Atheists vs. Theists -- Why Debate is Impossible

[mikkel_the_dane]

I argue that we humans evolved brains that come with certain anxieties, like purpose and meaning, and our endeavors in life are focused on addressing or resolving these primal needs. Religion was an early and effective solution, and it still is used by many folks. The meaning a person assigns religious concepts is not much different than the meaning they assign to their local sports team. We invest meaning, and then our involvement with the collective (a congragation or a team's schedule) we derive meaning and signficance. This is passive forms, but we also have more direct, goal-oriented forms like being athletes and competing ourselves. Or even raising children that are accomplished, or work goals is a way we seek meaning and significance. So meaning can be more objective and have real effects, or symbolic/abstract like religion.

The debates we have in these forums question the nature of meaning assigned to religion and religious concepts. Are they still relevant as they evolve in evolving societies?

Well, only my objective meaning counts, because I say so and thus it is objective, because I subjectively say so. Where as if you have a meaning it is subjective, because I can see that it is subjective.
It is objective, because I say so!!! And I see that you are subjective. I am objectively rational and objective, because that can't be doubted.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

No. Science doesn't work. Scientists try, though. I kinda pitty them.

"The grapes were probably sour anyway."

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Those people never came close to changing the world the way Christ has and still does.

That may not be quite the endorsement that you think it is. Besides, Christ had little to do with Christianity's success as a world religion, although that is irrelevant to my point. Christianity has not been good for mankind. I realize that you believe otherwise - you have to if you are to remain a Christian - but Christianity has been an anchor on Western intellectual and moral evolution. Fortunately, humanism rescued the West from theism to a large degree and helped moderate the brutality of Christianity, which was still conducting inquisitions and hanging women as witches when the deist instituted the humanistic model of government including church-state separation and a host of guaranteed persons rights including freedom of (and from) religion. Compare that with the Muslim world, which has NOT had the benefit of four centuries of humanism, and is still pushing people off of towers and burning them alive in cages with theistic governments' approval or condoning.

Science doesn't work.

"You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits. This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a super computer on a mass server. This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of manmade hogwash."- anon.

The debate is not impossible, the resolution of the debate is impossible

Debate is impossible if both debaters are not critical thinkers engaging one another's claims with rebuttal (falsifying counterargument), a process also called dialectic.

The difference between the theist and the atheist is that the theist perceives what the atheist doesn't.

No, the atheist perceives what every other human being with a functioning sensory system perceives, and he has the same neural circuits to interpret them. The difference is how they do that, how they interpret those apprehensions. The theist has misunderstood his own mental state. He thinks it is showing him something other than his own mind. But this is common to the human condition. Man has long misunderstood his own thoughts as evidence of an external reality informing those thoughts.

We know that the ancient Greeks made this mistake regarding creative inspirations, which they had no concept of arising from within, so they invented the muses, who they imagined were transmitting artistic intuitions to them. Likewise with the Christian model of internal conflict between older and newer neural centers (cognitive dissonance) depicted as God speaking and the devil trying to steal one's soul. And then there's people who see dreams as messages. It's all the same phenomenon - assigning external agency to internal intuitions.

Both obtain empirical evidence, and draw rational conclusions based on facts, experiments, theories, a-priori arguments, and hypothesis.

No, that's a description of empiricism, which goes from evidence to sound conclusion. Faith is the opposite. It begins with unjustified premises, then massages the evidence tomake it seem to support the premise, as if that premise were a conclusion rather than the starting point.

the difference is that the theist has more evidence to draw from because his wisdom and insights are more profound and scrutinizing.

The theist has no more evidence, and I've told you already what I think of these so-called profound insights. They're errors. Profound insights are the kinds of ideas that change worlds. Humanism was a profound insight, and it has improved the human condition dramatically. Our lives are longer, safer, more functional, freer, easier, more comfortable, and more interesting thanks to Enlightenment values ascending. Theism can make no such claim.

Not only does the theist see man, but he sees the nature, character and spirit of man. Whereas, all the atheist sees is a mammal.

LOL. How many theists know what a mammal is? Christianity has misjudged humanity from the start, thinking man was created in the image of a god with a soul rather than evolving from apes. There is no such thing as sin. Christianity depicts man as a spiritually diseased race born fit for perdition and needing salvation. That's incorrect, and a very damaging doctrine except to the institution that has the only remedy.

