I will make this post a positive case for the existence of God as stated in the Christian Bible. For those of you who agree, chime in on points that you think are incorrect, or that you have additional proofs for their correctness. For the nontheists, answer the points raised and I will respond to them as best as I can. If you don't fall into either category, present what you believe.

The case for the Christian God (Yhwh) and in opposition to nontheism, may be made with the following points.

First. The existence of the universe conclusively demonstrates that a Creator exists.

For centuries, nontheists held to the metaphysical belief that the universe was eternal, since the idea of an uncaused First Cause at a specific point in time was metaphysically untenable. However, physics has now made clear, by evidence of red shift (among other strong cases) that the universe began at a specific point of time - in fact, the beginning of time. Likewise, it has been shown that matter itself had a finite beginning.

Now this presents an interesting problem for the nontheist. Since the universe began to exist, and since the nontheist holds no creater exists, then the nontheist must conclude that all of the matter in the universe sprang from nothing at all. Since the entire universe may be taken as a closed system (for, no energy may pass into and out of the universe since it has no other place to go) this obviously breaks the Law of Conservation of Matter, which has been proven to be true even in the framework of General Relativity.

This means that a perfectly naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe fails. Not only does it entail a completely uncaused universe full of matter arising from literally nothing, but the idea of matter as such in the closed system of our universe breaks the Law of Conservation of Matter!

Therefore, it may be concluded that the universe must be caused by a force outside of nature. But this means it is caused by a supernatural force. Therefore, a Creator exists.

It may be objected that this Creator needs a cause. However, if the Creator is an eternal cause, as in Christian theology, then this entity needs no temporal cause at all. The typical nontheist objection - "then why couldn't the universe itself have no cause" - fails because the universe is demonstrably finite in both time and composition.

Second. The existence of intrinsic moral values indicate that a personal Creator exists.

We will work with a specific case here: rape. Rape, to the Christian, is immediately sinful, as it violates God's decree against sexual immorality.

However, the nontheist runs into another embarrassing difficulty. For, they must hold that no action that we know inside is truly evil - not even rape - is intrinsically wrong.

Many nontheists try to ground their arguments in a sort of utilitarianism. Obviously, they say, the utility of rape toward the overall happiness of humanity is overwhelmingly negative. But this argument fails because it does not outline how we are to weigh the effects.

For instance, what if three men rape a woman and get away with it? Certainly, the woman will be unhappy, but if the three men are satisfied, who are we to say that the overall sum of human happiness from this event hasn't improved? Moreso, even if rape occurs between one woman and one man, suppose this rape produces a child who cures cancer. Under the utilitarian view, this would make the action of rape in this case good, since it lead to the betterment of mankind.

Similarly, consider the Holocaust under this view. If the Germans had won World War II and had changed all of our minds to Nazi philosophy, then the Holocaust becomes good and necessary toward cleansing the human race. And since in this case humanity is indoctrinated to Naziism, his overall happiness improves, making the Holocaust good. However, in Christianity, the Holocaust - even in this case - would remain morally wrong because it violates the intrinsic notion that murder is wrong.

Many other subjectivist arguments fall into absurdity. Pragmatism asserts the morality of an action only when adequate proof arises. But William James himself wrote that much of our moral choice cannot wait for this consensus, thereby subjecting the vast majority of moral choice to a sort of whimsical notion of faith. This makes morality, at least in part, utterly empty.

Moreover, even if consensus were reached, it would not guarantee that consensus was correct. For instance, thousands of years ago the vast majority of people held that slavery was useful and moral. However, such a notion is utterly repugnant now. Therefore it can never be obvious that a consensus itself is correct. This makes any moral choice under pragmatism completely ungrounded in reality.

The fact that we have a sense that rape is wrong without relying on utilitarian calculation or peer review provides evidence to the existence of intrinsic moral values. Subjectivism ignores this completely. Therefore nontheism fails by morality, and a god therefore exists.

Third. We have shown, so far, that no more than at least one God and at least one Creator exists. Now, we will show that a unique Creator God exists according to the Christian religion. We do this by examining the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I. To establish a proper foundation, we must first establish the existence of a God able to work the supernatural, who is also moral. This establishes the possibility of a miraculous Resurrection for the reasons given in the Bible (and not e.g. for amoral Divine deception). Although my first two cases for God show that such a position is not conclusive, they show it is logically tenable.

