Alien,
Your statement demonstrates some of the problems in your approach. Thank you for the (sort of) compliment, but my arguments for the Resurrection are not based on personal incredulity…
On the contrary. When it's pointed out that there is any number of possible naturalistic explanations for the story, your response is, “what are the chances of that then?”. That’s what the argument from personal incredulity
is.
…my arguments about objective morality are not based on mere assertion (but demonstrate the choice of either there being no objective morality and hence nothing has a moral obligation on you and me or that there is objective morality and there needing to be a basis for it)
“Moral obligation” (ie, why we behave as we do) is readily explicable without inventing OM, and you precisely assert OM into existence in any case by insisting that (in some so far unexplained way) lots of people sharing a specific moral opinion means it must also be objectively true.
That’s what argument by assertion
is.
…and my account of two Muslims becoming Christians is not meant to demonstrate the existence of God, but was an aside in a post where I was responding to the claim that I was unable to differentiate between claims in the Bible and other holy books.
Yet after the anecdote you added a “God is good!” to imply that a god did it.
That’s what generalising from the anecdotal
is.
Apart from that though….
You seem to misunderstand me (or are otherwise confused). Having the same tools does not mean that people will necessarily come to the same conclusion. Surely you understand that, don't you. People can misuse the evidence they have. That is what some Global Flooders do. They claim to have scientific evidence of a global flood, yet are incorrect in their conclusions. Similarly economists can come to different conclusions.
Doesn’t wash. You claim to have reasoned your way to Islam being wrong and the faith with which you happen to be most familiar being right. I merely ask what tools or method you have to do that that have escaped the attention of countless muslim scholars over the centuries to give you such remarkable confidence in your finding.
Have you ever studied Islam in depth? I have, but have you? Please answer me on this, because if you have not then I would suggest you need to do so before telling me that I am not capable of determining whether the claims of Islam are indistinguishable from those of Christianity, particularly in what their holy books claim.
I didn’t say that the claims of Islam are indistinguishable from those of Christianity – of course they’re not. The content of their medieval superstitions are clearly different from the content of your iron age superstitions. The
foundational premises though are the same: deciding that a god is necessary to explain the otherwise inexplicable; the absence of a coherent definition of the deities, and the absence too of cogent arguments for their existence; dogma rather than developing understanding through testing and falsification; various miracle stories to convince the credulous; carrot and stick threats and promises to keep the cowed and gullible in thrall to the clerics etc.
Not here. It is not necessary to have read all 100,000 or more other god narratives to:
i) come to the reasonable conclusion that Islam is fundamentally wrong.
ii) come to the reasonable conclusion that Christianity is fundamentally right.
i) might well be a reasonable conclusion, but ii) is not. The point though is that you attempt to take me to task for not having an in-depth understanding of the window dressing of one faith rather than another. If you really think that to be relevant, then you have no choice but to apply the same “logic” to the window dressing of the countless other faiths – who’s to say that you wouldn’t find one or more of them to be more persuasive than the one you happen to have picked (and, by a remarkable co-incidence, are most enculturated to)?
Are you seriously suggesting that if you Alien, hadn’t been brought up in, say, Peshawar, you wouldn’t be making exactly the same claims about the truth/falseness of the two faiths
mutatis mutandis?
Seriously?
For i), I have already given some basic info, which you have not actually interacted with yet. Until you do that I will not waste my time supplying more info.
You don’t need to provide info (let alone the
ad hominem you actually provided). I can already reason my way to the finding that the truths of Islam are rationally unsupportable.
For ii), you and I disagree fundamentally about Christianity, but if something demonstrated Christianity (or some other world view) is correct, then it does not need anyone to look at all the rest to know that that world view is correct. For example, if, for the sake of argument, it can be demonstrated that Jesus is indeed the Son of God and what he says is true, then if he says A and another religion claims something incompatible with A, then the other religion must be false (at least on that point).
