseph Smith was arrested and taken to court three times for doing it. And he was known as a storyteller as a young boy, regaling his family with tales around the fire at night. The Book of Mormon was not just plagiarized from the Bible but several books made and popular around that time, including a children's history book of the war for independence in New York and View of the Hebrews, which also told stories of ancient Israelites traveling by sea to the Americas, eventually becoming the Natives that colonists found here when they arrived. And guess how polygamy among the Mormons started? Joseph was caught screwing the 16 year old nanny, Fanny Alger, and told his wife, "No, god wanted me to do this. It's uh....revelation! Surprise! I'm bringing polygamy back!"

So, don't kid yourself that he was "inspired" or spread misinformation about the nature of where the Book of Mormon came from. It was a scam run by the Smith family from the beginning attempting to accrue wealth without doing labor or working the land to get it(Joseph Smith Sr. was a failed farmer).

[The Grand Nudger]

 He can be wrong, of course, but until he's presented with a very good reason to doubt the validity of x, he doesn't need to check other religions, that would clearly be meaningless.

As meaningless as you presenting pascals wager, apparently.  If you don't need to check other religions, I don't need to check them either.

In the end, it's just an exercise in whether or not you can manage to think clearly - since neither of us is in any danger of hell.

[R00tKiT]

Oh boy... You really are hung up on certain ideas that have been sold to you.

An Experience that would come from God would be external to the person, to the person's mind and hence would be registered as any other external stimuli.
A delusion, hallucination, vivid dream or equivalent would necessarily come from within the person's own mind.
That's the meaning of "altered state" being used here. But you seem to be deliberately missing that notion for some god brownie points or something...

Well.. so what? By brain state, I mean any state a human brain can have, whether there is some external stimuli or not. And, to use your definition of delusion above, Muhammad definitely didn't have a delusion. It would really be a very severe mental illness if what he perceived as the angel Gabriel -following him and almost forcing him to recite the Qur'an for 23 years- was a pure product of his own mind, this is simply inconsistent with his career as a social reformer and military leader. 

Someone who experiences a debilitating mental illness generating all kinds of supernatural entities (jinns, angels, heaven and hell, etc.) just can't do what Muhammad did, it doesn't add up.

That is true. That's why I don't even try, I wave it away.
But what would we nowadays say of someone claiming what he claimed? What would we say of someone like Moses?

Why should it matter how we would react if Moses came in our time? We already know people killed many prophets and prosecuted them. We also know they were accused of being insane, including the prophet of Islam. Why should any of that matter? 

If we were to accept the religios narrative, Moses didn't just claim he is a messenger, he also performed a miracle, many people continue to reject his message despite witnessing the miracle. Muhammad came in a time where Classical Arabic was at its peak, his miracle was adapted to this context: the Qur'an as an unsurpassably great example of Arabic literature,

Muhammad even challenged them to come up with something alike or better -this kind of challenge was very common among poets in his time-, the Qur'an is still regarded to this time as the finest piece of literature in classical arabic, add that to the fact that he was reportedly illiterate and had a very tough childhood -there is no way he received advanced training in Arabic literature or religious studies at an early age, his biography is well-known.

Then how do you propose one discerns natural events from divine ones?
Is it "Mister so-and-so said so"?
Remember that, in navigating this world, we must be aware that many "misters so-and-so" are lying, and many are mistakenly certain of what they claim. We can't just accept any claim from anyone, regardless of how charismatic that person may be.

As I said above, prophets did more than just claim. In the case of Islam, one should evaluate whether the Qur'an could've been made up from the knowledge within local environment. This is a vast subject, but we know, for example, that many verses in the Qur'an mention natural phenomena in a way that seems to agree with modern science, this is clearly an unnecessary risk taken by Muhammad. In the case of the claim of divinity by the Pharaoh, imagine if it turned out -after we managed to decipher hieroglyphics - that the pharaoh of the Exodus worshipped some pagan deity..! That would clearly undermine many verses in the Qur'an.

You say, how should one discern natural events from divine ones. The assumption of the existence of God is very helpful here, again. A message from God should obviously be clear and unequivocal. Something like Buddhism clearly doesn't satisfy this criterion, we just see that Buddhism is a mix of ancient myths of philosophies. Islam, for example, has very simple articles of faith, and one requirement: to believe there is one god and that Muhammad is a messenger, that's it. All the rest is details that one learns along the way, the message is clear and uncompromising.

To put it in another way, Islam is the kind of message you would expect a God who cares about clarity would communicate to us. There really is nothing complicated about monotheism or following the sayings of some prophet, people are wired to follow their instructors, their parents, etc. A prophet is simply a spiritual instructor, nothing more.

