Single Best Argument For God?
I have been debating a Pastor on twitter now for some time and I was getting nowhere. After lost of anger and frustration I asked him for his single best argument for god. I wanted the best he had to offer and the one thing that would convince me I was wrong. He sent me back the following which he admittedly pulled from another source. I've decided to attempt to answer it, but could use any help you all would be willing to supply. I figure if I show him his best arguments are flawed then he will have no reason to continue to bombard my email and twitter and I will have won a small victory. Well, here it is:
The purpose for sending you this email is to show you that believing in
a God is not a blind faith, but rather a logical faith. A faith in
which all the empirical facts back up the belief that God exists. I
ENCOURAGE YOU TO BE OPEN MINDED WHILE READING THIS AND I'LL BE OPEN
MINDED WITH YOUR ARGUMENTS AS WELL. PLEASE READ THIS GATHERING ANY
QUESTIONS IN YOUR MIND SO THAT YOU CAN RESPOND. I WILL ANSWER EACH OF
THEM RATIONALLY.
This is a three part cumulative argument, starting with the weakest and
ending with the strongest. The first, although it doesn't prove that
God exists, shows how an atheist lives inconsistently with their
belief. The second lays down all the empirical facts and shows that the
best explanation for all of the facts is that God exists. And the
third is the scientific argument which shows that even science points
to a God. Keep in mind that no presumption made can be proved as true
for CERTAIN. I'm simply showing you that the belief in a theistic
universe is the best explaination for the world's existence. The
scientific theories that I will use to back up the argument for the
existence of God have not yet been disproved and are all backed up with
strong evidence such as the Principle of Causality, the Big Bang
Theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. IF YOUR PRESUMPTION THAT
"THERE IS NO THEISTIC UNIVERSE" IS BASED ON SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OTHER
THAN THE THEORIES JUST MENTIONED, PLEASE TELL ME AND EXPLAIN, BUT FIRST
READ THROUGH WHY I THINK THEY POINT TO GOD.
I) Psychological Argument For The Existence Of God.
Either God exists or He doesn't. If God doesn't exist then there are
three things that are true.
A) Life holds no ULTIMATE significance. Even if you argued that
there is significance in
your life such as the enjoyment of doing anything you want, it
would not be the Ultimate significance because everyone who has lived
or will live in the future will eventually end up in the grave. Even if
reincarnation exists everyone will still die and become nothing because
the world is slowly deteriorating down to nothing itself.
B) Life has no value. Everthing is permissible. There is no such
thing as right and wrong because there is no all knowing and all
powerful Creator to define what is good and what is bad. It becomes
society who tries to define it. What does that matter though if the
people making laws define right from wrong. They are just as human as
any other person in the world. The only thing that truly exists is
personal preference. What Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass murderer
did was not wrong at all. They simply had a different personal
preference than you do. The point is, you shouldn't tell anyone that
they are wrong or even right because they aren't either of those
things. You can believe that its wrong, but you have no place to
ground it. People can do anything they want to do without getting
punished for their actions if the world lived consistently with the
belief that God doesn't exist.
C) There is no purpose to life. Life has no ultimate goal. There is
no reason for living. Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid.
This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own
belief. If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your
house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE
is wrong to do that? If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing
wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs. But if
you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals.
But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only
subjective morality. So by saying it is wrong makes it only your
opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your
morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe. You
probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another
person." Even that statement right there is another objective moral
statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always
live by them.
II) Probable argument.
Scientist say that if you have a group of facts out there, you should
have a paradigm that best explains these facts. Here are the facts that
everyone who's sane would agree on.
A) Religious experience
What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious. In
every culture you see three things.
1) Everyone, except the atheist, worships a being higher than
themselves.
2) Everyone has a morality they cannot keep.
3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an
emptiness in themselves that they want to fill. If the material world
was the only thing that existed and if all your material needs were
met, you should be satesfied right? But how come people who have the
most wealth are usually the most unhappy. They constantly want more and
more.
And how can you explain the millions of people in the world
who say they have felt the closeness of God in their lives? I
personally am included with them. I have felt God's presence in my life
on a consistent basis. Now how can you rationally explain that without
God's existence?
B) Miracles.
There are many people in the world who report seeing miracles. In
other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur
where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I personally know
people who have had miraculous situations occur, such as immediate
healings. You might argue that science will someday explain those
things, but right now you can't explain them. The best explaination is
God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to
believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.