II. The existence of Jesus is acknowledged by the majority of Biblical scholars from both the believing and nonbelieving camps. Unless the nontheist can conclusively demonstrate He never existed, we will work under historical assumption that Christ lived at the time He was recorded to have lived, and preached in the area He is recorded to have preached, had disciples, and was crucified by Pontius Pilate. None of this requires supernatural belief, but it provides a basis for supernatural interaction.

III. The resurrection of Jesus on the third day of His death happened. These facts are attendant to the following details:

a) The empty tomb itself;
b) The willingness of the Disciples to die for what they believed;
c) The eyewitnesses to Jesus' Resurrected body.

Regarding the empty tomb, this at least must be a fact, as it is attested by all four Gospels, which were written in disconnected geographic areas and which were based on immediate oral tradition. Since we have established the position that miracles exist from a Creator (through the creation of the universe itself), the Resurrection must be considered as a possible historical explanation for this empty tomb.

Furthermore, no other proposed explanation conclusively reasons why the tomb was empty. For instance, the explanation that Christ merely fainted fails, for history shows no case of an individual surviving his execution under Roman rule.

Another common rationale is that the disciples stole the body. But this is absurd. At that time, it was absolute heresy to believe, in Judaic Wisdom tradition, that the Messiah would be resurrected, more or less that the Messiah would die. Therefore it would be unreasonable for the disciples to steal the body to perpetuate a viewpoint that would have been ridiculous under tradition, because nobody would have believed it from an empty tomb alone.

Furthermore, many disciples went to their deaths under Roman rule for what they believed. This is hardly likely to have happened if the disciples knew Christ was a lie. Therefore, the disciples believed that the Resurrection had happened. My above point on how ridiculous the concept of a dead and resurrected Messiah in Jewish Wisdom Tradition shows that the disciples were unlikely to have come up with the story through some sort of self-deception. Had Christ died and never rose, they would have abandoned Him (as they did in the Gospels) and remained on their own ways (as they clearly did NOT when He appeared to them after His resurrection).

Finally, the Resurrection can be substantiated by the eyewitnesses. The Gospels establish many appearances to the Disciples and to others. The Pauline epistles substantiate independently His appearance to the Disciples, and also record an event where Christ appeared to five hundred followers. References outside of Canon and Apocrypha can be found in the contemporary records of the historian Josephus and the pagan writer Tacitus.

Such numerous eyewitness events can be substantiated by the fact that Paul, the Gospel authors, and the authors of the other Epistles, writing not long after Christ's death, teach Jews without reference to their deeply held misconceptions about the Messiah, and teach Gentiles without any reference to Pagan tradition or philosophy at all! (The current adapted Pagan practices were established hundreds of years later by Constantine.) One would not expect such a pedagogy to be effective unless the Resurrection actually happened with many eyewitnesses still around to establish its fact, because otherwise such bold teaching ignoring long-held religious views would have been rejected.

Therefore Christ was raised from the dead, and since no other rational explanation is as likely as a miraculous one, we conclude that the Creater God is the Christian one.

It is now the job of the nontheist to both refute these arguments AND establish a rational basis for his or her nontheism. Have at it.

I've always found the intrinsic value of right and wrong to be interesting. Why murder/rape/societal ills are considered thus, etc... I've always found myself leaning far, far toward theism when those issues crop up because I've never heard a compelling enough argument against it all.

I do have an answer to the possibility of a moral view involving the intrinsic which does not rely on God, but practically everyone on this board would reject it.

I don't think any of the New Atheist crowd (with the possible exception of Harris) could argue their way through the post I constructed, with their biggest weakness being this very point of morality.

A good part of the post I made belongs to research made by Christian apologists, i.e. Craig, Habermas, Zacharias, McDowell, and the like. However, I've constructed a few arguments I haven't seen apologists use (and I've seen plenty). All of them have extraordinary difficulty with establishing a miracle as a tenable possibility for an event in the face of Hume's argument. However, the easy solution - that holding the position that the universe was created by supernatural means - itself establishes the possibility of a miracle, since existence itself is a miracle. The negligence of the Epistle writers to mention Pagan philosophy is also my own argument.

