Atheist Conversation

[prose]

I was on the friendlyathiest site (linked there by the article on beliefnet with the author of "I sold my Soul on Ebay" and I came across this list.

Thought I would put it here for your interest:

[quote](1) Holy Books - Just because something is written down does not make it true. This goes for the Bible, the Qu’ran, and any other holy book. People who believe the holy book of their religion usually disbelieve the holy books of other religions.

(2) “Revelations” - All religions claim to be revealed, usually to people called “prophets.” But a revelation is a personal experience. Even if the revelations really did come from a god, there is no way we could prove it. As Thomas Paine said, it is a revelation only to the first person, after that it is hearsay. People of one religion usually disbelieve the revelations of other religions.

(3) Personal Testimony / Feelings - This is when you are personally having the revelation or feeling that a god exists. Though you may be sincere, and even if a god really does exist, a feeling is not proof, either for you or for someone else.

As a matter of fact, scientists have begun to study why some people believe and other don’t, from a biological perspective. They have identified certain naturally occurring chemicals in our bodies that can give us religious experiences. Studies of identical twins separated at birth seem to indicate that god-belief is about 50% nurture and 50% nature. Some claim to have found a “god gene” that makes people more likely to believe.

In studies of religion and the brain, a new field called neurotheology, they have identified the temporal lobe as a place in the brain that can generate religious experiences. Another part of the brain that regulates a person’s sense of “self” can be consciously shut down during meditation, giving the meditator (who loses his sense of personal boundaries) a feeling of “oneness” with the universe.

(4) “Open Heart” - It will do no good to ask atheists to “open our hearts and accept Jesus” (or any other deity). If we were to set aside our skepticism, we might indeed have an inspirational experience. But this would be an emotional experience and, like a revelation, we’d have no way to verify if a god was really speaking to us or if we were just hallucinating.

(5) Unverifiable “Miracles” / Resurrection Stories - Many religions have miracle stories. And just as religious people are usually skeptical towards miracle stories of other religions, atheists are skeptical toward all miracle stories.

Good magicians can perform acts that seem like miracles. Things can be mismeasured and misinterpreted. A “medical miracle” can simply be attributed to our lack of knowledge of how the human body works. Why are there never any indisputable miracles, such as an amputated arm regenerating?

Regarding resurrections, atheists will not find a story of someone resurrecting from the dead to be convincing. There are many such legends in ancient literature and, again, most religious people reject the resurrection stories of other religions.

Modern resurrection stories always seem to occur in the Third World under unscientific conditions. There have been thousands of people in hospitals hooked up to machines that verified their deaths when they died. Why didn’t any of them ever resurrect?

(6) Fear of Death / “Heaven” - Atheists don’t like the fact that we’re all going to die any more than religious people do. However, this fear does not prove there is an afterlife – only that we wish there was an afterlife. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

There is no reason to believe our consciousness survives the death of our brains. The mind is not something separate from the body. Chemical alteration and physical damage to our brains can change our thoughts.

Some people get Alzheimer’s disease at the end of their lives. The irreversible damage to their brains can be detected by brain scans. These people lose their ability to think, yet they are still alive. How, one second after these people die, does their thinking return (in a “soul”)?

(7) Fear of Hell - The idea of hell strikes atheists as a scam – an attempt to get people to believe through fear what they cannot believe through reason and evidence.

Then there is the problem of which religion’s hell is the true hell. Without evidence, we can never know.

(8) “Pascal’s Wager” / Faith - In short, Pascal’s Wager states that we have everything to gain (an eternity in heaven) and nothing to lose by believing in a god. On the other hand, disbelief can lead to a loss of heaven. We’ve already addressed the issues of heaven and hell, so let us address the faith wager part.

First, it assumes a person can will himself or herself into belief. This is simply not the case, at least not for an atheist. So atheists would have to pretend to believe. But according to most definitions of God, wouldn’t God know we were lying to hedge our bets? Would a god reward this?