Your atheophobia is natural for your demographic, the Abrahamic theist. Your religion teaches it because it doesn't like dissenting opinion. It teaches that atheists are empty vessels living pointless lives, fixed on some limiting epistemological paradigm that strips life of meaning and color.

I saw this recently and had a chuckle. Here's a spiritualist (maybe a theist as well, I don't know) placing himself above those with religion, and both above the atheist, who is described to be as empty as a robotic vacuum mindlessly bumping into objects in the room and "measuring" them then turning and mindlessly going somewhere else until it makes another measurement:

Why are there so many religious edifices/temples/altars/shrines built around the world since history began?

If your argument is because a god exists, you're wrong. People have a proclivity to assign agency to all action, and to seek to control their fates by appealing to unseen deities with prayers and sacrifices. This is the bottom-up part. Others see an opportunity to manage them, and develop organized systems to do that. That's the top-down aspect that leads to organized religions.

you're on a forum amongst people who are of multiple and varied religions, and many of these religions have existed since the beginning of history - has the evidence eluded you?

That's much of the evidence that the religions have nothing to do with an actual god. Those same people are of multiple and varied languages. Both are systems of symbols that evolve as nested hierarchies. If these religions had anything to do with an actual god, there would be only one, just as there is only one periodic table of the elements. That's the power of empiricism.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

what is the ultimate purpose of our lives if we just disappear?

None. My life has no purpose to the universe. It only matters to me and some finite number of other animals both human and otherwise. That is much of the power of humanism. It's about life and making the most out of it for as many sentient creatures as possible, equipping each to with the resources and opportunities to determine their own purpose.

And be careful not to commit this fallacy:

"Appeal to consequences is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true."

we don't know what eternity will bring really.

Yet you say that if it is eternal unconsciousness, that life had no meaning.

Scientism is a belief that attributes too much to science than it is capable of doing.

I disagree. Scientism is a pejorative word (the commonest usage) demeaning the unwillingness to believe by faith, much like materialism. Theism is a belief that attributes too much efficacy to faith-based thought, which is always sterile, as creationism is compared to evolutionary science and astrology to astronomy.

It's a common mistake of theists to think that science is trying to answer theistic (metaphysical) questions, and just isn't quite up to the task for a lack of the proper tools, which religion provides while scientists continue in vain trying to answer metaphysical questions with nothing but laboratories and observatories. That's a misunderstanding of what science does and what can be known. Metaphysical statements are neither correct nor incorrect. They're "not even wrong." They're undecidable.

Correct and incorrect statements are falsifiable claims, incorrect ones being those that are falsifiable and have been falsified, with correct ones being those that are falsifiable but won't be falsified (rebutted with evidence) because they are correct. These are the issues theology deals with, but as I said earlier, such pursuits are uniformly sterile, theology being studies based in a god belief. No argument that begins with the premise that a god exists can produce a sound conclusion, or any idea that can be used to describe and predict nature.

The evidence does not need to be empirical. I'm not sure how it could be.

It can't not be empirical if it is evidence.

It's true that if the gospel writing is evidence, so is records in every scripture ever.

Yes, it is evidence, because it is evident to the senses. But evidence of what? What sound conclusions can be derived from apprehending scripture through one's eyes or ears (or fingers if deaf and blind). What I conclude is that it contains thoughts that human beings once put down on paper, people who may or may not have believed them, and shared with others who believed it, ideas that might be correct (David was an ancient king of the Hebrews), incorrect (woman was made from a rib), or "not even wrong" (Jesus sits at the right hand of God in heaven).

Scripture is not evidence of a deity. To do that, it would need to contain passages that human beings simply couldn't have written, and even then, naturalistic explanations involving extraterrestrials are more likely than gods as authors, but both become more likely if we find such a revelation. Likewise with uncovering a falsifying find upending evolution such as the irreducible complexity in biological systems that the ID were in search of. Suddenly, only deceptive intelligent designers remain to explain that, but naturalistic hypotheses remain preferred according to Occam's principle of parsimony.

Inner inconsistencies [of the Bible] have been mainly answered.

But not satisfactorily. The Bible contains internal contradictions, moral and intellectual errors attributed to a tri-omni deity, and errors of science and history.

