(Part 2) Best products from r/DebateReligion

> If Person A and Person B live identical lives

I would like to posit that this is, in fact, impossible. Catholicism insists that the purpose of human life is to encounter God; Person B, in your scenario, would presumably be participating in the activity of worship, which in itself would differentiate their life from that of Person A. To worship is to encounter God, and thus the lives of the two hypothetical persons would differ at least in that respect—Person B is participating in the activity for which, we believe, human beings were created, while Person A is not.

>Also, I would like to counter your point that those who do not practice Christianity are missing out on something. I would say that the opposite is true. That everyone who adheres to Christianity or any religion are the ones who are missing out. Because when you completely buy into a religion that has an established set of thoughts, beliefs, and practices that both explain all of life and death and prescribe all thoughts and actions you may entertain, you're virtually forfeiting the ability to think and act for yourself, to approach nature and life with a true sense of curiosity and discovery, to set your own course with the great assistance and give-and-take with your fellow humans to find truth in all the many ways that it exists.

Again, 'missing out' has to be understood in the context of the ultimate purpose of human beings. Our theology insists that human beings are created to share in the divine life, which is accomplished through (1) worship and (2) acts of loving-kindness. Those who fail to practice one, the other, or both are not living in accordance with their full potential—they are not living up to the purpose for which they were created.

It is also evident, I think, that no material or earthly good has the power to completely satisfy. As C. S. Lewis writes,

>Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best .possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

The things of the earth cannot completely satisfy because, being transient, they cannot provide the fundamental satisfaction and bliss which would serve to permanently fulfill the human heart. The only source of total, lasting, perfect fulfillment is the God who is eternal, all-encompassing—the God who created us for himself. They who are separated from God are unable to attain this transcendent fulfillment that is the intended state of the human person.

I would finally posit that, far from reducing one's curiosity in the world, adherence to a religion that professes creational monotheism amplifies it. The Christian thesis is that the creation is "good" and that human beings are "very good" (see Genesis 1), and therefore we can go into the world eager to explore the goodness, the grace present everywhere and in everyone. If God has breathed life into this creation, then this creation communicates God—and so encountering the creation and encountering beauty in nature, in art, in music, in poetry, in travel, in anything, is a moment of union with God and thus a true moment of discovery. By contrast, acceptance of an atheist worldview necessarily entails acceptance of the proposition that absolutely everything is arbitrary, that there is no ultimate purpose and thus that all of the things of the earth form a cacophony in which no deeper resonance or harmony can be heard.

>you willingly forfeit the immense potential of your intellect to seek and discover and analyze and draw your own conclusions about your experience here on Earth -- all the traits that make human beings unique from all other life forms -- because all such discoveries of truth have already been given to you by others.

Each person, each believer, encounters God in a different way. Ratzinger in Salt of the Earth was asked how many ways there exist to God, and his answer was immediate: "As many as there are people." When I visited Jerusalem I was quite struck that, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over what is thought to be the site of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, the walls are covered with crosses—crosses clandestinely chiseled into the stone by generations of pilgrims, over centuries, each slightly unique. The fact that others have gone before me in faith, the fact that others have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem (both literally and metaphorically, in terms of the 'Heavenly Jerusalem') does not mean that my experience will be identical to theirs. Yes, we are all united by the faith, by the holy sites, by these creeds—but we all, in our own way, leave a mark upon the Church, a mark that arises out of our personal and wholly unique encounter with the divine. The encounter with God occurs both communally, within the context of the broader Christian community, and individually, within the heart of each person. The communal aspect does not negate the need for the individual to seek, to discover, to encounter for themselves anew the truth. Nor does it lessen the drama of the adventure of life: nobody can look at the life of, say, Saul of Tarsus, or Augustine of Hippo, or John Paul II, or even of fictional characters like Jean Valjean—all people touched by grace—and say that they have been 'missing out' on the richness of the human experience.

I would also therefore reject the notion that we are forfeiting our intellects by adhering to the Christian faith. Some people perhaps do, but those are the kinds of people who would not have been curious regardless—there are surely some atheists who have unquestionably embraced a secularist worldview without even a second thought. By contrast, if one is naturally inquisitive, one will seek to read, to learn, to discover, to think, to engage. What makes you think that religious people have not drawn their own conclusions from their experiences here on Earth? I would ask that you perhaps consider the idea that intellectually engaged religious people go about life, live it, think about it, contemplate it, and on the basis of their experiences and reflections choose to freely adhere to their faiths. (And any general survey of theology will aptly demonstrate that, far from going into the enterprise of faith unthinkingly, theologically engaged Christians apply their intellect to the faith, not just believing blindly but implicating and using their reason in everything.)

>Finally, returning to my Person A an Person B scenario above, I would add that Person A is the one who deserves more respect and more credit for living a good and virtuous life because they chose to do so on their own judgement and will power, while Person B did so for a variety of outside reasons including fear of retribution from God, the promise of reward in eternal life, and so on.

If so, Person B has missed the point of the Christian religion. The Christian faith is ultimately founded upon love—we believe in a God who himself is love, and we believe that our purpose is to imitate him in love. Love, for us, is necessarily selfless—it is an act whereby one gives of themselves for the good of another, whereby one suspends self-centered considerations so as to do what is best for the beloved. If one performs an action for their own gain, then (say to avoid retribution from God or to obtain the promise of reward in eternal life), it means they have failed to really practice Christianity.

The question of why Jesus took on our human nature, and having thus taken upon himself mortality, himself perished, can be answered far more convincingly with reference to a shocking and spectacular passage in 2 Peter:

>His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.

(emphasis obviously mine)

The relevant questions are: if God became human, what does that mean about being human? If God died, what does that mean about death? Otherwise stated: Did God's becoming incarnate and dying accomplish something that could not have been accomplished through any other means?

The answer is clearly yes, and is best understood against the context of an "escape from the corruption that is in the world" that involves humans becoming "partakers of the divine nature." Christianity proposes that God loves the world and prescribes a role for human beings within it, but that we are prevented from accomplishing our role because of the effects of sin. Human beings are meant to reflect the eternal, everlasting, incorrupt image of the God-who-is-love into the world—this is God's whole plan for creation—but we fail in this task by separating ourselves from God with acts that run counter to love. The inevitable consequence of anti-loving actions (that is, of sins) is death because sins divorce us from the loving God, who is life itself.

God, however, remains faithful to his creation and is committed to having humans accomplish their role of reflecting his image within it, despite the fact that creation is, because of sin, beset with the corruption of death. To rescue his plan for the world, God enters the world himself. Jesus' becoming incarnate and dying reverses the corruption of the world and gets God's plan for creation back on track for the following reasons:

Jesus himself accomplishes the task appointed to human beings when they were incapable of doing it themselves. Human beings are charged with reflecting God's image into the world but cannot because of sin and its effect of death. God's solution to this dilemma is to reflect his own image into the world by becoming human himself, and though God thereby fulfills humanity's prescribed task on his own, it is God's becoming human that restores the rest of humanity's ability to do our job. Two things ought here to be considered.

The first thing to be addressed is the corruption in the created order that is manifested in death. Sin leads to death, but God considers death to be a gross deviation from how things ought to be. He desires life, but is not capable of preventing people from sinning (and therefore from dying), because he has pledged to respect free will so that human beings might freely love and so reflect the divine image of love. God's solution is to therefore enter death himself and reverse it. If God, who is life itself, dies, then death can no longer be what it once was—life itself enters into death, and so if one latches onto God through faith and follows him into death, death opens up into new life. To repeat: Life itself enters into death, and thus if you cling to life, if you follow God's commandments and are united with him in love, even in death you remain alive and "escape from the corruption that is in the world." You enter heaven first, but at the end of days will be restored to bodily life so that you can accomplish forever the task of reflecting God's image into what will be a renewed creation. In this way the corruption in the created order is reversed.

