Many of us have brought it up. Rather obviously, GEEPERS has absolutely no answer.
I did not know that (even though I read the book, I must have forgotten it).
Ignorance fought.
Hey, GEEPERS, which of those components of the “fruit of the Spirit” do you think you’re demonstrating in this thread? As I understand it, a follower of Christ should inevitably demonstrate those virtues, under any circumstances. Do you? I’m not expecting you to respond to these questions in this thread. But it does seem to me that if you’re a Christian, this is something you might want to think about on your own.
The interesting thing to me is, what you are being defensive about most is being called to task for not constructing a compelling argument. Not everything is an attack on you, personally. In fact, in this thread, almost none of it has been directly about you as a person; this thread is either about atheists explaining themselves in entirely non-combative contexts, or people from various points of view (including some Christians) taking apart the incredibly flimsy scaffolding you present to contain your argument. You have yet to sincerely address many of the reasonable criticisms of your argument. If you want to demonstrate that you have a solid argument, it is indeed up to you to demonstrate it constructively. And, if you’re going to uphold honesty as a virtue, to accept rational criticisms of it.
But as I understand it, even if you were under personal attack (which you’re not), the Christian ethos requires certain behavior. Turning-the-cheek behavior, as I recall.
Look, if someone waltzes onto the SDMB and presents shabbily constructed arguments on any subject, including evolution or atheism or what have you, that someone will be taken to task. The person’s choice is then to learn something, if nothing else than about how to properly set up and engage in an argument, or remain ignorant.
“Why are you trying to destroy my faith?” is a weird comment to make when you’ve spent page after page in thread after thread arguing that other people should believe the same thing you believe. From your point of view isn’t that an attack on their faith? (And no, I don’t think atheism is a faith - but you do, don’t you?) The main point people have made is that the arguments you have made on behalf of your religious-inspired views of history and science are wrong. Atheists have said it, Christians have said it, and maybe people of other faiths, too; I haven’t kept track. But the response is pretty ecumenical. The issue here is not just that your arguments are wrong (and they are), it’s that you are often insisting that they’re the only possible answer. They clearly are not. Evolution and physics and geology work just fine without your version of God and they stand up to scrutiny very well. Arguably they work better without your God, but that’s a philosophical point. There’s nothing in any of these sciences or others that fails to work without adding in a god - whatever that is, however it works, whichever one it is. And a lot of people worldwide reject your arguments because they run counter to almost every kind of science and many kinds of good sense. But some of those people still accept some of the general Christian principles you say you believe in.
From the point of view of a broad deist sympathetic with at least some forms of religious belief, reading this thread depresses me greatly. I suspect that some of the more anti-religion individuals within the modern atheist movement have mistaken views about the philosophies both of science and religion; this deserves a reasoned, measured, thoughtful discussion.
And then we have GEEPERS keeping a 325-post-strong thread active, spewing abject silliness, willfully refusing to acknowledge that anyone besides him could possibly have made a valid point, behaving with such belligerence that any possibly extant Christ could only blush or sigh. Such a discussion as I described has been rendered that much more difficult, maybe impossible for some. Congratulations on your apologetic work, GEEPERS. Keep it up.
GEEPERS - You’re missing the point. Logical fallacies aren’t something invented by some cabal of atheists to try to shut you up; fallacies are formal descriptions of argument methods that, by definition, do not hold water.
A sound position does not require the employment of fallacies to support it - in fact, a sound position is weakened by the use of fallacies, because they’re a distraction, and their very presence in an argument will generate the impression that not only is the fallacious argument false, but that the underlying position is also.
In short:
If you have a sound position, you don’t need - and should purposely avoid - fallacies. Use sound arguments and evidence instead.
If you can’t construct an argument in support of your position without employing egregious fallacy, then this is a strong indicator that you’re very probably just wrong. (you might be right by sheer luck).
There are any number of sites out there listing and describing logical fallacies, including reasoning for why they’re no use in arguments.
Or in other words, you’d be doing yourself a huge favour if you learn to avoid using logical fallacies, and if you do that, and still manage to present a coherent argument, you’ve pre-emptively silenced a vast swathe of potential arguments against your position.
Why would we have to prove it didn’t happen? For purposes of debate, if there is no evidence, it didn’t happen.
That’s an unsupported explanation, but it is not evidence.
You have not brought evidence to the table, all you have presented are self-serving explanations and demands for us to prove a negative. Denial is the appropriate response.
That’s been one of my original points all along. There is no evidence that you can not cast a shadow of doubt on which atheists eagerly do whenever a Christian attempts to prove God’s existence. To be fair, to claim that the Bible is fiction or the Exodus never happen and present it as indisputable fact which you atheists have certainly done is intellectually dishonest. Lack of evidence is not evidence.
I’ve said from the beginning that I never expected any atheist to accept my personal evidences yet they continue to demand evidence even though they will never give it a second of consideration. It’s just a sad mind game, the atheist’s form of going to church.