Part of Pascal’s Wager states that you “lose nothing” by believing. But an atheist would disagree. By believing under these conditions, you’re acknowledging that you’re willing to accept some things on faith. In other words, you’re saying you’re willing to abandon evidence as your standard for judging reality. Faith doesn’t sound so appealing when it’s phrased that way, does it?

(9) Blaming the Victim - Many religions punish people for disbelief. However, belief requires faith, and some people, such as atheists, are incapable of faith. Their minds are only receptive to evidence. Therefore, are atheists to be blamed for not believing when “God” provides insufficient evidence?

(10) The End of the World - Like hell, this strikes atheists as a scare tactic to get people to believe through fear what they can’t believe through reason and evidence. There have been predictions that the world was going to end for centuries now. The question you might want to ask yourselves, if you’re basing your religious beliefs on this, is how long you’re willing to wait – what amount of time will convince you that the world is not going to end?

(11) Meaning in Life - This is the idea that without a belief in god life would be meaningless. Even if this were true, it would only prove we wanted a god to exist to give meaning to our lives, not that a god actually does exist. But the very fact that atheists can find meaning in their lives without a belief in god shows that god belief is not necessary.

(12) “God is Intangible, Like Love” - Love is not intangible. Unlike “God,” we can define love both as a type of feeling and as demonstrated by certain types of actions.

Unlike “God,” love is a physical thing. We know the chemicals responsible for the feeling of love.

Also, love depends upon brain structure – a person with a lobotomy or other types of brain damage cannot feel love.

Furthermore, if love were not physical, it would not be confined to our physical brains. We would expect to be able to detect an entity or force called “love” floating around in the air.

(13) Morality/Ethics - This is the idea that without a god we’d have no basis for morality. However, a secular moral code existed before the Bible: the Code of Hammurabi.

Christians can’t even agree among themselves what’s moral when it comes to things like masturbation, premarital sex, homosexuality, divorce, contraception, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and the death penalty.

Christians themselves reject some of the moral laws found in the Bible, such as killing disobedient children or people who work on the sabbath.

Other animals exhibit kindness toward one another and a sense of justice. Morality is something that evolved from us being social beings. It’s based on the selfish advantage we get from cooperation, and on consequences.

(14) Altruism - People sometimes say that without a god there would be no altruism, that evolution only rewards selfish behavior.

However, it can be argued that there is no such thing as altruism, that people always do what they want to do. If they are only faced with bad choices, then people choose the thing they hate the least.

Our choices are based on what gives us (our genes) the best advantage for survival, including raising our reputation in society.

“Altruism” towards family members benefits people who share our genes. “Altruism” towards friends benefits people who may someday return the favor.

Even “altruism” towards strangers has a basis in evolution. This behavior evolved in small tribes, where everyone knew each other and a good reputation enhanced one’s survival. It is now hard-wired in our brains as a general mode of conduct.

(15) Free Will - Some would argue that without a god there would be no free will, that we would live in a deterministic universe of cause and effect and that we would be mere “robots.”

Actually, there is far less free will than most people think there is and, in fact, most atheists have no problem admitting that, indeed, free will may be an illusion.

Some believe that the only free will we have is to exercise a conscious veto over actions suggested by our thoughts.

(16) Difficulties of Religion - It has sometimes been argued that because certain religious practices are difficult to follow, nobody would do them if a god didn’t exist. However, it is the belief in the existence of a god that is motivating people. A god doesn’t really have to exist for this to happen.

Difficulties can serve as an initiation rite of passage into being counted one of the “select few.” After all, if just anybody could be “saved,” there would be no point in having a religion.

Finally, the reward for obedience promised by most religions – a heaven – far outweighs any difficulties religion imposes.

(17) False Dichotomies - This is being presented with a false “either/or” proposition: where you’re only given two choices when, in fact, there are more possibilities. Here’s one that many Christians are familiar with: “Either Jesus was insane or he was god. Since Jesus said some wise things, he wasn’t insane. Therefore, he must be god, like he said he was.”