I'm interested to see what people will say here.

I'll look into this thread a little closer after I'm done installing new light fixtures in my entryway and kitchen, but as for this post...

Universal mores and morals, topics on which nearly every society and form of human community seem to be in agreement, can be connected in one key way: they relate to issues which pose potential harm to the community. Murder, rape, stealing (in societies where material wealth is relevant), etc...they all disrupt the continued success of the community or, at least, the communal structure. And since communal success is directly linked to personal survival on a very basic level, especially in smaller tribes and communities, these things are therefore a threat to the individual.

A good case for this can be made by the fact that murder especially has a bit of acceptance in a number of societies...so long as the murder is of somebody outside the community, or if it is seen to benefit the community. Go to war, burn the witches, execute the child rapist/mutilator.

I just find it very unlikely that all societies would evolve where murder, rape, stealing, etc.... would be defined as harmful to society. I don't yhink this i sper se an arguement for God but it is the start of the idea the their are mores ingrained into our DNA.

A. Members of your society killing each other is flat out harmful to your society's existence. You don't have to evolve that idea, it's a fact. Why does it seem strange to you that a civilization would recognize this?

B. Technically, they don't all recognize it. Not as a universal construct, anyway. There are varying societies which find some of these things perfectly acceptable, under the right circumstances. For example, with rape you have the idea that rape is permissible with one's wife, or that the woman who was raped is to blame for the event. If mores were ingrained in our DNA, rape would be universally seen as wrong, would it not? And the blame placed on the rapist, who is committing the act? This also goes along with what I said before...killing is frequently seen as okay under circumstances like war, or in dealing with acts that sit outside the societal mores. If a moral stance against killing is biological, or based in a religious doctrine, then exceptions should either not exist or be far narrower in their scope. If it is societal rather than biological, then it's easier to explain actions like Russia's invasion of Georgia or America's response to 911.

tl;dr

I don't believe in fairy tales.

I knew I did a shitty job getting my idea across. Societies and what's good for societies are just human constructs. What makes us want to live in societies? What was the driving force that had people form societies? Then build the rules to what makes a society so that murder,rape, stealing, etc... are all viewed as bad for society?

In general things human made fall under critical type thinking and not analytical type thinking. So when I see near universal mores I generally tend to see the driving force being something beyond human engineering.

By this I mean in critical type thinking there's no right or wrong answer. You just build useable models and try to make them better as you go along. Examples of this are political spectrums, gay marriage. Analytical type thinking has a right answer. Math sciences is a great example of this. You don't build analytical think, we just discover the rules. The rules then become universal. I think with mores I see there being a core set of universal rules that were there to be dicovered by us because the rules were ingrained and created long before we came along.

I hope this makes it a little more clear what I was trying to get at.

Saying that everything exists is like saying that existence exists. Existence sustains on itself, it doesnt need a begining.

You really only responded to one of my thoughts there, tyler. And the second one was the more...interesting.




Really, they're just an expansion of our own herding tendencies. Family groups become expanded family groups, etc. Humans are creatures that naturally herd. Expanding abilities allowed us to expand our herding.



Tribes generally offer protection, a support structure and breeding opportunities. Agriculture and other developments allow for a larger tribe, and so it goes.



Again, this makes no sense to me. Under what circumstances would they have been able to or chosen to make rules stating that these things were GOOD for society? It's not a human construct or ingrained morality, it's a reality of situation. And it's a universal reality, same as gravity. It's math. Allowing murder within your sect is no smarter than choosing to set fire to all your crops. There's no rule building about it. The "rules," the thou shall nots and all that jazz, are codifications of mores that exist because we want our tribe to succeed. And we want our tribe to succeed because we want ourselves and our progeny to succeed. And again, this is why killing is almost never seen in the same light when the killing is in the context of a war. Hell, half the time neither is rape.



Sure, but you're building and testing models based around absolutes. The fact that murder harms society is an absolute, so we build and test ways to prevent it. I think the problem is that you're mistaking universal dilemmas with universal mores. Every human sect faces the pressure that societal upheaval brings...the threat of it. Just like they all face hunger.