C) Morality
How do you explain where guilt comes from? How do you explain why
all people in the world have this feeling called a conscience that
seems to tell them that something is wrong, such as murder. How come
people feel a heavy weight on their emotions called guilt when they do
something wrong, such as lie and steal, and the best thing to do to
take the weight off themselves is to tell the truth and/or ask for
forgiveness. If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally
explain all that?
D) Design
First of all, explain the existence of the world. How can you have
something and not nothing? We see a world so complex that it looks like
someone designed it. It has an incredible amount of order to it. If you
walked on a beach and saw the words "I love you" written in the sand,
would you say, "Isn't it funny how the water by random chance formed
those words in the sand." No, you would think that some person wrote
those words themselves. If you took apart a computer and examined the
complex parts, would you say, "Isn't it funny how a building with
mechanical parts exploded and by random chance came together and
created this computer." no, you would think that an intelligent
designer spent his time to put the computer together. But how come you
see a world full of more complexity and order then every man made
structure put together and you assume that no intelligent designer
created it? A single strand of DNA has more information on it then the
whole Encyclopedia Britannica. You can't even explain it without God.
Tell me, have you ever seen design and never a designer? You might
say that science will explain these questions in the future. Do you
think then that the belief in God's existence is stupid? I'm just being
what any truly rational person should be, looking at the facts and
choosing the best explanation for all those facts. That's how any
scientific hypotheses works. But you still don't want to believe in
God. You are simply not being a rational person with any of the facts
that we have. You just don't want to believe it, not for intellectual
reasons, but because you just don't want do believe it period, with no
evidence on your side.
THESE THINGS ARE OUT THERE AND THEY NEED AN EXPLAINATION FOR HOW THEY
EXIST. NO ONE CAN BE ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN OF HOW THESE THINGS CAME TO BE.
YOU CAN ONLY FIND THE BEST EXPLAINATION, WHICH IS WHY I BELEIVE IN A
THEISTIC UNIVERSE.
III) The Cosmological argument
A) Principle of Causality: Everything that comes to be needs a
cause. All science is built on the principle of causality. If it didn't
exist then we would have to remove the word "because" from our
language. How could we really talk without it?
B) Since something cannot come from nothing, something has to be
eternal. It's either God or the World.
C) In 1929 a man named Edward Hubble discovered that the redness
of the stars showed that the universe was constantly expanding
equilaterally in all directions. He said that the best explanation for
that is that there must have been a point in time, called the Big Bang
theory where the universe was nothing and then came to be.
D) To further the evidence for the universe having a beginning,
there is the scientific law, the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. It says
heat moves from hotter bodies to cooler bodies until there is an
equilibrium. In other words the universe is constantly winding down
until there is a heat death in our universe. That just goes to prove
that if the world was eternal then heat death would have already
occurred, but since it hasn't occured yet, the universe had to have a
beginning. You might say, "Maybe new heat is being put into the
universe. But the 1st law of Thermodynamics goes against it because it
says that there is no new energy being put into the universe. Since
everything that comes to be (the world) needs a cause, the best
explanation for this is God. Because there is only two explanations
that we see exist. 1. God, and 2. the World. God is the best
explanation between the two.
PS. I borrowed alot of the material from Matthew D Combs who has years
of experience defending the faith. Please read through these which I'm
sure you've gone through most of these arguments many times.
The purpose for sending you this email is to show you that believing in
a God is not a blind faith, but rather a logical faith. A faith in
which all the empirical facts back up the belief that God exists. I
ENCOURAGE YOU TO BE OPEN MINDED WHILE READING THIS AND I'LL BE OPEN
MINDED WITH YOUR ARGUMENTS AS WELL. PLEASE READ THIS GATHERING ANY
QUESTIONS IN YOUR MIND SO THAT YOU CAN RESPOND. I WILL ANSWER EACH OF
THEM RATIONALLY.
This is a three part cumulative argument, starting with the weakest and
ending with the strongest. The first, although it doesn't prove that
God exists, shows how an atheist lives inconsistently with their
belief. The second lays down all the empirical facts and shows that the
best explanation for all of the facts is that God exists. And the
third is the scientific argument which shows that even science points
to a God. Keep in mind that no presumption made can be proved as true
for CERTAIN. I'm simply showing you that the belief in a theistic
universe is the best explaination for the world's existence. The
scientific theories that I will use to back up the argument for the
existence of God have not yet been disproved and are all backed up with
strong evidence such as the Principle of Causality, the Big Bang
Theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. IF YOUR PRESUMPTION THAT
"THERE IS NO THEISTIC UNIVERSE" IS BASED ON SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OTHER
THAN THE THEORIES JUST MENTIONED, PLEASE TELL ME AND EXPLAIN, BUT FIRST
READ THROUGH WHY I THINK THEY POINT TO GOD.