So science can never say that there is no God or supernatural.

That's unimportant. It can also not say that there are n vampires or leprechauns, but that isn't slowing it down any.

We can rule out some gods, but not all. Neither the deist god nor any other non-interventionalist god can be ruled out, intervention being coming to earth, performing miracles, answering prayer, or leaving revelation - doing something empirically discernible.

Interventionalist gods said to have done things that we know didn't happen CAN be ruled out. Did you notice when I referred to falsifying evolution, an honest god was not one of the remaining possibilities. That's already been ruled out by the evidence that currently supports the theory. If evolution didn't occur as it appears to have occurred, then it was a massive deception perpetrated by a deceptive superhuman intelligence of great power - maybe Loki or Shiva, but not Jesus.

That's an empirical disproof - based in evidence. We can also rule out gods described in mutually exclusive terms as we do married bachelors, a disproof using pure reason. So, for example, imagine a god said to be perfect, but also said to have made errors that it regretted and attempted to correct. You can see that no such is possible any more than a married bachelor is, and for the same reason.

So the supernatural can exist and science know nothing about it and cannot study it and call it natural.

Supernatural is an incoherent concept like married bachelor. What is proposed is a realm capable of modifying nature but being undetectable even in principle. Bothof those things cannot be true about the same domain. Reality, existence, and nature are all the same thing. To exist is to be found in space and time interacting with other things existing. All of these thing are real, and the collection of them is reality. Another name for the collection of existents (things that exist) is nature. Everything that exists is another aspect of nature, and is detectible with the right sensory apparatus in the right place at the right time. To posit a realm, to call it real, and to say that it isn't detectible even in principle and not a part of nature is to propose a married bachelor.

 

[Wildswanderer]

I realize that you believe otherwise - you have to if you are to remain a Christian - but Christianity has been an anchor on Western intellectual and moral evolution.

You are quite the comedian.

 

[syo]

"You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits. This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a super computer on a mass server. This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of manmade hogwash."- anon

These all are very nice and very impressive. But aren't they a bit crude?

 

[paarsurrey]

The biggest problem that I have debating "Atheists" (commonly anti-theists) is that they only operate from a world view indicative of Christianity. Like this:

I don't care how you live you're life. I'm never going to tell an atheist that they're "wasting their life". As well, I will laugh at the notion that I fuss about myths. So that argument, from either side, is absolutely non-applicable in any theological debate about my beliefs.

" "Atheists" (commonly anti-theists) is that they only operate from a world view indicative of Christianity. "

Yes, the Atheism and the like "nones" people emerged in the West being disgusted (or in counter reaction) with the Hellenist-Paulism aka " Christianity" and there they ended their search/research and generalized it to other Religions, one gets to know, please. Right?

Regards

 

[The Kilted Heathen]

If evolution didn't occur as it appears to have occurred, then it was a massive deception perpetrated by a deceptive superhuman intelligence of great power - maybe Loki or Shiva, but not Jesus.

Eh, not quite Loki's style; there's no lesson learned from it. I could see something like the Shroud of Turin as a Loki Prank, though.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Of course we modern folk can look back and understand the "infinite" they were connecting to was imagined.

I compare what these folks did back then to soccer fans all over the world rooting for their home teams. Humans evolved brains that need meaning to satisfy certain anxieties, and the result has been religion, sports, competition, food, art, etc.


Watching Tour de France coverage includes aerial footage and this showcases churches all over the country. They are amazing and beautiful. Some are ruins and some have been maintained. It's hard to believe they could build these back then. These were symbols of power and authority, and were very expensive to build. These represent the human power and authority at the time, and this has waned since. The political authority is now secular in France. If these building represented an authentic God and divine that too has diminished.

It's amazing what humans accomplished back then without power tools and heavy equipment, but it always makes me wonder who paid for it, and how many died doing this work for the powers that be just so they could showcase their power and authority. I can never imagine this power being divine, rather humans who used religion (God) as window dressing to get their aims accomplished, even if immoral and deceptive.

