@ghug I have no opinion or knowledge about that. The premise was submitted by primera and not challenged by segunda, and I didn't see fit to step outside my knowledgebase either.

@bo_sox:

Ten of your posts still make their quicker than just one of mine, though... ;)

@YJ:

Thank you.

And to throw it out there:

I personally agree someone named Jesus probably existed, the same way someone named Socrates did...

I actually think one of Hitchens' best points on the Bible isn't in one of his usual blistering Hitchslap attacks on it, but rather when he points out the degree to which the Jesus story in the four Gospels (to say nothing of the other non-canon Gospels) is so apparent in how they're trying to engineer the story in such a way as to fit the criterion for Jesus to be the Messiah that there probably WAS such a figure who WAS charismatic and preached and thus DID inspire a lot of people to try and explain how he could be the Messiah...in short, the logical problems surrounding the location and nature of Jesus' birth gives some circumstantial evidence that some, evidently, really WANTED their round-peg view of Jesus to fit within the square peg that was the Messiah requisites (as it were) from the OT.

For an example of this (and I can't believe I'm about to say this) look no further than the Oxfordian Theory of Shakespearean Authorship and the film "Anonymous."

The Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and many of Shakespeare's plays weren't only written after 1604, but were influenced by events that occurred after 1604; "Macbeth" was written in part because James I, being from Scotland, wanted a play that both would delve into his homeland and also validate his rule, hence the reason that Banquo is said to be the father to a line of kings but not be king himself, as James I claimed to be a descendant of Banquo (and thus one reason Macbeth largely becomes unsympathetic after he has Banquo killed...killing Duncan was one thing, morally wrong, but Macbeth doesn't really hit the skids until he hits Banquo and sees Banquo's ghost, after THAT he becomes a murderous lunatic, and where many liked him after Duncan's death, after Banquo's death and the change that comes over Macbeth, all his followers drop away one by one) and "The Tempest" (pretty obvious here, England starts colonizing in 1607 with Jamestown, and this play is written just a few years after that and very much has to do with sailing ships, "brave new worlds," and colonization) as well as the Romances (these were written largely because James' wife liked them.)

From these facts, the fact many Shakespeare plays' first recorded performances are long after 1604, and dozens of other reasons, we generally have and do accept that Shakespeare wrote his plays or, at least, without any real proof otherwise, the credit goes to the man who had credit in his time and for the last 400 years. ;)

BUT tell that to an Oxfordian theorist, and they'll have an explanation for all that:

The plays written after 1604?
Oxford simply wrote them before his death and they were performed afterward.
The connection between "Macbeth" and James I?
James was crowned for England in 1603, he had a whole year before his death to write it.
The colonization connection with "The Tempest?"
The Spanish colonies (never mind Anglo-Spanish relations weren't exactly cozy then.)
The Romances being written for James' wife (that's a lot to write in one year...)
You're reading in that motivation and taking it from other sources is all, stop that.

And then they try and connect the dots--

"How could commoner with a grammar school education write about courtly characters?"
"Oxford, true to his name, HAD to be better educated than that grammar school kid Will..."
"The plot of 'Hamlet' can be seen as allegorical for Oxford's own life!"

And on and on (though if you see the contradiction in that last one and the previous "you're reading into it what you want to" Oxfordian objection above, well done.) ;)

The POINT (see, you COULD make it quicker than me, bo_sox) is that the people who believe Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays REALLY believe that, believe it fervently, and want it to fit and be the case, even if facts have to be contorted a bit (look at "Anonymous for a perfect example or 20, and then watch a good movie to get the sour taste out") or if they have to be supposed or suggested (case in point the argument that "Hamlet" is allegorical for Oxford's own life) and so on...

They want it to be so and try and craft a convincing theory on how it might be so, facts, figures, lies and damn statistics be damned.

The same may be said of the Jesus story:

The question of his birth?
http://www.archaeology.org/0511/abstracts/jesus.html
"The town of Bethlehem in the West Bank, some six miles south of Jerusalem, is revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus. According to the New Testament account of the apostle Matthew, Joseph and Mary were living in Bethlehem in the southern region of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth and later moved to Nazareth in the northern Galilee region. In the more popular account of the apostle Luke, Joseph and a very pregnant Mary traveled more than 90 miles from their residence in Nazareth to Joseph's Judean hometown of Bethlehem to be counted in a Roman census. Regardless of the variation, both apostles agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, the city where King David had been born a thousand years earlier. The Christian Messiah could thereby be considered a descendant of the House of David--a requirement for followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition."

It's a requirement, it has to be fitted together, so they try and fit it together, even though that leads to easy-to-see conflicts, such as "a complete absence of information for antiquities from the Herodian period--that is, from the time around the birth of Jesus."

And that's one aspect:

Think about it:

Jesus HAS to be born in the City of David...
The previous locations of Joseph and Mary HAVE to be reconciled...
They HAVE to somehow have traveled there and gotten there in time...
Mary HAS to be a virgin and have it be a virgin birth according to doctrine...
Even with a virgin birth, Jesus still has to be "descended from" David's House in a sense...