There's no logical theorem for that. The existence of universals, or absolutes, doesn't automatically lead to the idea that they were "created." Like I said, murder harming society is math...it's a right answer. Claiming that because it exists, it must be an ingrained moral stance doesn't follow any more than claiming that gravity is proof that the earth wants hugs.

d- is your argument based on C.S. Lewis and his logical argument for the existence of one true God?
and have you ever read "Between Heaven and Hell -A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with JFK, CS Lewis, and Aldous Huxley" by Peter Kreeft?
If not, you might like reading it- not that it did anything for me in terms of believing in the existence of one true God or not believing in the existence of one true God, but the format of logical argument was fairly interesting.
Lewis's argument took much the same form as what you stated above although the main question dealt with the identity of Jesus Christ.

Basically- all three men died on the same day: November 22, 1963- however since one of them was JFK, and he was assassinated, the death of the other two at the same time was largely overlooked. the premise is the three of them meeting up after death and discussing the above- Lewis is the Theist, Kennedy is the Humanist, and Huxley is the Pantheist.

what you are failing to mention here are many scientific theories, including the possibility there was something before this universe -- such as another universe. more on this to come. there are possibilities here, nothing proven without a doubt.



this is not true. physicist victor stenger (of more to come from above) has presented some fine contributions in this area, hitting on the law of conservation of matter, entropy, and the natural existence of something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God:_The_Failed_Hypothesis





i will let stenger's work stand here.



so you're just attributing the "Creator" a character tribute to get out of the scientific discussion?



rape is terrible no matter how you look at it. you do not need to be any sort of devoutly religious person to know rape is not something a woman should ever have to experience. we are not drawing from 1,500 to 2,000-year-old scriptures for evidence rape is not a good thing.



not true. is rape ever a good thing? has there ever been an honor killing deservedly so? are you OK with people killing each other in the name of claims about the world that we cannot verify? we are currently killing ourselves over these claims.

and, may i add, again i do not need to refer to a book -- just to common sense, evidence, and reason.



surely utilitarians on the whole do not think an innocent woman should be raped in any case for the sum societal happiness. the dilemma presented cannot add an innocent person to the death count for other happiness. that would be treating a woman as a means to your own end, not as an end it itself, as that guy kant noted.[/quote]



yes, torturing and murdering are wrong unless done with extremely, extremely good reason -- for instance, some war being necessary (such as the one we fought against the Nazis) and actions of war excused. but we have names for people who think the Nazis were in the right in that war: nutjobs. we don't afford these believes any sort of respect, do we? would we truly say the KKK are just of another mindset?

there are all sorts of people on the fringes of our society professing such ridiculous beliefs -- that, for instance, they talk to the "Creator" and get all their moral advice from both her, and from the text that she provided to men living in a desert thousands of years ago -- yet we've let them get power in this world. this is a concern of mine.



no no -- you look at the proof as you're going along. you make your decisions based on all the knowledge this world has provided (of course, with your beliefs driving your expansion). but why not take everything into account first -- including what you know from the past and what you currently see?



i think we can all agree consensus does not mean correct. one would have to be very unreasonable to believe the opposite.



however, intrinsic moral values can be explained by evolution. are you saying that the "Creator" has guided evolution? then why are our eyes backwards and upside down? i've touched on evolution quite a bit on here, and i don't feel like searching for it all, but do a search if you'd like.



heh.



no, you haven't, unless i missed something.



do you plan on establishing the evidence for a "God able to work the supernatural, who is also moral"? just stating something does not make it true. moreover, something being "logically tenable" does not admit to it's possibility of existence, unless you'd like to back that up with the chance percentage of existence? or are you just throwing as belief in the air and saying "it's possible"? because that doesn't sound like the kind of belief one should really be holding.



whether or not jesus lived doesn't matter. muhammad existed -- does that automatically make him the prophet who was hearing from the archangel gabriel?

i'm not going to answer III, frankly because christian theological arguments for the supernatural and jesus sitting at the seat of the "Creator" bore me, and i'm kinda busy. i hope someone else does. i'll get back to it if i can.