I) Psychological Argument For The Existence Of God.
Either God exists or He doesn't. If God doesn't exist then there are
three things that are true.
A) Life holds no ULTIMATE significance. Even if you argued that
there is significance in
your life such as the enjoyment of doing anything you want, it
would not be the Ultimate significance because everyone who has lived
or will live in the future will eventually end up in the grave. Even if
reincarnation exists everyone will still die and become nothing because
the world is slowly deteriorating down to nothing itself.
B) Life has no value. Everthing is permissible. There is no such
thing as right and wrong because there is no all knowing and all
powerful Creator to define what is good and what is bad. It becomes
society who tries to define it. What does that matter though if the
people making laws define right from wrong. They are just as human as
any other person in the world. The only thing that truly exists is
personal preference. What Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass murderer
did was not wrong at all. They simply had a different personal
preference than you do. The point is, you shouldn't tell anyone that
they are wrong or even right because they aren't either of those
things. You can believe that its wrong, but you have no place to
ground it. People can do anything they want to do without getting
punished for their actions if the world lived consistently with the
belief that God doesn't exist.
C) There is no purpose to life. Life has no ultimate goal. There is
no reason for living. Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid.
This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own
belief. If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your
house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE
is wrong to do that? If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing
wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs. But if
you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals.
But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only
subjective morality. So by saying it is wrong makes it only your
opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your
morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe. You
probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another
person." Even that statement right there is another objective moral
statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always
live by them.
II) Probable argument.
Scientist say that if you have a group of facts out there, you should
have a paradigm that best explains these facts. Here are the facts that
everyone who's sane would agree on.
A) Religious experience
What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious. In
every culture you see three things.
1) Everyone, except the atheist, worships a being higher than
themselves.
2) Everyone has a morality they cannot keep.
3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an
emptiness in themselves that they want to fill. If the material world
was the only thing that existed and if all your material needs were
met, you should be satesfied right? But how come people who have the
most wealth are usually the most unhappy. They constantly want more and
more.
And how can you explain the millions of people in the world
who say they have felt the closeness of God in their lives? I
personally am included with them. I have felt God's presence in my life
on a consistent basis. Now how can you rationally explain that without
God's existence?
B) Miracles.
There are many people in the world who report seeing miracles. In
other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur
where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I personally know
people who have had miraculous situations occur, such as immediate
healings. You might argue that science will someday explain those
things, but right now you can't explain them. The best explaination is
God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to
believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.
C) Morality
How do you explain where guilt comes from? How do you explain why
all people in the world have this feeling called a conscience that
seems to tell them that something is wrong, such as murder. How come
people feel a heavy weight on their emotions called guilt when they do
something wrong, such as lie and steal, and the best thing to do to
take the weight off themselves is to tell the truth and/or ask for
forgiveness. If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally
explain all that?
D) Design
First of all, explain the existence of the world. How can you have
something and not nothing? We see a world so complex that it looks like
someone designed it. It has an incredible amount of order to it. If you
walked on a beach and saw the words "I love you" written in the sand,
would you say, "Isn't it funny how the water by random chance formed
those words in the sand." No, you would think that some person wrote
those words themselves. If you took apart a computer and examined the
complex parts, would you say, "Isn't it funny how a building with
mechanical parts exploded and by random chance came together and
created this computer." no, you would think that an intelligent
designer spent his time to put the computer together. But how come you
see a world full of more complexity and order then every man made
structure put together and you assume that no intelligent designer
created it? A single strand of DNA has more information on it then the
whole Encyclopedia Britannica. You can't even explain it without God.
Tell me, have you ever seen design and never a designer? You might
say that science will explain these questions in the future. Do you
think then that the belief in God's existence is stupid? I'm just being
what any truly rational person should be, looking at the facts and
choosing the best explanation for all those facts. That's how any
scientific hypotheses works. But you still don't want to believe in
God. You are simply not being a rational person with any of the facts
that we have. You just don't want to believe it, not for intellectual
reasons, but because you just don't want do believe it period, with no
evidence on your side.