And so on--and that's just the BIRTH, never mind all the contradictions between the Gospels accepted into canon about the life and death of Jesus, to say nothing of the texts that, while not canonical today, WERE read and taken to heart before there was any official canon (a canon comprised largely of compromises) for hundreds of years.

WHY would anyone go through that kind of trouble?
Must of us as a species, if something doesn't logically fit, we discard the notion.
If The Tooth Fairy doesn't make sense to us, at some point, we drop it, no problem.

But say you love The Tooth Fairy. Say you spent your childhood being told what a great figure this Fairy is, kindly, even selflessly swapping cold-hard cash for your baby teeth that fell out, making a potentially painful or even frightening experience in losing your teeth almost palatable because, hey, you're getting a reward out of it, and you get the feeling that there's someone there watching out for you in at least some capacity.

The Tooth Fairy's almost like a guardian angel for you, as it were.

BUT you're a rational person once you grow up and 40-something now, and have to reconcile your belief in this great figure with facts that stand against that figure even existing.

What now?

Well, you either drop your faith, or else try and explain it...you try and fit that round hole in a square peg. You look for ways in which, maybe, fairies can exist, just "in mysterious ways." You explain their origin as being tied into biology somehow, engineering it just enough so that it sounds nice and almost might sound credible to a degree. You validate every point that you feel needs to be validated.

And I suspect that's what happened with Jesus--

He probably lived, had a career as a charismatic preacher, said something to someone which led to the Romans executing him, but had such a hard-core fanbase that they tried to write and re-write and think and re-think his origins and existence and even his death in such a way as might be not only explainable, and fit together, but be palatable, to fit the Messiah card so that he (and they) were validated.

This is nothing unique to the Jesus story.
I gave the Oxfordian Theory parallel,
"The Aeneid" is largely Virgil re-imagining Homer's epics from a Roman/Trojan perspective and saying "Well, we lost, but only because we were DESTINED to found this great empire whom the gods smile upon and shall of course never ever let fall!"
America's tried to romanticize the idea of "Cowboys and Indians," "The Winning of the West" rather than We Kinda Sorta Killed Millions of People in a Trail of Tears...
And the same with the South, there's even today a lot of opposition and nostalgia for the Pre-Civil War era, "the good old days."
David Ben Gurion went so far as to tell a team of Israeli archaeologists who failed to find proof for the Exodus that if they'd done so they'd have helped uncover "the title deeds" to land which Israel'd won in war and diplomacy and, thus, with those "title deeds," hoped to validate its actions.



So yes, a Jesus probably did exist--the sheer passion and complete contradictory nature of that passion, of trying to somehow get 2+2 to equal "Messiah" at every turn, shows evidence that there probably was someone who inspired others to go through all that trouble to try and deify (rather than discard) him after death.

"I didn't see fit to step outside my knowledgebase either. "

Par for the course

hardly on this forum. You get idiots spewing garbage they know nothing about. I do it too sometimes, but Draugnar always catches me.

@ obi, may I pick out a couple of things from your post ? -
1) ''Insert mathematics here and really, you have no need for God, math does not NEED God to explain why 2 and 2 make 4, they just logically do, you cannot credit the sheer existence of logic to God either, as that's essentially arguing God created and maintains logic,''
Can you please tell me what there is in science proves the laws of mathematics and/or logic? And yet it must necessarily completely rely on both.
As for you not being happy with the argument from first cause what alternative explanation/theory/hypothesis do you propose?
2) '' I've already said as much above...do I REALLY need to say how that's plugging in "God" for the answer without external reasoning or, in this case, flawed reasoning?''
I would argue that just as much can be said of the evolutionism belief system. That theory is where everything we can't explain is thereby attributed to natural selection (e.g., behaviour, morals, culture, economics etc.......). Richard Lewontin had it absolutely correct when he stated that to attribute so much to natural selection is inherently unscientific as it then becomes an unfalsifiable paradigm - that is of itself a belief system/religion.
It must also be born in mind that, if we rely solely on the hypothesis of natural selection, that humans will also speciate, just as every other species has done/will do. Proto-species or races will form the basis of such speciation. And anticipating, ''the mixing of the human gene pool makes us unique'' argument, I would say that there is clearly so anthropocentric as to be patently anti-scientific. Unless, of course, there is something else which makes us unique?

Isn't believing in God just like believing in magic...... you've got to have Faith.
If the only evidence you have to date is a collection of stories written by various people who never met the guy, you know how any story can get embellished to make it newsworthy. Doesn't really matter how the story (The Bible) got here, it's contents are compelling.
If we had nothing to believe in, what would our society be like, it could be anarchy. Religion was used as opium for the unwashed masses who couldn't read and needed moral guidance, I would say there is still a need today for such characters as God and Jesus.
Whether you believe or not these two characters are doing a great job around the world bringing order, ethics, morals to people who but a few years ago were boiling peoples heads or passing laws for different people based on their religion or colour of their skin.
Their relatively value/importance/relevance the world over is evident, getting hung up on other issues like miracles, etc is a bit of a side show.
Who has more relevance to us in our everyday lives, God or Darwin, if you had to choose I'd say God.
So in conclusion I say keep up the good work both God and Jesus, we realise you can't do everything but I'm happy if I know you're doing your best, surely that's all we can ask of any omnipotent being.

