Atheists, why debate christians?

Great Debates
281

I’ll say it. Countering the Cosmological argument is childishly simple.

Zippo.

He said that Christian salvation theology is not justified by the OT (which it isn’t). This basically shows a logical flaw in Christian theology. Christians have historically tried to argue to the contrary (indeed, attempts are made in the New Testament itself), but nothing that holds up to examination.
You first referred to “arguments for the Christian god”, but you’ve now changed it to two arguments that you know, and then you admit that you don’t know very many of the reasons for Christianity. It seems that you are in no position to comment on how easy the counterarguments are. Are you willing to retract your claim that they are “laughably easy”?I didn’t ask you why Christians accept things – I asked you for a concise, coherent explanation of why there are intelligent, educated Christians. Also, the “since childhood” riff is not an explanation. Why were the parents Christians, and their parents, and so on? It’s clear that you got nuttin’.I didn’t ask you to “refute god”. I asked you to support your claims:
Claim #1. All the attempts at rational arguments for any god are fairly simple to refute
Claim #2. The arguments for the Christian god as a special case for a god are laughably easy to refute.

You have not provided support for your claims. But, thanks for trying.
[/QUOTE]

Try me, bro. I can easily and effortlessly refute any argument for any supernatural claim you want to make.

Arguments specifically for the supernatural claims of Christianity are especially easy to knock down.

282

Well, if that’s your question, boiled down, “since childhood” is quite a good response, and for your follow-up question of why the parents were Christian, a few good responses come to mind:

  1. One’s Christianity doesn’t necessarily come from one’s parents (though the 90%+ correlation of one’s religion to one’s parents`religion is telling). One could become a Christian after being converted by a missionary or being exposed to Christianty in some social way. I’m not aware of anyone who ever “discovered” Christianity wholly independently, aside from (presumably) the first Christian.

  2. The parents might be Christians, but they aren’t necessarily the same type of Christians. The religion itself is undergoing constant evolution in response to the surrounding environment, and Christians widely seperated by geography (i.e. compare a Christian in Oregon to one in Rumania) or time (i.e. compare a Christian in modern-day Germany to one in 14th-century Germany) and there can be quite the variance in rituals and icons and whatnot, to the point where one Christian looks at the other’s Christianity and declares it to be wildly incorrect. The Catholic Church could enforce a fair degree of uniformity, but they do not represent all Christians and even with Catholicism are schisms and whatnot.

  3. Christianity itself didn’t just spring into existence - it absorbed numerous traditions from existing faiths, cobbling them together into a successful pattern based on a few simple ideas that actually have no real evidence going for them:

3a. God exists.
3b. Jesus is/was his son.
3c. Some stuff about original sin being resolved and such…

There are intelligent, educated people who find baseball fascinating, and its traditional forms have (with a few minor evolutionary changes here and there) have been around for 200 years, more or less. It’s fine that they enjoy it, but if they try to assign the game some cosmic significance, they take their chances at being lampooned and dismissed for it.

283

Much of Christianity is predicated on misreadings of the Bible, for instance by the person who wrote Matthew. The actual Messianic prophecies have little or nothing to do with the claims about Jesus.

Like everyone else in this country, I have been inundated with Christian claims.
The top ones, off the top of my head, are:

  1. It must have happened because the Bible, written by eyewitnesses, says so. I trust I don’t have to refute that one, not after the current threads.
  2. It is true because it fulfilled the prophecies in the OT, as you call it. No, because we don’t know what part of the story was made up to fulfill prophecies (like the virgin birth, which fulfilled a nonexistent prophecy) and that most of the so-called prophecies are tortured misreadings not in any way resembling their purpose.
  3. Christianity must be right because it grew so fast. So must Islam, then.

As for parents, Hinduism must be correct because Hindus have Hindu parents who have Hindu parents and so on. Plus, for most of Western history, deciding not to be a Christian was not good for your health. (Trust me, this is in my genes.) If that is your argument, it is hilariously easy to refute.