THESE THINGS ARE OUT THERE AND THEY NEED AN EXPLAINATION FOR HOW THEY
EXIST. NO ONE CAN BE ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN OF HOW THESE THINGS CAME TO BE.
YOU CAN ONLY FIND THE BEST EXPLAINATION, WHICH IS WHY I BELEIVE IN A
THEISTIC UNIVERSE.
III) The Cosmological argument
A) Principle of Causality: Everything that comes to be needs a
cause. All science is built on the principle of causality. If it didn't
exist then we would have to remove the word "because" from our
language. How could we really talk without it?
B) Since something cannot come from nothing, something has to be
eternal. It's either God or the World.
C) In 1929 a man named Edward Hubble discovered that the redness
of the stars showed that the universe was constantly expanding
equilaterally in all directions. He said that the best explanation for
that is that there must have been a point in time, called the Big Bang
theory where the universe was nothing and then came to be.
D) To further the evidence for the universe having a beginning,
there is the scientific law, the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. It says
heat moves from hotter bodies to cooler bodies until there is an
equilibrium. In other words the universe is constantly winding down
until there is a heat death in our universe. That just goes to prove
that if the world was eternal then heat death would have already
occurred, but since it hasn't occured yet, the universe had to have a
beginning. You might say, "Maybe new heat is being put into the
universe. But the 1st law of Thermodynamics goes against it because it
says that there is no new energy being put into the universe. Since
everything that comes to be (the world) needs a cause, the best
explanation for this is God. Because there is only two explanations
that we see exist. 1. God, and 2. the World. God is the best
explanation between the two.
PS. I borrowed alot of the material from Matthew D Combs who has years
of experience defending the faith. Please read through these which I'm
sure you've gone through most of these arguments many times.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Nelson on -
wow. this is just awful. not even just the arguments but the way they're presented.
and what's with the last sentence? if he's sure that you've gone through these arguments many times before and you're still an atheist then why would he offer these arguments again?
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Permalink Reply by Mr Good Without God on -
I do not know. It blows my mind, but I want to show him how flawed this all is. (Soon after this he pointed me to some of his "former atheist" buddies)
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Permalink Reply by Nelson on
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I)A) modo hoc fallacy.
that the universe or life have no ultimate meaning doesn't mean that they don't have any meaning at all. there is plenty that gives life meaning. what difference does it make that the universe has no ultimate meaning for us?
B) moral argument for god.
see my comments here.
C) a restatement of A) the same modo hoc fallacy.
II)
A)
1) the fallacy known as argumentum ad populum- that a majority of people believe something doesn't mean that that proposition is true! (ask him if he would renounce christianity if in a few years the number of christians falls to a minority!)
personal experiences, that is, religious experiences, are an awful way to determine objective reality because they are by their nature subjective!
that the majority of people in the world are religious means nothing when no one can agree on a conception of god or what he wants for us, to say nothing of the fact that most people's conceptions of god is incoherent and contradictory.
moreover, the fact that a person's religion is so closely tied to their culture demands that we be skeptical at the outset! who would argue that if they had been born in Saudi Arabia they would have been a Muslim or if they had been born in India they would have been a Hindu?
finally, religious experiences are mutually exclusive and contradictory. if all religious people are prone to these experiences then we can't rely on them as being veridical. they all cancel each other out!
2) everyone has a morality they can not keep? so what? what does that tell us about the probability of god existing? hell, religious people can't keep to their own morality. so?
3) what has dissatisfaction have to do with anything? people are dissatisfied because we're conspicuous consumers who crave acceptance and companionship.
but again, that someone is happier believing something tells us nothing about whether or not the proposition is true. as George Bernard Shaw said, "the fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
B) petitio principii fallacy. positing a divine action (a miracle) as evidence of the divinity begs the question you're trying to prove.
besides, Hume ruled out appeals to miracles back in 1748.
all religions (but certainly the big ones) can make appeals to miracles. that means that you're in the same boat as with personal religious experiences. it just becomes white noise through which we can hear nothing reliable. what do miracles tell us about the truth of a religion if all these religions can point to them and they all claim them to be evidence of the truth of their mutually exclusive contradictory religions?
finally, and on that last point, why the double standard? why expect me to take miracles as evidence for the truth of your religion while you reject miracles when it comes to establishing the truth of the other guy's religion?
C) we covered morality[1)B)]. the author of this email called this a cumulative case but so far he's repeated himself on two points. not much of a case, it seems, if he needs to do this.