@ nigee, it is possible for a being to be omnipotent and still wish to engage in a partnership/relationship with us. Such an arrangement requires the existance of free will on our part.

We have Kestas the omnipotent, he still keeps in contact from time to time.
You can be a benevolent dictator if you are a good person and it's always good to communicate.
God = Good
Devil = Evil
If you created the world it's your baby and you want to look after it, a bit like Kestas created this website, God is all around us in the good deeds done by others.
Also evil is with (New Town), that fight of Good vs Evil will go on for Eternity.
The free will surely is the path we choose

Obi, please never teach anyone math. Your pseudo-philosophical answer is bogus. The truth of why 2+2=4 is convention. We agreed that a single object is one, twice that is two, thrice that is three, so on. To say "two plus two equals four by logic" is false. It's an agreed upon convention, in this case, base ten. You know that naturally we think of numbers on a logarithmic scale and are trained to think on a linear, base ten scale? (http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080529/full/news.2008.866.html)

Please, please, never teach math. Or philosophy.

#obikilledmyscrollbaragain

I think both math and phil should be banned

Nigee, shut the fuck up.

Steady on Tiger this is a Christian thread, nobody wants to hear your foul-mouthed abuse

Notices
NigeeBaby
10:16 AM
Grow up you fucking idiot, stop being a complete twat

I sent it to you personally rather than subject the forum to that language, you're being a silly little boy. We can all write rude words on public forums but it's not big and it's not clever ..... grow up

Nigee is just being a troll/idiot/both, but doesn't the bible teach forgiveness of people dubmdell? Jk, I, and noone else with common sense and intelligence (that's truthful with themself) would take guidance from a contradictory, logically incoherent, homophobic and sexist text/group of crazies.

No offense intended.

Since Obi hasn't yet responded, allow me to take it upon myself, Fullhamish.

"Can you please tell me what there is in science proves the laws of mathematics and/or logic?"

Nothing. As far as math goes, as somebody above stated, it's a convention, a set of agreed upon laws in "numbers space," that is useful for modeling reality. As the needs of explaining the tangible have grown more complex and stringent, so has the mathematics we use to model it.


"As for you not being happy with the argument from first cause what alternative explanation/theory/hypothesis do you propose?"

You still don't get it. It's really annoying that people keep up this angle of "attack" We don't HAVE to. Christianity is YOUR outlandish claim. The burden of proof is on you. I challenge you to falsify the flying spaghetti monster - if you fail to do so, that is proof he is real. See how ridiculous that sounds?




"I would argue that just as much can be said of the evolutionism belief system. That theory is where everything we can't explain is thereby attributed to natural selection (e.g., behaviour, morals, culture, economics etc.......). Richard Lewontin had it absolutely correct when he stated that to attribute so much to natural selection is inherently unscientific as it then becomes an unfalsifiable paradigm - that is of itself a belief system/religion."

First of all, evolution isn't a belief system. It's a theory. It's the best theory we have to describe what we've seen. Now some people (me, for instance), it does approach a belief system, because it's outside of our area of expertise. I'm not going to challenge Nikola Tesla on AC current, because I know precisely dick about it. I'm not going to challenge anthropologists (or whoever) on evolution either, for precisely the same reason. I don't have the training or the knowledge, and therefore I don't have the right. How the hell do you presume to challenge them - are YOU an expert? No, no you are not. I TRUST in the experts in the field. And they overwhelmingly say there is a metric fuckton of evidence supporting evolution. Does that mean it's set in stone? No. It's a THEORY. That's what makes it different from faith. If new evidence comes in, the paradigm will shift.

It's highly presumptuous of you to think you have the right to challenge experts.





"It must also be born in mind that, if we rely solely on the hypothesis of natural selection..."

Nobody is.


"...humans will also speciate, just as every other species has done/will do."

We already did.... monkeys, remember? Contrary to your claim, it's not unscientific at all to suggest that in the global environment we live in speciation should not continue. By necessity, speciation requires isolation over thousands of years, and that is lacking today. This is not unfalsifiable. If we chose to isolate twins over thousands of years, that could test the theory. Just because we aren't willing to deal with the timescale or ethically comfomfortable testing it doesn't mean it's unfalsifiable.

Oh, I thought this talk had essentially ended...alright then, it appears I have some matters to address:

...Well, first I'll give a +1 to YellowJacket, as his answers are essentially mine, made more succinctly than my general ability or style, so I'll refer you to his responses, fullhamish, as they're good ones and ones which I endorse heartily enough that to add to them would seem mostly extraneous on my part.

"Obi, please never teach anyone math."

