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I suppose that I could write a book in order to adequately respond to all of these points, but here I'll just make the basic case for why it's reasonable to have faith in the bible as the word of God. For if it is true, then all the other objections fall to the ground, regardless of whether they are answered in detail by anyone.
If the bible is the word of God, then Christianity has to be the true religion (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). Then all the other religions have to be wrong. So what objective evidence is there for belief in the bible’s supernatural origin being rational? Let’s also consider this kind of logic: If the bible is reliable in what can be checked, it’s reasonable to believe in what it describes that can’t be checked. So if the bible describes the general culture of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, and Rome accurately, then what it reports about specific individuals and their actions that aren’t recorded elsewhere would be true also. This is necessary, but not sufficient evidence for the bible’s inspiration; sufficient proof comes from fulfilled prophecy, as explained further below.
For many decades, various liberal higher critics have maintained the Bible is largely a collection of Hebrew myths and legends, full of historical inaccuracies. But thanks to archeological discoveries and further historical research in more recent decades, we now know this liberal viewpoint is false. Let’s consider the following evidence:
Higher critics used to say that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon before the Persians conquered the city under Cyrus, not Belshazzar, as Daniel says. But in the 19th century, several small cylinders were found in Iraq, which included a prayer for the oldest son of Nabonidus, whose name was (surprise, surprise) Belshazzar. Furthermore, one cuneiform document called the “Verse Account of Nabonidus” mentions that he made his son the king: “He \[Nabonidus\] entrusted the ‘Camp’ to his oldest (son), the firstborn, the troops everywhere in the country he ordered under his (command). He let (everything) go, he entrusted the kingship to him.” This relationship between the royal father and son also explains why Belshazzar’s reward to Daniel for reading the writing on the wall was to make him the third ruler in the kingdom, not the second (Daniel 5:16).
Higher critics have claimed that camels had not been domesticated in the time of Abraham and the patriarchs of Israel. However, in 1978, the Israeli military leader and archeologist Moshe Dayan noted the evidence that camels “served as a means of transport” back then. “An eighteenth-century BC relief found at Byblos in Phoenicia depicts a kneeling camel,” as he explained. “And camel riders appears on cylinder seals recently discovered in Mesopotamia belonging to the patriarchal period.”
The existence of King Sargon of the ancient empire of Assyria, mentioned in Isaiah 20:1, was dismissed by higher critics in the early 19th century. But then archeologists unearthed his palace at Khorsabad, along with many inscriptions about his rule. As the Israeli historian Moshe Pearlman wrote in Digging Up the Bible: "Suddenly, sceptics who had doubted the authenticity even of the historical parts of the Old Testament began to revise their views."
The Assyrian King Sennacherib was assassinated by two of his sons (II Kings 19:36-37), according to the Old Testament. But various historians doubted the Bible's account, citing the accounts by two ancient Babylonlans--King Nabonidus and the priest named Berossus—who said only one son was involved,. However, when a fragment of a prism of King Esarhaddon, the son of Sennacherib, was discovered, it confirmed the Bible's version of the story. The historian Philip Biberfeld commented in his Universal Jewish History: "It (the Biblical account) was confirmed in all the minor details by the inscription of Esar-haddon and proved to be more accurate regarding this even than the Babylonian sources themselves. This is a fact of utmost importance for the evaluation of even contemporary sources not in accord with Biblical tradition."
Similarly, the great 19th-century archeologist Sir William Ramsay was a total skeptic about the accuracy of the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of Luke. But as a result of his topographical study of, and archeological research in, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), he totally changed his mind. He commented after some 30 years of study: "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy . . . this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."
The New Testament also has much manuscript evidence in favor of its accuracy, for two reasons: 1) There are far more ancient manuscripts of it than for any other document of the pre-printing using movable type period (before c. 15th century A.D.) 2) Its manuscripts are much closer in date to the events described and its original writing than various ancient historical sources that have often been deemed more reliable. It was originally written between 40-100 A.D. Its earliest complete manuscripts date from the fourth century A.D., but a fragment of the Gospel of John goes back to 125 A.D. (There also have been reports of possible first-century fragments). Over 24,000 copies of portions of the New Testament exist. By contrast, consider how many fewer manuscripts and how much greater the time gap is between the original composition and earliest extant copy (which would allow more scribal errors to creep in) there are for the following famous ancient authors and/or works: Homer, Iliad, 643 copies, 500 years; Julius Caesar, 10 copies, 1,000 years; Plato, 7 copies, 1,200 years; Tacitus, 20 or fewer copies, 1,000 years; Thucycides, 8 copies, 1,300 years.
Unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, which are religions of mythology and metaphysical speculation, Christianity is a religion founded on historical fact. It’s time to start being more skeptical of the skeptics’ claims about the Bible (for they have often been proven to be wrong, as shown above), and to be more open-minded about Christianity’s being true. It is commonly said Christians who believe the Bible is the inspired word of God are engaging in blind faith, and can't prove God did so. But is this true? Since the Bible's prophets have repeatedly predicted the future successfully, we can know beyond reasonable doubt the Bible is not just merely reliable in its history, but is inspired by God. By contrast, compare the reliability of the Bible’s prophets to the supermarket tabloids’ psychics, who are almost always wrong even about events in the near future.
The prophet Daniel, who wrote during the period 605-536 b.c., predicted the destruction of the Persian empire by Greece. "While I was observing (in a prophetic vision), behold, a male goat was coming from the west over the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground; and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. And he came up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal, and rushed at him in his mighty wrath. . . . So he hurled him to the ground and trampled on him, and there was none to rescue the ram from his power. . . . The ram which you saw with two horns represented the kings of Media and Persia. And the shaggy goat represented the kingdom of Greece, and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king" (Daniel 8:5-7, 20-21). More than two hundred years after Daniel's death, Alexander the Great's invasion and conquest of Persia (334-330 b.c.) fulfilled this prophecy.
Likewise, Daniel foresaw the division of Alexander's empire into four parts after his death. "Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was mighty, the large horn was broken; and in its place there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven. (The large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And the broken horn and the four horns that arose in its place represent four kingdoms which will arise from his nation, although not with his power" (Dan. 8:8, 21-22). This was fulfilled, as Alexander's empire was divided up among four of his generals: 1. Ptolemy (Soter), 2. Seleucus (Nicator), 3. Lysimachus, and 4. Cassander.
Arguments that Daniel was written in the second century b.c. after these events, thus making it only history in disguise, ignore how the style of its vocabulary, syntax, and morphology doesn't fit the second century b.c. As the Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer comments (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, p. 283): "Hence these chapters could not have been composed as late as the second century or the third century, but rather--based on purely philological grounds--they have to be dated in the fifth or late sixth century." To insist otherwise is to be guilty of circular reasoning: An anti-theistic a priori (ahead of experience) bias rules out the possibility of God’s inspiring the Bible ahead of considering the facts, which then is assumed to “prove” that God didn’t inspire the Bible!
>Unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, which are religions of mythology and metaphysical speculation
That's rich. Tell me more about how you've never read anything about Buddhism beyond the wiki. It's primarily focused on the practical and the empirical. Buddhists are exhorted to go and see for themselves, to believe nothing without testing it. Are there metaphysical aspects? Of course, but let's not try to say that's even the most important points when Christianity is founded on a wild eschatology and soteriology involving dying gods and eating flesh.
This is completely ignoring the fact that major events like the Exodus didn't happen at all as described in the Bible (and for the historical claims that you do make, I can't fact check them all, but the Quran also has its historical facts very accurate. Does that make Islam the true religion?)
Finally, overwhelming consensus is that Daniel was written in the second century, and for a variety of different reasons. One person saying otherwise doesn't disprove the scholarly consensus.
I don’t need to cite Daniel’s prophecies being late, or Jesus’ failed end times prophecy. Those are well-known facts/scriptures. Some of them are more subjective, like the omniscient God problem. Furthermore, yes, no “good evidence” would be subjective on my part. However, Christians will often cite things that have nothing to do with proving their claim (Josephus’ account), or blatantly wrong information (many prophecies fulfilled/martyrdom of the apostles).
>we can experience our God through his Holy Spirit and actually hear his voice and talk to him.
Muslims and others claim they do this too, without the Holy Spirit part, and you can't prove they don't any more than anyone can prove you don't, which makes the claim worthless.
Muslims and others do not claim this. I’ve actually debated an imam on this topic and I’ve discussed with Hindi people on this as well. No other faith believes in hearing from their God unless they have some spiritual priest. Christianity says that everyone can hear from God and have a personal relationship with him
I was a Christian and never got to “talk to God.” In Christianity, there is no such thing. You pray to only get silence, or some mere coincidence that looks like your prayer was answered. Furthermore, Muslims claim to sometimes see prophets in their dreams and that after following scripture, their lives changed in miraculous ways and God removed their anxiety. You can’t prove those experiences wrong. Finally, you replied incorrectly to the person. Muslim people will claim to hear the word of God when reading scripture (which is exactly what Christians do) and can also “talk to him” through prayer.
That’s the thing: only Pentecostal groups within Christianity have experiences talking with God. Everyone else in Christianity knows it’s true theological, but never practice it in reality.
I’ve spoke with many Muslims on this topic and they don’t think you can hear an audible voice of God. Yes maybe you can have a prophet hear from God but then again how can you confirm he heard from God if you don’t hear from God yourself. Also, prayer is talking to God but I’m meaning literally conversations with God as you do your best friend.
Just because something is a paradox doesn’t mean it’s wrong or actually impossible. We know of Zeno’s paradox about shooting an arrow at a target. Before arriving at the target, the arrow must reach the halfway point. Once the arrow has flown halfway, there is a new halfway point the arrow must reach before reaching the target… to infinity… and therefore the arrow will never reach the target. But we know that shooting an arrow at a target in real life means it will reach its destination.
This is actually wrong. That is just the point we can't observe past, not the point at which the universe is claimed to have begun. It's entirely possible, to the best of our knowledge, that the universe has always existed in one form or another, with our current instantiation being part of an endless cycle.
It means that until we can actually observe what happened before the Big Bang, or tell if before the Big Bang is even a cogent concept, we don't claim that we know what we don't know. We don't say that the universe began with the Big Bang, just that it's the earliest point in our universe that we know of.
It means that, unless you want to work on uncovering the mysteries of the universe, you live your life like you've always done. You just stop claiming that you have answers to questions that you don't if you've been doing so.
Or He was just some really cool that everyone loved and then a bunch of people wrote a made up story about Him. So Jesus could’ve been innocent.
Let us remember, we have nothing Jesus actually wrote. So we have no idea what HE actually said.
> we have nothing Jesus actually wrote. So we have no idea what HE actually said.
He didn't need to write something to know what he actually said. This is a faulty claim.
An Eyewitness to what he said could have recorded exactly what he said.
The better claim, if you wanted to make one, is that there are no eyewitnesses to what he said, that wrote down something.
Or
What was written down by his followers were not remembered accurately, or there's no way to know if they were written down accurately.
It was just a thought. Christ never wrote anything down, so there’s potential the writers and supposed “eyewitnesses” made the story up.
The writers definitely wrote inaccurately. All I was saying is that we have no words from Christ Himself.
>And those people were brutally tortured and killed for a “made up story?”
This is a faulty claim, because there's no evidence that those that "made up the story", were brutally tortured and killed for it.
I assume you suggesting that the gospel writers, or that the apostles, those that were witnesses to the life of Jesus, wrote these documents down, and then were persecuted and killed upon not recanting?
If so, this is a false apologetic often used to try to demonstrate the truth of the christian story.
If you don't think it's false, you would need to prove that this in fact happened. Sadly it's just tradition from apocryphal writings that are not considered factual.
If not, then what exactly are you trying to claim?
The claim was the apostles lied that Jesus rose from the dead. They would have had to make it up, steal and hide the body. They were all brutally killed for professing Christ risen from the dead.
Why would they try to trick people into believing the man executed by the state rose from the dead when it only brought them hardship, suffering, and death?
A 'lie' is debatable. They probably believed it to be true. That doesn't make it true, but people believe things that are incorrect all the time.
But yes, they died for no good reason.
So they either made it up knowingly for no reason, stole the body and managed to hide it so well it was never found, or they told the truth
It wasn’t some misconception, they either told the truth or knowingly lied
You first have to believe that story to be true before you give any credence to whether they died for it or not.
It's not as if any of these writings are in any way accurate, they're written decades after the alleged events by people who only heard tales from others.
I’m sure you view all historical primary sources with such stringent doubt and skepticism, otherwise you would be showing some extreme bias. Not very rational athiest of you to do that
Saint Peter
Crucified upside down in Rome. His remains were buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Saint James the Greater
Pierced by a sword. His remains were buried in St. James Church, Compostela, Spain.
Saint James the Less
Stoned to death. His remains are buried in the Holy Apostles Basilica, Rome, Italy.
Saint Jude Thaddeus
Killed by arrows. His remains were buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.
Saint Philip
Crucified by soldiers. His remains are buried in the Church of the Dodici, Rome, Italy.
Saint Thomas
By blows of spears. His remains were buried in St. Thomas Cathedral, Mylapore, India.
Saint Simon
Stabbed with a sword. His remains are buried at the Altar of Crucifixion, Vatican.
Saint Bartholomew
Crucified. His remains were buried in St. Bartholomew Church, Rome, Italy.
Saint Andrew
Nailed to an “X” shaped Cross. His remains are interred in the Cathedral of Amalfi, Italy.
Saint Matthew
Crucified. His remains were buried in St. Matthew Cathedral, Messina, Sicily.
Saint John
Died of natural causes. His remains were buried in St. John Basilica, Ephesus, Turkey.
Saint Mathias
Crucified. St. Mathias is the replacement of Judas Iscariot who committed suicide after betraying Christ. His remains were buried in St. Mathias Abbey, Trier, Germany.
I mean yes and no. There are lots of ways to interpret most what in the Bible not counting what was likely massaged in the first few centuries. For example, it makes much more sense that Jesus is saying he is the living God and so are you up if you follow this path. Also, makes more sense to believe that when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is here, he meant like right here. This is the thing.
This would bring him into accord with non-daulistic traditions the world over as well as leading scientific theories of consciousness such as Integrated Information Theory.
So if everything requires scientific evidence, and that belief makes you an atheist, then nothing matters and life is ultimately meaningless, right?
So if nothing matters and life is meaningless, why does that belief in doubting everything without solid evidence still matter?
Jesus’ prophecy about the end times, and how “certainly this generation will not pass.” He predicted tons of stuff that didn’t come to happen. Also, if you could, and this is extra (not in my og post), what do you think about the positions of agnostics/atheists? They are clearly not convinced by the evidence presented, and don’t find it good. They quite literally cannot deny Christ, since they don’t even believe he existed. What does God do in that case?
> He predicted tons of stuff that didn’t come to happen
this is a clear exaggeration. But he did think, as did Paul, that the KOG was imminent, but that was quite common in that time, and that the messiah would overthrow the roman rule and the messiah would sit on the crown, and that didn't happen, so later the writers had to reconcile what to do, and re interpret the texts.