Lewis is somewhat of an emotional arguer (kind of like the Hitchens of Christianity, or Pascal reincarnated, if you like). The "lord, liar, lunatic" false trilemma might be the worst argument for Christianity I've ever heard, but he did have a few better ones. His contemporary, Bishop Copleston, was quite a bit more logically sound.

The book sounds delicious (but wasn't Kennedy Catholic?). Pantheism has always been attractive to me, but I've seen no good reason to hold it. The original post comes from the list of Christian defenders I name at the end, and has at least done the service of making Christianity feasible (although still not logically tenable in my mind, unless you start to take away from the Bible).

None of us enjoy the concept of our mother's having sex. It's just not an image we want to pop into our heads. But to set up a world religion based on the concept that she never did is taking things a little too far...

This is correct, but they are all postulations at this point. Not even the Big Bang has been conclusively proven, as it fails to handle the problem of quantum gravity, and fails to address why a finite set of matter is not evenly distributed. Furthermore, we cannot presuppose a different theory which explains the acceleration of the galaxies will eventually arise, and such is ultimately possible given the idiotic nature of dark energy and dark matter (as a mathematician, I think that "dark shit" is ultimately a failure of human ability - even the best of it - to completely comprehend a model of space/time curvature).

In fact, quantum theory has been used to model an eternal universe, forever oscillating the Universe's state from a Big Bang to a near-heat death system which recollapses, the problem with complete heat death being the actual generation of lab-tested and approved Einstein condensates at near-absolute zero temperatures - which bring quantum theory to the macroscale and wipes Entropy off the map. The result is an eventual recollapse of the system into a state close to a singularity (but impossible to achieve it due to quantum gravity). A pre-Plank state is achieved and boom, it all happens again, with the same physical laws and setup (since there's no singularity to "fine tune" them all over again) but with a distribution of particles necessarily likely different due to quantum flux.

This is a metaphysically and scientifically possible argument because it does not wipe out matter nor create it from nothing - the creation of matter from nothing is another embarrassment of the Big Bang, by the way, because as I pointed out it breaks the Law of Conservation of Matter even AFTER the singularity is resolved. To follow this Law, there must be an equal amount of antimatter, so that the total amount of matter is still zero. But the existence of an equal amount of antimatter has been proven to be false, since it collapses. To state that there was an equal amount of antimatter as matter in the beginning also fails, because the process itself ends in a nonzero sum of matter - still breaking the Law (although, as the book you mentioned below presents, the total amount of Energy in the Universe may still be zero - but the Law of Matter always applies on its own merit, even in a general relativistic POV framework).

Also embarrassing for the Christian is the fact that creation from nothing is still a logical impossibility. A Creator God cannot generate a universe without putting that disproportionate amount of matter-over-antimatter in it. This is why I say that this argument fails, because it presupposes a universe with an equal amount of matter and antimatter in it. God, then, must either cut off part of Himself to make the universe (which is why, like Flew and Einstein, the only God I would ever believe in would be the Pantheistic one). I mean, it's like the universe in the Creationist point of view is God just dumping a bunch of Heavenly trash into His black-hole disposal.

Besides, as Hawking pointed out, how much freedom would such a Creator have in His fine-tuning? Hawking's answer is perhaps none at all - perhaps, considers Hawking, even though the conditions appear "fine-tuned," a universe may not actually appear until initial states reach our current ones and ONLY our current ones.

Furthermore, a Black Hole Universe is not out of the question either, for that matter. If a singular-state hypothesis is true, then the Universe itself could be a black hole with origins from another Universe, since a black hole is a singularity. Supposing a likely assumption that any given initial conditions of a universe produce black holes (even for a fraction of a second of time), ours could be one of an infinite number in an infinite chain. Since a singularity of quantum states is assumed to be a possible producer of matter before any physical laws take shape and ban the Law, we wouldn't actually need matter from another universe, and an infinitude of possible universes would not make ours any less probable even given that initial conditions could have been otherwise, since the Multiverse has, in essence, an infinite number of chances to "create" ours.

Most of this is Paul Davies' position. He is a fundamentalist Christian physicist, and so enjoys the idea of a single universe which is tuned up and shat out of a void by means of Yhwh's arbitrary fancy. A reading of Genesis, in which the Earth was formed and stocked with plants before a Sun and Moon existed, shows how much this position is really worth.

