Sue Sponte

I've explained several times now, which apparently isn't sinking in. You apparently believe that only a Christian can form conclusions regarding nature or come to a belief as to the likelihood of things occuring in the future, which I simply cannot understand. There is no connection between the two and, in my mind, there is no logic to your statements.

I apologize that I apparently am unable to help you understand this. But it seems to me that these things are so self-evident that you will never see them.

Take care.

John Page

The fact is, Keith, the only facts you've provided relate to your belief. I don't believe in god, I'm still here, I'm a moral animal and your arguments have no force either. All this evidence supports atheism and relativism as the views that most closely approximate to the real world.

Your life may be meaningless without god (for you) but life does not need any ulterior purpose in order to go on.

Try it, Keith, try not believing in god for a while and see if you stop participating in a moral society.

Cheers, John

Keith

To paraphrase (forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing your answer), what you've said is that the reason we can be sure that the sun will rise again tomorrow is because we've observed that thus far, the sun has always risen day after day without fail. We can know certain things about the future because of our enormous body of empirical observations from the past.

This is begging the question. I'm not doubting that certain things keep happening with nearly perfect regularity. But the question is...how can you--as an atheist, know that this regularity (uniformity of nature) will continue even til tomorrow?

It isn't valid proof here, to assume the uniformity of nature in order to prove the uniformity of nature. How does the atheist make sense of this uniformity? Why is nature so intelligently designed, orchestrated, and purposeful? Isn't "nature" just a collection of blind chance processes? How do you explain the regularity?

Keith

Keith

What I'm showing is that ON YOUR WORLDVIEW nothing makes any sense because atheism destroys the preconditions for understanding anything.

On your worldview, morality, logic, and reason are, by nature, relative, which renders them all meaningless.

Without the ultimate moral standard (God), morality is relative and meaningless. Rape and murder might seem wrong to you, but perfectly fine to someone else. Who's morality is right?

On your worldview, human beings are the ultimate "standard" for what is/isn't reasonable. But 1000 humans often provide 1000 conflicting answers as to what is/isn't reasonable to believe.

My argument is an indirect proof--that if God doesn't exist, nothing can make sense. Reality, without God, is completely meaningless. No one can be any more "right" or "wrong" --about anything--than anyone else.

Keith

John Page

I understand you perfectly, Keith

Philosoft

Heh. You're absolutely right. Atheism has no ability to explain apparent design and order. Now, do you understand why that is totally irrelevant?

Your phraseology grows more clever by the post. "Denial of reality"? I can polemicize my arguments against theism as well, but is that really going to be necessary?
We decide this by engaging in debate, each side with its own school of thought. Your appeal to an objective standard is fallacious, because you can't objectively demonstrate the standard - you can only argue for its existence, like the rest of us.

Philosoft

And what do we have to assure that? God's word? Nope. Yours.

Now, if you can just get everyone to agree with you about the Bible's alleged non-unclarity, you might have something. Or how about asking God to assure me himself that your interpretations are correct?


Granting your position for the moment, it's arguably true that God means something specific by the words and sentences in the Bible. But, the very fact that so many different interpretations exist is irrefutable evidence that the Bible is at least partially unclear, at least to humans. Unless you intend to argue that all interpretations except yours are intentionally erroneous?

Keith

The source of the confusion over how to properly interpret the bible is almost entirely due to the fact that we humans find it nearly impossible to be objective. We tend to interpret facts exactly as we want to. We want to believe in our own ability to be "reasonable" with the evidence, but we don't always place Truth at the top of our priorities.

Take the O.J. Simpson murder trial for example...is there any evidence that could have convinced THAT JURY that O.J. was guilty? Of course not. The trial was basically 'finished' at the jury selection phase.

How about our last presidential election...who really won the election? Gore or Bush? The answer you will receive generally depends less on the evidence itself than on who prefers whom. We humans are a lot more objective when it comes to issues we don't really care about. On everything else we're quite biased.

Keith

John Page

Sorry to jump in, Philo, but Keith, please can you define or describe what you mean by "Truth". This might help in determining whether such truth might be considered objective w.r.t your opinion, my opinion and Philo's opinion.

Cheers, John

7thangel

Philosoft, you seem to basically prejudice Bible theists. The initial post asks about things that atheist could not answer. I guess the right approach is to take experimentation of all bible interpretation which could make sense, isn't it? I believe you have had taken already such step but still find no answer. But unless we don't find answers shouldn't we keep pressing on the experimentation? Why not try Keith's?