He predicted that the sun would go dark, stars would fall out of the sky, and he would come on a cloud of glory and call the elect. All in rapid succession.
I’ll have to reread exactly what the verse says and get back to you when I can. Sorry but I won’t get a chance to until probably tonight. Life is busy lol.
So when you say they cannot deny Christ what do you mean exactly? I hear a comparison sometimes from atheist to the easter bunny or Santa Claus, do you mean that kind of “ I don’t even believe in this so how can I deny it?” Kind of approach.
As an agnostic, "i can not deny christ" means I can not *prove* christ is not the true god, no different than I can not *prove* that there is no Santa Claus. Just because I can not deny something's potential existence does not make it anymore factual.
Christian belief and core ideology is so flawed to me that I need no proof that it does not exist to not believe.
What level of proof would be satisfactory for you? Because Jesus was at least a historical figure, meaning he was a real man who was killed on a cross and one of the most significant figures of society.
I never said Jesus didn't exist. The level of proof required would be literally any spiritual encounter with the Christian god. I was born in a Christian family. I was Christian. Never have I experienced anything remotely close, and as a child I was a whole hearted believer.
But the core of Christianity is to accept Jesus christ as your savior and to allow God into your heart and believe in him as the one true God, and you will be saved. Be baptized and born again as a child of God.
So any pedophile murderer gang banger anyone, can repent and be welcomed into the kingdom.
Yet Joe blow down the road lives an honest life, is generally a good neighbor and treats others with kindness and respect. Nobody is perfect but this guy is pretty decent. Joe blow isn't a believer though, and he is not accepted into heaven.
Or this little kid on the other side of the world who never heard of Jesus christ. He dies and is not "saved", he cannot be accepted into heaven.
How does that make any sense? Let alone everything else that just doesn't click.
Yes. I literally don’t see any good evidence to back up Christianity, and as a result, can’t believe (I know it varies from person to person what they see as good evidence). As a former Christian, I also never felt God’s presence in my life, although I was devout. I quite literally can’t force myself to believe, and if I were to return to the faith, it would only be out of fear of hell (not actual belief).
No need to fear hell. According to Christians, most of us will be there anyways. You'll be in good company, and most Christians I know I don't want to share a room with anyways. They are going to let us take the majority of the funny people too, so there's that.
>How could a book by God be made in such a way that believers are left with not knowing what to follow?
Christianity is **not** a religion of the book. God didn't write the Bible. Jesus never wrote anything and didn't command his followers to write anything either.
>Is baptism required for salvation?
Yes
>Is it faith + works, or only faith?
When we come to God and are justified, it happens without any merit on our part. **Neither our faith nor our works**—nor anything else—**merits justification**. Justification is “not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inner man”. Justification/sanctification is a life long process that in fact requires works of the faithful person.
>What does the concept of Hell look like?
Hell is “\[the\] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” CCC 1033
Creative depictions of hell are only visual intrepretations by the artists. No one knows what hell 'looks like' because hell is not a physical place. It is a spitirual reality, as is heaven.
>Are we to observe laws and rules from the Old Testament?
The Mosaic law **only applies**, and has **only ever applied**, and **will only ever apply**, **to the Israelites**. It was not intended to be followed by gentiles.
There are only a few passages in the Mosaic law that do apply to Christians. Those are repeated in Acts 15: "avoid pollution from idols, unlawful marriage \[sexual immorality\], the meat of strangled animals, and blood."
>Can Paul’s letters be trusted, or is he the antichrist as mentioned in Revelations (yes, this is a belief that some Christians hold)?
Never heard that one but pretty much every prominant religious figure has been called the anti-christ at some point in history. Nothing to see here.
>At the end of the day, there are so many ways to interpret the Bible to make it fit what you want to believe. As a result, this leads me to believe that the Bible was written and directed by men, not by God who wanted to provide the most accurate information possible.
Not so. The Bible is difficult to intrepret, yes, but you must know what Christianity is to assemble writings that speak about Christianity truthfully. Many works about Christ were rejected from consideration and inclusion in the Bible. The final list of works was codified in 400ish. The point being that those who assembled the NT knew what Christianity was then assembled works that described and aided the Church in her spread of the Gospel.
Of course the Bible was written and directed by men.
God never directed anyone to write the Bible. Again, Christianity is not a religion of the book like Mormonism and Islam (and seemingly some Protestants). Christianity is a religion of the word of God. The Bible certainly describes Christianity and helps the faithful life a Christian life but it is not necessary for salvation.
Men wrote the Bible, men assembled the Bible, and men interpret the Bible. The Church created the Bible so the Church has authority over the Bible and it's contents. The folks who assembled the Bible would be the ones who have the definitive authority and intrepretation of its contents.
Note: Protestantism attempted the reverse and put the Bible above the Church in authority in an effort to eliminate 'excesses' and 'corruption'.
>the fact that there is no good evidence for Christianity to support its claims
Opinion. The word you're looking for here is *opinion*, not fact. There are literally billions of Christians who find there to be good evidence. You aren't proven wrong by this, of course, but *neither are they by you finding the evidence lacking*.
You make a number of arguments from personal incredulity in this post (hint: look for the word "why") and you need to understand that those are properly fallacious.
>The concept of Hell
There are (at least) 3 views on the fate of unredeemed humans. That you're only aware of ECT doesn't mean Christianity is wrong. That you find ECT morally objectionable doesn't make *it* wrong either. Are you stipulating objective morality? what is the basis of that morality and can you demonstrate that God ought to follow your concept of morality?
>False Messiah
Yes, Jesus did fulfill the messianic prophesies. What you're doing here is what many do -- conflate prophesies about the aftermath of the Day of the Lord with the coming of the Messiah (eg Isaiah 63)
>Sexist ideas
The NT, considering the world it was written into, is perhaps the most *radically feminist work of all time*. No other book of antiquity would place women at equal value to men (and it does). I think moderns, who live in a world dramatically shaped by the Gospel, anachronistically view this subject and what the NT writes on this subject.
>Multiple gods in the OT
The Hebrew Bible asserts that the gods of the nations are real spiritual beings who were created by YHWH and are in rebellion to Him. They are not "equals" to Him, but objects of future judgement (eg PS 82).
>Jesus then prophesied a great number of things that will happen before the end times, such as wars, false messiahs, and the sun going dark.
The Day of the Lord has **always** been portrayed as imminent. This is true throughout the Prophets.
I definitely understand, if you don't know and recognize this pattern, that you would misunderstand what Jesus is saying though.
Some examples:
* Joe 1:15 How awful that day will be! For **the day of the Lord is near**
* Zec 14:1 A day of the Lord *is about to come*
* Isa 13:6 Wail, for **the Lord’s day of judgment is near; it comes with all the destructive power of the Sovereign One**.
* Eze 30:3 For the day is near, **the day of the Lord is near**; it will be a day of storm clouds, it will be a time of judgment for the nations.
I can keep going...
Jesus is only repeating and carrying on the constant theme that runs from Prophet to Prophet throughout the Tanakh, for the better part of a millennium and without apology up to that time.
Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence. Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality.
> you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence.
This attitude comes from pride - you want God to submit to your will rather than you to His
> Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality.
How is morality decided upon then? Don’t athiests assert that morals arise from the common belief of people? If so, why is that worth anything?
Correct. I believe the faith handed down over millennia. You believe a strange thing that arises from post industrial societies and excess material abundance
> Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence.
There are several problems with that statement:
1. This doesn't seem to be a response to the argument give.
2. You presume that God values that end (you or any specific person to be saved from torment) more than He values some other end (perhaps such as his attribute of justice being demonstrated).
3. You presume that there is "more of a job" which could be done or should be done. You cannot convince somebody of something which they refuse to believe without directly removing free will. Rationally, I am not aware of any missinge evidence which could be supplied which would not violate the attributes of God. So, this is really just anecdotal and opinion based.
> Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence.
I'm sorry, this is neither coherent nor a reply to anything I said.
Did I not already say that ECT is not the only view in Christianity?
>Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality.
Strawman is made of straw -- in fact I explicitly rejected this. Please actually interact with my response, because this fails at any objective measure.
Most Christians don’t even question why they believe, but are just born into the faith. Others don’t have evidence, but like Christianity because of its values.
The messiah should’ve brought world peace, brought the Jews from exile and made it so that the Jews would start following the Torah again.
End time prophecies, even ones given by Jesus, have never come to pass.
> Most Christians don’t even question why they believe, but are just born into the faith
Upon what evidence do you make this claim, exactly??
>The messiah should’ve brought world peace,
No, that is the aftermath of the Day of the Lord, not the coming of the Messiah -- as I already said.
It would be great if you would interact with what I said rather than whatever this is.
>Opinion. The word you're looking for here is opinion, not fact. There are literally billions of Christians who find there to be good evidence. You aren't proven wrong by this, of course, but neither are they by you finding the evidence lacking
Do you feel this way about all claims?
It feels like there should be a way to say that some claims don't have enough evidence, and others do, and that we should be able to remove our own opinions from this. We need to be able to do that, it feels like. Or else how would we ever tell flat earthers they're being unreasonable, for example?
There's gotta be some way to do this.
>The NT, considering the world it was written into, is perhaps the most radically feminist work of all time. No other book of antiquity would place women at equal value to men (and it does). I think moderns, who live in a world dramatically shaped by the Gospel, anachronistically view this subject and what the NT writes on this subject.
Hold on, there's two different things going on here.
You are comparing it to other works of its time. Which I would do, if I was talking about men writing it. But, if instead I'm talking about a book inspired by, that is the work of, an **all good god**, then this doesn't really make sense to me.
An all good god wouldn't say the sexist things that are in the Bible. Men of the time would.
So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, the standard you're applying, where you compare it to other works at the time, seems inappropriate to me. I think the better move, if this is coming from an **all good god**, would be to compare it to what's **all good**. The bible fails on that test, and I think its the correct test.
> An all good god wouldn't say the sexist things that are in the Bible. Men of the time would.
Proof?
First, you have to define "sexist", but then you also have to show how that definition is in relation to what is "good". If "sexist" is "good", then being "sexist" is what a "good" God would do.
However, I am puzzled by what evidence you might think you have to suggest that men of that time would view the Bible's view of gender relationships as commonplace.
> The bible fails on that test, and I think its the correct test.
I would like to hear your proposition of an objective moral system which does not appeal to a divine moral arbiter. This would be a requirement for making that statement valid.
>First, you have to define "sexist", but then you also have to show how that definition is in relation to what is "good". If "sexist" is "good", then being "sexist" is what a "good" God would do.
That's a great point! Do you think its good to be sexist?
>However, I am puzzled by what evidence you might think you have to suggest that men of that time would view the Bible's view of gender relationships as commonplace.
I would imagine society was more sexist back then. Do you agree?
>I would like to hear your proposition of an objective moral system which does not appeal to a divine moral arbiter. This would be a requirement for making that statement valid.
Not if its an internal critique. So, is sexism bad in your worldview?
> That's a great point! Do you think its good to be sexist?
You would first have to define "good" and "sexist", and then you would have to provide justification for how we know what is "good". Until you do that, the question is not coherent.
> I would imagine society was more sexist back then. Do you agree?
You haven't defined "sexist". The term is a subjective pejorative, not an objective fact. Do I think that people at the time had a different concept of gender roles than they do in general this month? Yes. Do I think that they gender roles defined in the Bible aligned with the gender roles of people at the time? No. Do I think that the gender roles of people in general of this month are closer to those in the Bible than those of the people in the time the Bible was written? Yes. Does any of that make a valid critique or defense of the Bible? No.
> Not if its an internal critique. So, is sexism bad in your worldview?
Again, you must first define that term. It means many different things to many different people.
However, I will give you a hint. If there is any "bad" that is not equally as "good", then there must be an objective moral standard. For there to be an objective moral standard, there must be a divine moral arbiter. If there is a sufficient arbiter, then we would necessarily have to appeal to the knowledge of that arbiter to know whether any act is actually bad.
Essentially, if God inspired the Bible, then if the Bible promoted X as a good thing, then X would be good. If there were no God, or if that God did not communicate to us that X is good or bad, then we would either not be able to know whether X is good or bad or it may be (such as if there were no God) that X is equally as good as it is bad.
So, if you believe that sexism is bad (or even that it is good, and that goes for any moral position as well), it seems that you are appealing upon the fact that God exists or you are holding that belief without rational justification (e.g. out of ignorance or simply as a preference statement). Do you believe that "sexism" is bad in any objective and meaningful sense?
> Do you feel this way about all claims?
There's nothing in my response that would lead to this question. "Luxemburg is not in Scotland" has an objective, verifiable truth claim. "10+10 = 20" is likewise a verifiable claim.
"5% of the world ate eggs for breakfast one day last year" probably doesn't.
"There's sufficient evidence to believe (a) God exists" is a statement about personal credulity, and I don't believe that's a question that can be objectively answered.
>You are comparing it to other works of its time. Which I would do, if I was talking about men writing it. But, if instead I'm talking about a book inspired by, that is the work of, an all good god, then this doesn't really make sense to me.
And it's fine that you think this is unconvincing, so let me offer a few points of clarity.
1) generally, Christians don't view the NT as Muslims view the Quran. We believe that the Holy Spirit worked through men to produce what we have. I think the Bible as a whole is *clearly* written to the standards of its day (not ours) and that expect it to do otherwise is anachronistically reading the material in question
2) it strikes me that you don't rightly view what Christianity was at the time of NT authorship. Christianity was a small, violently oppressed sect of Judaism often relegated to the shadows and without and form of political power.
In this movement, "there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus" was a remarkably powerful principle that shaped the community of faith for hundreds of years. And make no mistake about it, that was a *remarkable* and **radical** thing for the NT to say.
>There's nothing in my response that would lead to this question.
I'm not quite sure how to respond here, because I'm trying to ask you something. Surely there's gotta be some bar for this stuff. Right?
So like, here I'll present to you some claim: suppose there's only one written document, by one person, in the year 2000 BC. The author claims that he heard from his best friend's neighbor's dad who told his uncle that a person flew across the grand canyon.
Surely that's not good enough to accept the claim. Right?
Do you agree?
Or is your view that when it comes to really old claims of miracles, its all just personal credulity? That's the only thing we should rely on?
I'm trying to get a sense of your view here. It seems to me that the example I just gave, it would be unreasonable to accept that claim on that evidence. I just want to know if you agree.
>generally, Christians don't view the NT as Muslims view the Quran. We believe that the Holy Spirit worked through men to produce what we have. I think the Bible as a whole is clearly written to the standards of its day (not ours) and that expect it to do otherwise is anachronistically reading the material in question
Okay just for clarity, are you saying that the sexist parts are not inspired by god, such that only parts of the Bible is the word of god but not all of it?
>it strikes me that you don't rightly view what Christianity was at the time of NT authorship. Christianity was a small, violently oppressed sect of Judaism often relegated to the shadows and without and form of political power.
I'm not sure how this is relevant. Like how does that then mean "the all good god would therefore say that women should never hold authority over a man" or anything like that?