Thank you for your book reference BTW. However I have one gripe:



This makes no sense. Existence just is. Asking why it is would be to necessarily step out of existence and into a divine consciousness, or else the same question could be applied to his explanation:



Then why, would the theist ask, is nothingness unstable? Maybe divine intervention is there, at that point. By the way, nothingness is stable in an absolute vacuum (whether one is present anywhere in our universe is unlikely, for good reason).



The matter portion of this is demonstrably false for reasons above, and dark matter/dark energy is still lab-unproven and thus only a hypothesis, unlike slowing down light, macroquantum effects near absolute zero, or macroevolution for that matter. But I do like the general spirit of what he's saying, and it's worth investigating: as many good philosophers point out, the idea of a true void is implausible, and now such metaphysics has been verified by physics.



This is not actually an avoidance by the Apologist. This is a good question worth considering by us atheists. If all that exists is in fact finite, then why couldn't an infinite Consciousness have created it? (Try looking at it on philosophical grounds, since such is removed from physics by definition).



But this fails to answer why rape is not a good thing. The Apologist will only grill you to death on this kind of a retort, since he will point out that you are doing no more than pointing out how we all really know, deep down inside, that intrinsic morals exist - and thus that a personal Divine creator exists, since atheism necessarily must make rape subjective.

Furthermore, if one uses the evolutionary morality argument of Dawkins, rape defeats it. Since the ultimate goal of an individual is to act in such a matter to further the survival of his race, rape would be a good action, since it promotes the spreading of one's seed by pressing on any woman your tendencies. Waiting for a woman's approval would mean you have less chances to further the human race. We see rape in the animal kingdom all the time, so it must be demonstrated by Dawkins why rape (without, obviously, murder) would not be conducive to furthering the race, and he must do so by considering man in his natural state - not with laws already present.

Besides, rape does not only involve a woman. It involves men upon men, and women upon men, and women upon women, and the mature upon the immature. For instance, the Greeks thought it GOOD for a mentor to have sex with a young boy he was teaching. If subjective standards hold, then who are we to say to those ancient Greeks that they are wrong? We know they were - but by what standard would we use to judge it, since subjectivity applies? Even if evolutionary morality applies, these sexual relationships did nothing to destroy the reproductive capability or lifespan of the young male, so even Dawkins fails here. We, as atheists, must establish a morality which answers this obvious flaw of the Greeks.

(My response: an intrinsically-based, non subjective morality does exist without the invocation of God, and furthermore, morality declared by God is not intrinsic, since it equivocates "intrinsic" with "outside a human mind." Intrinsic means outside any mind - even God's. The Christian morality is itself subjective, since God could have very well said rape is good.

The intrinsically-based morality everyone (even an atheist) recognizes internally, however much his philosophy may or may not destroy it, is actually due to a recognition that the freedom of a human to choose in his or her own context his values and method of life without force being applied against or applied by him or her, is violated by rape, whether by force on a woman who does not want it, or by deceiving a young male conceptually incapable of making the complex rational determination to have it.)



I.e. you develop such notion from reality. This is why I like Harris and Harris alone, since Hitchens is nothing but a fat polemicist and Dawkins dispenses of absolutely everything, even reality, in his mad desire for applying evolution to anything and everything. However, I wouldn't paint poor Harris as an Objectivist, especially since he dispenses of consciousness and reality in the last chapter of his book after using that interrelationship so well in the rest of the text.



In reality, one does not work to one's own end by satisfying any arbitrary whim or desire. Since one's end, in reality, is survival in happiness without affection by force from another, removing this right from another is an admittance to the abnegation of this right in everyone, including yourself. This is the fundamental evil in the world, and if fully used in practice means that one should be removed from society immediately (leading to one of the proper functions of government).

One can never "use" another as a means to his own end; this is a contradiction in terms. One makes fair, contractual trade with others for a proper sense of mutual satisfaction. This applies in personal life and in professional business.