The second thing to consider is an alteration in our nature effected through God's becoming incarnate. If God becomes human, then there is a permanent link between humanity and divinity such that humanity can be said to be divine. We appropriate divinity into ourselves by becoming like the God-man, Jesus. What characterizes Jesus is faithfulness born of love: God, faithful to his beloved creation and his beloved Israel, comes to earth in the person of Jesus the Messiah to accomplish his plan for creation and to fulfill the promises he made to Israel's patriarchs. If therefore we are united with Jesus by imitating his faithfulness-in-love, we become "partakers of the divine nature" ourselves and accomplish the task that was originally assigned to us.

What matters is not paying a debt or achieving a legalistic conception of justice. No, as Paul says, what matters is new creation (cf. Galatians 6:15). The original creation is subject to decay and death because of sin. Jesus, by becoming human and dying, reverses the corruption and institutes a new creation in a way that is faithful to God's original plan for his beloved creation and to the promises made to Israel, his beloved servant. I am sure you have heard the verse from John's gospel, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." This is what it means: God loves the world and did not give up on the world, nor on the role of humans within it; he sends Jesus, his only begotten son, directly into the corrupted creation precisely to restore it and manifest God's sovereign presence within it, fulfilling the role appointed to humanity and reversing the corruption of death; and he gives us the chance to participate in this new, everlasting creation by uniting ourselves to Jesus through an imitation of his loving faithfulness.

For purposes of citation, the bulk of this comment's theological argument is taken from N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a monumental achievement in biblical scholarship.

This thread has been around for a few hours so I'm afraid this comment might get buried, but since nobody who has commented so far on this thread is actually Catholic, I'll bite.

There are a few fundamentals that need to be cleared up before I can progress to considering the four questions you posed.

Firstly, I am not sure as to whether or not Catholics are actually required to believe in the existence of a literal Adam and Eve. Though in Humani Generis Pius XII wrote that the faithful were to affirm the historicity of "a sin truly committed by one Adam," John Paul II made no mention of a historical Adam and Eve in his "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution" (typically when a pontiff disagree with previous pontiffs, they do not call them out directly, but rather omit that with which they disagree from their own teaching).

The story of Adam and Eve is meant to implicate all humanity: before the fall they do not even have proper names but are rather referred to in the Biblical text simply as "man" and "woman" (seriously, go take a look). It is, then, entirely correct to affirm that these two literary characters, this primordial couple who disobeyed the will of God represents all humanity. Whether or not we can therefore claim that the story is completely allegorical and that Adam and Eve as such did not exist is beyond my competence, but for my part I do not think that the belief that they exist is technically required.

Secondly, original sin is a descriptive term for the fact that human beings are born with something deficient in their wills. This fact is obvious: human nature includes a desire to seize, possess, to advance the interests of the self over the interests of others, to elevate the ego (as Augustine observes in his Confessions). This, I think, is indisputable, and this deficiency, this willingness to prioritize the self over other people and over the good, is precisely what the term "original sin" means. The word "sin" in the term "original sin" does not mean that people are born with personal sin, that people enter the world already guilty of wrongdoing; rather, the word "sin" refers to a condition in which not everything is as it should be, in which something is lacking.

1. Evolution might have happened randomly, but at some point beings existed that had rational capacity and thus also the capacity for moral action (morality being a function of reason). Rational capacity, though perhaps a product of biological processes, presupposes the ability to act against instinctual urges for the sake of what one knows cognitively to be right. Thus evolution cannot be thought of as abjuring choice: if we have evolved to be rational creatures in a non-deterministic universe (as the Church believes we are), then the rational capacities we evolved necessarily entail our freedom in making our own choices.
   
   Perhaps the greatest revelation that Christianity brought into the world, the greatest "religious innovation," so to speak, is this notion that God is love. God wishes us to be united with him in love and does not wish to punish. Yet love to be real must be freely chosen; a love that is forced is by its very nature not love. If God allows us to participate in his being by loving, he is required to give us the choice of not loving.
   
   Thus I think the "sin" component of "Original Sin" is entirely coherent. The difficulty lies instead with the "original" aspect—how exactly is it that previous sin entails that the rest of us also enter this world in a state in which something is lacking in our wills? I am not entirely sure (and the Catechism itself says that "the transmission of original sin is a mystery"), but my personal theory is that any sin, by its very nature as a turning-away from God, effects a separation between the physical and the divine realms such that when sin entered into the physical world, the physical world became imperfect. If this realm of existence has become tainted, we who come after the tainting enter a world of imperfection, of lackingness and thus are conceived in lackingness. Something—some element of salvific grace proper to the divine realm—is missing.
   
   
2. Even if early humans "had less thinking capacity," their status as rational animals made them moral agents. According to Thomas Aquinas, conscience itself is an act of the intellect by which a human being can judge the morality of an action, and thus morality depends upon intellect, upon knowing.
   
   Perhaps the point at which human beings became capable of obeying or disobeying God was the point at which one of our ancestors was capable of giving him- or herself fully away, of surrendering himself not for his own good (and not for the survival of his genes either; as Dawkins brilliantly observed before he dabbled into fields beyond his competence, it is the gene that is truly selfish and thus we can observe seemingly "altruistic" behavior in animals like bees, who sacrifice themselves to protect their kin and thus perpetuate their genes even though they die) but rather for the good. The point at which a human being was able to surrender him- or herself for a good cause simply and exclusively because it was the right thing to do seems to be the point at which true love becomes possible, and thus relationship with God as well.
   
   Says Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI:
   
   > The clay became man at the moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought of "God". The first Thou that—however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which the spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed. For it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in relation to God. This holds fast to the doctrine of the special creation of man ... herein ... lies the reason why the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly be determined by paleontology: anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel. The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity.
   
   -Ratzinger, In the Beginning...
   
   
3. For this question I have no concrete answers, but I can offer some thoughts.
   
   Firstly, God is timeless. Therefore the span of time between the creation of the universe and the appearance of the first rational/moral agent is of no consequence.
   
   Secondly, it appears that this universe is unusually conducive to life. Now, I'm a theologian, not a physicist, and so I may be talking out of my ass here, but as Martin Rees writes in Just Six Numbers there are six fundamental constants that "constitute the 'recipe' for a universe," such that if any one of them were even slightly different, this universe would be utterly incapable of producing the advanced forms of life capable of rational inquiry and moral reflection that are relevant to our discussion. For example, the value of the fundamental constant ε is 0.007, and "if ε were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist." Thus I don't think we can say that this is the case of a "laissez-faire" creator; rather, it would seem that this creator ensured that rational beings would eventually come to exist in the universe that he created and that we were thus intended.
   
   Thirdly, God does not disappear from the scene at the point at which beings are capable of acknowledging him. He makes his presence known and is active in history (and with the incarnation he even enters history).

Personally I don't like the phrase as it was put to you. It comes off as a meaningless platitude.


Here's the gist:


If you told a friend you were attracted to someone, but were hesitant to ask him or her out on a date because you like your single life, perhaps your friend may say, “Just open your heart to the possibility, let this girl in, and perhaps that relationship will grow into love.” When you consider having a relationship to find love it’s a “matter of the heart”, and before asking someone to marry you, you may have a “heart to heart talk”. That person may give you a “heartfelt confession” and you may forgive them “from the bottom of your heart.”


Kinda the same as a bible tenet that faith is a relationship with God and that God changes hearts (1 Samuel 10:9, Jeremiah 24:7, Ezekiel 11:19, Ezekiel 36:26, Romans 2:29, etc., etc.). Paul prayed that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - Ephesians 3:17.


