Had to put this into two posts because it was almost 15000 characters long lmao.
Yeah, I've had to do serious editing myself. By the way, I'm not going to get into these arguments, just point out ways in which you've misunderstood them or whatever. The point I made is that arguments are available. I actually agree with you that they don't coerce belief. The skeptic has his wiggle room.
Firstly, kalam is false because it presupposes everything has a cause. If you use the kalam argument you must explain where God came from. And you cannot say that "God was always there" or "God is infinite" because that would violate the very kalam argument you are using.
No, Kalam says that
everything that began to exist has a cause. That the universe began to exist is reasonably uncontroversial, and so the natural question is what caused it to exist. On the other hand, God did not begin to exist. Thus we don't have to explain his existence in terms of anything else.
Another way to put this (got this from Plato) is that everything in the universe (the physical universe) is contingent. That is, it depends on something else for its existence and/or sustenance. Therefore, the whole universe is contingent. So how do we explain the existence of the whole chain of contingent things? What might cause this chain to continue to exist? Well, we need something
noncontingent (i.e., something that doesn't itself depend on anything else for its existence) to explain the existence of the universe.
Again, I can see ways for the skeptic to get around this. The skeptic might try to argue (however implausibly) that the universe is noncontingent. I don't think that argument is convincing, but there's nothing that says it isn't possible.
As for moral arguments, again, how do you reckon conflicting moral philosophies? If morality only comes from God, then other moral codes must therefore come from other Gods. Either you must acknowledge the existence of many other Gods who created these other moral codes (and justify not accepting them and accepting the moral code of your God), or you must show why God would create so many conflicting moral codes.
Well if my argument is approximately right, God is the source of our sense of right and wrong. If Christianity is true, God created us in his image, and it is because we bear his image we have access to moral truths. However, as it happens, our divine sense (that which we use to know truths about God and morality) is damaged through sin. As a result, we don't know God and morality as we ought. Thus we have that deplorable blooming, buzzing confusion about ethics, not to mention umpteen religions. So I don't have to acknowledge the existence of other gods to explain other moral codes. I can write it all off as confusion created by sin.
The historical argument for Jesus' resurrection is also a no-go because of many conflicts in the Bible and not to mention that a lot of the events do not match up with known historical records.
This misunderstands the case. Why should we expect every important Roman decree to have survived the ravages of time? And the hand-waving to "conflicts in the bible" is, to say the least, uninformative. Suffice to say that you have a lot of catching up to do on such things as historiography.
Not to mention Philo and Josephus wrote of King Herod's brutality and how he killed family members in order to retain power. But they never wrote of Herod killing all the cute little babies - a danger which Jesus was subjected to. So if the Bible is so fundamentally flawed historically, why on Earth would you possibly accept it as an accurate historical record?
Again, this doesn't show a flaw in the biblical history. Why should we expect Philo or Josephus to have recorded every atrocity by every tyrant? Why should the fact that Philo and Josephus (more accurately, those histories we have from them that have survived the ravages of time) don't record these events to be evidence that they didn't happen? That's just weird.
As for the "fine-tunedness of the universe's constants", this is irrelevant because it has been demonstrated that universes can still function much in the same way as ours does when some fundamental forces are removed completely. And the fine-tunedness arguments rely on all the other constants remaining the same. But why would the other constants remain the same?
Again, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument. The argument is that life requires a great number of universal constants to have an infinitessimally small range. So yeah, we might have a "universe" that "functions" with different constants, but we wouldn't have life. The argument was convincing enough to move such a staunch athiest as Antony Flew to a deist position. Flew is nothing if not a hard-nosed skeptic. So if you are not impressed by the argument, may I humbly suggest that you are either not conversant with the issues it raises or there is another source for your skepticism?
Furthermore the important fact of the matter aren't the constants, but the ratios that exist in the universe. I wonder why Creationists never address them as they might have a much stronger argument to make.
Okay, let's add those in.
All these "arguments" have been repeatedly shot down. Either on logical or evidential grounds.
Of course they have.
Agnostics claim that evidence is unattainable. That is a positive claim they make.
Some agnostics say this. Not all. Some agnostics say that we just don't have it.
But evidence being required for belief in God? That's true for everything. Evidence - to whatever standard suits the purpose - is required for all things. That's hardly a positive claim. And claiming there isn't enough of it is kind of redundant if they say it is unattainable, which as I said, is a positive claim and agnostics have that burden of proof.
This completely ignores everything I've said for dozens of posts. Let's take that claim: "It is irrational to believe anything without evidence." Do you have
evidence for that claim? Probably not. So clearly, you don't need evidence to believe some things. Evidence is simply not required for some of our beliefs to be rational. In fact, I'd go farther. MOST of our beliefs are rational without evidence.
Laws of nature are merely what humans describe as what normally happens in the universe with almost no exceptions. They are basic truths about the universe around us from hard observation that fits with mountains of data.
Thus the probability of an event violating the laws of nature is statistically almost nothing. That's why when somebody claims a miracle, we look for other explanations the laws of nature offer us before we conclude that it was something we cannot explain.
Faced with the mountains of evidence that Jesus actually rose from the dead, one might say "Well look, I can't explain all these evidences. I admit that the best explanation for it all is that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. However, we know that such things can't happen because the laws of nature are inviolate. So although I don't have another explanation right now, even though the evidence points to resurrection, I don't believe the resurrection."
For most of my life, I had it. And then I saw it was very irrational. Any belief that you cannot objectively prove is irrational, no matter what way you slice it.
That's simply not so. And what's sad is that you know it's not so. Once again, take your belief: "Any belief you cannot objectively prove is irrational." Apparently you think this belief is rational, but can you 'objectively' prove it? No. Must be irrational (I believe it is, but for different reasons).
From our communication, I know that you know how to speak English, you have some knowledge of computers, and the experiences you describe in communication are things I can attest to (Ex. bread/jam, breakfast, etc). So at the bare minimum the world we perceive is mostly the same. And probably completely the same. The exception are people who have a disability - are blind, deaf, mute, etc, or even mental disabilities. There are obviously differences there. But our common functioning senses are all the same. Someone who is blind experiences touch, smell, and hearing just as a sighted person does.
This is basically how I explain other people's lack of belief in God. Spiritual blindness. Something has gone awry with the cognitive establishment.
Besides, why would your God give you the ability to perceive him and not me and other non-believers?
I really don't know. It puzzles me more than anyone.
That's possible for any belief. Not just your own. I'm just wondering how you rule that out because it's a more ordinary conclusion (the powerful human mind creating "experiences") than your extraordinary one (It's God).
It's broadly logically possible. I rule it out because it just seems obviously false.