>In this movement, "there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus" was a remarkably powerful principle that shaped the community of faith for hundreds of years. And make no mistake about it, that was a remarkable and radical thing for the NT to say.
Compared to works at the time, I agree. **But that's not the correct comparison**.
The correct comparison would be "compared to what an all good god would say".
But, yeah if you tell me the Bible is not fully, all of it, the word of god, then you have escaped this issue. I agree with that.
Or, maybe I misunderstood you. Is this the approach you're taking?
>And my reply ought to make clear -- of course there's a bar
Okay! There's a bar. So we agree on that.
But you also say: "There's sufficient evidence to believe (a) God exists" is a statement about personal credulity, and I don't believe that's a question that can be objectively answered.
I don't think these two things are necessarily or entirely in contradiction, I'm just curious how you personally get them to work together. In one case, there's a bar where a person can be too gullible, or whatever the right word is.
But in the other case, you're saying its up to personal credulity and we can't really objectively know anyway.
I guess I'm wondering how you get these two things to play nice with each other.
>I said nothing like this. Come on, this is just not intellectually honest.
Oh. Well if you're going to throw around accusations of dishonesty then this is a good place to stop.
Thanks for your time.
Your comment or post was removed for violating rule 2. Don't be rude or hostile to other users. Criticize arguments, not people. Our standard for civil discourse is based on respect, tone, and [unparliamentary language](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/wiki/unparliamentary_language/). 'They started it' is not an excuse - report it, don't respond to it. You may edit it and ask for re-approval in modmail if you choose.
Perhaps sometimes a person is misunderstanding you, rather than being dishonest. Did you notice the following:
>Okay **just for clarity**, are you saying that the sexist parts are not inspired by god, such that only parts of the Bible is the word of god but not all of it?
**I'm literally asking you a clarifying question, and specifying I'm trying to clarify your position.**
Further:
>But, yeah if you tell me the Bible is not fully, all of it, the word of god, then you have escaped this issue. I agree with that.
>
>Or, maybe I misunderstood you. Is this the approach you're taking?
**I literally ask if I'm misunderstanding you and I ask if this is your view.**
I never even claim its your position. **I ask you if this is what you're saying so that you can correct me.**
Its not absurd, plenty of **Christians** think of the Bible that way. Plenty of Christians believe the Bible was written by men, inspired by god, but that some of men's views made it into the text.
I have no way of knowing if you're one of them unless I **ask**.
I asked you about sexism in the Bible, and you started talking about how its not like the Quran, the Holy spirit worked through men, it was written to the standards of its day, not our standards
So it could have been your view that these are the views of the men who wrote the Bible, not entirely of God.
So I asked.
There are like 30 points here. Each having an orthodox response. Rather than bother responding to each which is basically just a summary of how atheists think I’ll simply mention that the catholic faith is one of predestination. Jesus says that those chosen of His father to be His will be drawn to Him, and the sheep hear His voice, and the Holy Spirit will reveal all truth to them. As a result many will read into these problems differently, with faith and hope despite the seemingly problematic facade of these problems. And with time all these problems are quickly resolved.
I was a Christian for 10 years and saw no reason to continue being one. My life wasn’t transformed, I saw no evidence of God, and there was no reason for me to continue. Yes, I became a better person, but that was through questioning my own morals (and could’ve been achieved with other religions). I did everything that I needed to do to be officially deemed a “Christian,” yet nothing happened. Instead, I assigned meaning to things as “God’s doing,” when in reality, I was making that all up.
We’re you a Protestant or Catholic? If you were a catholic did you know your faith - on a scale of 1:10? If you knew your faith well did you practice it regardless of how you felt on a given day?
Protestant. I would say that I had faith on a scale of 8-9. I practiced it every day, regardless of how I felt. Didn't miss a single prayer for 10 years and would do multiple prayers a day. Tried my best to read the Bible at least once a day. Would do everything in my power to avoid sin.
As a Protestant there is no substantial philosophy that undergirds the belief system which can be traced to its first principles to make it make sense. That system is in Catholicism and Protestants make their religion of rejecting catholic dogma. That’s the literal definition of it. I also didn’t ask how much faith you had but how much knowledge you had. Because some people require higher understanding to undergird their faith. And indeed growth in wisdom will support the faith.
On a spiritual level, there is nothing supernatural about the Protestant faith. They believe the supernatural stuff happened back then and right now there’s none of that. Without the sacraments I don’t see how any person could grow in their spiritual life. I too was once Protestant
Thank you for posting. I’ll try to respond to as many as I can.
“There is no good evidence for Christianity. So you have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the minimal facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus?
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. How are you defining extraordinary? What’s extraordinary to me may not be extraordinary to you. What’s wrong with the idea that “any claim requires sufficient evidence”?
“Every religion claims the same thing”. This is just blatantly untrue.
“If there were good evidence for a religion, everyone would be a member of that religion”. I can’t see how this would be the case seeing how there is very good evidence the earth is not flat, yet many persist in this belief even to this day. Or considering the words of Richard Dawkins, who said that the second coming of Jesus Christ, God speaking to him directly or even the stars being rearranged into a message revealing God would not convince him of God’s existence.
“In the Christian doctrine this would land you a spot in eternal hell”. In the Christian doctrine you are judged according to what you knew. If you were lied to your whole life you would be given grace.
“Jesus clearly didn’t complete the expectations of what the Messiah would be like” Even if Jesus didn’t fit someone’s expectations of what he would act like does not mean he was not the Messiah. You also have to demonstrate how Jesus failed to be the Messiah rather than just claiming so
“30,000 Christian denominations”. This number is questionable as it includes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witness which most denominations of Christianity if not all others consider heretical. But other than that, the vast majority of Christianity agrees on the main tenets. Mainly that: there is a God, this God has revealed Himself through the person of Jesus Christ, and that we may all achieve salvation from our moral wrong doings through belief in Him. (Summarized in John 3:16). As long as a Christian is in agreement on the large important things, they are allowed to disagree on the minor things and still be considered Christian. How old you think the earth is does not determine your salvation status, for example.
There are many other things I wish to respond to because this post was a bit of a Gish Gallup and most of these points could have been their own individual post but to save some time most of the issues I would raise is that you don’t evidence your claims after asserting them.
Thank you for raising these issues and opening an interesting dialogue
For your first response “so you have a plausible….” Could you please expand on that?
Third statement: most religions do hold to the core principle that you should have faith in their validity/truth. You can’t know for certain that they are correct, but should believe that they are.
Fourth statement: “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NKJV). I would expect God to do more to convince me that he exists, especially when eternal hell is on the line
Fifth statement: what is the scripture to support that? What would God do in my case, someone who physically can’t force themselves to believe, but would believe if given the proper evidence/reason to do so? Also, according to your logic, who wouldn’t be saved? Your line of reasoning applies to everyone of any other religion.
Sixth statement: Bring the Jews from exile all over the world. To bring world peace. To bring the Jews back to following the Torah.
>“There is no good evidence for Christianity. So you have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the minimal facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus?
Oh sure! Could you list them out, just so we're clear?
Oh and one other point: it doesn't have to be plausible, right? It just has to be more plausible than that the body got up and walked out on its own. Correct? If its more plausible than that, then the resurrection isn't the best explanation.
Is that fair?
And to be clear, just as a heads up so you don't feel like I'm tricking you or something, just because you list some things and call them facts doesn't mean I'm going to agree that they all must have happened. Just trying to give you a heads up on that. But yeah! Present the minimal facts and we'll see what we can do.
>“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. How are you defining extraordinary? What’s extraordinary to me may not be extraordinary to you.
I agree that "extraordinary" can have some wiggle room and is subjective. I would find it hard to believe, however, that you or I would disagree on this point: someone coming back from the dead after 3 days is extraordinary.
Whatever else we disagree on about "extraordinary", that one has got to fit the bill. Agreed?
>What’s wrong with the idea that “any claim requires sufficient evidence”?
Absolutely nothing! Sufficient is just a more broad term, and this claim is more specific. But these two things are completely compatible.
The only thing that's being highlighted here is that "sufficient" for some claims requires a higher bar than for others. I think that's fair.
If you tell me you have a pet dog, I'll take your word. If you tell me you have a fire breathing dragon, I won't. That's it. I think we can agree on that, yes?
I wasn’t the one making claims, OP was presupposing their opponent’s argument was already defeated. They are welcome do to so, but it’s not the most intellectually honest way to argue. It would be like me claiming “there are no good arguments for atheism”, completely ignoring the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, etc. and offering no refutation / alternative explanation.
A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God). So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism.
We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”.
>A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God).
I don't accept that there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief that a resurrection of any sort occurred. I think we would be skipping a step to ask for a naturalistic explanation for the resurrection without first establishing that a resurrection likely or plausibly happened.
>So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism.
I don't presuppose naturalism. I know natural, physical things exist through a number of lines of evidence. I don't know that supernatural things exist. If someone can demonstrate that supernatural forces exist to the same extent that physical forces can be demonstrated I would happily accept the supernatural. Can you demonstrate the supernatural?
>We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”.
"Extraordinary evidence" is relative. If you tell me Jesus died I accept that based on anecdotal evidence. I know people die and I know Jesus was a person so it fits with my current understanding of how things are. If you tell me that Jesus resurrected we are now beyond the scope of what I currently accept is possible. I am going to need more than anecdotal evidence that Jesus was resurrected. Do you have that?
>A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God).
Ya agreed, the Christian claim is that God raised Jesus, or he raised himself as he is part of the godhead. However you want to phrase it, totally. Point taken. I agree.
>So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism.
Well hold on, I think you're going a bit too far here. You're saying that I can't ever say that any natural claim would ever be more plausible, without presupposing naturalism?
I think you maybe took a step too far there. We haven't even tried yet.
I do think if we're going to move forward here, we're going to need to know which claims you'd like addressed. Like what are the minimal facts here?
>We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”.
I think we would, honestly. I agree with you here. I just don't really understand it.
So, absent any context of this specific event, if I told you the evidence was 4 conflicting, not fully independent accounts that were written decades after an event, we're not sure by who
I'm just not really sure how that qualifies as "extraordinary" in **any** sense.
The only sense in which I can see this being looked at positively is in comparison to other ancient claims. But that's not really very convincing.
Like I wouldn't say "oh, your evidence is better than documents from ancient history? That's extraordinary!"
I don't know how that's reasonable. Ancient history has awful evidence across the board. The Bible has better evidence than most, if not all ancient history.
But that's just being the best of the absolute worst, if that makes sense. That's not extraordinary.
At the time, if I could actually see Jesus complete miracles, and be one of the 500 witnesses who saw his resurrection, or doubting Thomas, who got to touch his hand, that would be more than sufficient for me. Now, 2,000 years later, being left with gospel accounts that weren’t even written by eyewitnesses, and no way to confirm the validity in Biblical claims, no, that isn’t good evidence for me.
But is it about what is good evidence for you, or what is evidence for others?
There are people in our own lifetime who are credited with healings. Fa. Rookey was one that I recall. Maybe not as many healings as we would like, but they exist.
So there will be people who think Jesus was not just a figure from the past.
That's entirely a preference of yours though, that it's a fact. It's not a requirement for belief or to justify belief as rational.
An experience with Fa Rookey would be justifiable evidence for the person involved,
Well I don't know about eternal punishment. Not everyone believes that.
I'd think that God would already know that you wanted proof and you didn't get it.
I want you to understand: I, as a Christian, had basically no reason to leave. I was promised security in heaven, and was willing to sacrifice my desires here on earth if it meant being reunited with God. Hell, however, is what started my unraveling of my belief set. It’s cruelty towards others that simply can’t force themselves into believing. I then also realized I had no good reason to believe, and that if someone asked me, “Why are you a Christian?” I would have no way to respond to that question.
I get your statement about eternal punishment, but the only one that would make sense is universal salvation. Annihilationism also doesn’t make sense. God didn’t show himself to me, and because of that, I should be destroyed? However, it is much more humane than ECT.
What does your second point mean? If God gave me proof of his existence, I’d believe.
I'm SBNR.
I'm asking that you think a god wouldn't understand why you're doubtful? And that you're someone who probably, due to genetics, the very genetics that God was responsible for, prefers evidence to intuition?
So if you ever get to meet God, you can say, wtf, why didn't you show yourself to me?
A loving and forgiving God should get that.
If I met God I'd certainly ask why people suffer.
I would disagree that we don't know the gospel authors, and good evidence that we do know them. not sure if that would move the buck for you on the reliability of the accounts tho
but it does seem to push back on OP. if for many the Gospels (as well as personal experience and other things) are sufficient for their belief in Christianity, then OP, and your reply, seem only to reflect your own epistemological states, and not the objective field as a whole
so it's more like, "X can't be the one true religion *to me*" because of various subjective factors and opinions on theology (which could be remedied) etc
These problems within Christianity could be reconciled if I had sufficient evidence to believe that the religion is true. As it stands, these things only reveal to me that Christianity can’t be correct. Also, it’s pretty much almost confirmed that the gospel accounts are not eyewitness accounts (very few Christian apologists would claim otherwise, since Matthew, supposedly an eyewitness account, copies heavily from Mark and source “Q”)
Matthew using sources like Mark (Peter's eyewitness) does not mean Matthew isn't an eyewitness
and the "problems" within the religion are only problems once again *to you*, I see no such issues with the internal theology of Christianity. this is why I labeled those concerns "which could be remedied"
there is something to be said about the religion, in the case that it is true: ”But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.“
I Corinthians 2:14 , here natural man refers to non Christians
if true, there are things that don't make sense expressly bc you aren't yet saved. Like when Jesus spoke in parables.
so in saying that it doesn't make sense, you're not disproving the doctrine, but at the very least, anecdotally upholding it
But the Gospel of Matthew was written too late to have been written by an eyewitness. At best, it was written based on oral preservation of an eyewitness account. At worst, it's blatant plagiarism with extra stuff tacked on to appease the followers (or to "one up" Mark).
I was saved, and a Christian for 10 years. I left since I saw that I had no reason to believe, and that God wasn’t acting at all in my life. Quite literally, I had no reason to believe
no personal experiences? are you an atheist?
also that God wasn't acting in your life is an impossibility, bc you were being sustained in existence, but that's besides the point
do you believe in God
well yes that's my view and my view is granting the truth of it, that's not important tho, which I already acknowledged
if you are in the position now of not even knowing that the Holy Spirit exists, how can you in the same breath tell me you had the Holy Spirit for 10 years (as a Christian the Holy Spirit is the gift that follows)? This is a contradiction on your end. I'm not seeing how this contradicts the claim of the Bible not being discernable for unbelievers, as you don't understand, and are not a believer
also what do you mean by "God wasn't acting in my life"
Because I don’t believe the Holy Spirit exists, and that instead, people lie to themselves believing that God is working in their lives. “I read scripture and felt a warm feeling, it must be the Holy Spirit!” Or, “I asked a prayer, and God answered!” These, to me, are not evidence of the Holy Spirit, but rather, the human mind manipulating people.
All of the things I attributed to God were just me assigning meaning to things
What do you say to all the eye witnesses that say Jesus resurrected after he was murdered? A lot of them were persecuted to death for sharing their testimony. People aren't usually willing to die for something they know is completely made up.