D) anthropic principle. the only reason why we're here to ask the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is because the universe is the way that it is allowing us to exist to ask the question. the question assumes that something is intrinsically superior to nothing without explaining why that must be. sure, something is better than nothing when it comes to my opinion about the universe but why should the universe care about my opinion or that of the rest of humanity or indeed life in general?
god of the gaps/argument from incredulity. maybe we can't answer why there's something rather than nothing but why does that grant us license to posit a totally unevidenced transcendental supreme intelligence? just because you can't accept that there is and may be found a naturalistic explanation doesn't mean that the supernatural explanation is valid.
anyway, we're finding clues to the something rather than nothing question and these clues indicate that the supernaturalistic explanations aren't required.
--when it comes to biology as evidence of design, anyone who offers this clearly has no education in the subject of biology and is ignoring the many instances of absolutely awful design that life exhibits. if there is a designer and i believed in him i certainly wouldn't offer biology as evidence of his designing ability!
--have i ever seen design that didn't need a designer? um, yeah, all the time. all of life on Earth! lol.
NO ONE CAN BE ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN OF HOW THESE THINGS CAME TO BE.
except him apparently because he's certain that god exists, created the universe, designed all life, and communicates what he wants for humans when it comes to morality! LOL!
III)
A) not true! quantum physics allows for uncaused events.
besides, our notion of all things requiring a cause is down to our experience here on Earth where events in the macro world have cause and effect relationships. it does not follow that things in the micro world must follow this or that events that occurred at the big bang and just after before the laws of physics were fixed had to follow this.
but again, this is a god of the gaps argument. that we may not know what caused the universe doesn't mean that there's any validity to offering "god did it!"
B) and why believe that it was god? we know the world exists. why not admit that Occam's Razor dictates that we go on the assumption that the world is all there is until such time as any evidence can be adduced to show that the god hypothesis is more likely?
C) this is a fact, not an argument.
besides, what we've found since 1929 is that the big bang may just be a local event with a larger meta-universe. there may be infinite universes popping in and out of existence due, perhaps, to quantum foam fluctuations. this explanation, insofar as it is naturalistic and the natural world is all we can be sure exists given the evidence, is far more probable than any supernatural explanation could be!
D) again. multiverse.
he keeps referring to the choice as either god or "the world" but there's two hypothesis, one of which is god, the other of which is not "the world".
regarding Matthew D. Combs: that's just it isn't it? he's defending the faith. that's why these arguments are so plainly awful to anyone who has looked into them. it's because he began with the presupposition that his faith is true and then went looking for justification. a search for truth just doesn't work that way.
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Permalink Reply by M on -
The psychological aspect is too (and I'm not fond of this word) stupid to comment on. I apologize for that not being a sound way to argue, but I can't even go there.
I like the Probable Argument.
A. The religious experience: Uh, duh. Religions developed all over the globe as a way to order society and to explain things that could not be explained (yet), among other things. Many religions are extremely different. Multiple gods, goddesses, monotheism, no god at all, etc. The fact that religion exists in the plural is not a basis for god existing. As for people "feeling" god, that's completely subjective. People "feel" all kinds of things, and that doesn't always prove to be based anywhere other than the mind.
B. Miracles: In
other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur
where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I could say I saw a little green man with orange testacles dancing on my kitchen table. Is that a miracle? Is it the truth? Sometimes something may seem miraculous to someone who doesn't have a full grasp on a subject. Like someone whom the doctors said had no chance to live pulls through unscathed. Well, biology is amazing and diverse. Does that make it a religious miracle or a biological miracle-- or a miracle at all? I think sometimes people see something and they personally (which doesn't mean that someone with some knowledge on the topic couldn't) don't know how to explain it, so viola! It's a miracle! I also feel that miracles that aren't attributed to the fanatics or the scammers can be attributed to something that hasn't been explained scientifically-- yet. But it will. Again, this isn't what I would consider proof for a god.
C. Morality: This man needs to have a firmer background on the evolution of man. We would not have survived as a species if we went around killing whomever we wanted when we wanted. We, too, had to have rules so that we could get along together semi-peaceably in groups in order to survive. Once upon a time we were rather primitive. We didn't have houses, grocery stores, and the Gap. We had to find/build our own shelters, hunt/gather our own food, and clothe ourselves (often with skins of animals we killed). All of this required teamwork. Guilt, much like the love of high-calorie foods, is something we possess inherently. We don't really need a god to help with that. However, religion has played a huge part in making people feel guilty for their inherent biology and thus senselessly hating themselves, so we can definitely thank god for that!
