I’ve supported arguments I’ve made about evolution and genetics and other topics elsewhere. This thread was originally intended to educate you about atheists; unsurprisingly we’re now talking about something else because you’re apparently offended by anything any atheist says and would prefer registering that offense instead of moving through a series of questions and answers. Atheists don’t have to disprove gods to justify their views, and most of them acknowledge that they can’t do it. Many of them feel that’s not necessary, and I agree. It’s enough to demonstrate that most of the stuff that is chalked up to God has a more mundane cause, and you’re certainly not having much luck demonstrating that that’s not true.
It is not conclusive proof, but you cannot write off a total lack of evidence that easily. There is no evidence whatsoever anywhere that thousands of Hebrews were in Egypt, and it goes without saying there is evidence of other people who were there. The default proposition has to be that they weren’t there until there’s reason to think they were, and the Bible is not reason enough. The evidence says the Exodus story is a folk tradition intended to justify the Hebrews’ claim to the land they currently occupied (without leaving, if I remember right, southern Judea). The rest is really just excuse-making.
Meanwhile, I still agree there are some accurate points in the Bible when they are supported by other evidence. Care to comment on where this goes next?
There is no such thing as proof that an event never occurred.
Regarding the notion of insanity, by the way, I meant to point out that if I claimed that J.K. Rowling was inspired to write the Harry Potter series by actual knowledge of a clandestine society of magic users who live among us, and that in order to communicate with these beings I sought out snakes to converse with, and tied notes to wild owls, virtually no Christians would have any problem calling me deluded at a minimum.
We know the workers were not poorly treated slaves, we know that pottery didn’t change in the land if Israel after the supposed Exodus. We know that people can not turn sticks into snakes nor do we have any reason to believe that making gnats is harder than frogs.
Why should we believe your book, which is an obvious work of plagiary in many aspects over the thousands of other gods and mythologies that existed in the past.
ad hominim, You have given no evidence, you are the one making the extraordinary claim, can you not summon two she bears to kill dozens of children that laugh at your baldness?
How long can you live in a fish or do you prefer to travel by boat.
So did you not read, or not comprehend my post? I answered those questions. Do you need to have proper experimental protocols explained to you?
More projection. You’ve been shown both the factual and logical errors in everything you’ve said. In response, you have generally hopped up on the cross, insulted those who you disagree with or tried to handwave away your errors.
And yes, lack of evidence can indeed be conclusive proof that events didn’t occur. If I claim that I had 10 huge elephants dancing in my back yard last night. You check, and find not one footprint, let alone at least 40 prints from the dancing elephants. That is indeed proof that I haven’t had dancing elephants in my back yard.
Or if you want something simpler: you have a rhinoceros in your pocket. Do you honestly believe that you can’t show I’m wrong by checking your pocket and seeing if you actually do have a rhino there?
Bullshit.
You provided one link to “the Miracle story of Dr.Sean George”, as told by… Dr. Sean George. You also offered some glurge on a conference for “divine healing”. Of course, if such was an actual phenomena you should be able to find thousands of papers demonstrating that it is real. They should be free on pubmed, too.
When you start providing support we’ll stop saying you haven’t provided any.
All he’s basically saying here is that we might have missed any potential evidence. True, we might have. We might be missing evidence that the aliens built the pyramids. The problem with this is that what we do know doesn’t support an exodus. Assertions to Pharoah’s not recording losses to the contrary, there is no evidence of slavery or of the Jews. Further, if 1/2 million people wandered the desert for 40 years (improbable on the face of it, since the desert wasn’t really that big - what, did they walk in a circle for 40 years??) then there would, in all likelihood, be quite a bit of evidence. Archaeologists have spent decades searching that region (the Sinai Peninsula) and found nothing. Further, as presented in the Bible, the story is simply absurd (from here):
No one is surprised by the mundane claims that the Bible makes. It’s the extraordinary claims - the exodus, genesis, global flood, that are unsupportable. Just because the Bible is accurate on some details doesn’t mean we should swallow the rest whole cloth. Some of the epic of Gilgamesh is accurate on the details, that doesn’t mean that Gilgamesh ran through the underworld to save Enkidu.
Now I know you aren’t paying attention since I brought up the chiseling of Hatshepsut here I linked to the wikipage also. The fact is, this goes against your overall point since what it shows is that the evidence could not be fully destroyed. We still have those statues! Why don’t we have engravings of the Israelite slaves (with chisel marks)?
