The Ultimate Atheist Challenge Thread!

Matthew777 said:

Atheists hold to abiogenesis, that life arose from non-living matter.

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so. This does not mean all atheists have to have an answer for it.
Take the Atheist position that there are no gods, a conclusion that they came to for whatever reasons. This means that there are no supernatural methods for creating life and so it follows that the only other method is through naturalistic abiogenesis.

The only Atheists that would really have to defend abiogenesis are those that say "there are no gods because life can/did come about through naturalistic abiogenesis". This however is a rnon-sequitur, because even if it can/did, there is no reason why there shouldn't be a god.

In the absence of any actual Q document, it is just as logical to assume that divine inspiration is responsible for the similarities.

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Remember guys - when your choice of explanatory hypothesis is between a book and a deity, both are just as likely to be true!

Why not utilize the same methods with the Gospels that we would use for other ancient primary source documents?

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We do - and historians never operate by positing ghosts, pixies, or gods.

We are choosing between a document for which there is no evidence of its existence and divine inspiration. One is not more logical than the other unless you have a philosophical predisposition against God.

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Except we know documents exist. We have no evidence at all of a God existing. As others have pointed out, there's a man named Occam who said something about this.

What historians do you speak of? When it comes to Biblical scholarship, what matters is whether or not the events of the Gospels really happened - not how uncomfortable the implications of these events make you feel.

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It's not a matter of comfortable or uncomfortable. At it's very base, it's a matter of methedology. When a god can be used to explain any observation (or historical document), it becomes useless as an explanatory hypothesis.

We don't treat any other religious documents as divinely inspired for that reason, though they could be explained that way. The Gospels are no different.

Sure, the Gospels could be divinely inspired, but that alone doesn’t tell us their purpose. When we explain things using a deity, all bets are off. Anything is possible. It is just as “logical” to assume God fabricated the Gospels, in an attempt to test our free will. Not in the way you think, however. Perhaps, to God, faith in our own cognitive abilities is what matters most. Maybe he’s separating the skeptics from the gullible; the honest from the dishonest. A case can quite easily be made that only atheists go to heaven. In many ways, such an idea is more “logical” than the idea of rewarding the blindly faithful.

To Mathew777,

Matthew777 (to Physics-guy) said:

Abiogenesis postulates that life arose from non-living matter, on its own. One should be able to show that it happend, if it did.

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Given the above comment to Physics-guy and the context of your challenge to start this thread, I gather that by:-

“One should be able to show that it happened”

you mean

“One should be able to show now that it happened”.

If so, then how does it logically and reasonably follow that if life arose from non-life then one should be able to demonstrate this now.


Regards, Roland

No one has ever produced the "Q" document and therefore, we have no reason to believe it existed.

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You've never heard of an explanatory hypothesis? No one has ever produced a body of Julius Ceaser, but suggesting that there was a man who lived and died seems to be the simplest way of accounting for all the facts.

The issue is whether or not the events within the Gospels are supernatural in nature. If these events actually happened, it does not matter if the implications of these events make you feel uncomfortable.

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Saying that they did happen is one possible explanation. But invoking the supernatural as an explanation is not good practice in science or history. And for that reason we treat those claims of supernatural events with the same scepticism we show every other historical document with such claims.

We do not need to presuppose divine inspiration in order to assess the accuracy of Scripture, that would be circular reasoning. But we are able to show that the events of the Gospels are historically accurate, we have reason to believe they are divinely inspired.

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You're not able to show this. Nothing regarding Jesus' life is verified outside of the Gospels (Paul seems entirely ignorant of everything within them, for instance - he never even mentions the place of Jesus' crucifiction!). Many things within it are suspect (Matthew reporting the dead walking the streets of Jerusalem, that nobody else saw fit to mention), and some are obviously false (such as a ridiculous and unprecedented census of a country that Rome was not even ruling yet!).

Dragar said:

You've never heard of an explanatory hypothesis? No one has ever produced a body of Julius Ceaser, but suggesting that there was a man who lived and died seems to be the simplest way of accounting for all the facts.



Saying that they did happen is one possible explanation. But invoking the supernatural as an explanation is not good practice in science or history. And for that reason we treat those claims of supernatural events with the same scepticism we show every other historical document with such claims.