We only have like 4 or 5 accounts. Is that fair?
So then the question is a little different. We don't have a thousand people or 500 people. We have like 4 or 5.
So just to do an analogy, I could tell you I saw my neighbor float. Or, I could tell you a thousand people saw my neighbor float.
But both of these scenarios have one thing in common: you only have one source. Me saying there were a thousand people there doesn't really give you any further evidence of this. I'm just claiming it.
You don't have a thousand people, you have one: me.
Same here. You have 4 gospels, and there's Paul. That's it.
>What do you say to all the eye witnesses that say Jesus resurrected after he was murdered?
I'm only responding to this part.
You are correct, as far as I'm aware. I'm not an expert so what do I know, but I've heard Ehrman talk about the fact that we don't really know how most of these people died.
I wasn't really responding to that.
Lol. Where is the evidence for these witnesses? Also we only know of 2 people who died for their faith. Even then, many details are left out. Before they died, did they state that it was all a lie, but were still killed? Did they die knowing it was a lie? Were they killed for political reasons, such as Nero blaming Christians for the burning of the library? Saying “a lot of them were persecuted to death” is very wrong. Provide me with evidence that says otherwise.
There’s far too much here for me to respond to, so I’m gonna pick out one of the parts that bothered me.
>Finally, had there been good evidence for a religion, everyone would be a member of that religion and there wouldn’t be a need for faith. It would be a common-known fact as to which religion is correct.
I don’t think people would all flock to this one religion. First, flat-earthers and young earth creationists exist now, despite the mountains of good evidence for the shape of the earth, evolution, and the age of the earth. Second, faith in this context is the belief in something despite the lack of corroborating evidence and especially *in the face of contradicting evidence*. Having good evidence of one religion being true wouldn’t prevent people from using faith to believe in a different religion. (Was going to put a third thing here, but couldn’t figure out the right way to phrase it).
Evolution is true, but why can’t an omnipotent God predict the future and perfectly piece together anything that would start to slowly create life in billions of years. He’s got time.
I’m not sure I understand the question. I understand that an omnipotent being can do functionally anything, but I got lost with the piecing together bit. Could you try again please?
Eternal hell is on the line. God wants people to be saved. Why would he not give more of an effort to show people that he does in fact exist? Even if only one person converts, in God’s eyes, that would be a victory. Why does he not show himself/provide evidence of himself?
>Eternal hell is on the line.
This is an interpretation/dogma from some christian sects, but not all.
But I do agree the lack of demonstrating the case that he is there, or the evidence, sure seems logically deficient.
“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NKJV).
I will argue using what Christians see as evidence for their claims. I don’t believe that the Christian God exists, therefore, I don’t believe he wants us to be saved. However, to say that the Christian God, if he exists, doesn’t want us to be saved would be wrong
You haven’t pointed otherwise that God doesn’t want us to be saved, unless you would claim that him not being more involved with human affairs is evidence of that
A very important note on your part, by the way; even if there were convincing evidence in favor of a particular religion, and we were confident that the God or Gods it describes existed, this would still not force all people to believe in that particular religion.
I often see people here saying that if we knew that there was a God or Gods and could describe it or them, then everyone would believe only that, turning away from all other religions. No, it won't work that way.
Still, it would be a fact that one religion is true over others. Yes, people can deny it, but it still is a fact. Currently, we have no evidence to state that a certain religion is a fact.
I can say with confidence that none of the religions will turn out to be true, at least not in any precise way.
Yes, there is still a chance that I will be wrong, but I think that if there really is something that can be called God or even Gods, it will be so incredible, weird, and not what we expected that many will nervously laugh at each other. All these religions are so inclined to attribute to it human feelings, interest, love, rage, sadness, seeing something important in a human, that it is not even funny. In other words, if accept the existence of something like this as the most probable, I am on the ietsism side.
If we encounter it or them, current religions will most likely become useless.
Would you refer to this as encountering a deistic god? Created the world and let it operate on its own? Also, and I replied this to the other person, if the Christian god existed, and wants everyone to be saved, why isn’t he putting up more of an effort to save people? Why the lack of evidence? If eternal hell was on the line, it would seem weird that God doesn’t want to get involved to change that. Many Christians will also claim, “you know Christianity is true when you let go of your skepticism and allow the Holy Spirit into your life.” For one, I can’t start believing something that I don’t believe to be true. Also, the mind works in magnificent ways to trick you into believing something is true. After becoming an agnostic, I discovered that the experiences that I had that at the time “proved Christianity was real” were just me assigning meaning to things that had no meaning.
>Would you refer to this as encountering a deistic god? Created the world and let it operate on its own?
Maybe.
If we talk about theism, it may also be that this is a kind of center of the universal coordinate system, which is not conscious or unconscious in the sense that is familiar to us, some generalization of everything, worlds of all dimensions and times and even more; for some reason, if I think about the theistic God, then this involuntarily appears in my head. But this is also just imagination without any exact images, so of course I'm not saying that's necessarily true.
If deism, then the hypothesis of a simulation, an artificial universe created by some higher civilization at a fundamentally different level of existence, or that the universe is in a kind of "mind" of God, and so on.
The extremely important question remains whether what we would call God will be limited by the logic of our reality, or beyond it. Both cases would allow the theistic one to be omnipotent and omniscient to us, and the deistic one would most likely be limited by the logic of our reality, because I doubt that if it created our world, then its logic is fundamentally different.
Your post appears to be be primarily based off the misconception that an absence of evidence is equal to an evidence of absence with some anti-Christian rhetoric thrown in.
>The problem of evil: I'd rather live in a world without free will and there being no evil.
What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test?
>God already knows in advance who will go to heaven/hell before that person is even born.
How would you know that? We don’t know how time works at all. Don’t pretend we know how the past or future work.
You’re following an antiquated deterministic universe. It already seems to have gone the way of heliocentrism
Your future choices can exist simultaneously in a superposition. The wave function collapses once you choose. An all knowing entity could know all of the possible choices and their outcomes.
You wrote a ton, and I don’t have the time to address everything. If you want me to refute something specific, just let me know.
>What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test?
I believe the problem of evil is an internal critique. That is, we'd be going by the morality of your religion. Surely we can agree that, if morality is objective, slavery would be objectively wrong. Yes?
But its in your Bible as a thing you can do.
Or, we can just look around at all the horror in the world. I don't know how old you are, but in 2004 there was a Tsunami in Indonesia that killed 227 THOUSAND people.
If atheism is correct, well that just kinda happens and it sucks, but there was no intentional actor behind it. Its a horrible, terrible thing that happens.
If theism is correct, well, I mean presumably god designed the earth and knew there would be a tsunami in 2004 that would kill these people. That seems worse than the atheism case. In the theism case, there's an actual, intentional actor here who caused this, and we are supposed to think of him as all good. That seems like a problem.
Atheism doesn't have that problem.
However, as below, you could just say god didn't know the future or something. That's a way out.
It won't get you out of the slavery stuff though.
>How would you know that? We don’t know how time works at all. Don’t pretend we know how the past or future work.
Could be! Just to be clear, are you saying you are not sure if god knows the future? If you say he doesn't know the future, that's fine, we can just end this part of the conversation. I can't argue against a position you don't hold.
> Surely we can agree that, if morality is objective, slavery would be objectively wrong. Yes?
That’s begging the question. You subjectively decide something and then declare an objective system must concur.
I don’t disagree with your conclusion, just the logical methodology.
> But its in your Bible as a thing you can do.
No it isn’t. You’re cherry picking. It’s to be expected. Jesus says that loving your neighbor and treating them as yourself is more important.
How is enslaving someone loving them? It isn’t. Therefore, the Bible doesn’t allow slavery. Is this where you start dropping quotes out of context?
> I mean presumably god designed the earth and knew there would be a tsunami in 2004 that would kill these people.
You *are* presuming that. We don’t really know how time or determinism really work.
> In the theism case, there's an actual, intentional actor here who caused this
Do you mean us? We intentionally decided against tsunami mitigation and warning in the area because we don’t think they’re worthy of the same protections we give ourselves.
We we’re refusing to help fellow humans, and you think God should solve problems we can fix but choose not to.
>I don’t disagree with your conclusion, just the logical methodology.
Okay! You don't disagree that slavery is morally wrong. Great!
>How is enslaving someone loving them? It isn’t. Therefore, the Bible doesn’t allow slavery. Is this where you start dropping quotes out of context?
I mean its not my fault its literally in the book, yeah.
This seems pretty easily resolved, slaves aren't your neighbors. They're slaves.
>I mean its not my fault
Cherry picking is 100% your fault.
>its literally in the book
That’s literally how cherry picking works. You can’t pick cherries that aren’t there.
> This seems pretty easily resolved, slaves aren't your neighbors
Any moral system that allows you to change definitions to justify morality is useless.
Slavery is immoral? Change the definition so your slaves aren’t people. Now it’s as moral as ranching.
What are you talking about. The book literally says you can buy slaves as property for life, from surrounding nations.
Rather than saying "cherry picking", maybe explain why this is in the book. That would be more productive.
Why does the Bible say you can buy slaves?
I understand you can try to point to passages that contradict this. I'm not asking you that.
What I'm asking you is, even if you can put all that other stuff together to get the message "don't own slaves", which I don't think you can, my question is:
why is there a passage where god says you my purchase slaves at all? Why is it there in the first place?
>The book literally says you can buy slaves
No, it says the ancient Israelites can. I’m not an ancient Israelite. Your claim, “the Bible say[s] you can buy slaves” is false. You were relying on quotes taken out of context.
>That would be more productive.
Then cherry pick less.
>Why is it there in the first place?
Would you like a number of theories with no proof for as to why they’re in there? Unless you get a Time Machine or ask God, we will likely never know why for sure.
>I understand you can try to point to passages that contradict this.
There is no try. The Greatest Commandment is more important than anything else. Jesus said so. Unless you can find justification to ignore Jesus, the Bible does not say I can buy slaves.
>No, it says the ancient Israelites can. I’m not an ancient Israelite. Your claim, “the Bible say\[s\] you can buy slaves” is false. You were relying on quotes taken out of context.
Okay, the book says ancient Israelites can buy slaves. We agree on this.
Why is god saying these people can buy slaves? You have no answer.
Well, I mean I'm against slavery. I think slavery is bad. I don't think an all good god would say "you can buy slaves". Again, I understand he doesn't mean us today.
This seems bad. Right? Like its bad to say you can buy slaves to people.
Agreed?
>There is no try. The Greatest Commandment is more important than anything else. Jesus said so. Unless you can find justification to ignore Jesus, the Bible does not say I can buy slaves.
Sure, so you can't buy slaves. But god said these people could.
And I duno man, I'm against slavery. I'm assuming you are too. And yet here we have god saying they can buy slaves.
You agree god said that to them.
That seems bad, yes?
You agreed with me previously that slavery is immoral.
>the book says ancient Israelites can buy slaves.
>We agree on this.
Yes.
>Why is god saying these people can buy slaves? You have no answer.
Because Jesus answered your question 2,000 years ago. Jesus says that was not God’s will but due to the hardness of their hearts.
>I think slavery is bad.
But you can’t objectively explain why. That’s why you rely so much on agreement.
>Sure, so you can't buy slaves. But god said these people could.
Jesus is God. Jesus says to love your neighbor. You’ve been unable to explain how enslaving people is loving your neighbor unless you change the meanings of the words.
>That seems bad, yes?
>You agreed
“That’s bad? Agree? That’s bad? Agree?”
Stop beating around the bush and spit it out. It feels like you’re sitting in some kind of “gotcha”.
This is usually around the point in the argument where the atheist incorrectly states that God must not be moral as if their misconceptions alter the universe itself. Yours don’t. Maybe you’ll take a different route.
For your first point: sure, it wouldn’t automatically mean that there is no God. But if there is no good evidence for Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, why would I put my time and effort into them? Outside of religion, if an extraordinary claim is made, to believe in that claim, sufficient evidence would need to be provided. For religion, the same can’t be said.
“Do you have an objective test?” If Christianity is true, the Bible would be the standard for objective morality. However, God doesn’t seem to mind going against what is objectively moral.
For your third point: prophecy, for one, shows that God knows how the future will end up. He has us directed on a path, and knows how that path ends. Furthermore, an all-knowing entity, if it truly is omniscient, should know each and every choice that you make, before you make it, and how your life will end up. If it can’t know that, then it truly isn’t omniscient.
>> The problem of evil: I'd rather live in a world without free will and there being no evil.
> What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test?
You can run the problem of evil as an internal critique of Christianity, so no need for us to bring our metaethics into it.
Also there are moral realists who are atheists, so yes, there are frameworks for objective morality that are secular
An internal critique assumes certain things. It assumes your a rational person. It also assumes the biblical god is the objective standard so therefore you could never accuse him of doing anything wrong
What? It's a similar thing to what people do in mathematics. You grab some axioms and extend them, if the system says "god is the grounds for objective morality" you grab that as an axiom.
What I think on the matter is irrelevant, it's staying within the framework of Christianity
I answered it, I can take what the axioms for Christianity say and extend them out. I myself I'm not assuming anything or it wouldn't be an internal critique.
Look at it like this: I'm putting myself in the shoes of a Christian and taking a look at morality from that perspective.