But those are not the only two possibilities.

A third option is that, yes, it is possible to say some wise things and be deluded that you are a god.

A fourth possibility is that Jesus didn’t say everything that is attributed to him in the Bible. Maybe he didn’t actually say all those wise things, but the writers of the Bible said he did. Or maybe he never claimed to be God, but the writers turned him into a god after he died.

A fifth possibility is that Jesus is a fictional character and so everything was invented by the authors.

Here’s another example of a false dichotomy: “No one would die for a lie. The early Christians died for Christianity. Therefore, Christianity must be true.” What’s left out of this is that there is no direct evidence that anyone who ever personally knew Jesus (if he even existed) was ever martyred. We only have stories of martyrdom.

Another explanation is that followers had been fooled, intentionally or unintentionally, into thinking Jesus was God.

A final point is that if, for whatever reason, you believe you’ll end up in a heaven after to die, then martyrdom is no big deal. Does the fact that the 9/11 bombers were willing to die for their faith make Islam true?

(18) God-of-the-Gaps (Medicine, Life, Universe, etc.) - The god-of-the-gaps argument says that if we don’t currently know the scientific answer to something, then “God did it.”

God-of-the-gaps is used in many areas, but I’ll focus on the three main ones: medicine, life, and the universe. You’ll notice that God never has to prove himself in these arguments. It is always assumed that he gets to win by default.

Here’s a medical example: A person experiences a cure for a disease that science can’t explain. Therefore, God did it.

But this assumes we know everything about the human body, so that a natural explanation is impossible. But the fact is, we don’t have complete medical knowledge. Why don’t we ever see something that would be a true miracle, like an amputated arm instantaneously regenerating?

Several studies of prayer, where the patients didn’t know whether or not they were being prayed for, including a study by the Mayo Clinic, have shown prayer to have no effect on healing.

And, of course, this raises the question of why we would have to beg an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god to be healed in the first place. It also raises the Problem of Evil: Why would we be praying to an all-loving god to be cured from diseases and the effects of natural disasters that he himself created?

An example of god-of-the-gaps as it applies to life is creationism and “intelligent design.” It says we don’t know everything about evolution, therefore “God did it.” This ignores the fossil and genetic evidence and also fails to explain the many poor and sub-optimal “designs” we find in nature. Is “God” an incompetent or sloppy designer?

The final and most popular example of god-of-the-gaps is the universe. But to say we don’t know the origins of the universe – if the universe even had an ultimate beginning – does not mean that “God did it.”

Conclusion - Religious people have a tough, if not impossible task to try to prove a god exists, let alone that their particular religion is true. If any religion had objective standards, wouldn’t everyone be flocking to the same “true” religion? Instead we find that people tend to believe, to varying degrees, the religion in which they were indoctrinated. Or they are atheists.[/quote]

[jeffpugh]

[Edit] Woo! I got first blood on this thread, despite the fact it took me forever to type up[/edit]

This will be difficult to reply too... way too much goin through my mind. I'll try to get it down, though.

Well, first things that come to mind... The whole "god DNA" argument is irrelevant. The way the person puts it makes it just seem like he/she is not normal like the rest of the world. Another, when he/she talks about faith in the Paschal's wager section, he/she doesn't seem to realize that waking up is an act of faith: believing that gravity won't change, or pi will always be 3.14159... even science requires faith, insofar that previous studies are a good foundation for new ones because they are well researched. Scientists don't really have the time (and maybe the resources) to back-track through other theories in order to see if they work. They simply believe they work and use them as a base to their research.