Perhaps you feel an urge to learn more about God from reading or hearing God’s word. Trusting the urge, you consider opening yourself up to genuinely entertaining the thought of a relationship. So you consider your own limitations and shortcomings, which results in willingly submitting to God.


I recently read the book Counting to God by former atheist Douglas Ell who investigated faith genuinely because he married a Christian. Ell at MIT


Also former atheist/lesbian Dr. Rosario Butterfield submitted to a possible relationship with God, which led to her journey to faith

> Fides et Ratio, John Paul II, 1998

A reoccurring motif that runs through JP II's narrative is a position of presuppositionalism that Theistic Religious Faith, including the belief that the God Yahweh exists, is true; and this presupposition is the foundation upon which reason is built - even when reason leads one to consider/accept conclusions that are discrepant with Theistic Religious Faith.

This intrinsic and foundational presuppositionalism is the antithesis of reason; as well as representing a catastrophic failure of reason and reasoning.

As much as it pains me to agree with William Lane Craig, I will have to go with what this Great Christian Apologeticist god (lower case 'G'), who has said regarding Christianity (but is applicable to other Theist belief systems):

"...presuppositionalism is guilty of a logical howler: it commits the informal fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question, for it advocates presupposing the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism....It is difficult to imagine how anyone could with a straight face think to show theism to be true by reasoning, 'God exists. Therefore, God exists.' Nor is this said from the standpoint of unbelief. A Christian theist himself will deny that question-begging arguments prove anything..."

Source: Five Views on Apologetics by Steven B. Cowan, page 232-233

Or we can go with Drs. John H. Gerstner, Arthur W. Lindsley, and R.C. Sproul ....

“Presuppositionalism burns its evidential bridges behind it and cannot, while remaining Presuppositional, rebuild them. It burns its bridges by refusing evidences on the ground that evidences must be presupposed. “Presupposed evidences” is a contradiction in terms because evidences are supposed to prove the conclusion rather than be proven by it. But if the evidences were vindicated by the presupposition then the presupposition would be the evidence. But that cannot be, because if there is evidence for or in the presupposition, then we have reasons for presupposing, and we are, therefore, no longer presupposing.” (source: Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics)

> I do encourage you all, however, to read this and see how a prominent and intelligent man of very public faith is able to seamlessly link the two [Thestic Religion - specifically Christianity and Catholicism, and yet, always bow to the authority of reason.

A quick search through my bookmarks provides some reading material for you, OP, that undermines the validity of the claim that Theistic Religious Faith and reason can, and has been, seamlessly linked.

• A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 volumes, By Andrew Dickson White
  
• The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension, by Frank M. Turner, Isis, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 356-376
  
• Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, By John Hedley Brooke
  
• History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, by John William Draper
  
• An interesting look at revisionist apologistics: Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, by Gary B. Ferngren
  
• Persecution of Noted Physicians and Medical Scientists, by Steven I. Hajdu, Ann Clin Lab Sci Summer 2007 vol. 37 no. 3 295-297
  
• An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam, by Taner Edis
  
  Even a cursory examination of the Holy See (and other Christian and other Theistic Religious organizations) and secular reasoning and advancement shows a past and continuing discord between Theistic Religious Faith and reason: which raises the question - if one is to accept the transparent argument from appeal to authority (i.e., "prominent and intelligent man of very public faith"), then if there is actual and on-going conflict between Theistic Religious Faith and reason, why would such a claimed intelligent and otherwise super virtuous man accept Theistic Religious Faith as a foundational and core belief when actual reason shows such Theistic Religious Faith to be, at best, extremely questionable and non-credible?
  
  People, in general and including atheists and theists, have the capability of believing things (not just religion) initially based upon non-smart, non-intelligent, non-reasoned, emotional, false positive attribution, reasons; and then based upon this initial belief, develop smart arguments to defend or protect these beliefs, and to keep believing and defending even when reasonable refutation or contradictions have been demonstrated (cognitive dissonance).
  
  
• Why Do Intelligent, Well-Educated People Still Believe Nonsense?, by Neil Carter, October 9, 2015
  
  While the title is a bit pejorative, the short essay does address some thoughts on why otherwise smart/intelligent people have beliefs that are not always considered smart nor intelligent.
  
  Also, most scientists are not theologians, and yet....
  
  
• The Halo Effect
  
  And then there is the ever-popular argument from ignorance/God of the Gods...
  
  
• How Scientists Can Believe in God
  
  ----
  
  > Atheist counterparts will often say that faith is silly and simply used as a delusion
  
  > https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/e4/12/25/e41225b83c807c503797cf89a31704aa.jpg
  
  The image you selected OP does not support the test quoted above. The image does not explicitly, nor implicitly, state that "[Theistic Religious] Faith is silly" and than Theistic Religous Faith is a delusion.
  
  As such, your statement is an example of the logical fallacy of a strawman.
  
  The image text - "It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fails" Sam Harris - refers to the un-supportability and lack of credibility (e.g., very low to low levels of significance/levels of reliability and confidence) that can, in even a best case scenario, be assigned to Theistic Religious Faith through reason and reasoning. That Theistic Religious Faith, though claimed to be a virtue by many Theistics, represents reasoning that does not have credibility better than an appeal to emotion/argument from ignorance/failed and faulty logic arguments/wishful thinking - and yet many Theistic elevate and claim that this lack of credible reasoning represents an objective (or near) fact value (and then go on to hide their own self-serving bigotry and prejudice behind the facade of their Theistic Religious narratives and tenets).
  
  OP, AdGloriamDei, if you are a Theist of some favor, and you disagree that Theistic Religious Faith, belief in some God(s), only has credibility and supportability at the low value of appeal to emotion/argument from ignorance/failed and faulty logic arguments/wishful thinking, I would be most happy to discuss with you - using REASON - your arguments/evidence/knowledge that would elevate the credibility of Theistic Religious Faith above the threshold I presented:
  
  
• Identify the central God(s) (or Deities, Higher Power, Divine thingies, whatever) and present a coherent definition of this God(s)
  
• Make a presentation/listing/description of the attributes of this God(s)
  
• Make a presentation of claimed essential cognitive actualizations/interventions of this God(s)
  
• Make a presentation of the burden of proof, via credible evidence, and/or supportable argument that is free from logical fallacies and which can be shown to actually be linkable to this reality (i.e., both logically and factually true), to a level of significance (or level of reliability and confidence) above some acceptable threshold [Let's use a level of significance above that of a conceptual possibility or an appeal to emotion as a threshold for consideration - even though the consequences of the actualization of God(s), or proof that God(s) does exist, and associated claims, is extraordinary], of the above attributes and claims of this God(s)
  
• Defend your the burden of proof against refutation
  
  Note: For this discussion, the qualitative levels of significance (levels of reliability and confidence), for lowest to highest, are:
  
  
• None
  
• Asymptotically approaches none/zero; conceptual possibility
  
• Appeal to emotion/wishful thinking/Theistic Religious Faith
  
• Low
  
• Medium
  
• High
  
• Extraordinary
  
• Asymptotically approaches certainty
  
• Certainty/Unity

I believe that what makes our life meaningful is the meaning we give it. If for you that means committing to religion, then it is good for you to do that. I've personally met a bunch of people who said they felt like you did before joining the Church and that it really turned their life around.

>Just looking for reassurance that believing in God could be a plausible belief system.

I've only studied Christianity, but I would say that it definitely is plausible. There is a long tradition of very intelligent people who have thought a lot about the issues of God and religion, and whatever the New Atheists may say the answers these people have come up with can't be dismissed lightly. I would recommend this book, and especially any of the popular work of Swinburne or Plantinga (note: haven't read this one, but heard good things about it and Plantinga knows his stuff), as an introduction to the academic study and defence of theism.

>The possibility of God is all I've got, if I want to defeat my suicidal thoughts and embrace life fully.