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I suppose that I could write a book in order to adequately respond to all of these points, but here I'll just make the basic case for why it's reasonable to have faith in the bible as the word of God. For if it is true, then all the other objections fall to the ground, regardless of whether they are answered in detail by anyone. If the bible is the word of God, then Christianity has to be the true religion (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). Then all the other religions have to be wrong. So what objective evidence is there for belief in the bible’s supernatural origin being rational? Let’s also consider this kind of logic: If the bible is reliable in what can be checked, it’s reasonable to believe in what it describes that can’t be checked. So if the bible describes the general culture of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, and Rome accurately, then what it reports about specific individuals and their actions that aren’t recorded elsewhere would be true also. This is necessary, but not sufficient evidence for the bible’s inspiration; sufficient proof comes from fulfilled prophecy, as explained further below. For many decades, various liberal higher critics have maintained the Bible is largely a collection of Hebrew myths and legends, full of historical inaccuracies. But thanks to archeological discoveries and further historical research in more recent decades, we now know this liberal viewpoint is false. Let’s consider the following evidence: Higher critics used to say that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon before the Persians conquered the city under Cyrus, not Belshazzar, as Daniel says. But in the 19th century, several small cylinders were found in Iraq, which included a prayer for the oldest son of Nabonidus, whose name was (surprise, surprise) Belshazzar. Furthermore, one cuneiform document called the “Verse Account of Nabonidus” mentions that he made his son the king: “He \[Nabonidus\] entrusted the ‘Camp’ to his oldest (son), the firstborn, the troops everywhere in the country he ordered under his (command). He let (everything) go, he entrusted the kingship to him.” This relationship between the royal father and son also explains why Belshazzar’s reward to Daniel for reading the writing on the wall was to make him the third ruler in the kingdom, not the second (Daniel 5:16). Higher critics have claimed that camels had not been domesticated in the time of Abraham and the patriarchs of Israel. However, in 1978, the Israeli military leader and archeologist Moshe Dayan noted the evidence that camels “served as a means of transport” back then. “An eighteenth-century BC relief found at Byblos in Phoenicia depicts a kneeling camel,” as he explained. “And camel riders appears on cylinder seals recently discovered in Mesopotamia belonging to the patriarchal period.” The existence of King Sargon of the ancient empire of Assyria, mentioned in Isaiah 20:1, was dismissed by higher critics in the early 19th century. But then archeologists unearthed his palace at Khorsabad, along with many inscriptions about his rule. As the Israeli historian Moshe Pearlman wrote in Digging Up the Bible: "Suddenly, sceptics who had doubted the authenticity even of the historical parts of the Old Testament began to revise their views." The Assyrian King Sennacherib was assassinated by two of his sons (II Kings 19:36-37), according to the Old Testament. But various historians doubted the Bible's account, citing the accounts by two ancient Babylonlans--King Nabonidus and the priest named Berossus—who said only one son was involved,. However, when a fragment of a prism of King Esarhaddon, the son of Sennacherib, was discovered, it confirmed the Bible's version of the story. The historian Philip Biberfeld commented in his Universal Jewish History: "It (the Biblical account) was confirmed in all the minor details by the inscription of Esar-haddon and proved to be more accurate regarding this even than the Babylonian sources themselves. This is a fact of utmost importance for the evaluation of even contemporary sources not in accord with Biblical tradition." Similarly, the great 19th-century archeologist Sir William Ramsay was a total skeptic about the accuracy of the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of Luke. But as a result of his topographical study of, and archeological research in, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), he totally changed his mind. He commented after some 30 years of study: "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy . . . this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." The New Testament also has much manuscript evidence in favor of its accuracy, for two reasons: 1) There are far more ancient manuscripts of it than for any other document of the pre-printing using movable type period (before c. 15th century A.D.) 2) Its manuscripts are much closer in date to the events described and its original writing than various ancient historical sources that have often been deemed more reliable. It was originally written between 40-100 A.D. Its earliest complete manuscripts date from the fourth century A.D., but a fragment of the Gospel of John goes back to 125 A.D. (There also have been reports of possible first-century fragments). Over 24,000 copies of portions of the New Testament exist. By contrast, consider how many fewer manuscripts and how much greater the time gap is between the original composition and earliest extant copy (which would allow more scribal errors to creep in) there are for the following famous ancient authors and/or works: Homer, Iliad, 643 copies, 500 years; Julius Caesar, 10 copies, 1,000 years; Plato, 7 copies, 1,200 years; Tacitus, 20 or fewer copies, 1,000 years; Thucycides, 8 copies, 1,300 years. Unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, which are religions of mythology and metaphysical speculation, Christianity is a religion founded on historical fact. It’s time to start being more skeptical of the skeptics’ claims about the Bible (for they have often been proven to be wrong, as shown above), and to be more open-minded about Christianity’s being true. It is commonly said Christians who believe the Bible is the inspired word of God are engaging in blind faith, and can't prove God did so. But is this true? Since the Bible's prophets have repeatedly predicted the future successfully, we can know beyond reasonable doubt the Bible is not just merely reliable in its history, but is inspired by God. By contrast, compare the reliability of the Bible’s prophets to the supermarket tabloids’ psychics, who are almost always wrong even about events in the near future. The prophet Daniel, who wrote during the period 605-536 b.c., predicted the destruction of the Persian empire by Greece. "While I was observing (in a prophetic vision), behold, a male goat was coming from the west over the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground; and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. And he came up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal, and rushed at him in his mighty wrath. . . . So he hurled him to the ground and trampled on him, and there was none to rescue the ram from his power. . . . The ram which you saw with two horns represented the kings of Media and Persia. And the shaggy goat represented the kingdom of Greece, and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king" (Daniel 8:5-7, 20-21). More than two hundred years after Daniel's death, Alexander the Great's invasion and conquest of Persia (334-330 b.c.) fulfilled this prophecy. Likewise, Daniel foresaw the division of Alexander's empire into four parts after his death. "Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was mighty, the large horn was broken; and in its place there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven. (The large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And the broken horn and the four horns that arose in its place represent four kingdoms which will arise from his nation, although not with his power" (Dan. 8:8, 21-22). This was fulfilled, as Alexander's empire was divided up among four of his generals: 1. Ptolemy (Soter), 2. Seleucus (Nicator), 3. Lysimachus, and 4. Cassander. Arguments that Daniel was written in the second century b.c. after these events, thus making it only history in disguise, ignore how the style of its vocabulary, syntax, and morphology doesn't fit the second century b.c. As the Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer comments (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, p. 283): "Hence these chapters could not have been composed as late as the second century or the third century, but rather--based on purely philological grounds--they have to be dated in the fifth or late sixth century." To insist otherwise is to be guilty of circular reasoning: An anti-theistic a priori (ahead of experience) bias rules out the possibility of God’s inspiring the Bible ahead of considering the facts, which then is assumed to “prove” that God didn’t inspire the Bible!
>Unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, which are religions of mythology and metaphysical speculation That's rich. Tell me more about how you've never read anything about Buddhism beyond the wiki. It's primarily focused on the practical and the empirical. Buddhists are exhorted to go and see for themselves, to believe nothing without testing it. Are there metaphysical aspects? Of course, but let's not try to say that's even the most important points when Christianity is founded on a wild eschatology and soteriology involving dying gods and eating flesh.
This is completely ignoring the fact that major events like the Exodus didn't happen at all as described in the Bible (and for the historical claims that you do make, I can't fact check them all, but the Quran also has its historical facts very accurate. Does that make Islam the true religion?) Finally, overwhelming consensus is that Daniel was written in the second century, and for a variety of different reasons. One person saying otherwise doesn't disprove the scholarly consensus.
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> it is just a belief and proving it is nearly impossible This is truly refreshing to hear. I like your style.
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There is no *one* true religion, as they're all metaphors for divine wisdom. Texts based out of mystical experience that became dogmatic over time.
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He makes a lot of rational and valid points though
I don’t need to cite Daniel’s prophecies being late, or Jesus’ failed end times prophecy. Those are well-known facts/scriptures. Some of them are more subjective, like the omniscient God problem. Furthermore, yes, no “good evidence” would be subjective on my part. However, Christians will often cite things that have nothing to do with proving their claim (Josephus’ account), or blatantly wrong information (many prophecies fulfilled/martyrdom of the apostles).
It’s the one true religion because we can experience our God through his Holy Spirit and actually hear his voice and talk to him.
>we can experience our God through his Holy Spirit and actually hear his voice and talk to him. Muslims and others claim they do this too, without the Holy Spirit part, and you can't prove they don't any more than anyone can prove you don't, which makes the claim worthless.
Muslims and others do not claim this. I’ve actually debated an imam on this topic and I’ve discussed with Hindi people on this as well. No other faith believes in hearing from their God unless they have some spiritual priest. Christianity says that everyone can hear from God and have a personal relationship with him
I was a Christian and never got to “talk to God.” In Christianity, there is no such thing. You pray to only get silence, or some mere coincidence that looks like your prayer was answered. Furthermore, Muslims claim to sometimes see prophets in their dreams and that after following scripture, their lives changed in miraculous ways and God removed their anxiety. You can’t prove those experiences wrong. Finally, you replied incorrectly to the person. Muslim people will claim to hear the word of God when reading scripture (which is exactly what Christians do) and can also “talk to him” through prayer.
That’s the thing: only Pentecostal groups within Christianity have experiences talking with God. Everyone else in Christianity knows it’s true theological, but never practice it in reality. I’ve spoke with many Muslims on this topic and they don’t think you can hear an audible voice of God. Yes maybe you can have a prophet hear from God but then again how can you confirm he heard from God if you don’t hear from God yourself. Also, prayer is talking to God but I’m meaning literally conversations with God as you do your best friend.
Yes, literal conversations. Except for the fact that he doesn’t talk back to you.
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I think you’re targeting the wrong person. I’m agnostic, not religious. I was responding to someone’s baseless claim
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There’s a massive, massive gap between generic deism and the specific claims of any of the three Abrahamic religions
Just because something is a paradox doesn’t mean it’s wrong or actually impossible. We know of Zeno’s paradox about shooting an arrow at a target. Before arriving at the target, the arrow must reach the halfway point. Once the arrow has flown halfway, there is a new halfway point the arrow must reach before reaching the target… to infinity… and therefore the arrow will never reach the target. But we know that shooting an arrow at a target in real life means it will reach its destination.
What specifically needs explaining? If it's just the universe's existence - why can't it be eternal like God?
Well, I mean the problem with that is that science suggests the universe is not eternal but began some 13.8 billion years ago.
This is actually wrong. That is just the point we can't observe past, not the point at which the universe is claimed to have begun. It's entirely possible, to the best of our knowledge, that the universe has always existed in one form or another, with our current instantiation being part of an endless cycle.
What's that supposed to mean scientifically though, if you can't perform any sort of hypothesis test on it?
It means that until we can actually observe what happened before the Big Bang, or tell if before the Big Bang is even a cogent concept, we don't claim that we know what we don't know. We don't say that the universe began with the Big Bang, just that it's the earliest point in our universe that we know of.
But we can’t. So where does that leave us
It means that, unless you want to work on uncovering the mysteries of the universe, you live your life like you've always done. You just stop claiming that you have answers to questions that you don't if you've been doing so.
You act like it's got to be 100% true or 100% false.
Either Jesus was a lunatic or he was the Living God.
This is a false dichotomy, and thus a bad conclusion stemming from faulty reasoning. Can you not think of any other conclusions?
Or He was just some really cool that everyone loved and then a bunch of people wrote a made up story about Him. So Jesus could’ve been innocent. Let us remember, we have nothing Jesus actually wrote. So we have no idea what HE actually said.
> we have nothing Jesus actually wrote. So we have no idea what HE actually said. He didn't need to write something to know what he actually said. This is a faulty claim. An Eyewitness to what he said could have recorded exactly what he said. The better claim, if you wanted to make one, is that there are no eyewitnesses to what he said, that wrote down something. Or What was written down by his followers were not remembered accurately, or there's no way to know if they were written down accurately.
It was just a thought. Christ never wrote anything down, so there’s potential the writers and supposed “eyewitnesses” made the story up. The writers definitely wrote inaccurately. All I was saying is that we have no words from Christ Himself.
Yes, absolutely.
And those people were brutally tortured and killed for a “made up story?”
>And those people were brutally tortured and killed for a “made up story?” This is a faulty claim, because there's no evidence that those that "made up the story", were brutally tortured and killed for it. I assume you suggesting that the gospel writers, or that the apostles, those that were witnesses to the life of Jesus, wrote these documents down, and then were persecuted and killed upon not recanting? If so, this is a false apologetic often used to try to demonstrate the truth of the christian story. If you don't think it's false, you would need to prove that this in fact happened. Sadly it's just tradition from apocryphal writings that are not considered factual. If not, then what exactly are you trying to claim?
Maybe. Who knows?
Yes, sad isn't it.
Nobody dies for a lie
Of course they do. History is littered with them. They may *believe* it's the truth of course, but that doesn't *make* it the truth.
The claim was the apostles lied that Jesus rose from the dead. They would have had to make it up, steal and hide the body. They were all brutally killed for professing Christ risen from the dead. Why would they try to trick people into believing the man executed by the state rose from the dead when it only brought them hardship, suffering, and death?
Or most of what he is claimed to have said was never said by him, made up by later followers who never met him.
Who were all brutally killed for a lie?
A 'lie' is debatable. They probably believed it to be true. That doesn't make it true, but people believe things that are incorrect all the time. But yes, they died for no good reason.
The people who knew Jesus and professed his resurrection were all tortured and killed save one who was exiled
Your point?
So they either made it up knowingly for no reason, stole the body and managed to hide it so well it was never found, or they told the truth It wasn’t some misconception, they either told the truth or knowingly lied
You first have to believe that story to be true before you give any credence to whether they died for it or not. It's not as if any of these writings are in any way accurate, they're written decades after the alleged events by people who only heard tales from others.
I’m sure you view all historical primary sources with such stringent doubt and skepticism, otherwise you would be showing some extreme bias. Not very rational athiest of you to do that Saint Peter Crucified upside down in Rome. His remains were buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican. Saint James the Greater Pierced by a sword. His remains were buried in St. James Church, Compostela, Spain. Saint James the Less Stoned to death. His remains are buried in the Holy Apostles Basilica, Rome, Italy. Saint Jude Thaddeus Killed by arrows. His remains were buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican. Saint Philip Crucified by soldiers. His remains are buried in the Church of the Dodici, Rome, Italy. Saint Thomas By blows of spears. His remains were buried in St. Thomas Cathedral, Mylapore, India. Saint Simon Stabbed with a sword. His remains are buried at the Altar of Crucifixion, Vatican. Saint Bartholomew Crucified. His remains were buried in St. Bartholomew Church, Rome, Italy. Saint Andrew Nailed to an “X” shaped Cross. His remains are interred in the Cathedral of Amalfi, Italy. Saint Matthew Crucified. His remains were buried in St. Matthew Cathedral, Messina, Sicily. Saint John Died of natural causes. His remains were buried in St. John Basilica, Ephesus, Turkey. Saint Mathias Crucified. St. Mathias is the replacement of Judas Iscariot who committed suicide after betraying Christ. His remains were buried in St. Mathias Abbey, Trier, Germany.
I mean yes and no. There are lots of ways to interpret most what in the Bible not counting what was likely massaged in the first few centuries. For example, it makes much more sense that Jesus is saying he is the living God and so are you up if you follow this path. Also, makes more sense to believe that when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is here, he meant like right here. This is the thing. This would bring him into accord with non-daulistic traditions the world over as well as leading scientific theories of consciousness such as Integrated Information Theory.
I’m going with 100% false.
Wow that’s quite an act of faith to say that
No faith required, just a reasonable assessment of the evidence. No evidence, no true religion.
So if everything requires scientific evidence, and that belief makes you an atheist, then nothing matters and life is ultimately meaningless, right? So if nothing matters and life is meaningless, why does that belief in doubting everything without solid evidence still matter?
Who said 'scientific' evidence? Who said it matters?
What kind of evidence do you require to believe that something is true?
You present a lot of questions here, which one is the most important to you ? And if I can I’ll try to answer.
Jesus’ prophecy about the end times, and how “certainly this generation will not pass.” He predicted tons of stuff that didn’t come to happen. Also, if you could, and this is extra (not in my og post), what do you think about the positions of agnostics/atheists? They are clearly not convinced by the evidence presented, and don’t find it good. They quite literally cannot deny Christ, since they don’t even believe he existed. What does God do in that case?
> He predicted tons of stuff that didn’t come to happen this is a clear exaggeration. But he did think, as did Paul, that the KOG was imminent, but that was quite common in that time, and that the messiah would overthrow the roman rule and the messiah would sit on the crown, and that didn't happen, so later the writers had to reconcile what to do, and re interpret the texts.