You're not able to show this. Nothing regarding Jesus' life is verified outside of the Gospels (Paul seems entirely ignorant of everything within them, for instance - he never even mentions the place of Jesus' crucifiction!). Many things within it are suspect (Matthew reporting the dead walking the streets of Jerusalem, that nobody else saw fit to mention), and some are obviously false (such as a ridiculous and unprecedented census of a country that Rome was not even ruling yet!).

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Gidday Dragar,


Your response to Matthew777 is interesting.

I gather that 2000 years ago in the Middle East, if you had claimed to have spoken to a person, any person, who had died (recently or further in the past), no one would blink an eye at you. Such would be the normal part of discourse. Virgin births for the most powerful of people were not unheard of either. I gather it is written that Caesar Augustus was born of a virgin, conceived by a god!

Even these days, many claim to be able to speak with the dead. This too constitutes normal discourse within some parts of Western culture. For the believer, irrefutable proof can always be gathered.

For the skeptic, such proof is not irrefutable by a long shot.


Regards, Roland

Matthew777 said:

It's a hypothesis based on the assumption that Matthew could not have been an eye-witness, intended to discredit the reliability of its testimony.



All one must do is look at the events themselves and conclude what is most likely to be true. Granted, there are slight imperfections of the Gospels but all ancient historical documents have them.

Peace.

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Gidday Matthew777,

Dragar said:

You've never heard of an explanatory hypothesis? No one has ever produced a body of Julius Ceaser, but suggesting that there was a man who lived and died seems to be the simplest way of accounting for all the facts.

Matthew777 said:

It's a hypothesis based on the assumption that Matthew could not have been an eye-witness, intended to discredit the reliability of its testimony.

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Saying that it is a “hypothesis based on an assumption” is saying little more than “it is an assumption”.

It is an hypothesis based on evidence. You may choose to call the evidence “insufficient” while another may choose to call it “sufficient”. But it is hardly an “hypothesis based on an assumption”.

And it was not necessarily “designed to discredit the reliability of its testimony” either. That depends on the motive of the claimant. The hypothesis may have been developed simply because the evidence was there. That the testimony was unreliable was a consequence of this hypothesis. In such a case the hypothesis certainly was not designed to discredit anyone.

Matthew777 said:

All one must do is look at the events themselves and conclude what is most likely to be true. Granted, there are slight imperfections of the Gospels but all ancient historical documents have them.

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So other evidence does not count in ascertaining the likelihood of something being true or false, likely or unlikely? I would have thought any evidence was relevant, providing it could be shown to be so. And I would have thought that all relevant evidence would be so, simply because it all constitutes a part of this thing you call "event". Essentially what you are arguing for here is that your "events" be considered, while someone else's "events" be ignored.

Thus your appeal to all historical records having imperfections may be a red herring. Certainly all historical records have them. Sometimes they can be ignored on the grounds that you suggest. At other times they cannot - simply because that imperfection can be crucial to demonstrating an argument. It all depends.


Regards, Roland

All one must do is look at the events themselves and conclude what is most likely to be true.

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No. What we are explaining are not the events, but the accounts of the events. One explanation is that these are eye-witness accounts of supernatural events that took place.

A far more likely explanation is that these - like every other supernatural event that has been reported, and which you likely yourself discount, Matthew - are actually tall tales. Myths, fables, stories or exaggerations - take your pick.

For instance, consider the following (an example taken from an essay by Richard Carrier, and re-worded so I don't have to quote): in around 500 A.D., a monk (annonymous) made writings of the life of one Saint Genevieve. She had died only ten years earlier. In this account, the monk describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters leaped out from it and breathed a fatal stench on lots of men for two hours. While she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead.

We have found nothing written (or responses to anything written) to suggest these claims are false. The person who wrote them considered it immoral to lie.

And yet do we believe them?

Absolutely not. And we shouldn't. Because we can explain it without the need for monsters leaping from trees, or ships being righted due to prayers. Fantastical stories tend to be just that - fantastical stories.

Dragar said:

Remember guys - when your choice of explanatory hypothesis is between a book and a deity, both are just as likely to be true!

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You betcha! And any inconsistencies or similarities can be attributed not to the authors, but the deity himself, thus proving the existence of said deity.