So what you’ve done is find one scholar (?) who says that the Exodus might have happened, but we have no empirical evidence of it. Whereas the consensus of scholarship says:
You actually did not address it beyond saying there is evidence for Jesus and not for Gary Coleman - that’s a viewpoint that is going to depend on who is evaluating the stories and what they consider evidence. This is one of the problems you’re having, I think: you already believe the Christian version, but you’re having trouble with the idea that other people don’t, and that they won’t be convinced by details that seem significant to you because they agree with what you already think.
The one that shows that Christianity has no reason to be privileged above all the other beliefs out there, and even proving science wrong, or the ‘supernatural’ real, would still not prove your God?
Handwaved. You handwaved it. You actually retreated after you were entreated to cleave to an objective epistemological standard that you could apply to any religion to judge its veracity. You decided it was a trap, since such an objective metric would apply to your religion too.
Why the relentless refusal to even tell me what qualifies as non-disputable evidence? Funny that you will accept evidence without question whenever it goes against Christianity.
BTW, why did you slap me on the wrist for derailing a thread when you have allowed this thread to morph into a big ugly mess way off from the OP? That kinda makes you a hypocrite, in my book.
Can you answer at least one question honestly? Why are you so determined to try and destroy my faith by claiming it is all ridiculous? What do you have to gain?
There is no such thing as “non-disputable” anything. All it takes is one idiot with a keyboard to dispute just about anything and everything on the 'net. There is, however, actual evidence and furthermore good evidence showing that many parts of your narrative are false. As usual, you demand to cast this as some sort of effort to persecute you, and even the act of showing that all religions are equally implausible seems like a deliberate and distinct attack on Christianity to you.
As pointed out, you can’t reason someone out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. Nobody is attempting to “destroy your faith” as it’s based on faith, not reason, obviously. You’re simply offering yourself up as an object lesson and you’re being used as such. We’re not acting to convince you. I doubt many here even believe it’s possible to do so.
What the heck is “non-disputable evidence?” Some types of evidence are better than others - well-designed and controlled scientific studies are good and apochyphal stories tend to be at the bottom - but the whole point of evidence is that it can be interpreted and discussed.
Nobody is accepting any evidence without question, and this is not “evidence that goes against Christianity.” It’s evidence against miraculous claims in the Bible, and many Christians have no problem with it. And how is a radio turning on and off evidence for Christianity and not every other religion?
I could not possibly care less.
Nobody is trying to destroy your faith. That’s the entire point of this thread.
You are mistaken if you think there is such a thing as indisputable evidence. One can always dispute evidence. It’s simply a matter of evidence being sufficiently convincing. I can dispute the evidence that there ever existed a vessel called Titanic that sailed from Southampton, hit an ice berg, and sank, in 1912, all day long. It’s just that the evidence for the existence of such a ship is very, very convincing.
A good place to start for convincing evidence of your deity would be as simple as some repeatable, independently verifiable, physical manifestation along with a demonstration of power. In other words, if the deity simply assumed some physical form, appeared in the middle of Times Square, said “Hey, guys. What’s shakin’?” and then proceeded to transform lead into gold with a wave of his hand, that would help a lot. It would not be conclusive proof, mind you, but it would be a start.
I can supply all kinds of evidence for the obvious existence of wizards and witches. The Harry Potter books describe practices and events in great detail, making it likely that Rowling was magically inspired. Furthermore, the books depict real-world events and settings that we know existed; the fact that some aspects of the book are obviously factually true is evidence that the entire thing is. Finally, it is indisputable that objects occasionally fall off shelves at odd angles, providing convincing evidence of a wizard using the accio spell.
You can dispute what you like. However, evidence that is credible will be stuff like scientific measurements (say of rate of healing), video, archaeological and so on.
Someone who may be wrong, confused, lying or whatever, offering a story about levitating objects isn’t good evidence.
Stuff written in the bible isn’t good evidence for anything except what ancient men believed.
Most atheists see no evidence going for the bible. We don’t need evidence *against *it.
As I said in another thread, the people that wrote the bible thought the sky was a dome. They thought there was a world-wide flood. There is no evidence for either of those things happening.
A world-wide flood would leave geological evidence, and it isn’t there.
This thread is about what atheists think and you’re the one trying to tell us what we think.
Your faith isn’t what is in question here, it’s your assertions of fact that are not justifiable. No one knows if God exists, but we do know that there wasn’t a world-wide flood.
And if your faith were destroyed, the only improvement that would come of that would be to your life.
Dawkins also seems to be a bit of a smug blowhard who prefer to be incendiary and argumentative to sell more books. This is not a reflection on merits of his arguments, but on his style.
However, i confess to not reading very much of his work, and I don’t think I finished a complete book of his sine “Climbing Mount Improbable” back in the 90s.