Oh, trust me, I don't intend to...the horror, the horror! ;)

"The truth of why 2+2=4 is convention. We agreed that a single object is one, twice that is two, thrice that is three, so on. To say "two plus two equals four by logic" is false. It's an agreed upon convention, in this case, base ten."

The base-ten is convention, the numerals and names are convention...

That one rock plus another rock makes two rocks isn't convention...

Or if it is, I'd argue that's as base as we can get in terms of logic, and that it's relatively self-evident.

I know that's a BIG claim to make, that something is self-evident, but I don't think I'm terribly overstepping my bounds when, really, even if they couldn't articulate it, every sentient being on this planet could tell 1 and 1 are 2...

And YES, I understand they're numerals and on a base-ten, but use whichever numerals and whichever system you like, it's a bit like changing the cover of a book but not the actual words...

The IDEA is consistent and constant.

1 +1 NEVER equals 5 (and on the off-chance that there is some weird base-something where that does come out as a result of the base, you know my point, as stated above...one something and another something make two somethings, not 42, and that's as close to axiomatic as we can get.)

I also have to point out:

Saying 1 and 1 are two (or that two H's and one O makes H2O properly bonded) and claiming that is constant with a pre-existing axiom is, I daresay, easier to defend as a proposition than supposing a deity not only as the cause of this balance, but supposing that deity AT ALL, and claiming knowledge of this deity, etc...

The latter has significantly less backing for its position and claims more for itself than the former.

"As for you not being happy with the argument from first cause what alternative explanation/theory/hypothesis do you propose?"

Oh a great many of things:

1. I propose that admitting that I don't know the answer is superior than assuming an answer with no proof other than a book...it is more honest and more productive to say "I don't know" than "I don't know but I believe it's God" with nothing to back up that view beyond contradictory documents written thousands of years ago in an until-then obscure part of the world...

And thus postulate that the whole UNIVERSE had a first cause that was somehow explained by Jews in Judea thousands of years ago, when people thought the earth was just a few thousand years old and that the sun went around the Earth, and that all of it was created in 6 days.

Kind of hurts the credibility of that claim, and I'd rather admit honestly to not knowing than claim an erroneous truth as my claim, or cling to it when reason seems to show it demonstrably silly, especially considering...

2. AGAIN, if we plug God in as a prime mover here, up shoots the Sunday School hand as a kid asks "Well, who made GOD, then, if everything has a maker?"

The religious answer: "God has always been/the definition of God necessitates that he's always been/God is by nature eternal/etc."

The response?
A. That's all presumed by a religion with not external proof and thus is a religion making claims for itself, that's hardly a way to build one's view of how the cosmos began, B. How very convenient to define God that way and assume these characteristics of him without any evidence that he exists, let alone that he possesses such qualities or ever did, and C. That seems a cheap cop-out here when the crux of the first mover argument is that everything needs a creator...and then "Except God, of course" is just hastily tacked on there with no external proof whatsoever.

3. The Big Bang seems a plausible theory, or the most plausible at the moment, and we're working on discerning how that worked out, and that's a far more promising lane of inquiry for me than to accept a ready-made answer crafted by religious apologists who, even in the time of Aquinas and before Galileo started rocking their world view, realized that the Judeo-Christian ideology, as with any religion, has several logical flaws in it.

4. Alternatively, Bertrand Russell in a debate once asked why we NEED to assume a course of events before the beginning, that seeming absurd (how do things begin before the beginning, after all?) and put forward the idea of treating the universe as something that's always been, at least in the form we would consider it "the universe"...I'm not saying this is a logically-sound idea through and through or even that it's one I endorse, but I WOULD accept the universe always having existed in some form before accepting the statement that GOD has/had always existed in some form as, well, I can more or less sense proof that there IS a universe, whereas God remains without such proof. For the two-point conversion, if we wanted to take that idea of an eternal universe with the Spinozan idea that "God" is more or less just a term for the totality of everything, impersonal and just taking "God" and "Nature/Existence" as more or less interchangeable (with slight deviations in kind) then come to an Einsteinian take on the universe, as Einstein liked Spinoza and adopted his idea of a non-personal "God = Existence Alone" theological view...and well, Einstein and Spinoza were two pretty smart fellow Jews, after all, so... ;)

5. As a quick jab back, even if we were somehow to assume that a deity WAS the most reasonable explanation for the start of things...on what grounds do we claim it to be the JUDEO-CHRISTIAN GOD that started it all...why not any other Creator God from any other religion, other than the fact you happen to have been born now instead of in Ancient Greece or Medieval India or Buddhist China or Aztec-controlled Mexico or pre-colonization Africa...?

6. I'll reiterate my point above, thus, that you can see that I openly admit a lack of knowledge, as with every other human being, as to how the universe began (or if it did "begin" in the sense we generally understand) but that doing so is superior in a moral as well as intellectual and honest sense as opposed to insisting on plugging in an un-sustained, internally-inconsistent theological conception of a deity thought up in a small part of one planet amongst a solar system of 8 planets and dozens of moons amidst the hundreds of thousands of presumed stars and planets in this Milky Way Galaxy as well as the Andromeda Galaxy and hundreds of other galaxies...that a deity thought up on one tiny speck of one planet by oppressed peoples in Judea give a reasonable explanation for how all THAT came into being.