I think you are making an error here in confusing secular authority with religious authority, as if the two were indistinguishable, prior to the enlightenment. This is a false assumption; there isn’t really any evidence at all to support your assertion that Neolithic monuments in Europe were built to showcase any earthly power or authority. But then there isn’t any conclusive evidence to refute it either, to be fair. This period of human society is referred to as prehistoric for a good reason; there are no written records available to us, and in the case of Avebury and it’s environs, not a great many other clues either, about the people who left such a dramatic mark on the landscape. So your theory is unfalsifiable; we are all free to interpret the significance of ancient monuments in accordance with our own worldview.

What seems indisputable is that the people who built those monuments devoted an extraordinary amount of effort, time and resources on collective religious undertakings. As did the Normans, Franks, Saxons, Burgundians etc who built those early mediaeval churches, and later the great Cathedrals, not in the service of Kings, princes, barons or warlords, but in the service of a religious authority which exerted it’s influence entirely without access to the sword. Church and crown in medieval Europe were anything but a unitary political body, as evidenced by the struggles between Thomas a Becket and Henry II of England, and Pope Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. It’s a common misconception, I think, that religion has always been an arm of the state, whose primary purpose was to serve the interests of the ruling classes.

 

[Trailblazer]

That may not be quite the endorsement that you think it is. Besides, Christ had little to do with Christianity's success as a world religion, although that is irrelevant to my point. Christianity has not been good for mankind. I realize that you believe otherwise - you have to if you are to remain a Christian - but Christianity has been an anchor on Western intellectual and moral evolution.

Christ had little to do with Christianity's initial growth but I think belief in Christ is what has sustained the religion over time.
Christianity is a mixed bag, as it has many teachings that have been good for individuals and society, but it also has many doctrines of the Church that have not been good for individuals and society. I don't hold Christ responsible for those doctrines since He had nothing to do with them.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Christ had little to do with Christianity's initial growth but I think belief in Christ is what has sustained the religion over time.

That or a constant flow of taxpayer cash and forced tithes, along with threats ranging from fines to imprisonment to grisly death - depending on the era and location - for non-Christians.

 

[Brian2]

And yet they don't. Observe any discussion on any historical figure that changed and impacted the world.

And as well, you are either forgetting or ignoring that if the dead know nothing, Yeshua bar Yoseph (mercifully) does not know what became of his teachings.

I don't know who invented the wheel even if the wheel lives on. That is no help for the person who invented the wheel however, even if we did know his/her name.
As for Jesus, He rose from the dead and is alive.

Wow, again it's almost like I quoted "But a noble name will never die," and "One thing now that never dies, The fame of a dead man's deeds."

Fame eventually dies and if there is no after life then what's the point of fame or wealth or anything else, it all ends up meaningless for you the moment you die.
If you have a family you no doubt leave a legacy for them and you may have left a legacy for your community or even for the whole world for a period of time BUT we and they all die and it all is meaningless in the long run unless there is an afterlife.

 

[Brian2]

Lasting meaning? That's correct. Others have commented about diminishing value of endless life, but there is more to consider. An eternal afterlife is a terrifying proposition if there is no way out. Eternal unconsciousness can be a friend. Here's a serious question. You can choose now to remain conscious or unconscious eternally after death, but you can't change your mind. You have no prior knowledge of what the afterlife will be like or how it might evolve over time, or how you might evolve, such as becoming beyond bored unto despondency. Maybe you find that eventually, you've seen and done it all, and are just tired of going on. I know that you believe that bliss is guaranteed, but it's not if your Bible is the words of men, and even then, who can say what the biblical god will do in an eon or forty. He's been known to regret his decisions and turn on both men and angels.

Incidentally, anybody who says that life has no purpose without an afterlife is telling us that his present life is meaningless, just as anybody who wonders why an atheist behaves morally absent a god belief has no conscience.

If there is no afterlife then yes ultimately my present life is meaningless. What else could I mean than that?
We all can make our lives tasty and meaningful for us in the short term, until we die possibly, but all the meaning we have put into those lives is ultimately nothing if all that happens is that we die and everyone else dies and the universe dies.
I have no problem with atheist morality even if it is not the same as theistic morality. Atheist morality can fulfill the demands of God's law, we are beings with a capacity for morality.
Someone who says that an atheist cannot behave morally might be wrong but that does have anything to do with whether they have a conscience or not.
With your proposition of wanting to either have eternal consciousness or eternal unconsciousness I would have to say I would want the former. I have that choice now and choose that and take the chance that God is actually an ******* who will turn nasty in the future.
Does your proposition mean that if God ends up being real and you get judged worthy of eternal life ("eternal" pertaining to not just the length but also the quality of life) that you would say no or make the condition that you can choose death in the future if you want?