Go for it, and I wish you the best of luck (though I also second others' recommendations of seeking counselling, it was a great help to me when I needed it).

Selfishly I will hope that at some point you might come to see the meaning I see in an atheistic world and be in a better space to consider the merits of atheism, but it sounds like that isn't what is important right now.

No. On the contrary, I think it can be shown that theism is rationally obligatory; that is, that we deny the existence of God on pain of irrationality.

To avoid the conclusion of the Modal Cosmological Argument an atheist must deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason: He must hold to the principle that a physical object can exist without a sufficient reason for its existence. Schopenhauer aptly dubbed this a commission of, "the taxicab fallacy." The reason is as follows: Ordinarily, the atheist agrees that things have sufficient causes and explanations: headaches, global warming, diamonds, teapots, lightning. Indeed, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a lynchpin of rational thought for theist and atheist alike. But when the atheist is asked to follow the principle through to its ultimate logical consequence (i.e., the universe) he attempts to dismiss it like a hired hack—and not because it is rational to do so but because he doesn’t like where it is taking him.

As we move through the rest of the arguments the cost of atheism continues to rise. Faced with the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an atheist must deny the precept of Parmenides that ex nihilo nihil fit; in other words, he must believe that physical objects can pop into existence uncaused out of metaphysical nothingness. To avoid the theistic implications of cosmological fine tuning, he must (in an extravagant defiance of the principle of parsimony) postulate the existence of infinitely many unobservable universes. To explain the origin of life, he must believe that it self-assembled by chance in the prebiotic soup of the early Earth when on every reasonable calculation this is prohibitively improbable. To reconcile his atheism with the essential properties of human mental states, he must deny those properties—including free will and, with it, the rational content of his own denial. He must, finally, deny moral objectivity since morality, on his metaphysic, arises from evolutionary processes in the service of reproductive fitness. This has the absurd and unpalatable consequence that to first principles of moral reasoning (say, It is always wrong to bayonet babies for sport) he cannot give his unqualified assent. And when it is pointed out to him that his belief that, "Beliefs that arise from evolutionary processes serve reproductive fitness and cannot be trusted," is itself a belief that arose from evolutionary processes and so, ex hypothesi, cannot be trusted, he has no reply.

The entailments of atheism are counterexperiential and absurd. Atheism cannot be rationally affirmed.

On the face of it agnosticism would seem to be a very reasonable position to take. What could be more prudent than suspending judgement in matters about which absolute certainty is impossible?

Note, however, that to be agnostic is to hold that, possibly, atheism is true. And since to affirm atheism is to affirm that all its entailments obtain, to hold to agnosticism is to affirm that, possibly, all the entailments of atheism obtain: It is possible that physical objects can exist without a sufficient reason for their existence; it is possible that physical objects can pop into existence out of nothingness uncaused—and so on. Clearly: If it is absurd to believe that married bachelors actually exist then it is just as absurd to believe that married bachelors possibly exist. Atheism and agnosticism cannot therefore be rationally affirmed and so it follows that theism is rationally obligatory.

Against all this the list of objections you cite have no force whatsoever.

>We would see many religions claiming absolute truth that are incompatible with each other, all with fervent and devout believers claiming all others are misled
>
>Vastly different moral codes among religions, cultures, and nations. And time periods. And...this is what we observe.

Yes. But see posts 20 to 23 here

>Prayers would not be answered aside from what chance would allow. And...this is what we observe.

This is a bare claim made without support.

>Miracles would be locked away in the past and would cease to happen in modern times, when the population is more educated and has recording devices. And...this is what we observe.

Recommended reading. Plot spoiler: This massive tome is an encyclopaedia of well-evidenced modern miracles.

>No religion would have compelling evidence outside of their own holy books (or confirmation bias). And...this is what we observe.

Pish posh.

>Believers would commit the same atrocities as everyone else. And...this is what we observe.

If you are saying that some purportedly-religious people act immorally that is a very insignificant claim. If you are saying that the religious life does not overall conduce to the production and pursuit of virtue that is a more interesting but very controversial claim in great need of support. But even granting it, how does this prove there is no God? Man has free will.

>Believers would not live any more or less privileged lives; misfortune or good luck would befall everyone regardless of their inner beliefs

God is not a fairy god mother. He is concerned with his creatures obtaining higher order goods, not material comfort.

>Faiths would continue to splinter into more and more sects, and argue over interpretations of minutiae instead of consolidating

This is a subtype of the problem of hiddenness which theists have coherently addressed.

>Supposed miracles would be unfalsifiable or proven to be hoaxes or simply natural occurrences

Miracles are unfalsifiable? This is rubbish. The Resurrection could have been falsified if the corpse of Jesus had been produced.

>New belief systems and/or cults would appear and sometimes gain large followings despite seeming ridiculous to everyone else (ie. Scientology)

See the above link on divine hiddenness.

>Religions would often need apologists or lies to keep their followers, and that wouldn't always work. And...this is what we observe.

I came to Christian Theism through Natural Theology. I think that on the total evidence it is far more probable than not that there is a God and that he met us face-to-face in the person of Jesus Christ. You are implying here that natural theology has no force.

Well, sure. Anyone can claim anything about the state of a philosophical field but if you actually do the heavy lifting and lay out your case you would get both my attention and my respect. Will you do it or will you tentatively withdraw your insinuation as unsubstantiated? There is no third option—at least, not one that avoids intellectual dishonour.

>Religious beliefs would often demonstrably contrast with observed reality

On the contrary, see my opening remarks.

>Greater access to information would correlate with growing non-religious populations

Google some stats. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of times and places have been theists. Today religiosity is, if anything, growing.

I. Sure, some forms of theism are coherent (Christianity is not one of those forms, for what it's worth; the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma being a couple of big problems), but not all coherent ideas are true representations of the world; any introductory course in logic will demonstrate that.

II. The cosmological argument is a deductive argument. Deductive arguments are only as strong as their premises. The premises of the cosmological argument are not known to be true. Therefore, the cosmological argument should not be considered true. If you think you know a specific formulation of the cosmological argument that has true premises, please present it. I'm fully confident I can explain how we know such premises are not true.

III. There is no doubt that the teleological argument has strong persuasive force, but that's a very different thing than "being real evidence" or "something that should have strong persuasive force." I explain apparent cosmological fine-tuning as an entirely anthropic effect: if the constants were different, we wouldn't be here to observe them, therefore we observe them as they are.

IV. This statement is just false on its face. Lawrence Krauss has a whole book about the potential ex nihilo mechanisms (plural!) for the creation of the universe that are entirely consistent with the known laws of physics. (Note that the idea of God is not consistent with the known laws of physics, since he, by definition, supersedes them.)

V. This is just a worse version of argument III. Naturalistic evolution has far, far more explanatory power than theism. To name my favorite examples: the human blind spot is inexplicable from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution; likewise, the path of the mammalian nerves for the tongue traveling below the heart makes no sense from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Evolution routinely makes predictions that are tested to be true, whether it means predicting where fossils with specific characteristics will be found or how fruit fly mating behavior changes after populations have been separated and exposed to different environments for 30+ generations. It's worth emphasizing that it is totally normal to look at the complexity of the world and assume that it must have a designer...but it's also totally normal to think that electrons aren't waves. Intuition isn't a reliable way to discern truth. We must not be seduced by comfortable patterns of thought. We must think more carefully. When we think more carefully, it turns out that evolution is true and evolution requires no god.