A galactic, celestial perspective of that Pale Blue Dot on which we live is one of the first and most convincing arguments against the First Cause = God argument.

As for those "how did logical rules come into being, then?" claims...

I refer you back to the idea that the universe (and thus such concepts which are consistent with the laws of the universe) has always existed in some form...

OR the other "I don't know, but 'God' is a poor enough explanation and no explanation and earnest effort towards finding one with the acceptance that there's no shame in honestly admitting a lack of knowledge, thus, a poor explanation is worse than this admission" point I advance.

Lack of an answer does not mean you have to accept one which is poor and internally inconsistent.

YJ,

"Burden of proof, Semck. Not on smcbride. You know who it's on. And as the only non-delusional avowed Christian I've chatted with at any length on this site, you must admit OP's article is sorely lacking."

I wasn't purporting to prove or disprove anything. I was just pointing out that smcbride had made a silly point. Whether somebody with a three-year career was mentioned _during his lifetime_ by historians is not really relevant to the question of whether he existed.

In the future, please keep track of exactly what it is I'm claiming to do before you suggest I have failed to do it.

"You can very well argue that the lack of historical evidence is somewhat explained by the brevity of the man's fame, but that certainly isn't evidence that he DID exist. At best it softens smc's point somewhat. "

Nor did I claim to have established that he did exist. I did eviscerate smc's argument to the contrary, though, not just soften it. Where that leaves us is still with no positive evidence for existence having been offered, but with an argument against existence having been refuted.

smcbride's fallacious point about the gospels had already been dealt with. And in a part of my post that you conveniently ommitted, I did actually cite two historians who mentioned Christ's existence, which IS an argument for it. So odd that you didn't notice that.

@SC,

"New York times and Washington post reported on David Koresh and L Ron Hubbard. Now, granted the difference is that the Branch Dividians didn't have editing rights over the Times and the Post for a couple centuries... "

Sure. I don't really get your point though. I assume we would mostly agree that (a) those papers aren't historians, (b) there were no widely-circulated dailies in the Roman Empire, that we know of, and (c) both those men did exist. I don't really take your point, therefore. Elaboration would be welcome.

@ obiwanobiwanobiwanobiwanobiwan:

"Ahem:

"1. Does God exist? The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today."

Not novel or new, it's The Argument from Design, insert appropriate scientific and rational evidence that has been used here and elsewhere to blow that to pieces...next...

"2. Does God exist? The universe had a start - what caused it?"

First mover argument, first put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition and LONG before him in the Greek tradition (and let's face it, that was probably one of the first questions we asked PERIOD once our species evolved any semblance of consciousness, as once you ask "Who and Where am I?" and then "How did I get here?" Question #3 is often "What brought me here/started this?")...

Insert either an argument saying there doesn't HAVE to be a first cause (an interesting idea), the scientific argument or, better yet, ask the most obvious question to kill this one, "OK, well, if God created the universe, who created God?" and before a theist jumps up and declares that by his very nature God is eternal and therefore always was...PLEASE see how invented, self-serving, and utterly lacking in external proof and logic that line of arguing is, and refrain from it...next...

"3. Does God exist? The universe operates by uniform laws of nature. Why does it?"

...I'll concede that's an interesting question, but given how UN-uniform God is (if you have any doubt of that, check how many times he either changes his mind or flatly contradicts previous actions and decisions in the OT, and no, that cannot just be his changing as a character or what have you if you make the claim he's also eternal and perfect, as it's rather absurd for the eternal and perfect to likewise be changeable and changing due to a past decision reversed and thus an imperfection in judgment, choice, or both) God is anything BUT the mathematical answer needed here...and...

Insert mathematics here and really, you have no need for God, math does not NEED God to explain why 2 and 2 make 4, they just logically do, you cannot credit the sheer existence of logic to God either, as that's essentially arguing God created and maintains logic, the latter being shown to be rather false by his illogical actions in the OT (if you question THAT, go ahead and try to defend Noah's Ark as logical, or placing an Apple to tempt humanity as logical..."But it was God testing--" testing is different than LOGIC, that God wanted to test his creations--"God was giving us a choice!"--that God gives us a CHOICE does not mean that choice is RATIONAL or LOGICAL...even beyond that, try defending Leviticus and Deuteronomy as logical, try it) and the former is a re-working of #2, the First Cause/Creation Argument, and that's already been covered, so...next...

"4. Does God exist? The DNA code informs, programs a cell's behavior."

ANOTHER reconfiguration of the Argument from Design...if you doubt that, the last sentence of this section is, any I quote, "You cannot find instruction, precise information like this, without someone intentionally constructing it," and that's pretty much the Creationist/"Intelligent Design" argument in a nutshell, and we've already addressed and cracked that nutshell here and elsewhere, SO...next...

"5. Does God exist? We know God exists because he pursues us. He is constantly initiating and seeking for us to come to him."

