Ku Bop

Hello all:

I'm curious to know of any persuasive or pointed arguments for the non-existence of a Christian God. Are there any one-two arguments comparable to Pascal's wager and the "Liar, Lunatic, Lord" arguments.

Curious,

Ku Bop

Bible Humper

The problem of evil:

1. If God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil

2. If He is all powerful, He must be able to abolish evil

3. But evil exists.

The problem is, if you affirm two of these facts, you cannot affirm the third.

4. Therefore, an all powerful, loving God does not exist.


Would you care to offer the free will defense?

Bible Humper

Oops, my manners went out the window in my eagerness!

Welcome to Infidels!

Ku Bop

The problem of evil is indeed a big problem. Would you care to explain and critique the free will defense? I'm not familiar with it myself.

Thanks,

Ku Bop

Bible Humper

Hi, Ku Bop.

Since you don't use it yourself, I would prefer to discuss your own answer to this problem. For the sake of ease of reference, here is something I wrote about it not too long ago.....


The Free Will Defense.

First of all, the argument that the deity doesn't violate our freedom to believe in him or not has unacceptable implications for many of christianity's most cherished claims.

The first and most obvious are the numerous fantastical stories found in the Bible, the common Xian claim that the Bible is a credible eye-witness account needs to be abandoned if they are going to answer the above questions with the free-will defense. Xians who are fond of the free-will argument need to admit that the bible isn't credible enough to be evidence of anything.

Secondly, we have the Xian testimonies that claim the believer "felt the Holy Spirit" or "communicated with Jesus during prayer". These claims seem especially contradictory, how can one have free will to decide to believe if the deity makes it's presence manifest? Could these perceptions be compared to the make-believe lalaland which imaginative children inhabit, and could the Xian's alleged communication with Jesus be compared to the child's communications with his imaginary playmate Dinky the bunny-rabbit?

Third is the christian philosophy itself. Is it believable to claim that the christian philosophy came from the omniscient mind of an unearthly entity? If "the Word" was as profound and inspirational as one would expect from the deity, and indeed as profound as has been claimed by Xians, it would contain ideas that clearly could not be the product of human thought and would remove all doubt of the Bible having been inspired by an actual deity. Incidentally, there would also be a uniformity of interpretation, human inventions would be unable to even approximate the diety's profundity so the correct interpretation would be apparent.

Fourth is the credibility of miracle claims, which are the foundation of the religion. Despite the fact that all religions have claims of amazing magical phenomena, we are supposed to reject the claims of all other religions as "tall tales" but take the Xian claims seriously. If the Xian miracles have credibility that the others lack, the free-will to believe in Yahweh or not has been taken away in a rather ham-handed manner. Blatant magical events are nothing less than absolute proof of supernature, though the Xian miracles in reality don't seem to have any credibility that the others lack.

Fifth are the claims that prayer results in actual intervention by the deity on behalf of the Xian. If the deity was to actually intervene in a manner that allows for the free-will to believe or not, then he would have to do so in a manner that allows natural explanations and especially "coincidence explanations", in which case it is obviously wishful nonsense when the Xian proudly proclaims that the deity helped him out. Especially silly are the claims that the deity always answers prayer, just that the answer is often "no", if all events in the believer's life that he applies prayer to are manipulated by the deity, how can you invoke the free-will defense?

The free-will defense seems to fill a vital role for theologians by attemping to offer a rationalisation for why the universe works the way it does despite the benevolent attentions of an omnipotent deity. It fails. They say that "The Lord works in mysterious ways", well it isn't so mysterious any more if you pretend that he doesn't exist, and that the universe follows nothing's will, you can figure him out. The lightning rods on the churches are exhibit "A". If any theists are interested in disputing this point, there are numerous threads that deal with this specifically.

If a theist is still willing to swallow that bitter pill which is the free will idea, he is left with an entirely solipsistic conjecture as his religion.

In other words, he is saying that a universe where his deity exists is indistinguishable in EVERY WAY from one where he does not!

If solipsism is nonetheless enough for them, perhaps the christians should think about the possiblility that we are all brains in a laboratory, being fed stimuli by a sophisticated computer in a perfect simulation of reality.

In actual fact, this "brain in a laboratory" scenario trumps christianity immediately by virtue of the fact that we can see how it could be done, in principle, when technology is able to reverse engineer the brain, feed stimuli directly instead of through sense organs, etc.

Contrast this with any and all supernatural solipsistic scenarios which suffer from the embarrassing fact that supernaturalism has yet to be discovered despite the fact that there have been trillions of claims by billions of believer which all turned out to be naturalistic after all when the mysteries of the phenomenon in question were at last unraveled.

Supernature has no sound argument. Much less a theistic variant of it. Much less the specific christian version of the theistic variant of it! MUCH LESS the particular flavour of any sect of the specific Christian version of the theistic variant of it!

On top of everything I mentioned above, it is patently absurd to attribute to the transcendant mind of an omniscient entity an over-riding desire for his creations to believe in him, specifically to believe in him without any evidence. "To have faith."

It is instead suspiciously consistent with the petty desires of the human minds of a worldly priest class.

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: Bible Humper ]</p>

Bible Humper

Since it isn't wise to rely on your counterpart's presentation of your arguments, <a href="http://www.xenos.org/essays/evilpo.htm" target="_blank">here is a summary of the idea, written by a Christian.</a>

Uzzah

I've always liked the Argument from non-belief myself.

1. God is both omnipotent and omniscient.

2. God wants me to believe in him.

Because of 1, God knows exactly what it would take for me to believe in him and would be able to do it. And because of two, God wants me to believe in him, yet I don't. Therefore god does not exist.


Uzzah

Jamie_L

The <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theodore_drange/aeanb.html" target="_blank">arguement from non-belief</a>. It's only half of this article (arguement from evil is the other), but I like arguement from non-belief better. It's one I always thought about to myself before I found an article where someone expressed it better.

Essentially, the arguement goes like this: The Christian God is omnipotent. The Christian God (according to scripture) wants everyone to believe in Him. Everyone does not believe in Him. Therefore, the Christian God as defined does not exist.

Jamie

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: Jamie_L ]</p>

Arvel Joffi

Uzzah,

Well, an ominpotent and omniscient god does exist. But then, that sounds just like the angry, confused Old Testament god, doesn't it?

"Adam? Eve? Where are you? There you are! Forgive you? NEVER!"

Gemma Therese

Then, there would be no free-will.

If God forced us to worship Him, He would not be loving.

Gemma Therese