D. Design. I disagree. I feel it is just the opposite of what this guy believes. To me, the world being "designed" by one being is utterly more complicated than it unfolding scientifically and naturally through physics, biology, evolution, mathematics, etc. One deity being so intricately wowza-intelligent and putting together a universe is way more out-there to me than a scientific theory.
As for a cosmological theory to explain how the universe came into being, there are a few. In truth, no one really knows. For all we know, the universe always "was." That doesn't prove the existence of a god, either.
But maybe I could consult the green man on my kitchen table. He might have some insight...
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Permalink Reply by Wesley on -
Just terrible arguments.
The first thing I would do if I were talking to this guy would be to ask him to define god and to give his arguments as to why his version is true and other religions versions are not. They all use the same supportive arguments... Truth in sacred scripture. Miracles. Personal spiritual experiences. Fullfilling of prophesy. etc...
After he fails there I'd ask him if he would be willing to switch to hinduism or one of the yoga paths to hold on to his faith in a 'creator god' if Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok's cyclic model of the universe turns out to be true?
This is a pretty sticky question. If they really want to support their arguments from a scientific standpoint then they MUST be HONESTLY willing to adopt a different belief system if the evidence points toward doing so. I think very few people could honestly say they would or even could do it. I imagine it would be an uncomfortable question.
and then this stickler.... I'd ask him to tell you the ultimate purpose of life.
If our very salvation forever and ever hinges upon our acknowledgement of our sinful and unworthy nature and our acceptance that God created such a system that he had to kill himself in order to save a small portion of his creation...... What the fuck kinda ultimate purpose is that? What great wisdom and spiritual knowledge is gleaned from that?
Why did an all-powerful, all-knowing being create an ETERNAL TORTURE CHAMBER and fill it with MOST of his creation? What kind of ultimate purpose is that?
Why didn't an all-powerful, all-knowing being create a universe that was based on rehabilitation and growth? Why does all growth stop after the incredibly short insignificant physical lifespan? If its not possible to learn anything after you die then what the fuck is the ultimate purpose to eternal damnation?
Why the fuck didn't god create a system in which people could learn from their mistakes, atone and ask forgiveness even after they died?
Oh well ,,, lol... those are just a few things I'd ask him
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Permalink Reply by Greg Gorey on -
I would suggest the following:
1. pose that all faiths must be examined from the starting point of "unweighted" agnosticism. if you just do Christianity, you are special pleading. Many religions have individuals that have seizures and supposedly come into touch with deities through their divine senses (Islam, Christianity, Mormonism all mention a divine sense in their writings)
2. show that indifference fits the universe better than the theistic view due to the:
-age of the cosmos compared to the age of humanity
-size of the cosmos compared to that of our planet
-scale of cosmos compared to the scale of humanity
-the brutality and suffering found in nature
3. show how theistic explanations (like ID and fine-tuning) fail
-they cant be tested
-you can not make predictions with them
-they have to posit many additional entities to work
-the violate ockham's razor
-they aren't very informative
-they go against scientific naturalism's successful precedent
4. You must conclude that the Bayesian probability of atheism is much higher than theism.
This is my line of debate against theists. The only time it doesn't work is against people who are too far gone and will openly admit nothing will change their mind. I think the inception of doubt works on most of these people too. Ideas are powerful things and once they are planted, it is hard to reverse them without submitting to outright delusion.
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Permalink Reply by noisician on -
Wow, I never heard it put so succinctly:
God's ultimate purpose for most of humanity is to be eternally tortured!
Nicely done.
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Permalink Reply by willailla on -
Well, I wonder if the god he keeps mentioning is the Christian god, for he offers no proof of it. If he means some other god--how does he know what that god thinks?
He banks heavily on The Big Bang Theory not realizing that scientists have various conflicting theories on the nature of the universe, IUT, for example. It certainly didn't come from nothing, i.e. finite singularity if, as many scientists believe, the universe is infinite. And nothingness is impossible.
DNA? Scientists have not discovered the mechanism for the creation of life, but to postulate a god in place of ignorance is foolish. Science has proven itself many times and given us 'miracles'. Religion has merely been a clog in the wheel.
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Permalink Reply by Greg Gorey on
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Jack Szostak is projected to have accomplished abiogenesis within the next 2 years.
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