First, before delving into the actual point here itself--notice the LANGUAGE in that proposition and how utterly vague it is...also note that it makes a supposition right off the bat--"We know God"--that is not at all necessarily true, for instance, *I* do not know God...it's rather hard for me to "know" entities that don't exist or are not proven to exist...

NOW.

I'll be fair and make one allowance there, as the theist may well answer ME "Obi, of ALL PEOPLE you 'know' entities that don't exist or are claimed not to exist, after all, you 'know' Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes, your literary heroes in fiction, right?"

Yes...and they're also just that, fiction, Hamlet being based off previous works of fiction and, possibly, some sort of political turmoil sometime somewhere in Denmark maybe, and Sherlock Holmes is based partly off of Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective Auguste Dupin and partially from a doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew of who was, well, rather Sherlockian in his approach and meticulousness.

NEITHER of those characters I assume to actually exist, though, so an argument for God along those same lines would just make a God equal to a fictional character...which is an argument I'd thus side with as that's what I thing God IS, a fictional character written in works of mythology and theology by men, period.

But onto the argument itself.

Let me take this bit by bit:

"I was an atheist at one time. And like many atheists, the issue of people believing in God bothered me greatly. What is it about atheists that we would spend so much time, attention, and energy refuting something that we don't believe even exists?!"

As an atheist that is STILL an atheist, I'll answer that by saying 1. Atheism doesn't necessarily mean that you attempt to refute the existence of God but, again, that you yourself are arguing there is no PROOF for God and 2. To answer the question, we spend time on it for the same reason, say, Newton spent so much time developing the Laws of Motion and contradicting the ideas of Aristotle and showing many of his ideas to be false and many of his conceived scientific ideals not to exist--

Because there is a thirst for the truth and so a wrong answer is an answer worth refuting and showing to be wrong or, we're to be fair to the Christians here, if I perceive their books and their God and a large degree of their aesthetic as illogical, socially harmful, or both (and I do) it is then something worth arguing against...

ESPECIALLY when the alleged existence of said God and ideals is largely behind thing such as fights over abortion, gay rights, and teaching intelligent design vs. evolution

You're all free to hate Shakespeare...
I claim him to be the best author in all the English language, but NOT holy...
You can disagree, as did Tolstoy, and even argue Shakespeare's utter garbage...
But good luck. ;)

But if you were to come into my home and personally trash my Shakespeare collection, or pass a law saying Shakespeare was immoral or tried to ban his works on the basis of some religious ideal of YOURS that he disagrees with...you've now crossed the line.

LIKEWISE, Christians, you can got to Church, you may pray, you may read the Bible and praise Jesus and sing hymnals...and more power to you...

But when the argument is made MY country is "Judeo-Christian" when its Founders went out of their way to separate Church and State, when belief in your creation story hinders science being taught in classes tax money will pay for, when your beliefs hinder the rights of others...THEN it is something to argue against.

What's more, in this "realm of ideas" that Plato and Shakespeare and Locke and everyone else somehow still "exist" in, not literally but in the sense we still read and argue over who and what is right and who and what is not, God, then, is part of that, and will ALWAYS be argued over even if he DOESN'T exist, which I think IS the case.

"To be honest, I also had another motive. As I challenged those who believed in God, I was deeply curious to see if they could convince me otherwise. Part of my quest was to become free from the question of God. If I could conclusively prove to believers that they were wrong, then the issue is off the table, and I would be free to go about my life.

I didn't realize that the reason the topic of God weighed so heavily on my mind, was because God was pressing the issue. I have come to find out that God wants to be known."

I've already said as much above...do I REALLY need to say how that's plugging in "God" for the answer without external reasoning or, in this case, flawed reasoning? WHY do you assume that God "wants to be known" from your asking questions either way...better yet, since this seems to have been skipped over here, HOW did you come to the conclusion God EXISTS? The above reasons in 1-4 have been debunked, so...?

"He has surrounded us with evidence of himself and he keeps the question of his existence squarely before us. It was as if I couldn't escape thinking about the possibility of God. In fact, the day I chose to acknowledge God's existence, my prayer began with, "Ok, you win..." It might be that the underlying reason atheists are bothered by people believing in God is because God is actively pursuing them."

That's again assuming God as first the answer to the question, second assuming God's rationale--which is itself an exercise of the Fallacy of Intention--and third, again citing 1-4 as being blown to bits here, in other debates we've had, in other debates people with far fancier degrees and far more money than I have had, in books, in the literature on the topic in academia...in all those places citing 1-4 as being defeated...

HOW did you come to the conclusion God exists, then?

That assumes a God, assumes his intent, assumes his intent towards atheists...

That's one bundle of unsupported logical fallacies and assumptions after another.

SO...next...

"6. Does God exist? Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God revealing himself to us."

...!!! xD

THAT is your argument here? CHRISTIANS can't even agree on this clearest, most specific picture of Jesus Christ as God!

Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Methodists...etc...THEY DO NOT 100% agree on Jesus AT ALL, and remember, you're arguing this is the CLEAREST picture of God...!