(11)Of course atheists can find meaning to their lives, but otherwise it's a temporary sense of meaning.
(13)Unfortunately, our Christian division is a cause of atheism, though I'm sure atheists would find other reasons not to believe otherwise. My overall opinion of this point though, is that the universe is too logical for there not to be a God. He/she speaks of the natural law written on hearts. It's funny though how famous atheists have been totally defiant of that law, because they did not know of it or seek it's origin.
(14)Blah, can't even remember the argument against this type of attitude. All I know is the person is just being a jerk at that point. Maybe the answer though, is that love is willing the good of an other. And it requires another party.
(15)If some atheists don't believe in free will, who has their will?
(16)This a skewed way of looking at things. It seems the person just sees religions as a club, though. He/she needs to look at Christianity closely though. We are called to love and serve the Lord and love others! Forget about hell. God doesn't cause that. It's devoid of hell. We believe the tenets of Heaven, hell, God, morality because it is not from us. Face it. Humans can be shallow. That's why we have some churches that omit things, despite that they are biblical. Just can't handle it.
(17)Well, sounds like a proddy bible thumper was trying to convince this person. The book proceeds tradition. End of story. But, the bible shouldn't even be brought into play, despite the awesome consistency of it being transferred through the ages. I think it's like 98% accuracy between transcripts? the small percentage of "errors" are spelling mistakes. As for the dichotomies, there is a lot of word play in that argument. I just have to say, he/she loses by equating 9/11 terrorists with someone like St. Cecilia. Kindly remind the atheist that atheist regimes have brought much more slaughter than a sort of crusade. As for Jesus being God, he/she is not even ready for that yet. it's sorta like buttering the toast that isn't even toasted yet. The atheist needs to get to God through natural reason before he/she gets to God through the Church and her teachings.
(18)Well, I don't even think animals in nature can instantly regenerate lost parts, even if regeneration is in their DNA. Seems like grasping at straws to me. As for the healing with prayer (which is unknown to the subject), give proof. Absolute proof. I know about people who have been cured by prayer and haven't even known it. But that's irelevent for now I think. Anywho the thing about pain and suffering (through disease and disaster) seems to be a complaint about "the problem of pain". Again, person doesn't seem to be ready for that. But for the record, it goes back to the fall. The fall of man is when Adam and Eve chose not to love God, which is basically willing the good of one another. That's just the beginning. The rest actually relies on believing in God. Again, best way to get to this person is through natural law. I recommend Scott Hahn's [i]Reasons to Believe[/i]. He helps with giving a good answer to God using natural law.

But, here's the clinker for the atheist on the Conclusion: how is it that the Catholic Church survived through 2000 years through so much tribulation? Feel free to direct him/her to some non-liberal historical sources. Anything that's revisionist makes the Church seem like either A: she is a sneaky weasel that just somehow survived, or B: the persecution really wasn't that bad. My good friend had put atheistic arguments against the church as follows, "people who hate the Church can't agree on how much [She] smells of elderberries". It's true. I've heard arguments similar to this (from my good friend Naralas, who I got to come on PM), but they varied.

Edited September 24, 2007 by Sacred Music Man

[Socrates]

[quote name='prose' post='1392476' date='Sep 24 2007, 03:28 PM']I was on the friendlyathiest site (linked there by the article on beliefnet with the author of "I sold my Soul on Ebay" and I came across this list.

Thought I would put it here for your interest:[/quote]
A bit too many different arguments to respond to them all - though they all seem pretty common atheist arguments - most of them quite fallacious. I started a point-by-point rebuttal, but it was getting too bloody long.

Any particular points of interest?

[prose]

I dunno, I just thought they were interesting, thought I would see what phatmassers had to say about any or all of them.

[kafka]

Psalm

{13:1} In finem, Psalmus David. Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus.

{13:1} Unto the end. A Psalm of David. The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

[cmotherofpirl]

Why don't you pick out one point to discuss at a time, the post is far too long to deal with at once.

[dairygirl4u2c]

two main points i see.

just because chemicals and genes make us prone to believe in god doesn't mean he don't exist, obviously. it should be noted though that God can work through his creation in how we believe because the chemicals. much like i tend to think heaven is ruled by physics too, but in a world beyond what we know.

as for the miracles, i've actually heard studies that said prayer does work. it might be mental, but it does work somewhat. we shouldn't assume it's mental though, an they haven't shown why. perhaps we shouldn't assume God did it, but i see no reason not to. objectively, as far as we can tell, it's something beyond us. and the idea of generating limbs, would be that god doesn't want to be obvious, but is willing to do less obvious things to egg on our faith but not substantiate it.