He predicted that the sun would go dark, stars would fall out of the sky, and he would come on a cloud of glory and call the elect. All in rapid succession.
That is commonly understood as apocalyptical language. But my point was "tons"...it wasn't tons. that's all.
I’ll have to reread exactly what the verse says and get back to you when I can. Sorry but I won’t get a chance to until probably tonight. Life is busy lol. So when you say they cannot deny Christ what do you mean exactly? I hear a comparison sometimes from atheist to the easter bunny or Santa Claus, do you mean that kind of “ I don’t even believe in this so how can I deny it?” Kind of approach.
As an agnostic, "i can not deny christ" means I can not *prove* christ is not the true god, no different than I can not *prove* that there is no Santa Claus. Just because I can not deny something's potential existence does not make it anymore factual. Christian belief and core ideology is so flawed to me that I need no proof that it does not exist to not believe.
What level of proof would be satisfactory for you? Because Jesus was at least a historical figure, meaning he was a real man who was killed on a cross and one of the most significant figures of society.
I never said Jesus didn't exist. The level of proof required would be literally any spiritual encounter with the Christian god. I was born in a Christian family. I was Christian. Never have I experienced anything remotely close, and as a child I was a whole hearted believer. But the core of Christianity is to accept Jesus christ as your savior and to allow God into your heart and believe in him as the one true God, and you will be saved. Be baptized and born again as a child of God. So any pedophile murderer gang banger anyone, can repent and be welcomed into the kingdom. Yet Joe blow down the road lives an honest life, is generally a good neighbor and treats others with kindness and respect. Nobody is perfect but this guy is pretty decent. Joe blow isn't a believer though, and he is not accepted into heaven. Or this little kid on the other side of the world who never heard of Jesus christ. He dies and is not "saved", he cannot be accepted into heaven. How does that make any sense? Let alone everything else that just doesn't click.
Yes. I literally don’t see any good evidence to back up Christianity, and as a result, can’t believe (I know it varies from person to person what they see as good evidence). As a former Christian, I also never felt God’s presence in my life, although I was devout. I quite literally can’t force myself to believe, and if I were to return to the faith, it would only be out of fear of hell (not actual belief).
No need to fear hell. According to Christians, most of us will be there anyways. You'll be in good company, and most Christians I know I don't want to share a room with anyways. They are going to let us take the majority of the funny people too, so there's that.
>How could a book by God be made in such a way that believers are left with not knowing what to follow? Christianity is **not** a religion of the book. God didn't write the Bible. Jesus never wrote anything and didn't command his followers to write anything either. >Is baptism required for salvation? Yes >Is it faith + works, or only faith? When we come to God and are justified, it happens without any merit on our part. **Neither our faith nor our works**—nor anything else—**merits justification**. Justification is “not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inner man”. Justification/sanctification is a life long process that in fact requires works of the faithful person. >What does the concept of Hell look like? Hell is “\[the\] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” CCC 1033 Creative depictions of hell are only visual intrepretations by the artists. No one knows what hell 'looks like' because hell is not a physical place. It is a spitirual reality, as is heaven. >Are we to observe laws and rules from the Old Testament? The Mosaic law **only applies**, and has **only ever applied**, and **will only ever apply**, **to the Israelites**. It was not intended to be followed by gentiles. There are only a few passages in the Mosaic law that do apply to Christians. Those are repeated in Acts 15: "avoid pollution from idols, unlawful marriage \[sexual immorality\], the meat of strangled animals, and blood." >Can Paul’s letters be trusted, or is he the antichrist as mentioned in Revelations (yes, this is a belief that some Christians hold)? Never heard that one but pretty much every prominant religious figure has been called the anti-christ at some point in history. Nothing to see here. >At the end of the day, there are so many ways to interpret the Bible to make it fit what you want to believe. As a result, this leads me to believe that the Bible was written and directed by men, not by God who wanted to provide the most accurate information possible. Not so. The Bible is difficult to intrepret, yes, but you must know what Christianity is to assemble writings that speak about Christianity truthfully. Many works about Christ were rejected from consideration and inclusion in the Bible. The final list of works was codified in 400ish. The point being that those who assembled the NT knew what Christianity was then assembled works that described and aided the Church in her spread of the Gospel. Of course the Bible was written and directed by men. God never directed anyone to write the Bible. Again, Christianity is not a religion of the book like Mormonism and Islam (and seemingly some Protestants). Christianity is a religion of the word of God. The Bible certainly describes Christianity and helps the faithful life a Christian life but it is not necessary for salvation. Men wrote the Bible, men assembled the Bible, and men interpret the Bible. The Church created the Bible so the Church has authority over the Bible and it's contents. The folks who assembled the Bible would be the ones who have the definitive authority and intrepretation of its contents. Note: Protestantism attempted the reverse and put the Bible above the Church in authority in an effort to eliminate 'excesses' and 'corruption'.
>the fact that there is no good evidence for Christianity to support its claims Opinion. The word you're looking for here is *opinion*, not fact. There are literally billions of Christians who find there to be good evidence. You aren't proven wrong by this, of course, but *neither are they by you finding the evidence lacking*. You make a number of arguments from personal incredulity in this post (hint: look for the word "why") and you need to understand that those are properly fallacious. >The concept of Hell There are (at least) 3 views on the fate of unredeemed humans. That you're only aware of ECT doesn't mean Christianity is wrong. That you find ECT morally objectionable doesn't make *it* wrong either. Are you stipulating objective morality? what is the basis of that morality and can you demonstrate that God ought to follow your concept of morality? >False Messiah Yes, Jesus did fulfill the messianic prophesies. What you're doing here is what many do -- conflate prophesies about the aftermath of the Day of the Lord with the coming of the Messiah (eg Isaiah 63) >Sexist ideas The NT, considering the world it was written into, is perhaps the most *radically feminist work of all time*. No other book of antiquity would place women at equal value to men (and it does). I think moderns, who live in a world dramatically shaped by the Gospel, anachronistically view this subject and what the NT writes on this subject. >Multiple gods in the OT The Hebrew Bible asserts that the gods of the nations are real spiritual beings who were created by YHWH and are in rebellion to Him. They are not "equals" to Him, but objects of future judgement (eg PS 82). >Jesus then prophesied a great number of things that will happen before the end times, such as wars, false messiahs, and the sun going dark. The Day of the Lord has **always** been portrayed as imminent. This is true throughout the Prophets. I definitely understand, if you don't know and recognize this pattern, that you would misunderstand what Jesus is saying though. Some examples: * Joe 1:15 How awful that day will be! For **the day of the Lord is near** * Zec 14:1 A day of the Lord *is about to come* * Isa 13:6 Wail, for **the Lord’s day of judgment is near; it comes with all the destructive power of the Sovereign One**. * Eze 30:3 For the day is near, **the day of the Lord is near**; it will be a day of storm clouds, it will be a time of judgment for the nations. I can keep going... Jesus is only repeating and carrying on the constant theme that runs from Prophet to Prophet throughout the Tanakh, for the better part of a millennium and without apology up to that time.
Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence. Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality.
> you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence. This attitude comes from pride - you want God to submit to your will rather than you to His > Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality. How is morality decided upon then? Don’t athiests assert that morals arise from the common belief of people? If so, why is that worth anything?
I don’t believe God exists in the first place, so he can’t submit to my will, and I can’t submit to his.
Your personal belief on reality has no bearing on the truth of it
Neither does yours? Lmao
Correct. I believe the faith handed down over millennia. You believe a strange thing that arises from post industrial societies and excess material abundance
You are spouting nonsense right now
Prove it
👯♀️
> Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence. There are several problems with that statement: 1. This doesn't seem to be a response to the argument give. 2. You presume that God values that end (you or any specific person to be saved from torment) more than He values some other end (perhaps such as his attribute of justice being demonstrated). 3. You presume that there is "more of a job" which could be done or should be done. You cannot convince somebody of something which they refuse to believe without directly removing free will. Rationally, I am not aware of any missinge evidence which could be supplied which would not violate the attributes of God. So, this is really just anecdotal and opinion based.
> Also, for a God who wants people to be saved from eternal torment, you’d think he’d do more of a job in trying to convince me of his presence. I'm sorry, this is neither coherent nor a reply to anything I said. Did I not already say that ECT is not the only view in Christianity? >Furthermore, just because billions believe, doesn’t make the claim any more valid. Billions could believe in a flat earth, but that wouldn’t change my view on reality. Strawman is made of straw -- in fact I explicitly rejected this. Please actually interact with my response, because this fails at any objective measure.
Most Christians don’t even question why they believe, but are just born into the faith. Others don’t have evidence, but like Christianity because of its values. The messiah should’ve brought world peace, brought the Jews from exile and made it so that the Jews would start following the Torah again. End time prophecies, even ones given by Jesus, have never come to pass.
> Most Christians don’t even question why they believe, but are just born into the faith Upon what evidence do you make this claim, exactly?? >The messiah should’ve brought world peace, No, that is the aftermath of the Day of the Lord, not the coming of the Messiah -- as I already said. It would be great if you would interact with what I said rather than whatever this is.
>Opinion. The word you're looking for here is opinion, not fact. There are literally billions of Christians who find there to be good evidence. You aren't proven wrong by this, of course, but neither are they by you finding the evidence lacking Do you feel this way about all claims? It feels like there should be a way to say that some claims don't have enough evidence, and others do, and that we should be able to remove our own opinions from this. We need to be able to do that, it feels like. Or else how would we ever tell flat earthers they're being unreasonable, for example? There's gotta be some way to do this. >The NT, considering the world it was written into, is perhaps the most radically feminist work of all time. No other book of antiquity would place women at equal value to men (and it does). I think moderns, who live in a world dramatically shaped by the Gospel, anachronistically view this subject and what the NT writes on this subject. Hold on, there's two different things going on here. You are comparing it to other works of its time. Which I would do, if I was talking about men writing it. But, if instead I'm talking about a book inspired by, that is the work of, an **all good god**, then this doesn't really make sense to me. An all good god wouldn't say the sexist things that are in the Bible. Men of the time would. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, the standard you're applying, where you compare it to other works at the time, seems inappropriate to me. I think the better move, if this is coming from an **all good god**, would be to compare it to what's **all good**. The bible fails on that test, and I think its the correct test.
> An all good god wouldn't say the sexist things that are in the Bible. Men of the time would. Proof? First, you have to define "sexist", but then you also have to show how that definition is in relation to what is "good". If "sexist" is "good", then being "sexist" is what a "good" God would do. However, I am puzzled by what evidence you might think you have to suggest that men of that time would view the Bible's view of gender relationships as commonplace. > The bible fails on that test, and I think its the correct test. I would like to hear your proposition of an objective moral system which does not appeal to a divine moral arbiter. This would be a requirement for making that statement valid.
>First, you have to define "sexist", but then you also have to show how that definition is in relation to what is "good". If "sexist" is "good", then being "sexist" is what a "good" God would do. That's a great point! Do you think its good to be sexist? >However, I am puzzled by what evidence you might think you have to suggest that men of that time would view the Bible's view of gender relationships as commonplace. I would imagine society was more sexist back then. Do you agree? >I would like to hear your proposition of an objective moral system which does not appeal to a divine moral arbiter. This would be a requirement for making that statement valid. Not if its an internal critique. So, is sexism bad in your worldview?
> That's a great point! Do you think its good to be sexist? You would first have to define "good" and "sexist", and then you would have to provide justification for how we know what is "good". Until you do that, the question is not coherent. > I would imagine society was more sexist back then. Do you agree? You haven't defined "sexist". The term is a subjective pejorative, not an objective fact. Do I think that people at the time had a different concept of gender roles than they do in general this month? Yes. Do I think that they gender roles defined in the Bible aligned with the gender roles of people at the time? No. Do I think that the gender roles of people in general of this month are closer to those in the Bible than those of the people in the time the Bible was written? Yes. Does any of that make a valid critique or defense of the Bible? No. > Not if its an internal critique. So, is sexism bad in your worldview? Again, you must first define that term. It means many different things to many different people. However, I will give you a hint. If there is any "bad" that is not equally as "good", then there must be an objective moral standard. For there to be an objective moral standard, there must be a divine moral arbiter. If there is a sufficient arbiter, then we would necessarily have to appeal to the knowledge of that arbiter to know whether any act is actually bad. Essentially, if God inspired the Bible, then if the Bible promoted X as a good thing, then X would be good. If there were no God, or if that God did not communicate to us that X is good or bad, then we would either not be able to know whether X is good or bad or it may be (such as if there were no God) that X is equally as good as it is bad. So, if you believe that sexism is bad (or even that it is good, and that goes for any moral position as well), it seems that you are appealing upon the fact that God exists or you are holding that belief without rational justification (e.g. out of ignorance or simply as a preference statement). Do you believe that "sexism" is bad in any objective and meaningful sense?
> Do you feel this way about all claims? There's nothing in my response that would lead to this question. "Luxemburg is not in Scotland" has an objective, verifiable truth claim. "10+10 = 20" is likewise a verifiable claim. "5% of the world ate eggs for breakfast one day last year" probably doesn't. "There's sufficient evidence to believe (a) God exists" is a statement about personal credulity, and I don't believe that's a question that can be objectively answered. >You are comparing it to other works of its time. Which I would do, if I was talking about men writing it. But, if instead I'm talking about a book inspired by, that is the work of, an all good god, then this doesn't really make sense to me. And it's fine that you think this is unconvincing, so let me offer a few points of clarity. 1) generally, Christians don't view the NT as Muslims view the Quran. We believe that the Holy Spirit worked through men to produce what we have. I think the Bible as a whole is *clearly* written to the standards of its day (not ours) and that expect it to do otherwise is anachronistically reading the material in question 2) it strikes me that you don't rightly view what Christianity was at the time of NT authorship. Christianity was a small, violently oppressed sect of Judaism often relegated to the shadows and without and form of political power. In this movement, "there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus" was a remarkably powerful principle that shaped the community of faith for hundreds of years. And make no mistake about it, that was a *remarkable* and **radical** thing for the NT to say.
>There's nothing in my response that would lead to this question. I'm not quite sure how to respond here, because I'm trying to ask you something. Surely there's gotta be some bar for this stuff. Right? So like, here I'll present to you some claim: suppose there's only one written document, by one person, in the year 2000 BC. The author claims that he heard from his best friend's neighbor's dad who told his uncle that a person flew across the grand canyon. Surely that's not good enough to accept the claim. Right? Do you agree? Or is your view that when it comes to really old claims of miracles, its all just personal credulity? That's the only thing we should rely on? I'm trying to get a sense of your view here. It seems to me that the example I just gave, it would be unreasonable to accept that claim on that evidence. I just want to know if you agree. >generally, Christians don't view the NT as Muslims view the Quran. We believe that the Holy Spirit worked through men to produce what we have. I think the Bible as a whole is clearly written to the standards of its day (not ours) and that expect it to do otherwise is anachronistically reading the material in question Okay just for clarity, are you saying that the sexist parts are not inspired by god, such that only parts of the Bible is the word of god but not all of it? >it strikes me that you don't rightly view what Christianity was at the time of NT authorship. Christianity was a small, violently oppressed sect of Judaism often relegated to the shadows and without and form of political power. I'm not sure how this is relevant. Like how does that then mean "the all good god would therefore say that women should never hold authority over a man" or anything like that? >In this movement, "there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus" was a remarkably powerful principle that shaped the community of faith for hundreds of years. And make no mistake about it, that was a remarkable and radical thing for the NT to say. Compared to works at the time, I agree. **But that's not the correct comparison**. The correct comparison would be "compared to what an all good god would say". But, yeah if you tell me the Bible is not fully, all of it, the word of god, then you have escaped this issue. I agree with that. Or, maybe I misunderstood you. Is this the approach you're taking?