The critical thinking community sees it the opposite way, hence the god of the gaps, which narrows with each discovery that assigns a function previously assigned to a god to the laws of physics, which makes the god concept increasingly unnecessary. Before the Renaissance, the Western god was the builder and ruler of the cosmos. Following the first wave of scientists, a clockwork universe was revealed that ran itself without intelligent oversight, and the ruler-builder god of Christianity became the builder god of deism. The second wave showed how the universe could organize itself from seeds according to natural law into filaments of galaxies of solar systems cooking heavier elements. With that gap closed, the builder god wasn't needed, either, and atheism became tenable.

But to somebody that has decided by faith rather than by reviewing and analyzing evidence critically that a god exist, everything is supporting evidence to him.

So the God of the gaps argument was wrong and functioning can be assigned to the things in God's creation which actually work as designed to work. Now we can see that. But purpose is something that science can say nothing about and let's face it, those things that the God of the Bible has actually said that He did/does (create, give life, sustain things) are the things that science is stuck in and can only speculate on even if atheist might say (or maybe even hope since you don't seem to want eternal life anyway) that science has done so well that we will eventually know.
But no, science can only speculate on these things and come even with open eyes on how things function in the universe, nothing is known about the beginnings and why and why things keep going.
And yes there is supporting evidence for a designer in what we see in science imo. But it would be evidence that works on another level in our humanity, our spirit and not just in our brain as empirical evidence does.
If empirical is all that you accept then you deny the evidence that the spirit sees.
Critical thinking does not review and analyse the evidence and logically come up with the answer that a God is not needed. That is just a speculation, not a logical conclusion.

All evidence is empirical evidence. The phrase is redundant (pleonasm, tautology). Empirical means, "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." Evidence is the noun form of the adjective evident, meaning apparent to the senses. Whatever you are calling nonempirical evidence is either empirical if it is evident, or not evidence if it is not.

The other evidence is evidence for the spirit. If you live only in your brain it means nothing to you.

We don't live in the long run. And we don't live in the grand scheme of things. We occupy several decades on a particular planet on the scale the naked senses report to us. It's true that at the scale of a galaxy or a proton, it's all meaningless. There is no evidence of life or mind on either scale. And eventually, there will be no evidence of either on any scale. And in a few millennia, none of us will be remembered or have any residual impact on the world except perhaps through our DNA. But we don't live at that scale.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of Abrahamic religions is their tendency to disparage life and nature in order to make what they are promoting seem more valuable than what we have here and now. How many believers live life as if they were waiting at a bus stop for something to take them away to a better place, like a child in an unhappy home waiting to be able to move out some day to a better place?

I don't think you have to be a believer in Abrahamic religion to notice the evil in the world and prefer to live in a better place. To deny it is to close your eyes.
But we all see the beauty we have around us also and appreciate it.

 

[Brian2]

And be careful not to commit this fallacy:

"Appeal to consequences is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true."

That's true. What I have noticed is what seems to be a refusal on the part of many people to see the truth about the ultimate meaninglessness of this life however without an afterlife.

Yet you say that if it is eternal unconsciousness, that life had no meaning.

We don't know what any afterlife will bring really but we do know that if we will not be there, there will be nothing for us, including meaning that has come across from a previous existence. And here is me thinking that you saw the ultimate meaningless of this life without an afterlife.

I disagree. Scientism is a pejorative word (the commonest usage) demeaning the unwillingness to believe by faith, much like materialism. Theism is a belief that attributes too much efficacy to faith-based thought, which is always sterile, as creationism is compared to evolutionary science and astrology to astronomy.

It's a common mistake of theists to think that science is trying to answer theistic (metaphysical) questions, and just isn't quite up to the task for a lack of the proper tools, which religion provides while scientists continue in vain trying to answer metaphysical questions with nothing but laboratories and observatories. That's a misunderstanding of what science does and what can be known. Metaphysical statements are neither correct nor incorrect. They're "not even wrong." They're undecidable.