Kant's morality utterly fails. For, Kant's morality must require that we work with others only as ends in themselves, and that taking any personal value from such deals is immoral. We must throw aside personal values to be moral, or else we would benefit and use others as a means. To use an example, you and I cannot be friends, because you value intellectual discussion with a like mind - unless you find a way to realize our interpersonal relationship without deriving personal happiness. You must do your duty and sacrifice all you have and derive no value from it. To be truly moral, says Kant, you must ignore all of your desires. This is not original - it was developed by Christ in the Gnostic Gospels ("sell all you have" etc.) and was pushed to full-scale already by Augustine and Calvin, who were at least honest enough to recognize that no man could ever do it and that it would take divine intervention for a man to act so crazily.



But this still fails to show why Nazism is wrong in reality. You are correct to say that reality does present a convincing case that collectivism in the state and in the race are incorrect, but you (and Harris) cannot do this by mere assertion. It is not self evident from reality, but must be developed in a moral framework derived from reality.

The concern of yours in the latter paragraph can be answered: the first of those men who recognize the so-called "natural law" (i.e. objective morality) mixed in the guilt we all feel by breaking it (i.e. the knowledge we have broken the rights of others to live in their own nonviolent freedom), subsequently used such guilt as evidence that we can never keep it on our own (i.e. wrecking our self-esteem), and tapped any divine sensation that the barbarians possessed as means to keep them in line and themselves in power.

This was not always so in ancient times. The Greeks - whatever their faults, immorality, or religious foolishness - managed to develop moralities without God, as in many instances did the ancient Chinese. However, most ancient cultures developed this way, mainly because, at least in the Western sense, they had the moronic, murderous Egyptians as an example.



This is correct. But this is not pragmatism - however proper they are with this notion, they, as William James does, wreck this notion by saying they can only be assured of their choice if they had means of consensus or absolute knowledge of reality. Instead, the direct implication of absolute moral choices in context, which requires much less burden, can be derived by a shave of Occam's razor.



Evolution does not explain morality. Evolution explains the development of the human animal from life in general, and can IN AND OF ITSELF provide no more of a good morality than analyzing quantum mechanics or geology. Evolution describes why man is here and why man is the way he is physiologically; moral philosophy describes that, now given such quantities, what man should do based on our observations.



The arguments in the original post endeavored to show the existence of a miracle-working Creator through point I (the Big Bang point), and the existence of a personal God (I should have added "personal") through point II (the moral point). Thereby, the Apologist argues, it is possible for a miracle to happen in the framework of a Divine moral code.

My two arguments do not show there is just one God. There could be a host of Gods, one the Creator and one the author of Morality. Shit, there could be billions of them as in Hinduism. But the argument for Christ's resurrection will show there is a unique Creator God as described in the Bible. This is what I meant.

(This argument doesn't actually come from any particular Christian Apologist. It's my own invention. The only way to answer it is to undermine my arguments for either, thereby either wiping out the possibility of a miracle for Christ's empty tomb (first God could provide this) or the consideration of the possibility that some uncaring or wicked God is up "in the sky" instead of a morally good one (second God declares this). You have done a good job of dispensing the first IMO but not entirely of dispensing the second.)



Showing that it is logically tenable is sufficient. Without the logical tenability of a Creator God who is moral, then the resurrection of Christ necessarily cannot be as it appears. This is a point I think Christian Apologists like Craig, who back-derive God ENTIRELY from the Resurrection, fail on.

With the first two arguments for God, I-as-Devil's Advocate (haha) establish the necessity of at least one Creator God and at least one Decreer of morality. This makes their unification into one God logically tenable, but not logically necessary from the necessity of my first two arguments. But the "argument from Christ" now makes this singular God necessary, by providing the fact that His miraculous resurrection for good purpose is possible with the tenable (but not necessary) existence of the Christian God, and then by establishing that His resurrection is historical fact due to the tenability of a miraculous working God coupled with the history.

It's a bit ponderous, but if you think it through, this should be logically clear.



I did not imply that Christ's existence necessitated His resurrection. Only, the existence of Christ Himself is, even to Christian apologists, not exactly axiomatic, and of course establishing His existence as some sort of man to begin with would be necessary (but not sufficient) to prove the resurrection, since if He never lived He of course could never have been resurrected!