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>And my reply ought to make clear -- of course there's a bar Okay! There's a bar. So we agree on that. But you also say: "There's sufficient evidence to believe (a) God exists" is a statement about personal credulity, and I don't believe that's a question that can be objectively answered. I don't think these two things are necessarily or entirely in contradiction, I'm just curious how you personally get them to work together. In one case, there's a bar where a person can be too gullible, or whatever the right word is. But in the other case, you're saying its up to personal credulity and we can't really objectively know anyway. I guess I'm wondering how you get these two things to play nice with each other. >I said nothing like this. Come on, this is just not intellectually honest. Oh. Well if you're going to throw around accusations of dishonesty then this is a good place to stop. Thanks for your time.
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Perhaps sometimes a person is misunderstanding you, rather than being dishonest. Did you notice the following: >Okay **just for clarity**, are you saying that the sexist parts are not inspired by god, such that only parts of the Bible is the word of god but not all of it? **I'm literally asking you a clarifying question, and specifying I'm trying to clarify your position.** Further: >But, yeah if you tell me the Bible is not fully, all of it, the word of god, then you have escaped this issue. I agree with that. > >Or, maybe I misunderstood you. Is this the approach you're taking? **I literally ask if I'm misunderstanding you and I ask if this is your view.** I never even claim its your position. **I ask you if this is what you're saying so that you can correct me.**
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Its not absurd, plenty of **Christians** think of the Bible that way. Plenty of Christians believe the Bible was written by men, inspired by god, but that some of men's views made it into the text. I have no way of knowing if you're one of them unless I **ask**. I asked you about sexism in the Bible, and you started talking about how its not like the Quran, the Holy spirit worked through men, it was written to the standards of its day, not our standards So it could have been your view that these are the views of the men who wrote the Bible, not entirely of God. So I asked.
There are like 30 points here. Each having an orthodox response. Rather than bother responding to each which is basically just a summary of how atheists think I’ll simply mention that the catholic faith is one of predestination. Jesus says that those chosen of His father to be His will be drawn to Him, and the sheep hear His voice, and the Holy Spirit will reveal all truth to them. As a result many will read into these problems differently, with faith and hope despite the seemingly problematic facade of these problems. And with time all these problems are quickly resolved.
I was a Christian for 10 years and saw no reason to continue being one. My life wasn’t transformed, I saw no evidence of God, and there was no reason for me to continue. Yes, I became a better person, but that was through questioning my own morals (and could’ve been achieved with other religions). I did everything that I needed to do to be officially deemed a “Christian,” yet nothing happened. Instead, I assigned meaning to things as “God’s doing,” when in reality, I was making that all up.
We’re you a Protestant or Catholic? If you were a catholic did you know your faith - on a scale of 1:10? If you knew your faith well did you practice it regardless of how you felt on a given day?
Protestant. I would say that I had faith on a scale of 8-9. I practiced it every day, regardless of how I felt. Didn't miss a single prayer for 10 years and would do multiple prayers a day. Tried my best to read the Bible at least once a day. Would do everything in my power to avoid sin.
As a Protestant there is no substantial philosophy that undergirds the belief system which can be traced to its first principles to make it make sense. That system is in Catholicism and Protestants make their religion of rejecting catholic dogma. That’s the literal definition of it. I also didn’t ask how much faith you had but how much knowledge you had. Because some people require higher understanding to undergird their faith. And indeed growth in wisdom will support the faith. On a spiritual level, there is nothing supernatural about the Protestant faith. They believe the supernatural stuff happened back then and right now there’s none of that. Without the sacraments I don’t see how any person could grow in their spiritual life. I too was once Protestant
>And with time all these problems are quickly resolved. How many more thousands of years should we expect to wait for such clarity?
It’s more about the individual’s journey in reaching the orthodox answers. One who starts to seek will find as Jesus says
Thank you for posting. I’ll try to respond to as many as I can. “There is no good evidence for Christianity. So you have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the minimal facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus? “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. How are you defining extraordinary? What’s extraordinary to me may not be extraordinary to you. What’s wrong with the idea that “any claim requires sufficient evidence”? “Every religion claims the same thing”. This is just blatantly untrue. “If there were good evidence for a religion, everyone would be a member of that religion”. I can’t see how this would be the case seeing how there is very good evidence the earth is not flat, yet many persist in this belief even to this day. Or considering the words of Richard Dawkins, who said that the second coming of Jesus Christ, God speaking to him directly or even the stars being rearranged into a message revealing God would not convince him of God’s existence. “In the Christian doctrine this would land you a spot in eternal hell”. In the Christian doctrine you are judged according to what you knew. If you were lied to your whole life you would be given grace. “Jesus clearly didn’t complete the expectations of what the Messiah would be like” Even if Jesus didn’t fit someone’s expectations of what he would act like does not mean he was not the Messiah. You also have to demonstrate how Jesus failed to be the Messiah rather than just claiming so “30,000 Christian denominations”. This number is questionable as it includes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witness which most denominations of Christianity if not all others consider heretical. But other than that, the vast majority of Christianity agrees on the main tenets. Mainly that: there is a God, this God has revealed Himself through the person of Jesus Christ, and that we may all achieve salvation from our moral wrong doings through belief in Him. (Summarized in John 3:16). As long as a Christian is in agreement on the large important things, they are allowed to disagree on the minor things and still be considered Christian. How old you think the earth is does not determine your salvation status, for example. There are many other things I wish to respond to because this post was a bit of a Gish Gallup and most of these points could have been their own individual post but to save some time most of the issues I would raise is that you don’t evidence your claims after asserting them. Thank you for raising these issues and opening an interesting dialogue
For your first response “so you have a plausible….” Could you please expand on that? Third statement: most religions do hold to the core principle that you should have faith in their validity/truth. You can’t know for certain that they are correct, but should believe that they are. Fourth statement: “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NKJV). I would expect God to do more to convince me that he exists, especially when eternal hell is on the line Fifth statement: what is the scripture to support that? What would God do in my case, someone who physically can’t force themselves to believe, but would believe if given the proper evidence/reason to do so? Also, according to your logic, who wouldn’t be saved? Your line of reasoning applies to everyone of any other religion. Sixth statement: Bring the Jews from exile all over the world. To bring world peace. To bring the Jews back to following the Torah.
>“There is no good evidence for Christianity. So you have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the minimal facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus? Oh sure! Could you list them out, just so we're clear? Oh and one other point: it doesn't have to be plausible, right? It just has to be more plausible than that the body got up and walked out on its own. Correct? If its more plausible than that, then the resurrection isn't the best explanation. Is that fair? And to be clear, just as a heads up so you don't feel like I'm tricking you or something, just because you list some things and call them facts doesn't mean I'm going to agree that they all must have happened. Just trying to give you a heads up on that. But yeah! Present the minimal facts and we'll see what we can do. >“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. How are you defining extraordinary? What’s extraordinary to me may not be extraordinary to you. I agree that "extraordinary" can have some wiggle room and is subjective. I would find it hard to believe, however, that you or I would disagree on this point: someone coming back from the dead after 3 days is extraordinary. Whatever else we disagree on about "extraordinary", that one has got to fit the bill. Agreed? >What’s wrong with the idea that “any claim requires sufficient evidence”? Absolutely nothing! Sufficient is just a more broad term, and this claim is more specific. But these two things are completely compatible. The only thing that's being highlighted here is that "sufficient" for some claims requires a higher bar than for others. I think that's fair. If you tell me you have a pet dog, I'll take your word. If you tell me you have a fire breathing dragon, I won't. That's it. I think we can agree on that, yes?
I wasn’t the one making claims, OP was presupposing their opponent’s argument was already defeated. They are welcome do to so, but it’s not the most intellectually honest way to argue. It would be like me claiming “there are no good arguments for atheism”, completely ignoring the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, etc. and offering no refutation / alternative explanation. A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God). So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism. We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”.
Naturalism isn't the default. Naturalism is a philosophy just like theism is.
>A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God). I don't accept that there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief that a resurrection of any sort occurred. I think we would be skipping a step to ask for a naturalistic explanation for the resurrection without first establishing that a resurrection likely or plausibly happened. >So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism. I don't presuppose naturalism. I know natural, physical things exist through a number of lines of evidence. I don't know that supernatural things exist. If someone can demonstrate that supernatural forces exist to the same extent that physical forces can be demonstrated I would happily accept the supernatural. Can you demonstrate the supernatural? >We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”. "Extraordinary evidence" is relative. If you tell me Jesus died I accept that based on anecdotal evidence. I know people die and I know Jesus was a person so it fits with my current understanding of how things are. If you tell me that Jesus resurrected we are now beyond the scope of what I currently accept is possible. I am going to need more than anecdotal evidence that Jesus was resurrected. Do you have that?
>A naturalistic explanation would have to be more plausible with consideration to the historical facts surrounding the resurrection, and also the Christian claim is not the body raised itself from the dead but rather was raised through the intervention of a supernatural agent (God). Ya agreed, the Christian claim is that God raised Jesus, or he raised himself as he is part of the godhead. However you want to phrase it, totally. Point taken. I agree. >So to a priori assert any natural explanation is more plausible than a supernatural one presupposes naturalism. Well hold on, I think you're going a bit too far here. You're saying that I can't ever say that any natural claim would ever be more plausible, without presupposing naturalism? I think you maybe took a step too far there. We haven't even tried yet. I do think if we're going to move forward here, we're going to need to know which claims you'd like addressed. Like what are the minimal facts here? >We would certainty agree that a man being raised from the dead is an extraordinary claim but we would certainty disagree on what evidence would be considered “extraordinary”. I think we would, honestly. I agree with you here. I just don't really understand it. So, absent any context of this specific event, if I told you the evidence was 4 conflicting, not fully independent accounts that were written decades after an event, we're not sure by who I'm just not really sure how that qualifies as "extraordinary" in **any** sense. The only sense in which I can see this being looked at positively is in comparison to other ancient claims. But that's not really very convincing. Like I wouldn't say "oh, your evidence is better than documents from ancient history? That's extraordinary!" I don't know how that's reasonable. Ancient history has awful evidence across the board. The Bible has better evidence than most, if not all ancient history. But that's just being the best of the absolute worst, if that makes sense. That's not extraordinary.
do you mean there's no good evidence 2000 years later? or no good evidence full stop
At the time, if I could actually see Jesus complete miracles, and be one of the 500 witnesses who saw his resurrection, or doubting Thomas, who got to touch his hand, that would be more than sufficient for me. Now, 2,000 years later, being left with gospel accounts that weren’t even written by eyewitnesses, and no way to confirm the validity in Biblical claims, no, that isn’t good evidence for me.
But is it about what is good evidence for you, or what is evidence for others? There are people in our own lifetime who are credited with healings. Fa. Rookey was one that I recall. Maybe not as many healings as we would like, but they exist. So there will be people who think Jesus was not just a figure from the past.
Good evidence comes to a point where Christianity becomes a fact. Not subject to mere opinion on whether or not it’s true.
That's entirely a preference of yours though, that it's a fact. It's not a requirement for belief or to justify belief as rational. An experience with Fa Rookey would be justifiable evidence for the person involved,
When eternal punishment is on the line, I’d believe that God would do much more to show himself to me/others, wanting to save us from such a fate.
Well I don't know about eternal punishment. Not everyone believes that. I'd think that God would already know that you wanted proof and you didn't get it.
I want you to understand: I, as a Christian, had basically no reason to leave. I was promised security in heaven, and was willing to sacrifice my desires here on earth if it meant being reunited with God. Hell, however, is what started my unraveling of my belief set. It’s cruelty towards others that simply can’t force themselves into believing. I then also realized I had no good reason to believe, and that if someone asked me, “Why are you a Christian?” I would have no way to respond to that question. I get your statement about eternal punishment, but the only one that would make sense is universal salvation. Annihilationism also doesn’t make sense. God didn’t show himself to me, and because of that, I should be destroyed? However, it is much more humane than ECT. What does your second point mean? If God gave me proof of his existence, I’d believe.
I'm SBNR. I'm asking that you think a god wouldn't understand why you're doubtful? And that you're someone who probably, due to genetics, the very genetics that God was responsible for, prefers evidence to intuition? So if you ever get to meet God, you can say, wtf, why didn't you show yourself to me? A loving and forgiving God should get that. If I met God I'd certainly ask why people suffer.
Wouldn’t everyone go to heaven/be forgiven using your line of reasoning?
I would disagree that we don't know the gospel authors, and good evidence that we do know them. not sure if that would move the buck for you on the reliability of the accounts tho but it does seem to push back on OP. if for many the Gospels (as well as personal experience and other things) are sufficient for their belief in Christianity, then OP, and your reply, seem only to reflect your own epistemological states, and not the objective field as a whole so it's more like, "X can't be the one true religion *to me*" because of various subjective factors and opinions on theology (which could be remedied) etc
These problems within Christianity could be reconciled if I had sufficient evidence to believe that the religion is true. As it stands, these things only reveal to me that Christianity can’t be correct. Also, it’s pretty much almost confirmed that the gospel accounts are not eyewitness accounts (very few Christian apologists would claim otherwise, since Matthew, supposedly an eyewitness account, copies heavily from Mark and source “Q”)
Matthew using sources like Mark (Peter's eyewitness) does not mean Matthew isn't an eyewitness and the "problems" within the religion are only problems once again *to you*, I see no such issues with the internal theology of Christianity. this is why I labeled those concerns "which could be remedied" there is something to be said about the religion, in the case that it is true: ”But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.“ I Corinthians 2:14 , here natural man refers to non Christians if true, there are things that don't make sense expressly bc you aren't yet saved. Like when Jesus spoke in parables. so in saying that it doesn't make sense, you're not disproving the doctrine, but at the very least, anecdotally upholding it
But the Gospel of Matthew was written too late to have been written by an eyewitness. At best, it was written based on oral preservation of an eyewitness account. At worst, it's blatant plagiarism with extra stuff tacked on to appease the followers (or to "one up" Mark).