VI. There are two points here: 1) the universe follows rules, and 2) humans can understand those rules. Point (1) is easily answered with the anthropic argument: rules are required for complex organization, humans are an example of complex organization, therefore humans can only exist in a physical reality that is governed by rules. Point (2) might not even be true. Wigner's argument is fun and interesting, but it's actually wrong! Mathematics are not able to describe the fundamental behavior of the physical world. As far as we know, Quantum Field Theory is the best possible representation of the fundamental physical world, and it is known to be an approximation, because, mathematically, it leads to an infinite regress. For a more concrete example, there is no analytic solution for the orbital path of the earth around the sun! (This is because it is subject to the gravitational attraction of more than one other object; its solution is calculated numerically, i.e. by sophisticated guess-and-check.)

VII. This is just baldly false. I recommend Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain" for a coherent model of a materialist mind and a wealth of evidence in support of the materialist mind.

VIII. First of all, the idea that morality comes from god runs into the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma pretty hard. And the convergence of all cultures to universal ideas of right and wrong (murder is bad, stealing is bad, etc.) are rather easily explained by anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Anthropology and evolutionary psychology also predict that there would be cultural divergence on more subtle moral questions (like the Trolley Problem, for example)...and there is! I think that makes those theories better explanations for moral sentiments than theism.

IX. I'm a secular Buddhist. Through meditation, I transcend the mundane even though I deny the existence of any deity. Also, given the diversity of religious experience, it's insane to suggest that religious experience argues for the existence of the God of Catholicism.

X. Oh, boy. I'm trying to think of the best way to persuade you of all the problems with your argument, here. So, here's an exercise for you: take the argument you have written in the linked posts and reformat them into a sequence of syllogisms. Having done that, highlight each premise that is not a conclusion of a previous syllogism. Notice the large number of highlighted premises and ask yourself for each, "What is the proof for this premise?" I am confident that you will find the answer is almost always, "There is no proof for this premise."

XI. "...three days after his death, and against every predisposition to the contrary, individuals and groups had experiences that completely convinced them that they had met a physically resurrected Jesus." There is literally no evidence for this at all (keeping in mind that Christian sacred texts are not evidence for the same reason that Hindu sacred texts are not evidence). Hell, Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Christ" even has a strong argument that Jesus didn't exist! (I don't agree with the conclusion of the argument, though I found his methods and the evidence he gathered along the way to be worthy of consideration.)

-----

I don't think that I can dissuade you of your belief. But, I do hope to explain to you why, even if you find your arguments intuitively appealing, they do not conclusively demonstrate that your belief is true.

> I think the Old Testament is invalid for numerous grave historical inaccuracies

It's not the topic here, but for the sake of discussion (not debate), I'll share that I researched the field for years and found enough scholarship to consider it to be plausible. I know the claims that you are saying, but my research found that there is something there.

See the www.patternsofevidence.com documentary if interested.

Also these books:

https://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Egypt-Evidence-Authenticity-Tradition/dp/019513088X
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Israel-Sinai-Authenticity-Wilderness/dp/0199731691

Christianity really rests on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ though. If that didn't happen, then nothing makes sense in the faith. He affirmed Adam, Noah, Abraham,Moses, Jonah and all of the Old Testament. He rose from the Dead after brutal public execution, like he said he would, so He is my ultimate source of authority. I was an atheist for over 30 years, and also had a supernatural conversion experience, so there is ZERO doubt for me. That experience was like meeting Him, but it is always best to test claims. It wasn't some vague thing that could be mistaken. It was the most real thing that I ever experienced, but I didn't know which Church was true. The facts of History and logic led me from Christianity to Catholicism.

> The church put it seal of approval on those terrible practices at the time. How can you say then that this is the church that is guided by a divine power?

Sorry, but you are sadly misunderstanding about what is sealed or not. Catholic Doctrine is sealed with approval and Doctrines can never change. People and their malpractices change. It's like Math. Math is always true, but there are a lot of bad Mathematicians. Scientists invented the Atomic bomb, but that doesn't mean the Science is evil.

>> Indulgences

Indulgences are in the Bible and were practiced by Israelites. See link below for scripture references. The Catholic Church was founded by Jews and is continuing the practice, but it is prone to abuse. The Israelites abused it too. For example, instead of offering a Lamb for sacrifice, people would buy favors. Good priests know better, and God will hold everyone accountable.

https://www.catholic.com/tract/myths-about-indulgences

>> Spanish Inquisition

That is mostly British and German protestant propaganda. Lies from King Henry, spread for centuries into the English speaking world, because he went to war against Catholics (France, Spain). To the credit of the British, the BBC produced this Documentary admitting the facts : https://youtu.be/qhlAqklH0do

> burning witches/ heretics

Those were Pagan practices, and more protestant Propoganda. The Catholic Church defeated Pagan practices, but had to live within their cultures for centuries.

The Catholic Church didn't execute people. The Civil authorities did. Catholic Churchmen were Judges, like the Supreme court, who were asked by Civil Authorities to verify (inquire) whether or not someone was lying about being Catholic or not. The "inquistion" was really about finding fake Catholics during civil war. Islam was raping Spain, and the Church had to aggressively weed it out.

The Puritans and other heretics were ones who did things like throw people in water.

> challenging the work of scientists.

The Catholic Church has been the greatest champion of Science in world history. See list below. The Galileo thing is a myth. I read his own letters. He loved the Church, and did his best work after he was under house arrest. He was trying to teach Theology, which he wasn't qualified for. The Church put him under house arrest, which meant free room and board in an Italian Villa for the rest of his life. Again, he went on to do his best work afterwards.

https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-galileo-controversy

Clergy-scientists include Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham

Catholic scientists:
Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Louis Pasteur, Blaise Pascal, André-Marie Ampère, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Pierre de Fermat, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Alessandro Volta, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Pierre Duhem, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Alois Alzheimer, Georgius Agricola, and Christian Doppler.

Also Catholic Musicians:.
Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Joseph Hayden, Franz Liszt,
Claudio Monteverdi, Gioachino Rossini, Franz Schubert, Antonio Vivaldi.

Artists:
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Donatello,
Gaudenzio Ferrari, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dalí,Antoni Gaudí, James Tissot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_musicians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_artists

> Lastly, your argument is essentially that the Church can’t be wrong on its doctrine due to divine intervention. Don’t you see an issue with this logic?

There have been some who abused their authority, but the Church itself is against such abuses. Therefore, the Church itself is the primary victim of malpractioners.

Regarding the truthfulness, everything is based on whether or not God exists, and whether or not He incarnated into His own creation as Jesus. If you don't believe in God, then I contend that nothing could make sense or have meaning. The material universe would just be a bunch of atoms that bump into each other before the Universe dies Heat Death in a blink of Cosmic time. Anything divided by infinity is ZERO.

I was an atheist for most of my life, and spent over 10 years researching every step between atheism, theism, judaism, christianiity and catholicism. Eventually, by the grace of God, and to my shock, I found that the Doctrines and Dogmas of the Catholic Church are true. It all would be too much to go into here on a reddit comment, but if you want to discuss a particular sticking point topic, let me know. I hope you can see already that you have a lot of misconceptions.

There are very good answers for everything. Seek and you shall find. Atheism is a dead end, literally and for eternity.

> What would it take for you to say that the catholic church is objectively wrong and not the correct religion?

As a start, you would have to prove that God doesn't exist, the Holy Spirit didn't inspire the Bible, that most of the facts of history are false, that my own life experience is false, that the Universe created itself, that Life created itself, and that Consciousness is "natural".

If God exists, then truth exists. If truth exists, then that God knows we are here. If God knows we are here, then He would know what we are going through. If He knows what we are going through, then He would do something about it. Within the Ontological argument, everything that Jesus did makes perfect sense to me now, to win our Hearts and Minds to get back to Heaven. This Earth is a spiritual battlefield. Virtues are the way to Truth. Vices are the way to Death. Choose wisely my friend.

> Are there individuals who really believe that God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th?