Correct and incorrect statements are falsifiable claims, incorrect ones being those that are falsifiable and have been falsified, with correct ones being those that are falsifiable but won't be falsified (rebutted with evidence) because they are correct. These are the issues theology deals with, but as I said earlier, such pursuits are uniformly sterile, theology being studies based in a god belief. No argument that begins with the premise that a god exists can produce a sound conclusion, or any idea that can be used to describe and predict nature.

The definition of scientism which I gave is just the definition. I have not added opinion to it. You can take it in a pejorative way or it can be used that way by people I guess. You have used the word theism in a pejorative way but you aren't going by the actual definition of "theism" you are just using an opinion about theism.
You seem to be disagreeing that the word "scientism" is a legitimate word.
I don't know who made up the word. Maybe it is a word made up by theologians or Christian apologists to describe a certain form of atheism and with a presumption behind it that science has limits and cannot tell us about the existence or not of God.
Even though you say that the question of God is undecidable you also seem to be saying that because the question does not come under the purview of science that the answer has been decided by science or empiricism already.
You seem to want everything to fit into science when clearly that is not the case with everything.

It can't not be empirical if it is evidence.

Well I guess pure mathematics is not empirical evidence but we don't want to take away the value of mathematics.

Yes, it is evidence, because it is evident to the senses. But evidence of what? What sound conclusions can be derived from apprehending scripture through one's eyes or ears (or fingers if deaf and blind). What I conclude is that it contains thoughts that human beings once put down on paper, people who may or may not have believed them, and shared with others who believed it, ideas that might be correct (David was an ancient king of the Hebrews), incorrect (woman was made from a rib), or "not even wrong" (Jesus sits at the right hand of God in heaven).

Scripture is not evidence of a deity. To do that, it would need to contain passages that human beings simply couldn't have written, and even then, naturalistic explanations involving extraterrestrials are more likely than gods as authors, but both become more likely if we find such a revelation. Likewise with uncovering a falsifying find upending evolution such as the irreducible complexity in biological systems that the ID were in search of. Suddenly, only deceptive intelligent designers remain to explain that, but naturalistic hypotheses remain preferred according to Occam's principle of parsimony.

Occam's principle of parsimony looks pretty subjective to me.
But scripture is not good evidence in itself, especially to our mind and more analysis of the scriptures needs to be done to determine if particular scriptures are good evidence or not.
With ID and irreducible complexity I suppose the science would be shown to be wrong if the complexity was reduced. If the IDers kept using a particular example even after the complexity was reduced that would mean they are being deceptive. But of course reducing complexity is not something that can be said to be an answer to a problem and so it cannot be said that the reduction that was found is the way that something came to be, it is just speculation.

But not satisfactorily. The Bible contains internal contradictions, moral and intellectual errors attributed to a tri-omni deity, and errors of science and history.

Internal errors have mainly been answered. Other errors appear to be a matter of opinion I would say.

That's unimportant. It can also not say that there are n vampires or leprechauns, but that isn't slowing it down any.

We can rule out some gods, but not all. Neither the deist god nor any other non-interventionalist god can be ruled out, intervention being coming to earth, performing miracles, answering prayer, or leaving revelation - doing something empirically discernible.

Interventionalist gods said to have done things that we know didn't happen CAN be ruled out. Did you notice when I referred to falsifying evolution, an honest god was not one of the remaining possibilities. That's already been ruled out by the evidence that currently supports the theory. If evolution didn't occur as it appears to have occurred, then it was a massive deception perpetrated by a deceptive superhuman intelligence of great power - maybe Loki or Shiva, but not Jesus.

That's an empirical disproof - based in evidence. We can also rule out gods described in mutually exclusive terms as we do married bachelors, a disproof using pure reason. So, for example, imagine a god said to be perfect, but also said to have made errors that it regretted and attempted to correct. You can see that no such is possible any more than a married bachelor is, and for the same reason.

Genesis does not have to taken as an historical account to the Bible God cannot be ruled out because of Genesis. But imo evolution can be read in Genesis anyway so that is no problem.
And to say that the naturalistic methodology of science, which has deceived humans into deciding on a particular answer for what happened in the past, is a deception by God, is to deceive yourself.
To see the Bible tell us that God regretted something and to react to the then current events just shows that God is doing things according to the present circumstances and not looking into the future to decide what to do now.