The third point I would like to see you address, if possible. While ultimately faulty, it IS a logically powerful thrust. THIS is the point where the New Atheists could be - and actually are - crushed to sand by Christian apology. THIS is why Anthony Flew is so pissed off at them, and has sided with the now virtually opponentless Habermas even though Flew still doesn't believe a lick of Christianity at all (his God is Einstein's pantheist God). I think New Atheism, primarily Hitchens, is polemic, irresponsible, and snobby toward the very reasonable and very powerful (but still very faulty) field of Christian Apology. If nonbelief is to survive, we cannot do this. We have to face the best of Christians on their own terms, recognize their intelligence and intellectual honesty, analyze the evidence they provide, and refute it.

atheists suck

Point 3 rebuttal

That Jesus' disciples were willing to die for their religion is not proof of his divinity.

A person is more likely to die for something they incorrectly believe (crashing a plane into a building will grant them a harem of virgins in heaven) than a man is likely to rise from the dead.

While this statement is true, you have to realize the immediate situation the disciples faced. Either:

1) The disciples died for what they knew was a lie;
or,
2) The disciples died for what they believed was true.

To consider (1) a case is absurd. The disciples had no reason to perpetuate a lie, since they could have freely (without threat of death) walked away at His death, and since it's ridiculous to consider they would have knowingly gone to their deaths for a lie.

In fact, the Gospels show they did in fact abandon Him while their lives were safe, since it was only Joseph of Arimathea who was assuredly there to bury Him (other attendees not attributed to all four Gospels include some of the Marys, the Roman guards, and Nicodemas). So, doubly, they have no reason to propagate a lie as truth, since they already were prepared to abandon Him in thinking it was a lie anyway. Furthermore, this clearly shows the disciples were in a critical mindset, not filled with zeal and expectation of a resurrection, in contrast to the mindset of those who normally die for a belief that isn't true.

Now consider (2). Certainly history shows there have been many cases of those believing true what is not in fact true. But there was always some kind of confounding event which caused this. The plainly stated event which caused the disciples to go to their deaths was that they believed the Lord to have been resurrected, even going so far as to claim to have seen Him in person and seen Him ascend to Heaven.

As this occurrence was immediate (three days after His burial) and as they had previously abandoned Him as I stated above, it must have taken some amazing immediate concrete that turned the disciples from critical disbelief to full belief. This event was the empty tomb, which some of the Disciples witnessed firsthand (John 20:3-8). They furthermore saw the Resurrected Christ, as did the Marys, the guards in Matthew, and the 500 followers mentioned by Paul. Therefore, they saw the following: an empty tomb and a living Jesus (resurrected or surviving the Crucifixion).

There is no case of anyone surviving crucifixion in Roman history. Records show they made absolutely sure the crucified had died. Furthermore, a "swoon theory" doesn't work, since such a condition as a crucified man would not have been survivable alone in a sealed tomb for three days.

To quash all these witnesses and the subsequent early Christian movement, all the Romans needed to do was produce the entombed body of Christ as proof. Joseph of Arimathea's tomb would have had to have been labeled, as tombs (as opposed to common graves) were in those times; furthermore, the location of the tomb was known to the Romans who guarded it.

But the Romans did not produce a body to quash the rebellion, nor did they recapture a man who they would have considered a survivor of crucifixion - something that would have embarrassed them extraordinarily enough to justify a massive man-hunt. But Christianity survived and spread, and no instance of an attempt to produce Christ's body is recorded in the Roman histories or the Gospels or Epistles. We can only conclude that the tomb was indeed empty, and that none of His disciples committed a lie by stealing His body.

Since His tomb was heavily guarded from the burial to its emptiness, what else can we conclude? Where did the body go?

And your message board personality is below standards and proves God does not exist.

I think you are missing a very clear option - that the disciple maybe knowingly lied, but in hopes for political revolution, which people in dire situations have willing died for over and over again. And the jews in this time were definitely in a dire situation and they would have looked for anyway, no matter how fantastical, to get out of it.

As far as the body goes -- I haven't studied the non-bible accounts of how guarded the tomb was, but I refer to my original logical argument:

It is more likely that a group of men seeing a chance for political revolution found a way to kill some guards and steal a body (or sneak in or whatever) than for a man to come back from the dead.