Sort of. First, you have no means of demonstrating such a thing. Second though, you’d also need to demonstrate that this “god” had somehow managed to eliminate the possibility of any other gods. Who’s to say that the Melanesian Tree Frog God hasn’t just made the christian god think he’s the only game in town?
<sigh/>It does not need to have happened. Islam holds Mohammed to be the supreme example of how to live. Some years ago I spent many hours discussing with a Muslim online (an Osama Bin Laden fan) who said that Mohammed never sinned (and that you should wipe your bum with an odd number of stones rather than use toilet paper!). If that is mainstream Muslim view then, if having sex with a 9 year old is morally wrong, then we have an example of a so-called sinless person sinning. If he did really have sex with the 9 year old then he actually sinned; if it never actually happened, we still have a religion holding up as the prime example of living who is depicted as a sinner. That is all. This is not complicated.
Bigger sigh. The point you’ve missed is that you attempted a character assassination on the basis of
stories. Whether those stories lead to internal contradictions in the claims of muslims is a separate issue. I find the claims of Islam to be as bonkers as the claims of your faith, but bonkers or not you cannot dismiss one faith instead of another on the basis that its stories are all true.
I don't know. However, Romeo is not being held up as an example for us to follow by a religion and she was 5 years old so, on two accounts, that is not a very good analogy.
Of course it’s a good analogy – you tried your
ad hominem by applying contemporary moral standards to a 14th century narrative. The use people then made of the players involved in those stories is a separate matter – all that’s being said here is that applying morality anachronistically is just bad thinking.
Again, this is not relevant and you would understand better if you had a better understanding of Christianity and at least a basic understanding of Islam. Hence my question to you about whether you have ever looked at Islam in depth.
Yes, in the Bible God is involved with lots of "wretched sinners", but their behaviour is not held up as the behaviour we should imitate. Come on, BHS, this is dead simple stuff.
Yet again, you miss the point. You invited us to dismiss Mohammed as a witness because of his (supposed) character traits in other areas of his life. That’s just bad reasoning for reasons I explained, and moreover it would rule out the credibility of various “sinners” from your faith who you
do think to be reliable witnesses. Whether any of these people is being “held up as the behaviour we should imitate” is neither here nor there: the point you were attempting was that the witness credibility of one of them (but only one of them) fails because of his other character traits. And that point fails.
Come on Alien, this is dead simple stuff.
Yet again, you have misunderstood and would, hopefully, not do so if you had a basic understanding of Islam, the religion you tell me I am unable to compare properly with Christianity.
Yet again, no I haven’t but you have. You introduced lurid stories about a figure from Islam in an attempt to discredit that figure in other areas of his life. That’s what
ad hominem is, and it’s just more bad thinking on your part.
Look, as I have said above and which I will repeat now in the hope that you will see that you do not yet have the understanding of Islam to make the claims above, Mohammed is held up as the example for Muslims to follow in everything (except the number of wives, apparently). Islam relies totally on whether Mohammed was used by God to give his final revelation to mankind. If Mohammed was not a suitable person to do that, e.g. if he was a liar, mentally unstable, was a rapist, was a paedophile or whatever, then that means there is no good reason to accept the Quran as God's word. It is that simple. Islam relies totally on Mohammed.
And still you’re completely missing the point. Mohammed may well be held up by muslims as an exemplar of moral rectitude, but even if you accept wholesale the stories about him, even if you apply anachronistically morality you happen to approve of, and even if you successfully discredit him with irrelevancies and casually indulge in a character assassination to boot, all of that would
still have nothing whatever to say to whether or not his pronouncements were morally good or bad.
If a murderer says “murder is wrong” is “murder is wrong” thereby incorrect, or has he merely failed to adhere to his own moral opinion?
By all means critique Islam (or any other faith) if you wish, but playing the man rather than the ball really isn’t he way to do it.
Really.
Yes, some Christians become atheists and think they are following reason.
