it but got lost in the logic.

"... though he is completely and importantly right to insist that modern fundamentalism is exactly that, a modern outgrowth that ignores the bulk of what Christians have actually said and thought about the Bible for two millennia."



It seems he forgot all the good missionary-work that was done in Africa and the Americas: The merciless condemnation of the unbelievers as deserving of conquest, re-education and violence.

Or what about the "Mark of Cain" being used as an excuse for racism?

What about the demonization of homosexuals?

What about holding all womenkind accountable for the original sin committed by Eve?



Those aren't outgrowths of a "modern" fundamentalism. They are perfectly in line with centuries and millennia of main-stream Christianity.

But the validity of that conclusion depends entirely on what is the "bulk" of Christian legacy. That in turn requires a sifting of what is Christian from the other influences on the development of human societies.

Marx's model of the transition from primitive communism through slave-based labor through feudalism through nation-states and industrialism all the way up to dominant transnational concentrated capitalism, works for me as a analytical tool.

If Marx is right, those developments are inexorable, stemming from the development of, and control of, advancing means of production, regardless of the religion prevailing at any given time and in any given place.

Separating the dubious from the valid also requires everyone put down their own biases and presuppositions. Disagreements will remain but at least they will then be based on an honest assessment of the evidence.

I propose a compromise: The believers abstain from lecturing unbelievers about God until the believers agree among each other what they are talking about. And in return, we unbelievers promise to ponder the believers' teaching on God, once it has been formulated and published, with all seriousness and without prejudice.

What supposed acts of narcissm are you refering to? The atheistic philosophy holds that we aren't special, that we aren't chosen ones, that we arent separate from the rest of the universe.

Isn't it narcisstic to believe that one has a special connection and insight on the unknown thing that created the whole universe?

Just more BS.
The only response to atheism, new or old, is to prove the existence of God. Still hasn't been done.

Once again, design the experiment to test the existence of something described as ineffable.

All major religions anthrapamorphise God. You do. You probably have an image of Jesus in your house. More than one I would guess. So get out of here with that ineffable shit.

Therefore there will never be evidence. The existence of a god(s) can neither be proven nor disproven, other than by a philosophical attempt.

You are confusing particular religious claims, most of which can be proven or disproven, with the existence of a god(s).

The "evidence" argument for or against the existence of a god(s) is, and has been, specious.

But most religions and certainly Christianity are highly dependent on evidence arguments.

But perhaps not so much when you realize most religious texts and most certainly the bible were obsessed with evidence. The foundation of Judeo-Christian belief is almost entirely based on accounts of second person divine witness. The messianic claim of Jesus is well documented in the NT, albeit with contradiction and demonstrable error. Claimed miracles are well documented and well repeated in Christian popular culture. The entire basis of mainstream Christian belief relies on proving the concept of the trinity, for which little evidence can be found even within the canonical gospels.

Such questions may matter to the so-called "fundamentalists" but I think they completely miss the point so I don't attend fundamentalist churches

The story that has come to us through the millennia is full of scandalous meaning, even without evidence: the King of the Universe born as a human child to a mother not yet married when she becomes pregnant, raised by a man who was not his father, a refugee in childhood, a poor homeless wanderer as an adult, murdered by the state on demand of the religious authorities

Look at the reaction to the Resurrection, Luke 24:11.

Everyone is born atheist. People do not spontaneously develop faith in a divine being, and even if they did it certainly wouldn't be organized into a complex and organized system of philosophy and dogma. Organized religion relies completely on evidence, just piss poor evidence of revelation.

B) Atheism is not simply nonbelief; it is specific nonbelief. one cannot lack belief in a deity util one has a concept of a deity.

C) What evidence do Hindus rely on for reincarnation?

One cannot believe in a deity unless one has a concept of a deity. Atheism is the default condition. Anything else requires revelation, which is the same evidence Hindus rely on.

Some religions, including the one you specifically mentioned, are nontheistic, yet still rely on revelation. Atheism does not.

I have eggs to color.

Very telling how you'd abandon that train of thought when the destination turns out to be not what you'd hoped.

Including that it is benign, knowledgeable or powerful to any degree of your choice.

Racing to ineffability to avoid questions about any putative god means we can say absolutely nothing about said god. If we cannot validate his existence we certainly can make no claim about his disposition, intent, or desires.

What, precisely, is the difference between a god about whom no claims can be made, inclusing existence, and a god which does not exist?

Which is specious.

Do you have some other means to "validate" the existence of a god(s)?

Do you think we can say anything true about God?

Philosophers and logicians have multiple definitions of "truth".

So... who witnessed God and described him to others as being undescribable?

Or is God rather defined as undescribable by the believers?

And God is described as being all-knowing, all-merciful, all-powerful andsoforth. Knowledge, behavior, competence... Those are parameters that can clearly be tested.
BUT how does one test God's infinity? How could you, a finite human, tell the difference between an entity that is vastly but finitely larger than you and an entity that is truly infinite?