Indeed there are. Many in the early centuries of Christianity (I lack the knowledge to comment on interpretations in ancient Judaism) found this interpretation of Genesis as a strictly chronological account dubious; what does it mean, after all, for there to be "days" and "nights" before the creation of the Sun, Moon, and stars? St Augustine drew the conclusion that the "seven days" do not indicate a succession of time, but the natural order of the things attributed to the different days.

> Is God equally All-Loving and All-Powerful? Or is He more powerful than loving or visa versa?

A major tenet of classical theism is that God is absolutely simple; there are no parts of God that are not identical with the whole of God. While we, as finite beings, consider God under many aspects, His attributes are really identical with the divine nature and with each other; God's knowledge is His power, His power is His justice, His justice is His mercy, and as the New Testament famously declares, "God is love."

> Why does the idea of Hell exist the way that it does? Why does Lucifer, a fallen angel that stood up against God, continue to punish people who also did not follow God?

The Satan of Christian belief is not the despotic ruler of hell of popular culture. He is himself one of the damned.

> Why is the bible full of miracles witnessed by groups of people when "miracles" now just seem to be shown to individuals? If God wants a mass of followers wouldn't He just cause miracles?

This question is moot if contemporary miracle reports, such as the Miracle of the Sun witnessed by tens of thousands of people in 1917, or those many healings that have resisted naturalistic explanation, are accepted. There may be some question of how many miracles are enough miracles for God to lead as many people as possible into a loving relationship with Him; but given the speculative nature of the subject, such arguments, I think, carry little weight against faith in the wisdom and providence of God.

> Why do you believe in God?

The rational order of cause and effect that we see in the natural world points beyond the natural world to its Creator. Many have attempted to refute the conventional arguments of this kind (such as the various cosmological arguments, the henological argument, and the teleological argument), but they are unconvincing compared to the arguments; the argument from contingency in particular has, I find, a certain intuitive obviousness that is hard to match. Ultimately, I think the rejection of these arguments requires denying the existence of that rational order of cause and effect, undercutting the belief in science that we surely all want to hold.

A good academic overview of these arguments is Brian Davies' An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.

Hi OP, thanks for the insightful post. You did a lot of collecting of good Bible verses to make the point.

Essentially, your argument is a reductio ad absurdem taking the form: "If X, then Y. Not Y. Therefore not X."

1. If the world is full of magic (as the world seems to be described in the Bible), then there will be verifiable, creditable magic to be present in history and in modern times.
   
2. But there isn't verifiable creditable magic in history and modern times.
   
3. Therefore, the world is not how it is described by the Bible -- a world full of magic.
   
   I think you well supported the first premise. And the conclusion follows from the two premises.
   
   The place to look is your second premise. The second premise you simply stated. You said that history and modern times are not replete with miracles (except ones that are "discredited").
   
   If I challenged the second premise, asserting that anyone who cares to investigate miracle claims (from Christians or any other group) will discover that the observable world is indeed full of them, what would you say?
   
   I'd venture that some people (and just wait for the comments!) will mock me. But let's ignore them.
   
   

• Some people will say that many miracle claims have been discredited. That's true! But many historical claims have been discredited, and that doesn't discredit all of history, only those claims. Many historical claims, and many miracle claims, have been credited and verified.
  
  
• Some people will say "Where's the evidence? Prove it to me." To that I say, four things: first, I'd say beware of sealioning. It's not my job to prove to flat-earthers that the earth is round. It's not my job to prove to materialists that reality is material and formal. If you don't know how things stand, or who to trust, that's on you. But if the question is sincere, perhaps start with Craig Keener's book, Miracles (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525) Thirdly, "proof" is completed when the proof has been given. Persuasion is not the same as proof. I can prove things to my five year old son that will not persuade him because he is being unreasonable. So you have to persuade yourself; the proof is out there.
  
  Fourthly, and relatedly, the problem with doubting a thing's existence is that doubt disincentivizes the search for evidence. If I don't believe in sea creatures, I am not likely to go swimming in the ocean looking to "prove" to myself that the ocean is indeed empty.
  
  All that to say, the evidence and proof are plain to most people and readily available unless you are (a) already so sure that you're right that you only mock and dismiss those who could potentially offer you evidence and (b) don't go out of the way to seek the uncomfortable truth about our world.
  
  I believe in science, have a Ph.D., and have personally experienced miracles and know people who perform miracles with some regularity. So, despite skepticism of some particular claims, I credit many of the Biblical stories, historical stories, and modern stories. I don't think that I am weird in this way. Disbelief in the supernatural is a minority report, globally. Most scientifically educated Americans believe in the supernatural. About 50 percent of working scientists are religious and believe in a god or higher power (footnote: http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/)
  
  So there is nothing particularly wild or mysterious about the phenomena you describe as "magic." I've seen it personally, and hundreds of people I know have experienced it personally. So, when I consider the evidence impartially (including verifiable eye-witness accounts), I'd say your second premise needs revisiting.
  
  But like I said, I appreciated the post, and enjoy thinking these things through.
  
  I'd appreciate non-mocking thoughtful responses as well.
  
  Cheers!
  
  Edit: added footnote to verify claim that a slight majority of scientists believe in a god or higher power (51%) according to Pew.

New religious movements is one of my main research areas (I'm working through my MA in religious studies at the moment). James Lewis is pretty awesome, but has a massive range of traditions that he studies and doesn't necessarily get that deep into Scientology. I can't speak to Dr. Partridge's work. The scholar who has done a lot of great, in-depth work with Scientology and is probably the leading expert on the subject is Hugh Urban. His history of Scientology presents a great, well-researched, and theoretically-sensitive examination of the topic.

While exposing esoteric teachings of Scientology is by no means his goal, Urban gives pretty convincing reasons to accept that the space opera narratives are a part of top-tier Scientology initiations. Various church documents (including OT materials) are publicly available after court cases like Lawrence Wollersheim v. The Church of Scientology of California and Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz. Ex-Scientologists who were initiated to OT levels confirm the details pretty consistently, and in other court cases Scientology officials have acknowledged that Xenu is a core part of OT materials:

>Moreover, in at least one major court case, Religious Technology Center (RTC) director Warren McShane frankly acknowledged that "the discussion of the... volcanoes, the explosions, the Galactic confederation million years ago, and a gentleman by the name Xemu" are a core part of Scientology's advanced materials; indeed, he did not even defend the story itself as a trade secret, but stated that the only trade secret is the "actual technology itself and how to undo that great catastrophe that occurred"—that is, how to remove the extra-body thetans through auditing.

(Unfortunately I don't have a page number because I'm using a kindle edition of the book)

I've appreciated this conversation, and you obviously have done quite a bit of thinking about it. Your comments are very sincere, and you've got a great grasp of the issue. As you know, I really have nothing else for you. To date, the autographs have not been discovered, and who knows if we would know they were the autographs even if something was found. It might give us an earlier manuscript, but it wouldn't change the debate much. A man named Jesus most likely (according to Gospel records and the accounts of a few other contemporary historians) existed in a small country in a corner of a large empire. He was spurned by the religious authorities, so there's no likelihood they would write about him, and he was executed as a criminal by Rome, so there's no likelihood they would write about him either. A movement grew up around him (according to Gospel and historical records), and great teaching and miracles were attributed to him by those who supposedly knew him. What he taught and did was allegedly done in public arenas and witnessed by many people, some of whom believed and some of whom didn't. Anonymous written records started showing up a half a century later, and they weren't assembled into a single volume until centuries later. You're right—that's the history, and I can't add to it or change it.

For me, there are a few loose ends that make me give "validity" more weight.