[adt6247]

I think what says more is what is not mentioned. He answered the common arguments used by uneducated individuals. Missing is his address of the form of truth, the natural law, or the first mover principal. Then again, people who'd use those arguments are unlikely his target audience with this.

[prose]

Maybe we should have a "campaign" to reach him. Maybe if some Catholics from here emailed him with challenges we may be able to form a good dialogue.

[Lord Philip]

[quote name='prose' post='1393041' date='Sep 25 2007, 04:59 PM']Maybe we should have a "campaign" to reach him. Maybe if some Catholics from here emailed him with challenges we may be able to form a good dialogue.[/quote]

Oh sweet....I am totally in.

I LIVE to debate atheists. The arguments in the initial post are so outrageous that pitting a campaign against them would be like an army of Crusaders advancing against against an ant colony.

[Didacus]

Isn't it interesting that belief in God is 50% nurture and 50% nature, but homosexuality is only 100% nature?

[infinitelord1]

"just because something is written down doesnt make it true"

this is a terrible reason to discredit the bible. This applies to anything that is written down. If you dont put your faith into something then you will be completely lost. Its a matter of faith...not evidence.

Yes there are different religions out there. They all have their differences but at the same time they have a lot in common. Its not like they all completely contradict each other.

[Socrates]

[quote name='infinitelord1' post='1393115' date='Sep 25 2007, 09:49 PM']"just because something is written down doesnt make it true"

this is a terrible reason to discredit the bible. This applies to anything that is written down. If you dont put your faith into something then you will be completely lost. Its a matter of faith...not evidence.

Yes there are different religions out there. They all have their differences but at the same time they have a lot in common. Its not like they all completely contradict each other.[/quote]
I think arguing from the Bible is bad way to start when arguing with hardened atheists.
If one rejects the existance of a God, of course he will not believe that any book is divinely inspired.

This is a weakness with the whole Sola Scriptura protestant aproach which begins and ends with biblical authority, and often rejects or ignores reason as being contrary to faith.

I am not in anyway downplaying the importance of Scripture to the Faith here, but simply pointing out that an atheist will usually have to be first convinced by reason that there is a God, then from there he can be led to accept Divine Revelation.

[Socrates]

[quote name='Didacus' post='1393063' date='Sep 25 2007, 07:24 PM']Isn't it interesting that belief in God is 50% nurture and 50% nature, but homosexuality is only 100% nature?[/quote]
The atheist falls into logical contradiction when claiming (as this one does) that religious belief, free will, etc. are biologically determined by genes or chemical activities in the brain, and thus rejects them.

By this materialist logic, the atheism of the atheist can be dismissed in the same way. Is his disbelief merely caused by an "atheism gene"? While the atheist claims that his arguments are based on reason, human reason itself is undermined, if it is nothing more than the meaningless firing or neurons in the brain. How can one trust these purely physical processes to tell us anything about whether or not there is a God?

Edited September 26, 2007 by Socrates

[infinitelord1]

I actually agree with this guy on a lot of the points he makes however it doesnt prove that there is no god.

I really dont think prayer induces any kind of miracles. I think a lot of times when things turn out in favor that it was a matter of coincidence and not god intervening....these kinds of things can easily be mistaken for miracles. I think God for the most part has done everything he has had to do by sending his son and setting forth moral guidelines. I think the true reward lies within ones willingness to follow those moral guidelines and that is how people come to see that god exists. I dont think you can say a prayer for somebody and a god will intervene....I think it was the choices of the individual that got he/she into whatever predicament he/she is in and the consequences are being unleashed.

My belief in God is that he has given us all we need, and that it is up to us to find our way and make the right choices. God vary vary rarely intervenes in our lives. Only in cases like saul and moses. We have enough testimonies from people to start growing in faith.