I said before that these things aren't the product of one person alone, but I believe I failed to properly convey my idea.
These things, such as Islam, arise because there is a following, a bunch of people who follow those ideas that, in the case of Islam, were allegedly spoken by Mo himself and Mo alone. Same concept as the disciples of Christ, same with the disciples of Socrates, etc.
Of course they come from a cultural position where the ideas were already accepted by that group and, probably, by the majority of the people in the region.
It would be easy to compile a group of things that these people already agreed with and would wish to see spread all over the land, whether or not they were spoken by a particular man is irrelevant. It is a given that this leader would be in agreement (at least the rest of them would think so).

This is definitely true for most religious movements. But why should this undermine the message, or explain away divine revelation...? Okay, let's admit Muhammad needed disciples to spread the message, and had a favorable environment to form the world religion of Islam, so what..? Why is this a threat to the divinity of his message?

Again, you seem to assume that a divine message must somehow spread magically, or that people should magically accept it without ever being able to second-guess it or doubt it.....? And let's not forget what all this does to their free will.

No, size is not very relevant. But it does speak as to the creator's priorities.
If the purpose is to have this planet be somehow important, then why bother with the rest?
All the stars we see in the night sky are from our galaxy, heck, they are from our corner of the galaxy. Why bother with creating a Universe with as many galaxies as we have stars in this galaxy alone if it's only for the benefit of humanity?
For us to wonder and marvel at the extreme power required? That would not have been an issue 14 centuries ago.
It makes more sense to think that we are not special, even if there is a creator god.

If size isn't relevant, you won't get very far arguing from the vastness of the universe. This is clearly an argument from ignorance. Additionnaly, God has infinite resources. He could create billions of galaxies as big as the universe surrounding some selected species, where is the problem?
Also, the Earth was more than enough for people to thrive (climate change and other similar issues notwithstanding) why would they need the entire galaxy at their service? Why is it important that every atom of matter should directly serve their needs or be a resource?

And one more thing, I assume you are familiar with fine-tuning arguments. All of them posit that the universe really had us in mind, it's true that we adapted to the universe to exist and survive, but this still required life-permitting conditions that are linked to the laws of physics that govern the entire universe.

You think?
I believe you missed my argument where the fact that there are multiple religions, multiple prophets, heck, the fact that such a thing as a prophet is how the divine creator decided to communicate with humanity is the clue to the non-benevolence of this creator entity. It's a clue when you combine it with the obvious result in human history.

I'm not saying there was any mangling by the supposed recipient of the message, it's what comes after, the interpretations.
If the message was so perfectly preserved, how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims? The message got mangled and these two factions appeared and have most certainly generated suffering simply due to that.
You may dismiss this as "free will", but I submit that the benevolent creator would, in its infinite wisdom, account for that and proceed accordingly.

I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one... certainly not the most benevolent one.
I present a simple, yet, in my opinion, far better way to pass on the message: communicate with every intelligent being on the planet (and other planets with intelligent life in the Universe).

At this stage, all theists I've discussed with will point out again "free will". My solution inhibits it by having god present itself to everyone, thus excluding any possibility for the individual to reject belief.
As someone who posits no value on belief, I don't see a problem in this.
I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that a creator entity who desires humanity to behave in a certain way, within its characteristic free will, would not care whether those humans believe it to exist or not, but would care about passing on a message in a way that all (or most, not to exclude people with actual mental disorders) would acknowledge and accept. Clearly, if we accept that communication was achieved for a few prophets, the creator entity can do it for anyone... unless there is some limitation from its side.

You say, "how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims?" . I can simply respond: how come you have a flat earth society? how come you have people who deny the holocaust? how come you have people who think 9/11 is an inside job?

People can deny anything, even the clearest facts, let alone a politically charged subject like who is the successor of Muhammad. You seem to understimate what people can with their free will. Shia Islam (except a minority) doesn't disagree with Sunnism on major articles of faith like monotheism or Muhammad's prophethood.

You say, "I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one". Well, that's simply another instance of incredulity. Religious narratives answer a great many of you questions, God and his messengers did show people miracles and many still rejected their message. It's not clear at all that it would be better (while preserving free will), if God showed everyone some miracle or communicated some message.  We know there are people who rejected Jesus despite being able to reanimate the dead.

And to give you a more "secular" example, smoking is universally known to be bad. Medicine "communicated" the clear message that people should avoid smoking cigarettes, it's the most stupid thing one can do to their health, and guess what? People still smoke, they are proud to show it off.