Supernatural is an incoherent concept like married bachelor. What is proposed is a realm capable of modifying nature but being undetectable even in principle. Bothof those things cannot be true about the same domain. Reality, existence, and nature are all the same thing. To exist is to be found in space and time interacting with other things existing. All of these thing are real, and the collection of them is reality. Another name for the collection of existents (things that exist) is nature. Everything that exists is another aspect of nature, and is detectible with the right sensory apparatus in the right place at the right time. To posit a realm, to call it real, and to say that it isn't detectible even in principle and not a part of nature is to propose a married bachelor.

That looks like you are making up stuff about reality so you can eliminate the supernatural.

 

[The Kilted Heathen]

I don't know who invented the wheel even if the wheel lives on.

You are still massively missing the point and the very evident omni-cultural fact.

As for Jesus, He rose from the dead and is alive.

Your beliefs do not count for fact, and this is still absolutely beside the point.

Fame eventually dies

Yes, it does eventually fade and die when memory no longer persists. All things will pass.

and if there is no after life then what's the point of fame or wealth or anything else, it all ends up meaningless for you the moment you die.

You are overly obsessed with the afterlife. Yes, your fame and wealth becomes meaningless for you (even with an afterlife this is so; you do not take it with you), but it is not meaningless for you children, as you half-note. Even with an afterlife this is not meaningless, as that is what frames and founds ours lives. We do not live for the afterlife (and to do so is very sad), we live despite it.

 

[Valjean]

So science can never say that there is no God or supernatural.

So the supernatural can exist and science know nothing about it and cannot study it and call it natural.

So what's your point? Science can't study what it can't detect.
Isn't it reasonable to disbelieve in that for which there is no evidence? Isn't non-existence even more probable when there is neither need for nor reason to suspect the existence of a thing?

Science can't say there are no herds of unicorns grazing on the far side of the moon, but does anyone keep that in mind as a real possibility?

So are you saying you don't accept the reports of others and that you need to see it yourself before you will believe and therefore you believe the supernatural is just something dreamed up?

In a word, yes.
It is often unreasonable to accept unsupported reports. Even first hand eyewitness reports are well known to be unreliable. How much more unreliable are they after being told and retold, embellished, and edited, by people with an agenda?
There are all sorts of legends, tall tales, and sworn, eyewitness reports; of innumerable gods, monsters, magicians, space aliens, supernatural events, and even natural events, from every culture, now and historically. Do you believe in all of them, or is there, rather, an evidence-based hierarchy of probability?

The Bible is not a reliable, historical source. It's full of contradictions, inaccuracies, and outright falsehoods. It's testimonies are hearsay, agenda based, often edited, and usually of unknown authorship. Even the four gospels are inconsistent.

I suppose that is the same as wanting science to have seen and studied supernatural before you believe.
So you attribute more to science than even science attributes to itself.

Science doesn't accept eyewitness reports, even if first hand. It's skeptical. It questions and tests every claim. It's the opposite of religious folklore.

 

[DNB]

??????????
Is this an argumentum ad populum?

Still waiting for the evidence.

...that's always been my point!

 

[DNB]

Really? Since the beginning of history? And when was that, in your view?

See, far as I know, the earliest texts known to us are from the 35th to the 32nd centuries BCE, with pictorgraphic characters precursor to cueiform. Then, we get the Epic of Gilgamesh -- how many people still believe in the Bull of Heaven, or

• Ea - god of wisdom & magic
• Aruru - goddess of birth
• Siduri - goddess of wine making
• Ishtar - goddess of love & war
• Shamash- sun-god
• Ninsun - the wild cow
• Enlil - supreme god on earth?

Following that, Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Which of the beliefs from those periods are still with us, and where are their temples, churches, do you know? And where is the evidence for the existence of all these great and powerful gods and goddesses?

...out of your own mouth - you're looking right at it.

 

[DNB]

Because if there's one thing that religion is good at, it's sucking surplus wealth away from the state and the people to aggrandize itself.

...how in the world do you people invariably, keep missing the point???

 

[DNB]

"Most people since time immemorial have held beliefs that are incompatible with my personal beliefs, so this is a sign that my personal beliefs are true!"



Not only did you appeal to a logical fallacy, but you didn't even properly think through what the implications would be if we did accept your fallacious nonsense.

...sorry, is English your second language?