If you find an entity that is supposedly God, how do you decide whether it's God or not?

Hence the historicity discussions.

Most larger and older religions do in fact hold that God is indescribable. Not that it stops tanyone from trying.

If you think omniscience can clearly be tested", by all means, do so. I'm all ears. It really is as impossible to test as infinity.

You won't like the answer to the last question but that answer is faith. Informed, questioned, and frustrating faith. That leads to a question that might be subject to an answer:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1218225455

This entity over there, it's either God or it's not. I either believe in it or I do not. This means there are four possible outcomes:

It's God and I believe in him.
It's a False God and I don't believe in him.
It's God and I don't believe in him.
It's a False God and I believe in him.

And all four of those outcomes would be "legal" because they have been achieved by applying faith.

The more fundamental question is whether there is a god at all. Only after accepting that premise is it usefult to discern whether there are more than one, or whether it's the right one or not. Those latter questions are the stiuff of organized religions , which usually do not end well.

I try to look at such problems the way statistical math does: Which of those two theories leads to explanations that are more in tune with evidence?
We are incapable of being 100% sure (mathematical reasons, too complicated to explain in short), but if theory A makes predictions that are in tune with a big chunk of the evidence and theory B makes predictions that are in tune with only a small part of the evidence, then theory A is more likely to be correct and gets declared "true" for practical reasons.



I have never seen a reasonable argument for God existing. Anselm's proof has a glaring loophole, Goedel's proof is based on unrealistic premises, Pascal's wager is flatout ignorant and disingenuous... Most reasonings I have encountered were based on the notion that God hasn't been disproven yet.



And believing in God is a radically different topic, because faith as a method of revelation has nothing to do with evidence or logic. Having faith means accepting a (religious) statement and then never doubting it.
Just take a look at the intellectual traditions of ancient and medieval Europe, if you don't believe me: In these ages of massive religious faith, ideas and arguments weren't weighed on their accuracy or practicality. The origin of the idea decided whether it was correct. Ideas from old and reputable sources (e.g. the Bible) were summarily declared to be correct and new ideas, or ideas from crazy free-thinkers, were summarily declared to be wrong. Up until the Renaissance, the concept of testing the validity of a theory via experiments didn't even exist!

Apart from that, I cannot say much about faith. I have a hard time emulating the mindset in my mind. I'm a scientist and faith as a method of revelation is psychologically anathema to me because there are so many ways it can fail you.



And let's not forget, that faith has another component: the luciferic problem. Lucifer's crime was to refuse to obey God, despite God being God.
If we prove God's existence via a method of doubt (e.g. science) or if we postulate his existence via a method of faith (e.g.religious belief), this still leaves the question untackled whether we should be loyal to him.

Simple example: the devil. You have faith that he exists, but you aren't loyal to him, e.g. for moral reasons.
The same way it would be thinkable to acknowledge God's existence AND to disavow him at the same time.

I don't think evidence in the conventional sense is useful at all in testing whether a god(s) exist. Evidence is what is evident to human senses, augmented by technology. It is the ultimate confirmation bias; if I don't see it, it don't exist.

That said, all reasonable conclusions are based on premises and logic, whether those conclusions are right or wrong. Your premise is that physical evidence must exist for a thing's existence. My premise is that god is undetectable. Without going through the logical steps again, I conclude it is reasonable to conclude there may be a god. From your premise you conclude there cannot be a god. Both conclusions are reasonable and logical, though contradictory, but both conclusions are constrained by their premises.

I assume you agree that neither conclusion is proof of anything.

Let's for starters assume that God is undetectable and exists. Why not.

The problem:
If you separate detection from existence, what defintion of existence do you use?
How can you tell something that is undetectable and exists apart from something that is undetectable and doesn't exist?

To date, all we know suggests a beginning point.

If all around us, by its own terms, could not have always been in existence, what is the nature of that which caused it? That does not negate existence as we knew it but it does require some additional description of something altogether different.

I always thought the name "I am who am" was stupid but I'm not so sure. It simply describes existence in a way we have never experienced.

None of the canonical gospels are authored by those in which they are attributed. No first hand account of Jesus exists anywhere.

"...there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being."

1. There is no condition that determines this primordial agency to be an intelligent or willing entity. "God" could very well simply be a law of nature. Unthinking, uncaring, without perception or will or intention or morals.

2. Using a massless particle, it's very easy to derive an Energy-Time Uncertainty-Principle from the Momentum-Space Uncertainty-Principle. As time and space are interconnected in relativity, and as energy and momentum are interconnected as the energy-momentum-tensor in relativity, it's not a far stretch to postulate the existence of an Uncertainty-Principle that encompasses the variables energy, momentum, time and space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Energy can bootstrap itself into being. Electromagnetic quantum-fluctuations are the easiest proof of that. Without those fluctuations, electrons excited into a higher quantummechanical state would have no reason whatsoever to return to a stable ground-state. It is only when one of those photons which created out of nothing via the Uncertainty-Principle hits such an excited electron that something interesting happens: The electron is lifted from its stable, excited state to a slightly higher energy... but there is no state at this energy that the electron could adapt. With no final state the electron could go to, it re-constitutes itself in one of the states that are available: It dumps some of the excess-energy and adapts one of the lower, stable states.