What's more, the Early Christians didn't agree at all either. We now know what a diverse field of belief there WAS among them, there were those saying Jesus was man and God, saying he was just divine (arguing "How could a God DIE?"), arguing Jesus was a man MADE divine by his actions and God (which some didn't like and you can probably guess the reasons why), Gnostics, etc...

And that's amongst CHRISTIANS! These are the people in Jesus' own CAMP!
(I'd make a "Jesus Camp" joke here, but I digress.)
That's amongst people who are in favor of the motion "A. God exists and B. Jesus is the Messiah."

Now consider people who are theists of another Abrahamic slant (so for A but against B)...

Jews sure as hell don't agree with the picture of Jesus the Christian community today, 2,000 years ago, or at any time has or has had of Jesus 100%...that's sort of how they're Jews and not Christians, and part of the reason the Jews faced persecution for 2,000 years (well, and the fact it took until 1964 for the Vatican to say the Jews and Jews living today were not to blame for the Death of Jesus, that may have possibly led to, well, a pogrom or two or six or sixty...and I exaggerate and kid with that last number, but still...)

Muslims certainly don't agree with the image of Jesus the Christian community has...

They have (correct me if I'm wrong) a different account of his birth, or at least tell it differently...and they don't believe in him dying on the Cross...that's a big strike against the Christian view of Jesus...

And then there are those of Eastern Faiths who are scowling at all this talk about deities they don't even believe in...

And then there are agnostics and atheists...

And these two groups CERTAINLY don't have the same view of Jesus...

So HOW is Jesus, at all, possibly the clearest picture of God revealed, when not only the majority of the world can't agree on that picture, but when amongst even Christians there is considerable disagreement and, the further you go back and closer you get to Early Christianity and the decades following Jesus' death, the more adamant and strict the divides become?

HARDLY a Unified Theory of God, as it were.

(Incidentally, I HIGHLY recommend the Yale Lecture Series/Course Religious Studies 152--The New Testament...you can watch or listen to it free via Yale's open source program or on YouTube, and I recommend it on a fun as well as factual basis, it's very engaging and done intentionally without a slant theist or atheist.)

"Why Jesus? Look throughout the major world religions and you'll find that Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius and Moses all identified themselves as teachers or prophets. None of them ever claimed to be equal to God. Surprisingly, Jesus did."

^Again, there are some Early Christians rolling in their graves right now who did NOT believe Jesus was God's equal...

"What proof did Jesus give for claiming to be divine? He did what people can't do."

Such as?

"Jesus performed miracles."

And your evidence for that, besides documents written in the Bronze Age decades after the actual events and which don't always have the same account of same events is...?

Furthermore, there are a slew of religious figures throughout the Bible and in other religions who performed miracles in their texts...what about THEM?

"He healed people...blind, crippled, deaf, even raised a couple of people from the dead."

Medical science treats and comes ever closer to curing blindness and deafness, and as for #3, again...proof?

"He had power over objects...created food out of thin air, enough to feed crowds of several thousand people."

Proof?

"He performed miracles over nature...walked on top of a lake, commanding a raging storm to stop for some friends. People everywhere followed Jesus, because he constantly met their needs, doing the miraculous. He said if you do not want to believe what I'm telling you, you should at least believe in me based on the miracles you're seeing."

Proof? For "straight-forward reasons" and proofs of God, you're not very good at this whole "supplying proof" business here, are you?

WebDip's Christian community argues better and supplies better arguments and attempts to prove and support statements than you do.

Aaaaaand I'd keep going and quoting along on this one, but it'd largely amount to my saying "Proof?" again and again as we're all re-told the same Jesus story and same claims about how God could do this or does to that...

Oh, I thought this talk had essentially ended...alright then, it appears I have some matters to address:

...Well, first I'll give a +1 to YellowJacket, as his answers are essentially mine, made more succinctly than my general ability or style, so I'll refer you to his responses, fullhamish, as they're good ones and ones which I endorse heartily enough that to add to them would seem mostly extraneous on my part.

"Obi, please never teach anyone math."

Oh, trust me, I don't intend to...the horror, the horror! ;)

"The truth of why 2+2=4 is convention. We agreed that a single object is one, twice that is two, thrice that is three, so on. To say "two plus two equals four by logic" is false. It's an agreed upon convention, in this case, base ten."

The base-ten is convention, the numerals and names are convention...

That one rock plus another rock makes two rocks isn't convention...

Or if it is, I'd argue that's as base as we can get in terms of logic, and that it's relatively self-evident.

I know that's a BIG claim to make, that something is self-evident, but I don't think I'm terribly overstepping my bounds when, really, even if they couldn't articulate it, every sentient being on this planet could tell 1 and 1 are 2...

And YES, I understand they're numerals and on a base-ten, but use whichever numerals and whichever system you like, it's a bit like changing the cover of a book but not the actual words...

The IDEA is consistent and constant.