My definition of fairly simple might involve more complicated arguments than most people’s, I must say, but then I spend a lot of time analyzing arguments when reviewing papers, etc. The arguments Liberal made for God were not easy to refute, and were better thought out and more logical than any others I’ve seen in almost 40 years of doing this on-line. But, survey the arguments for God around here. They are pretty much first cause arguments and “you can’t disprove it” arguments. Both fairly easy.
Now that I’ve given some Christian arguments and their refutations, why not give some good ones if you don’t like the ones I gave. I admit I’ve only read the NT once, and was not impressed. From the perspective of someone not indoctrinated in Jesus from an early age, the whole thing seems as about a believable as a cargo cult, except that the planes did actually show up once. (I think Jesus did live, btw, but he didn’t do any miracles.)

284

OK, here…I hope you accept, are the commonly cited best proofs of the existence of god.

There are more of course but I shan’t bore everyone with the rest. They are all asserted without evidence and remember, these are the distillation of the best theological and philosophical minds of history…you have something novel and new? I’d love to hear it.

Heard them all before, there is never anything novel put forward as evidence and never anything that rises above anecdote, question begging and circular reasoning.
If you do have anything substantial let me know and we can discuss it, though I can already see you have a much loser definition of “evidence” than I do.

Of course it is an imperfect explanation, my own view is that we use rational enquiry and empiricism to build a more useful model. Whereas the traditional approach of religion is to preserve ignorance for as long as possible, to keep asserting “god did it” until forced by scientific progress to concede defeat.

285

In my experience debating religion with the Straight Dope atheists is like debating with a parrot. All you get is the same few phrases repeated over and over.

Sqwark
There is no evidence for God
Sqwark
It’s up to religious people to prove their claims
Squark

I don’t think I have ever seen an SDMB atheist give a coherent, reasonable argument as to why anyone should accept atheism. They all rely on the fallacious logic that unless religion generally or Christianity specifically is proven then atheism is somehow true. It is also a statement of faith amoung these people that there is actually no evidence for religion, since this belief is never supported by arguement or it seems based on observation and evidence.

I might be surprised and someone in this thread might make a genuine attempt to address these issues, but I doubt it.

Calculon.

286

These are obvious mis-characterisations and parodies of a number of arguments. The fact that you apparently can’t tell the difference between these and the actual well formulated arguments speaks volumes.

Calculon.

287

Give me one piece of actual evidence and you’ll never hear that statement from this atheist again.

Also, do you believe in the IPU? If not, why not? If not, what’s different about God?

288

That’s pretty much all we need. You have the burden of proof, not us.

What does “accept atheism” mean? Atheism isn’t anything to accept. it’s not a belief, it’s an absence of belief. It requires no argument. It’s the logical default.

Atheism is not something that can be “true” or “untrue.” It’s not an assertion. It’s an absence of assertion.

There is abundant evidence for religion. Religion is all around us. There is, however, no evdience for any of the supernatural claims made by religion.

What kind of circular horseshit is this? I don’t even know what you’re asking for. You want us to prove there’s no evidence? The proof is the deafening lack of evidence. It speaks for itself.

289

I can’t help it if this is a simpler concept than you’d prefer it to be.
If you can’t wrap your head around why we find the evidence lacking and why the burden of proof lies with those who claim that gods exist…well, you are going to struggle here.

Seriously?

“There is not sufficient evidence for the existence of god”

You surely must’ve seen that or a variation of it scores of times. Or perhaps not, well there it is now. Glad to help.

You are confused here, no-one claims that there is no evidence for religion, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a church before, big pointy things yes?
Nor do I think anyone claims atheism is in some way “true” (whatever you mean by that).
Merely that one is an atheist until given reason to be otherwise. It is the default state until one chooses to believe in a deity.

you’ve already likened some posters to parrots, I suspect you aren’t quite ready to debate in good faith.

290

The examples are tongue in cheek but the headlines are absolutely correct.

In what way is the ontological argument misrepresented? or any of the others?

if you want the dry facts have these

See? less catchy and yet equally assertion heavy and evidence free.

291

Of course. First, it’s a reasonable demand. Second, you don’t have any evidence, so it’s a good argument. And third, atheist arguments tend to be repetitive because religion is intellectually sterile. Religion doesn’t advance, it doesn’t come up with new evidence; it can seldom even come up with a new rhetorical ploy. Religion is blatantly stupid now for the same reasons it was yesterday, last year, last decade. You hear the same arguments from atheists over and over because there’s nothing new to argue against. Just the propped up corpse of a bronze age mythology.