I'm no physicist.

Why is this primordial agency supposedly an entity? Why couldn't it simply be something unthinking and uncaring as the law of gravity?

The ex nihilo nihil fit position dating back to Lucretius and beyond.

Other than in theory, everything that exists in the universe came from something. To date the existence of nothing can be proven to have come from nothing. As Sagan famously asked, "Why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed?"

You made mistake in there that I encountered a few days ago in a discussion about science-stuff: You cannot extrapolate the behavior of the multiverse from the laws of nature inside our universe. We have no evidence that the "realm" "outside" of our universe has the same laws of nature as our universe. (In the other discussion, the other guy simply assumed that the laws of probability outside of our universe are the same as within our universe... which we don't know.)


What is impossible here might very well be possible there and vice versa. It's intellectually interesting but practically futile speculation.

"And Shortt is rightly merciless towards those who wriggle out of difficulties by slipping disguised constants into the “nothingness” out of which the universe comes – primitive electrical charges, quantum fields, timeless laws or whatever. "


What about the people who fill the "nothingness" with explanations drawn from faulty observations, with suppositions about God's nature drawn from their own psychological frameworks, with morals drawn from their confined and primitve cultures?

Why is it bad to postulate that the universe is filled with things like electric charges but it's good to postulate that this particular set of morals is the one that everybody everywhere in the whole universe is supposed to live by?

The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being.

I've seen that argument criticized but never debunked.

and physics.

And using philosophy to understand the origins of the Universe is like using dance to discuss the results of an MRI.

whatever or whoever that is. The bible, just another holy book with grains of truth, the rest is human agenda tampering. The churches and their leaders, especially radical christianity and islam, a god awful sham bent on control of the masses and a welcome tool to politicians.

"some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself" to the resurrection of Jesus in which he believes, if he wants to apply the former to his idea of 'God'. Such a "fundamental agency or energy" seems to be an argument against all Christian (and Muslim, Hindu etc.) theology, and for deism.

I think pp.151-7 of 'The God Delusion' show that Richard Dawkins has confronted this "there must be some fundamental agency" claim before: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ekremer/resources/From%20Richard%20Dawkins,%20The%20God%20delusion,%202006.pdf

Which is why "high-profile" atheists don't respond to them.

Few believers know their own belief system, and even fewer know the various apologetic arguments out there. The vast majority come to their belief through something other than being convinced by these apologetics. So in general discourse, they aren't discussed.

Most of the the high profile atheists are just populizers, and much of the atheist movement is about secularism, not philosophy of God. The intellectuals in apologetics are in a profession even their own flock ignore, and their arguments have little bearing for most people.

Creationism and "Gods Not Dead" represents a huge portion of religious pop culture in the US that many atheists are responding to. It seems a lot of religious apologetics don't understand just how ignorant most believers are of their own beliefs and how for many atheists, it's about fighting for equal access in a world full of religious privilege.

"But Dawkins didn't address the most common religious arguments in religious philosophy!" It's because religious philosophy is ignored and irrelevant for the vast majority of people out there. I'm more concerned with the huge number of believers that think atheists are just angry at God than metaphysical apologetics in my day to day life.

Other atheists have responded to these apologetics, professional philosophers even, and I've found all of the apologetics pretty bad regardless, and it's just not interesting to me at all, since it's not what most believers even base their beliefs on.

Preferably with appropriate publicity.

Generally, none of this is rigorous enough for many theology students no doubt, but then nobody really cares about theology in the general population.

The debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham is the kind of thing that people mostly get interested in, for example, and even then, not that many.

article--say on Cabbalah, William Paley, or even Baron von Ungern-Sternberg--conclusively puts their whole worldview to bed

but I suspect you don't either.

Because I wonder how one can write 200 pages on two very simple questions:
if there is a god, what is it and how do we know it?

1- what is the total universe (multiverse, etc). Experimentally unverifiable.
was it created and by what? Pure conjecture. Idle talk.

2- even if assuming a 'creator god', one would need to look where to learn about it.
The leading religions rely on books which are so riddled with inconsistencies, scientific and historical errors and plain myths that they can't possibly be taken seriously.

What I understand from the article is that this book takes the shortcomings of 'New Atheists',
and **poof, shazam** therefore god. Not very convincing.

If God is not conditioned by anything external, does that mean the divine nature is arbitrary or random? It seems to me that being unconditional just means that there is no reason for God to be any particular way. And more than that, if God can change his/her own nature, then it really is arbitrary. But if he/she can't, then God is the functional equivalent of a law, rather than a moral agent capable of choice.