1 +1 NEVER equals 5 (and on the off-chance that there is some weird base-something where that does come out as a result of the base, you know my point, as stated above...one something and another something make two somethings, not 42, and that's as close to axiomatic as we can get.)

I also have to point out:

Saying 1 and 1 are two (or that two H's and one O makes H2O properly bonded) and claiming that is constant with a pre-existing axiom is, I daresay, easier to defend as a proposition than supposing a deity not only as the cause of this balance, but supposing that deity AT ALL, and claiming knowledge of this deity, etc...

The latter has significantly less backing for its position and claims more for itself than the former.

"As for you not being happy with the argument from first cause what alternative explanation/theory/hypothesis do you propose?"

Oh a great many of things:

1. I propose that admitting that I don't know the answer is superior than assuming an answer with no proof other than a book...it is more honest and more productive to say "I don't know" than "I don't know but I believe it's God" with nothing to back up that view beyond contradictory documents written thousands of years ago in an until-then obscure part of the world...

And thus postulate that the whole UNIVERSE had a first cause that was somehow explained by Jews in Judea thousands of years ago, when people thought the earth was just a few thousand years old and that the sun went around the Earth, and that all of it was created in 6 days.

Kind of hurts the credibility of that claim, and I'd rather admit honestly to not knowing than claim an erroneous truth as my claim, or cling to it when reason seems to show it demonstrably silly, especially considering...

2. AGAIN, if we plug God in as a prime mover here, up shoots the Sunday School hand as a kid asks "Well, who made GOD, then, if everything has a maker?"

The religious answer: "God has always been/the definition of God necessitates that he's always been/God is by nature eternal/etc."

The response?
A. That's all presumed by a religion with not external proof and thus is a religion making claims for itself, that's hardly a way to build one's view of how the cosmos began, B. How very convenient to define God that way and assume these characteristics of him without any evidence that he exists, let alone that he possesses such qualities or ever did, and C. That seems a cheap cop-out here when the crux of the first mover argument is that everything needs a creator...and then "Except God, of course" is just hastily tacked on there with no external proof whatsoever.

3. The Big Bang seems a plausible theory, or the most plausible at the moment, and we're working on discerning how that worked out, and that's a far more promising lane of inquiry for me than to accept a ready-made answer crafted by religious apologists who, even in the time of Aquinas and before Galileo started rocking their world view, realized that the Judeo-Christian ideology, as with any religion, has several logical flaws in it.

4. Alternatively, Bertrand Russell in a debate once asked why we NEED to assume a course of events before the beginning, that seeming absurd (how do things begin before the beginning, after all?) and put forward the idea of treating the universe as something that's always been, at least in the form we would consider it "the universe"...I'm not saying this is a logically-sound idea through and through or even that it's one I endorse, but I WOULD accept the universe always having existed in some form before accepting the statement that GOD has/had always existed in some form as, well, I can more or less sense proof that there IS a universe, whereas God remains without such proof. For the two-point conversion, if we wanted to take that idea of an eternal universe with the Spinozan idea that "God" is more or less just a term for the totality of everything, impersonal and just taking "God" and "Nature/Existence" as more or less interchangeable (with slight deviations in kind) then come to an Einsteinian take on the universe, as Einstein liked Spinoza and adopted his idea of a non-personal "God = Existence Alone" theological view...and well, Einstein and Spinoza were two pretty smart fellow Jews, after all, so... ;)

5. As a quick jab back, even if we were somehow to assume that a deity WAS the most reasonable explanation for the start of things...on what grounds do we claim it to be the JUDEO-CHRISTIAN GOD that started it all...why not any other Creator God from any other religion, other than the fact you happen to have been born now instead of in Ancient Greece or Medieval India or Buddhist China or Aztec-controlled Mexico or pre-colonization Africa...?

6. I'll reiterate my point above, thus, that you can see that I openly admit a lack of knowledge, as with every other human being, as to how the universe began (or if it did "begin" in the sense we generally understand) but that doing so is superior in a moral as well as intellectual and honest sense as opposed to insisting on plugging in an un-sustained, internally-inconsistent theological conception of a deity thought up in a small part of one planet amongst a solar system of 8 planets and dozens of moons amidst the hundreds of thousands of presumed stars and planets in this Milky Way Galaxy as well as the Andromeda Galaxy and hundreds of other galaxies...that a deity thought up on one tiny speck of one planet by oppressed peoples in Judea give a reasonable explanation for how all THAT came into being.

A galactic, celestial perspective of that Pale Blue Dot on which we live is one of the first and most convincing arguments against the First Cause = God argument."


Wow, your posts don't get any shorter, do they?

A polite response to Yellowjacket:

1) Science is rooted in experiment/observation, indeed that is the test of scientific knowledge or, if you prefer it, the scientific method. The theorems of mathematics cannot therefore be ''scientific findings''. Your reasoning is circular.

2) You fail to adress the issue of logic.

In view of 1) and 2) I would repeat:''Can you please tell me what there is in science proves the laws of mathematics and/or logic? And yet it must necessarily completely rely on both.''

I will respond to the rest of your points in due course.