As said, it’s your obligation to provide evidence that your particular sky thug is real, not ours to demonstrate that there’s a lack of evidence for all the infinite numbers of possible nonexistent entities. You of course want to force atheists to prove a negative because whether you choose to admit it or not, you obviously full well know that there isn’t any evidence for your fantasy. If there was, you’d provide it because that would be such a strong argument for your side; but as you know there is no such evidence, so you try to use rhetorical tricks to make us look unreasonable for wanting evidence.

292

My hat is off to you, sir. Never in nearly 40 years of arguing about religion on line have I seen someone undermine his own credibility so efficiently. One of Dawkins’ main objections to religious arguments is that they involve special pleading. That yout think it is silly to be asked to “prove” (I assume you mean in the legal, not mathematical sense) your claim is exactly what he means.

So, you think the argument that since we have never seen a flying purple-people-eater, and proponents of their existence have never “proven” (in the legal sense) their existence, the lack of belief in them is invalid? And why not spend some of the effort in objecting to claims that there is no good evidence for religion in providing some? it is obvious that anyone saying there is no evidence of religion is engaging in hyperbole, since even the guy caught murdering someone on film in front of thousands would no doubt present some “evidence” of his innocence.

The only issue here is your lack of understanding of what constitutes a reasonable argument.

293

Interesting, but what’s point? Are you still trying to demonstrate that it is “laughably easy” to dispute claims about the Christian god? You’re not doing a very good job. All you’re presenting is a bunch of unsupported opinions.

I see. So now it’s not about arguments for God – it’s about arguments for God around here.

I looked up some of Liberal’s posts and it seems that he is/was a Christian, albeit a non-traditional one, and his arguments for God were based on the Christian God. You found his arguments “not easy to refute”, so they were neither “laughably easy” nor “fairly simple”. And, do you think that he is the smartest, most sophisticated theist in the world? Are you now willing to retract your claims?

I’m pointing out that some atheists make unsupported claims and then don’t provide support for those claims, just like some theists. And, just like some theists, they tapdance, move the goal posts, use “no True Scotsman”, miss the point, address the wrong issue, and are just plain sloppy.

I’m sure that you can do better than this, but I’m guessing you have little reason to do so.

294

So you don’t know the difference between a claim and a proof. Not good.

295

I don’t believe in God.

296

It certainly is. Name one claim that isn’t.

Try out any argument for any god you want. I will ruin any and all of them with considerable ease.

I never saw one of Liberal’s arguments that were not easy to refute, although it was often tedious and time consuming to do so because his argumentation was either very wordy and dense, or amorphous and vague or both.

You haven’t provided any examples of that in this thread.

297

He summarized the classical proofs very well. Turns out none of them are actual proofs. I promise, you can’t offer any kind of argument for any kind of supernatural claim that I can’t easily refute.

298

You’re getting down to the point here which is this: reading some book and concluding something does or does not exist is neither inherently rational nor irrational. It depends on the facts and logic behind the subject matter. The book could be quite compelling or complete crap.

What you are trying to do is skate over all that and pretend that merely because you can read some books about different topics and come to different conclusions, that makes all conclusions equally rational. What my version of your story shows is that you can’t do this. You have to consider whether the facts and logic are there, or not.

There was nothing flawed about my post at all. Your conclusion to the contrary is based on the assumption that it is rational to believe in something unless it is proven not to exist. This is nonsense and I don’t think you believe it. Or do you think it rational to believe in invisible pink elephants and vanishing fairies?

This point is made over and over in these thread and you (and your fellow travellers) never, ever get to grips with it or have any real reply. You will blather till the sun goes down about how your pet deity should get some slack because he hasn’t been proven not to exist, but you wouldn’t for a moment believe it rational to believe in every piece of nonsense that cannot be disproved.

In the end, you just believe in your particular god because you grew up with the idea of it and give it special status. You call your god “supernatural” but what you really mean by that is not that your god is outside nature but that it is outside the zone in which you choose to apply rational thought.

299

Do you feel that people who claim to are rational?

300

That’s me. A secular Christian, yep also called a cultural christian whatever floats your boat.

Allows me to function in a world that says it is following religion but in actual fact is only following cultural mores.