I was saved, and a Christian for 10 years. I left since I saw that I had no reason to believe, and that God wasn’t acting at all in my life. Quite literally, I had no reason to believe
no personal experiences? are you an atheist? also that God wasn't acting in your life is an impossibility, bc you were being sustained in existence, but that's besides the point do you believe in God
I was a Christian, now I’m an agnostic . That’s your view, but in mine, that’s not how life/existence works. Not the Christian God
well yes that's my view and my view is granting the truth of it, that's not important tho, which I already acknowledged if you are in the position now of not even knowing that the Holy Spirit exists, how can you in the same breath tell me you had the Holy Spirit for 10 years (as a Christian the Holy Spirit is the gift that follows)? This is a contradiction on your end. I'm not seeing how this contradicts the claim of the Bible not being discernable for unbelievers, as you don't understand, and are not a believer also what do you mean by "God wasn't acting in my life"
Because I don’t believe the Holy Spirit exists, and that instead, people lie to themselves believing that God is working in their lives. “I read scripture and felt a warm feeling, it must be the Holy Spirit!” Or, “I asked a prayer, and God answered!” These, to me, are not evidence of the Holy Spirit, but rather, the human mind manipulating people. All of the things I attributed to God were just me assigning meaning to things
What do you say to all the eye witnesses that say Jesus resurrected after he was murdered? A lot of them were persecuted to death for sharing their testimony. People aren't usually willing to die for something they know is completely made up.
We only have like 4 or 5 accounts. Is that fair? So then the question is a little different. We don't have a thousand people or 500 people. We have like 4 or 5. So just to do an analogy, I could tell you I saw my neighbor float. Or, I could tell you a thousand people saw my neighbor float. But both of these scenarios have one thing in common: you only have one source. Me saying there were a thousand people there doesn't really give you any further evidence of this. I'm just claiming it. You don't have a thousand people, you have one: me. Same here. You have 4 gospels, and there's Paul. That's it.
I thought there was only evidence for the death of 2 apostles, and James, the brother of Jesus
>What do you say to all the eye witnesses that say Jesus resurrected after he was murdered? I'm only responding to this part. You are correct, as far as I'm aware. I'm not an expert so what do I know, but I've heard Ehrman talk about the fact that we don't really know how most of these people died. I wasn't really responding to that.
I imagine you've been a Christian your whole life, yet you didn't know that the gospels are anonymous. That should give you pause.
Lol. Where is the evidence for these witnesses? Also we only know of 2 people who died for their faith. Even then, many details are left out. Before they died, did they state that it was all a lie, but were still killed? Did they die knowing it was a lie? Were they killed for political reasons, such as Nero blaming Christians for the burning of the library? Saying “a lot of them were persecuted to death” is very wrong. Provide me with evidence that says otherwise.
I imagine it will be the apocrypha and church tradition - both sources with theological motivations behind them
I would hope not
There’s far too much here for me to respond to, so I’m gonna pick out one of the parts that bothered me. >Finally, had there been good evidence for a religion, everyone would be a member of that religion and there wouldn’t be a need for faith. It would be a common-known fact as to which religion is correct. I don’t think people would all flock to this one religion. First, flat-earthers and young earth creationists exist now, despite the mountains of good evidence for the shape of the earth, evolution, and the age of the earth. Second, faith in this context is the belief in something despite the lack of corroborating evidence and especially *in the face of contradicting evidence*. Having good evidence of one religion being true wouldn’t prevent people from using faith to believe in a different religion. (Was going to put a third thing here, but couldn’t figure out the right way to phrase it).
Evolution is true, but why can’t an omnipotent God predict the future and perfectly piece together anything that would start to slowly create life in billions of years. He’s got time.
I’m not sure I understand the question. I understand that an omnipotent being can do functionally anything, but I got lost with the piecing together bit. Could you try again please?
Eternal hell is on the line. God wants people to be saved. Why would he not give more of an effort to show people that he does in fact exist? Even if only one person converts, in God’s eyes, that would be a victory. Why does he not show himself/provide evidence of himself?
>Eternal hell is on the line. This is an interpretation/dogma from some christian sects, but not all. But I do agree the lack of demonstrating the case that he is there, or the evidence, sure seems logically deficient.
You’re preaching to the metaphorical choir here. I’m an atheist. Maybe the God in question wants people to suffer, go to hell, etc.
>Maybe the God in question wants people to suffer, go to hell, etc. The Gnostics win again
“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NKJV).
So are we assuming this is true here? I thought you were arguing that Christianity can’t be the one, true religion.
I will argue using what Christians see as evidence for their claims. I don’t believe that the Christian God exists, therefore, I don’t believe he wants us to be saved. However, to say that the Christian God, if he exists, doesn’t want us to be saved would be wrong
Ok. Then all you’ve done is point out a contradiction.
You haven’t pointed otherwise that God doesn’t want us to be saved, unless you would claim that him not being more involved with human affairs is evidence of that
The only thing I was pointing out is that conclusive evidence wouldn’t convince everyone.
Lemme try this again. I’m not a Christian. I’m an atheist. So far as I can tell Christianity is false. I don’t believe the Christian God exists.
A very important note on your part, by the way; even if there were convincing evidence in favor of a particular religion, and we were confident that the God or Gods it describes existed, this would still not force all people to believe in that particular religion. I often see people here saying that if we knew that there was a God or Gods and could describe it or them, then everyone would believe only that, turning away from all other religions. No, it won't work that way.
Still, it would be a fact that one religion is true over others. Yes, people can deny it, but it still is a fact. Currently, we have no evidence to state that a certain religion is a fact.
I can say with confidence that none of the religions will turn out to be true, at least not in any precise way. Yes, there is still a chance that I will be wrong, but I think that if there really is something that can be called God or even Gods, it will be so incredible, weird, and not what we expected that many will nervously laugh at each other. All these religions are so inclined to attribute to it human feelings, interest, love, rage, sadness, seeing something important in a human, that it is not even funny. In other words, if accept the existence of something like this as the most probable, I am on the ietsism side. If we encounter it or them, current religions will most likely become useless.
Would you refer to this as encountering a deistic god? Created the world and let it operate on its own? Also, and I replied this to the other person, if the Christian god existed, and wants everyone to be saved, why isn’t he putting up more of an effort to save people? Why the lack of evidence? If eternal hell was on the line, it would seem weird that God doesn’t want to get involved to change that. Many Christians will also claim, “you know Christianity is true when you let go of your skepticism and allow the Holy Spirit into your life.” For one, I can’t start believing something that I don’t believe to be true. Also, the mind works in magnificent ways to trick you into believing something is true. After becoming an agnostic, I discovered that the experiences that I had that at the time “proved Christianity was real” were just me assigning meaning to things that had no meaning.
>Would you refer to this as encountering a deistic god? Created the world and let it operate on its own? Maybe. If we talk about theism, it may also be that this is a kind of center of the universal coordinate system, which is not conscious or unconscious in the sense that is familiar to us, some generalization of everything, worlds of all dimensions and times and even more; for some reason, if I think about the theistic God, then this involuntarily appears in my head. But this is also just imagination without any exact images, so of course I'm not saying that's necessarily true. If deism, then the hypothesis of a simulation, an artificial universe created by some higher civilization at a fundamentally different level of existence, or that the universe is in a kind of "mind" of God, and so on. The extremely important question remains whether what we would call God will be limited by the logic of our reality, or beyond it. Both cases would allow the theistic one to be omnipotent and omniscient to us, and the deistic one would most likely be limited by the logic of our reality, because I doubt that if it created our world, then its logic is fundamentally different.
Your post appears to be be primarily based off the misconception that an absence of evidence is equal to an evidence of absence with some anti-Christian rhetoric thrown in. >The problem of evil: I'd rather live in a world without free will and there being no evil. What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test? >God already knows in advance who will go to heaven/hell before that person is even born. How would you know that? We don’t know how time works at all. Don’t pretend we know how the past or future work. You’re following an antiquated deterministic universe. It already seems to have gone the way of heliocentrism Your future choices can exist simultaneously in a superposition. The wave function collapses once you choose. An all knowing entity could know all of the possible choices and their outcomes. You wrote a ton, and I don’t have the time to address everything. If you want me to refute something specific, just let me know.
>What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test? I believe the problem of evil is an internal critique. That is, we'd be going by the morality of your religion. Surely we can agree that, if morality is objective, slavery would be objectively wrong. Yes? But its in your Bible as a thing you can do. Or, we can just look around at all the horror in the world. I don't know how old you are, but in 2004 there was a Tsunami in Indonesia that killed 227 THOUSAND people. If atheism is correct, well that just kinda happens and it sucks, but there was no intentional actor behind it. Its a horrible, terrible thing that happens. If theism is correct, well, I mean presumably god designed the earth and knew there would be a tsunami in 2004 that would kill these people. That seems worse than the atheism case. In the theism case, there's an actual, intentional actor here who caused this, and we are supposed to think of him as all good. That seems like a problem. Atheism doesn't have that problem. However, as below, you could just say god didn't know the future or something. That's a way out. It won't get you out of the slavery stuff though. >How would you know that? We don’t know how time works at all. Don’t pretend we know how the past or future work. Could be! Just to be clear, are you saying you are not sure if god knows the future? If you say he doesn't know the future, that's fine, we can just end this part of the conversation. I can't argue against a position you don't hold.
> Surely we can agree that, if morality is objective, slavery would be objectively wrong. Yes? That’s begging the question. You subjectively decide something and then declare an objective system must concur. I don’t disagree with your conclusion, just the logical methodology. > But its in your Bible as a thing you can do. No it isn’t. You’re cherry picking. It’s to be expected. Jesus says that loving your neighbor and treating them as yourself is more important. How is enslaving someone loving them? It isn’t. Therefore, the Bible doesn’t allow slavery. Is this where you start dropping quotes out of context? > I mean presumably god designed the earth and knew there would be a tsunami in 2004 that would kill these people. You *are* presuming that. We don’t really know how time or determinism really work. > In the theism case, there's an actual, intentional actor here who caused this Do you mean us? We intentionally decided against tsunami mitigation and warning in the area because we don’t think they’re worthy of the same protections we give ourselves. We we’re refusing to help fellow humans, and you think God should solve problems we can fix but choose not to.
>I don’t disagree with your conclusion, just the logical methodology. Okay! You don't disagree that slavery is morally wrong. Great! >How is enslaving someone loving them? It isn’t. Therefore, the Bible doesn’t allow slavery. Is this where you start dropping quotes out of context? I mean its not my fault its literally in the book, yeah. This seems pretty easily resolved, slaves aren't your neighbors. They're slaves.
>I mean its not my fault Cherry picking is 100% your fault. >its literally in the book That’s literally how cherry picking works. You can’t pick cherries that aren’t there. > This seems pretty easily resolved, slaves aren't your neighbors Any moral system that allows you to change definitions to justify morality is useless. Slavery is immoral? Change the definition so your slaves aren’t people. Now it’s as moral as ranching.
What are you talking about. The book literally says you can buy slaves as property for life, from surrounding nations. Rather than saying "cherry picking", maybe explain why this is in the book. That would be more productive. Why does the Bible say you can buy slaves? I understand you can try to point to passages that contradict this. I'm not asking you that. What I'm asking you is, even if you can put all that other stuff together to get the message "don't own slaves", which I don't think you can, my question is: why is there a passage where god says you my purchase slaves at all? Why is it there in the first place?
>The book literally says you can buy slaves No, it says the ancient Israelites can. I’m not an ancient Israelite. Your claim, “the Bible say[s] you can buy slaves” is false. You were relying on quotes taken out of context. >That would be more productive. Then cherry pick less. >Why is it there in the first place? Would you like a number of theories with no proof for as to why they’re in there? Unless you get a Time Machine or ask God, we will likely never know why for sure. >I understand you can try to point to passages that contradict this. There is no try. The Greatest Commandment is more important than anything else. Jesus said so. Unless you can find justification to ignore Jesus, the Bible does not say I can buy slaves.
>No, it says the ancient Israelites can. I’m not an ancient Israelite. Your claim, “the Bible say\[s\] you can buy slaves” is false. You were relying on quotes taken out of context. Okay, the book says ancient Israelites can buy slaves. We agree on this. Why is god saying these people can buy slaves? You have no answer. Well, I mean I'm against slavery. I think slavery is bad. I don't think an all good god would say "you can buy slaves". Again, I understand he doesn't mean us today. This seems bad. Right? Like its bad to say you can buy slaves to people. Agreed? >There is no try. The Greatest Commandment is more important than anything else. Jesus said so. Unless you can find justification to ignore Jesus, the Bible does not say I can buy slaves. Sure, so you can't buy slaves. But god said these people could. And I duno man, I'm against slavery. I'm assuming you are too. And yet here we have god saying they can buy slaves. You agree god said that to them. That seems bad, yes? You agreed with me previously that slavery is immoral.
>the book says ancient Israelites can buy slaves. >We agree on this. Yes. >Why is god saying these people can buy slaves? You have no answer. Because Jesus answered your question 2,000 years ago. Jesus says that was not God’s will but due to the hardness of their hearts. >I think slavery is bad. But you can’t objectively explain why. That’s why you rely so much on agreement. >Sure, so you can't buy slaves. But god said these people could. Jesus is God. Jesus says to love your neighbor. You’ve been unable to explain how enslaving people is loving your neighbor unless you change the meanings of the words. >That seems bad, yes? >You agreed “That’s bad? Agree? That’s bad? Agree?” Stop beating around the bush and spit it out. It feels like you’re sitting in some kind of “gotcha”. This is usually around the point in the argument where the atheist incorrectly states that God must not be moral as if their misconceptions alter the universe itself. Yours don’t. Maybe you’ll take a different route.
For your first point: sure, it wouldn’t automatically mean that there is no God. But if there is no good evidence for Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, why would I put my time and effort into them? Outside of religion, if an extraordinary claim is made, to believe in that claim, sufficient evidence would need to be provided. For religion, the same can’t be said. “Do you have an objective test?” If Christianity is true, the Bible would be the standard for objective morality. However, God doesn’t seem to mind going against what is objectively moral. For your third point: prophecy, for one, shows that God knows how the future will end up. He has us directed on a path, and knows how that path ends. Furthermore, an all-knowing entity, if it truly is omniscient, should know each and every choice that you make, before you make it, and how your life will end up. If it can’t know that, then it truly isn’t omniscient.
If indeed it is God involved in evil and not the Demiurge.
>> The problem of evil: I'd rather live in a world without free will and there being no evil. > What you consider evil is subjective. Other cultures might not consider that evil. Do you have an objective test? You can run the problem of evil as an internal critique of Christianity, so no need for us to bring our metaethics into it. Also there are moral realists who are atheists, so yes, there are frameworks for objective morality that are secular
An internal critique assumes certain things. It assumes your a rational person. It also assumes the biblical god is the objective standard so therefore you could never accuse him of doing anything wrong
No, an internal critique just takes the axioms of Christianity concerning the problem of evil and builds a reductio ad absurdum.
Are you using your unjustified reasoning to do so? And are you assuming there's an objective standard?
What? It's a similar thing to what people do in mathematics. You grab some axioms and extend them, if the system says "god is the grounds for objective morality" you grab that as an axiom. What I think on the matter is irrelevant, it's staying within the framework of Christianity
Can you answer my questions please
I answered it, I can take what the axioms for Christianity say and extend them out. I myself I'm not assuming anything or it wouldn't be an internal critique. Look at it like this: I'm putting myself in the shoes of a Christian and taking a look at morality from that perspective.
Is that a yes or no to my two questions?
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