You are the one claiming as fact that it never happened. A claim without any support is worthless. Proving a negative is a another lame atheist copout. You don’t have non-belief. You believe in something or there wouldn’t be anything to discuss here.
Wonderful, can you show me an example of a Christian on this forum silencing the atheists?
Again: this is not a Christian thing.
People have explained why they take that view and what the evidence is. Drawing a conclusion based on evidence is not intellectually dishonest.
As I’ve said from the beginning, people are arguing with you about your factual assertions about (for example) evolution, the Big Bang, abiogenesis, the history of Egypt, and events like healing and radio tuning. Not “your personal evidences.”
Yes, and your point is bull. Anybody can “cast doubt” on anything they require. But as you’ve been shown over and over, but not understood, both logic and the entire structure of factual knowledge we have both argue against the claims you’ve made. There is a distinct difference between baseless “disputing” something and using reason to eviscerate someone’s claims.
Yet again you don’t understand a term you’re using. It is not at all intellectually dishonest to state the facts, which are that there never was an Exodus and there never was a Flood and there never was an Adam and Eve and so on. And as seems to be your only true tactic here, you’ve ignored refutations and tried to change the subject when shown how you can indeed prove a negative.
Or do you think that I might be right and you’ve got a rhino in your pocket?
Fallacy of equivocation. Reference was made to silencing arguments, not silencing posters.
You have no idea what logic is, do you?
Are there any claims for the existence of god that you don’t believe? Do you take everything that anyone says about god to be true?
Nope, we’ve tried to do that one too. Identifying objective metrics he could use to analyze claims of belief is something GEEP has announced is a trap, out to get him.
You are being disingenuous - when the experts expect that there should be evidence (ie, global flood, Exodus) and there isn’t, that does suggest the event never happened. Does it conclusively prove that it didn’t happen? No, but generally people do not expect that level of proof - as I mentioned in the post responding to your post (which you ignored) it’s possible that the exodus happened in the same sense that it’s possible that aliens built the pyramids.
It is not rational to hold to either position (exodus happened, aliens built the pyramids) because both positions lack evidence and, at least with the Exodus, we should expect to see evidence.
I fail to see how your personal experience is evidence in favor of the Christian God. As I’ve repeatedly stated, how do you know that it wasn’t a trick performed by Ahiriman, meant to distract you from the true God Ahura Mazda?
You’ve repeatedly failed to address this and as such, not only is your personal experience unable to be verified, it seems as though it cannot be used to support your claim that the Christian God exists.
So it fails to be compelling on two accounts.
I would love to read that one in the original gibberish. Link please?
I’d finally managed to get him to answer what metrics he uses to dismiss Islamic theology. When I pointed out that the same points would be used against Christianity, he declared it was a trap.
On what subject? Anyway, that’s not really what I’m trying to do here - All I’m trying to do is to help you to stop shooting yourself repeatedly in the foot.
I’m not even asserting that there’s any way for you to succeed (maybe there is, maybe there aint), I’m just highlighting that if you employ logical fallacies in your arguments, you can only fail.
Unfortunately, you seem unreceptive to argument, criticism and well-meaning advice alike. At this rate, it wouldn’t surprise me to see you try to shoot down someone completely on side with you, should they happen along.
Unfortunately this kind of suggests GEEPERS doesn’t want to make the effort to construct a sound argument unless he knows it will convince atheists to accept what he says. You’re never going to get a guarantee people will accept your argument and be converted to your position, GEEPERS, and you say you knew that. That kind of thing works with limited factual claims, but not on big philosophical issues. On its own terms, your argument is either logically sound or it isn’t. The argument that the universe requires a god isn’t logical from a philosophical point of view, in my opinion, but if you believe in a god that created the universe through the laws of physics and the world through processes that follow what we know scientifically, I can’t particularly argue against that (and I usually don’t bother unless someone says that’s the only way it could’ve happened). On the other hand when somebody argues that basically all of science is wrong (except for some convenient exceptions) and a millennia-old book is right, and then supports that with a bunch of vague assertions that don’t add up and often don’t have anything to do with the book in question either, all of that is up for debate.
In a lot of the particulars here, GEEPERS, you’re saying that if anything in the Bible is true, we have to accept the whole thing, and that simply doesn’t work from a logical point of view. Common sense ought to tell you that doesn’t work. There’s some truth in there. There are parts that have been verified by the historical record. But in other places, it’s about this simple: the Bible says the world was created in six days in a particular order, that whole world was flooded, and that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. If those things are true, there should be evidence for it. There isn’t. So if we have an assertion without solid evidence - and radios turning on and off isn’t evidence for any of those things - why should anybody accept it as true? Why shouldn’t it be dismissed the way you dismiss the idea that Adam might be 90 feet tall, which for some reason is less credible than the idea that he lived to 900? One says he was 10 times taller than any know human, the other says he lived seven times longer than any known human. They’re equally implausible from where I sit.