1. According to tradition (that nasty word again!), all 11 of his disciples were martyred (with the possible exception of John). I know it's always possible to find someone who will die for a cause like this, but that all 11 of them let themselves be killed for a story they knew to be false doesn't make sense. Somebody would-a squealed. During Watergate, the conspiracy held together until there was the real threat of imprisonment. Then the whole thing fell apart like a house of cards, very quickly, with fingers pointing, plea bargaining, and singing a whole different tune. We see the same thing in American politics, such as the current IRS scandal. Cincinnati is quick to say "Washington made us do it!", and Washingtonians are pointing fingers at each other. Yeah, send one to the electric chair and you'll hear a choir of confessions. Nobody wants to die for a lie. That all 11 apostles let themselves be killed is r-e-a-l-l-y odd. There's something much deeper happening.
   
   
2. I don't discard the time significance as much as you do. If we're talking about a 50-year span, that's like, say, the Vietnam war. Lots of people are around who were there. If I'm writing about someone who lived 50 years ago, say, Jimi Hendrix, there are still plenty of people around who knew him, worked with him, gigged with him. And if you want to go 50 more years, it's a like a person now saying, "My grandfather fought in WWI. He told me stories about it." Those stories can be verified by others whose grandfather was in WWI, and by newspaper accounts. Now, we don't have any newspapers from Jesus, but we have the writings of people who said, "Yeah, my dad knew him. He's the one who wrote that." And there's unanimity on it. 2000 years later, many skeptics say, "That's a bunch of baloney." I guess it just comes down to what a person chooses to believe. On both sides people would say the weight of evidence is in their favor.
   
   
3. Well, what about the stone carvings of what a particular Pharaoh did? We know that they trumped themselves up and wrote whatever made them look good. No pharaoh wrote, "Yeah, I was stupid and make a military mistake and lost half my army." Even though it might be true, they would never write it. To me it's interesting that the gospel writers wrote about stupid stuff they said, mistakes they made, misjudgments, misunderstandings, and plenty of rebukes from Jesus. I mean, these guys tell how they doubted that somebody could come back from the dead ( a pretty normal and predictably thought), except that it was the main claim of evidence that Jesus was who he said he was. Instead of writing that Jesus slayed dragons, they wrote "I got hot-headed and chopped off a guy's ear when I was scared out of my wits. Jesus calmly healed him." Who writes like this? Nobody does, unless they think they're telling it the way it was. It's just things like this that make me go "hmmm...."
   
   
4. You know, I've read and heard a bunch of the midrashic stories written by Jewish scholars and storytellers that have been accumulated through the centuries and millennia alongside the Tanakh. The best of the best of the best still don't compare to the stories Jesus told, one after another. There is something unearthly about the answers he gives, his responses to people, and the stories he tells. Good authors can tell a good story or two. Good editors can assemble collections of them. But for them all to come from one guy—in my opinion, nobody could make this stuff up. There's a quality there, in my opinion, that is over the top. Something deeper is happening here.
   
   Well, thanks for listening. We know the heroes of history and stories that surround them—people like Abraham Lincoln and Alexander the Great. But the stories of Jesus are different from that. And I know fantastic stories are told about a lot of people, but a few stand out: Ulysses, Achilles, and Hercules, for instance. But the story of Jesus is even different from those. It has a whole different character to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Christ_in_comparative_mythology. As I started out saying, I don't know what else to say. You know that mountains of work have been done on the historicity of Jesus and grappling with the reliability of the documents about his life (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906, especially pages 5-11, as one example.) And here's a very informative 10-minute YouTube video if you are truly interested in the topic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=292NTf1cCNw)

Thanks for your nice message.

These arguments made a big difference in my life and if they make a difference in someone else’s life (or at the very least challenged them to give serious consideration to the evidence of natural theology) I am very happy to hear it.

I understand your reservations about the argument from desire. I think I mention in my discussion of it that it has only moderate force but has an important place in the cumulative case.

I would highly recommend some further reading because my posts are all capsule versions of arguments that are presented and defended with much greater rigour in my sources. If you only ever read two books on this subject let them be The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne and The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright. If you have an iPad or Kindle both are obtainable in a matter of seconds online.

And regarding your question, I recommend this video: The whole thing or from around 6:00 if you’re short on time. In short: Aquinas suggested that wealth and poverty can each be either a blessing or a curse. Much more would need to be said to give a satisfactory answer but I think that is a good starting point. And of course if third world poverty is something that could be ended if first world countries were totally committed to ending it, then ultimately it is a consequence of moral evil.

All the best :)

Thanks!

No, I'm not Muslim. I would probably call myself a Christian Deist.
Well, I don't think they Bible is the inerrent word of God, here is a good series of video's that shows why:

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 1/10

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 2/10

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 3/10

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 4/10

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 5/10

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus 6/10

The remaining for videos are on youtube, but they are just Q&A. Also, he has a very good book that talks about the problem of determining what the Bible originally says, you can get it here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4150144, I mean here! Here, here, here! The book is a balanced account of how the modern Bible came to be, without trying to push you theologically.


So I cant' take the Bible's word on Jesus's divinity. It has also always been my position that God doesn't suspend the laws of nature even in the performance of miracles. So if God parted the Red Sea, for instance, it was via the gravity of the moon. And if God wanted to come visit us he would cause a physical person to exist in the natural course of history to say and do the things he would. A person that is causally determined by the universe cannot be God because God determined the course of the universe based on it's initial conditions. However it is at least possible for someone to be an agent of God. I suppose you would back up such a claim of agency by performing miracles that world require knowledge that only such an agent would have (but the Bible alone can't be relied on to show that Jesus did that either). Also there were early Christians that did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, but they were snuffed out by the proto-orthodoxy of the church.

The question then is did the resurrection at least occur? Well, we can't take the Bible on it's word on it, so how could we at least make it more probable to have happened? I would say that if we could find extra biblical historical evidence that people who claimed to be eye witnesses of the risen Christ were willing to die for that belief, it would at least be at bit likely. The one piece of evidence along those lines is this, by Josephus except the "who was called Christ was probably and addition, and the passage makes more sense if James was the brother of Jesus, the son of Damneus. So basically, beyond the Bible I can't find any proof that there really were martyrs of the risen Christ.


I have no problem with the Bible as evidence, but look at it this way. If your friend sends you a postcard that says he went to Jerusalem and saw a teacher give a lecture series, I'll believe him. If I receive an anonymous letter (since the gospels are all anonymous) that says the writer heard that a teacher rose from the dead at the end of his lectures--I'm gonna need a little more corroboration. Extraordinary claims need more than paltry evidence.

From a post I made awhile back:

If you want to go for a scholastic/western positive apologetics approach check out: The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

If you want to go for a scholastic/western negative apologetics approach check out Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds. This is the work that actually re-kindled serious philosophical debate on the existence of God in Anglophone philosophical circles according to Quinten Smith (a notable atheist philosopher btw). From there you could also check out Alvin Plantinga's warrant trilogy in order: Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.

Personally I'm skeptical of the scholastic/western approach in general and I favor the Eastern/Mystical approach. I think the scholastic/western approach cannot escape radical skepticism, and I mean this in terms of secular and religious. If one takes seriously the scholastic/western approach in general, whether one is atheist or theist, radical skepticism follows. This video from a radical skeptic that goes by the user name Carneades.org does a good job of demonstrating this: Arguments of the Indirect Skeptic

The Orthodox approach has always been mystical rather than scholastic all the way from the beginnings of Christianity. From Jesus, to the apostles, to the church fathers, to right now we still have the original apostolic faith in the Orthodox Church. Check out this short documentary to learn more: Holy Orthodoxy: The Ancient Church of Acts in the 21st Century.

Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky explains the Eastern/Mystical approach: "To properly understand the Orthodox approach to the Fathers, one must first of all understand the mystical characteristic of Orthodox theology and the tradition of the apophatic approach to an understanding-if "understanding" is indeed the proper word-of what the hidden God in Trinity reveals to us. This needs to be combined with the insight that what is incomprehensible to our reason inspires us to rise above every attempt at philosophical limitation and to reach for an experience beyond the limits of the intellect. The experience of God is a transcendence born from union with the divine-henosis (oneness with God) being the ultimate goal of existence. This makes the requirement of true knowledge (gnosis) the abandoning of all hope of the conventional subject-object approach to discovery. It requires setting aside the dead ends of Scholasticism, nominalism, and the limits set by such Kantian paradigms as noumena/phenomena. One must return to, or better yet, find in one's heart (or nous, the soul's eye) union with the Holy Trinity, which has never been lost in the Orthodox Church."

Source: Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky, (2004). Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. p. 178. Zondervan, Grand Rapids

> Huh? Whole chunks of NT are questionable. Even entire chapters of Paul are questionable. The gospels are a complete mess.

Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?

A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

> They don't call it apologetics because there's a good solid foundation for Christian beliefs.

Lol, they call it apologetics because it's based on the Greek word "apologia". Nice try though.

So I'm pretty familiar with the modern version of "Jesus mythicism", which is what you're talking about. I'll try to summarize without writing too long of an essay.

(For further reading, look into books or presentations by Richard Carrier, author of the peer-reviewed scholarly work On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt or David Fitzgerald, author of a much more approachable Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Here is a 60 minute presentation of the theory laid out in Carrier's book.)

There are two major thrusts of this argument:

1. The purported "evidence" for Jesus' existence, when actually examined in detail, is severely lacking
   
2. There is another plausible explanation for the origins of Christianity and the New Testament books besides Jesus being a real person.
   
   Arguments around 1) have been around for a long time (although there are interesting recent developments), but 2) is where Richard Carrier, specifically, is making some significant contributions. Unfortunately, the publication of his work is very recent, and it is as-yet-unclear whether it will be broadly accepted.
   
   So with regard to the evidence, let's list a few and their problems:
   
   

• The NT gospels are highly mythologized, and can't be accepted as a reliable historical narrative (even the non-miraculous parts)
  
• The NT epistles were written years later, and up to half of Paul's letters are considered to be forgeries
  
• Paul's (authentic) epistles were some of the earliest NT books written, but Paul never even claims to have met a physical Jesus, just had a vision/spiritual encounter. In fact, Carrier claims that a proper interpretation of Paul's writing shows that he viewed Jesus as a celestial being
  
• There is nothing else contemporaneous. Literally nothing, nada, zip. Jewish records about Jesus stirring up trouble? Nope. Roman records about Jesus' trial and crucifixion? Nope.
  
  Aaaaand then we have like a huge gap before other documents start appearing. And most of these other sources are evidence of Christianity or Christians, not evidence of Jesus, per se. For example:
  
  
• Josephus is frequently mentioned, but both references in Josephus have been shown to be interpolations.
  
• Did the astronomer Thallus mention the darkness at Jesus' death? No, he did not.
  
  Getting a little long, so for part 2 (how did we get Christianity, then?), I'll mainly refer you to Carrier's Presentation. In short, Carrier thinks that the original conception of Jesus was of a celestial Jesus in the heavens, and he was later euhemerized (put into stories on earth), and then the latter stories became popular as the gospels, and the original stories/ideas were lost/discarded.
  
  Hope that makes sense.
  
  (Edit: replaced presentation link with a better quality video. Also, fixed links to Carrier's new blog.)

>I'm currently reading Counting To God: A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief by Douglas Ell, a former atheist who graduated early from MIT where he double majored in math and physics. He then obtained a masters in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland. After graduating from law school, magna cum laude, he became a prominent attorney.

And Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project who found Jesus because he spotted a waterfall frozen in three stream while taking a walk in the woods and took it to be representative of the Trinity.

>There's your summer reading list.

I've actually read one of them. Some say the scientific community is still laughing.

>Translated: "Use whatever methods you want as long as they meet my personal standards." Like I said, in the real world (people not arguing online) trust many methods and methodologies to prove things and make rational decisions. You are free to limit yourself, but we have the liberty to choose our own method or any combinations of methods.

I would hardly call these my personal standards as they are the standards of the entire scientific community, but hey, whatever makes it easy for you to be nonchalantly dismissive, right? ;)

>Sure, so is a dictatorship.

Totally unrelated and unnecessary.

>Consider that there are many things you don't know.

Aww I love condescension substituted for argument!

> Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?

And there are a lot of smart people, smarter than you or I who say that the gospels have lots of historical problems for instance...

> A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

There were no eye witnesses to Jesus. The gospels were written at least two generations after his death and the verification for the life of Jesus is pitiful. Meanwhile, some of the verifiable events (earthquake, eclipse, Harod's actions, etc.) are shown to have not occurred.

Anyway, good luck with your appeals to authority.

Try the First Way. Or if you prefer, user hammiesink wrote a good explication. He also wrote a series of posts on the subject in this community. Here is the denouement, with links to the prior posts.

If you're really interested in this subject, the Blackwell Companion is an indispensable resource.

As a panentheist (not pantheist) and a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, I would recommend:

David Bentley Hart

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526005966&sr=1-3&keywords=david+bentley+hart

Marcus J. Borg

https://www.amazon.com/God-Never-Knew-Authentic-Contemporary/dp/0060610352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006014&sr=1-1&keywords=borg+god+we+never+knew

Alan F. Segal

https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Convert-Apostolate-Apostasy-Pharisee/dp/0300052278/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006077&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=segal+apostleship+apostasy+of+Paul

Rennyo's Blog

https://rennyo01.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/god-immanent-and-transcendent/

John Paraskevopoulos

https://www.amazon.com/Fragrance-Light-Journey-Buddhist-Wisdom/dp/1597311456/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006153&sr=1-3&keywords=paraskevopoulos

There is not an academic consensus on the definition of atheism. People here who promote a particular definition from a particular academic source are cherry picking and dishonestly misrepresenting it as agreed upon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199644659/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8

>Even today, however, there is no clear, academic consensus as to how exactly the term should be used. For example, consider the following definitions of ‘atheism’ or ‘atheist’, all taken from serious scholarly writings published in the last ten years:

>1. ‘Atheism […] is the belief that there is no God or gods’(Baggini 2003:3)

>2. ‘At its core, atheism […] designates a position (not a “belief”) that includes or asserts no god(s)’ (Eller 2010: 1)

>3. ‘[A]n atheist is someone without a belief in God; he or she need not be someone who believes that God does not exist’ (Martin 2007: 1)

>4. ‘[A]n atheist does not believe in the god that theism favours’ (Cliteur 2009: 1)

>5. ‘By “atheist,” I mean precisely what the word has always been understood to mean — a principled and informed decision to reject belief in God’ (McGrath 2004: 175)

> but a historical Jesus isn’t a point of contention for historical/biblical scholars.

Also existence of Bigfoot is not a point of contention for lifelong believers. I don't understand why you appeal to a source with such a conflict of interest.

Point of Contention

I suggest you have a look at the book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. There might be a little more evidence of the Resurrection than previously thought.

Has anyone read Craig Keener's Miracles? I am considering purchasing it, because I have heard it referenced in arguments by some Christians (The argument is usually something like, "You don't believe in miracles, but Craig Keener wrote a book documenting over 1,000 pages of miracles. Have you looked at all of them?).

First of all, that's not agnosticism.

Secondly, Huxley and Spencer's agnosticism made a fair bit of sense in the 19th century, but they've not aged well with discoveries on the limits of knowledge in the 20th. That is, you don't get the formally agnostic Will to Believe from James (inexpertly presented recently as Life of Pi) and get to banish Russel's discussion of the matter.

Note that the overlap between atheism and agnosticism isn't new, radical, or limited to reddit. It's reasonably well documented by both the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the recently published Oxford Handbook. The former should be required reading on the topic, you can view how the latter discusses this debate using Amazon preview.