So Allah is good then, or will you treat us to more special pleading to get you off that hook?
My point was not that the those two becoming Christians demonstrates that Christianity is correct. You said, "Why not just give them a call to explain where they've gone wrong?" I gave an example where I did just that (except that they themselves came calling). If you didn't actually mean anything by your, "Why not just give them a call to explain where they've gone wrong?", why write it?
Because you followed the anecdote with, “God is good!” Why did you do that if you didn’t think that the anecdote lead to that conclusion?
Oh look, BHS claims that Christians have not come to Christianity by following reason. Certainly some (many?) have not, but plenty have. It was a large part of my conversion and of some people with bigger brains than I have.
Yet that reason collapses into faith when you examine it. That’s why your and other faith claims are not taught as facts in schools (except some odd ones) but instead are taught only as, “these are the things that some people believe”. Funny that don’t you think, given the “reason” you think underpins your faith beliefs? Why would anyone treat your “reason” so radically differently from the reason used to support physics or maths or chemistry or geography or….
There you go again. Straw man. Of course, if a person (theist, atheist or whatever) "descends into logical fallacy" there is a problem. You assume that this is what all Christians do, yet cannot see the logical fallacies of your own position.
You find one and I’ll see it.
Good luck with that!
Yes, it is a belief. Strong atheism is a belief that there is no God/god. Weak atheism (your position I gather) is that there is insufficient evidence to believe that there is a God/god.
First, as we’ve discussed before I don’t recognise the two types – so far as I know no-one says “there categorically can be no gods” and the “strong atheism” schtick sounds to me like an attempt by the religious to shift the burden of proof.
Second, what you (wrongly} describe as “weak” atheism is in fact the finding that all arguments made so far for an objectively true god are fallacious.
God got them to walk there.
Amazing innit the stuff you can casuistically retrofit to any observable fact at all. Besides, you’re clearly wrong about that – it was deffo the Nigerian Ant God who made them do it.
You might be correct. Which other anecdotes have I used, bearing in mind I am "fond of using anecdote as if it were in some way illustrative of a larger principle or truth"?
Resurrection stories? Lots of (though not all) people thinking that TACTDJFF is morally wrong?
Oh look, another straw man.
Let’s see shall we…
I am not shrugging my shoulders. For starters, the existence of evil does not demonstrate the non-existence of loving God.
It does if you think there to be an omnibenevolent and omniscient and omnipotent god, and the “it’s a mystery”, “He has a plan” etc schtick is
precisely shrugging your shoulders.
Why not address the problem instead?
Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks to me like you are relying on "personal incredulity".
You’re corrected. It’s no such thing.
You say, "As the observable facts are just as you’d expect them to be with no god at all." You will surely be aware that this does not itself imply that there is no God (loving or not).
Yes I am, which is why I didn’t say that it
does imply that there is no god. What I did imply though was, well, "As the observable facts are just as you’d expect them to be with no god at all" and that’s all. You know, the thing I actually said rather than your straw man version of it.
What it does do though is to give a pretty big logical problem for those who claim a god of the omnis – the problem you ducked.
You need to demonstrate that the observable facts show there is not god at all, not just that it is compatible with there being no god at all.
I need to do such thing. All I need to do is to show that the world is just as you’d expect it to be with no god at all, for example that bad things happen to good people and
vice versa.
You were speaking earlier of Christians and logical fallacies. You've got into one yourself here. I realise that some of your atheist friends here won't understand the difference, but surely you yourself do.
Oh dear – you’re very confused. There’s no logical fallacy, just an observable truth. The
contradiction at least though that there is is yours: claim a god of the omnis if you wish, but you have then to deal with the observable facts that contradict that claim.
So…
…no straw man at all then, except that is your your misdescription of what I had said.
Ah well.
OK, support your claim with reason or evidence.
A bit rich from you of all people, but OK – which “claim” do you want me to support exactly?
