Best Atheist Objections to Theism

Your confirmation bias is showing, but it’s understandable, given your worldview. God’s providence in the lives of his children is hardly a sideshow. Was that a flourish for my enjoyment, too? You really should reread Maggie’s account again, putting yourself in her shoes. You don’t think it was ‘an unexpected outcome which actually mattered’ in her life? And you obviously have never read any of George Müller, not that the occasion has never been presented to you. We could talk about my own decades long Co-instants Log sometime, too. I have one series of a dozen disjointed events, except for their mutual meaning, and they became significant in a couple of lifepath changes, and not just mine.

This exchange is getting us nowhere - my impression is that you want me to persuade you or somehow make you believe what I say, or perhaps you wish to persuade me to believe what you do?

We are free to come to our beliefs and thus I would rather each person comes to his/her beliefs by their own effort. The only proviso I would bring is that information is available to enable an informed decision.

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I was saying that the most the objective evidence can do is limit the claims we can make about such things as unicorns. How is it reasonable, for example, to insist there are no unicorns anywhere in the universe?

A lot of beliefs are unreasonable… even beliefs about unicorns… these are the ones which contradict the objective evidence, i.e. those which FAIL to limit themselves accordingly.

I’ve certainly read some Christians acknowledge the unreasonableness of what they believe. Its unreasonableness just isn’t sufficient to discount that belief. Even as an outsider I don’t think that is necessarily an unreasonable stance.

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The beliefs of some Christians and the beliefs of some atheist are indeed unreasonable, i.e. contrary to the objective evidence. But there is a big difference between contrary to the objective evidence and simply not having sufficient objective evidence for them. It is only the former type of belief which is unreasonable and I don’t buy into beliefs of that kind no matter how many Christians might support them.

What atheist belief is contrary to objective evidence

There is a difference between “beliefs of some atheists” and “atheist beliefs.” The following are claims I have heard made by atheists which are not reasonable.

  1. People only believe in God or in a religion because their parents raised them to do so.
  2. People only believe in God because they are afraid of death.
  3. You cannot be a good scientist if you believe in God.
  4. Atheists are more intelligent than theists.

Of course many if not most atheists know better than to make claims like this. And to be sure some atheists who have said such things are just being careless, but other atheists perhaps only repeating the careless claims of other atheists will insist they are true. Obviously being an atheist doesn’t automatically make you more intelligent, no matter what the statistics are.

Some more I’ve heard:

Religion is a primitive attempt at science which has now been replaced.

Evidence is needed to support any belief whatsoever.

Science will soon or at least eventually provide answers to all questions.

It may well become possible to live for ever inside computers.

I can’t insist that X does not exist anywhere if X is not defined. We know unicorns from tales and if someone say they saw a unicorn we can reasonably conclude that they are mistaken from the basis of what we understand unicorns to be. You can say that maybe there is “something” that we haven’t discovered about the universe that actually allows for magic and unicorns. But for now, the reasonable tentative position is that unicorns do not exist.

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I agree 1000%. Tentatively of course. I mean, you can never prove a negative can you? OOOOOOOOOH!!!

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Your second part sounds very defeatist. You are saying “do your own research” and I have. We could discuss why our conclusions then differ. Neither of us have the accumulated human knowledge. That’s why we discuss things, to point out important points the other part may have overlooked.

But that wasn’t the point here. The question was about an argument against theism. And the point was that the particular type of God that has the power to demonstrate anything and provide sufficient evidence for anyone AND wants everyone to believe he exists CANNOT exist by the mere fact that I don’t believe. The question of WHY that god has not provided sufficient evidence is less important to me. I care more about why I should believe. Because if I in fact should believe then I want to believe.

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Hmmm. I don’t want to should believe when there is no warrant for doing so. I just want to believe. Should I?

Proof is for maths. Lack of supporting evidence where you would expect to find it is evidence to support negation. Everything is tentative apart from tautologies like “I am me”

Ah, but I don’t expect to find it, therefore I don’t have to negate! And no. I am me, you’re not.

There is only one. Origin.

I have tried to stick to fairly short exchanges -an adequate response to this type of statement, (for me) requires a discussion of Christian theology (this includes sin and separation from God, free will, why Christ came for our salvation, repentance, becoming like Christ (theosis) and other topics).

So I again repeat, that your approach (which I am struggling to understand, rightly or not), leaves me with the impression that you will believe if God makes you believe, or at the very least, does things that you want that would be sufficient to convince you that He exists. As a Christian, I turn to the Gospel and point out that Christ came amongst us and did a lot of things that should convince us (and many religious Jews of the day), but many decided not to believe.

Why is this? If Christ could do many miraculous things, why was this insufficient? Perhaps an all powerful God would have found a way to convince people by a display of power and control. Yet He did not. I guess this would puzzle some people.

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As I understand what you are saying it is that if you study the mythology thoroughly enough then you will eventually also be convinced. And I somewhat understand that view from someone who already has accepted it to be true. I hope it is understandable that this is a very vague form of epistemology. I could propose the exact opposite.

Yes, I want a convincing reason and/or convincing amount of evidence to be convinced. I struggle to see how that is not obviously a reasonable stance. You read in the Gospel that some were unreasonable in NOT being convinced. It does not in any way follow that you are reasonable in being convinced.

Yes! Why would that be? Did it really happen as described? And why does it not happen now? The conclusion remains; God is either not powerful enough to provide evidence or unwilling. You can’t have both.

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#1. Not JUST because, but we note the oddityof being born into the one true religion.
#2. Pascale wager
#3 Yecism is incompatible with intellectual honesty
#4 Averaged out, more honest too.

One can insist on all sorts of nonsense. Any claim about something which is not defined is likewise undefined and thus meaningless. You have to define your terms in order to make meaningful statements about them and negative statements do not get any exception to this (except to observe that the term has not been defined). Attempts to exempt something like negative statements to such basic rules of rational discourse is an example of special pleading.

Different tales say different things about unicorns. But then the same is true about different tales of just about anything. There are all kinds of fantastic tales about Mars, but no that does not mean I would conclude that someone is mistake if they claim to have seen Mars.

You can call whatever conclusion you make reasonable all you like but you cannot reasonably expect me to agree unless you have objective evidence to support your conclusion. I do not make the limits of my experiences the limit of reality itself – I do not consider that to be reasonable.

I can say with complete certainty that there are many things we haven’t discovered about the universe and I also know with certainty that the things some people do will look like magic to another. And I would not be the least surprised if somewhere in the universe there were living organisms that the majority familiar with stories of unicorns would name unicorn if they saw them.

And I repeat, you can call any sort of nonsense reasonable and it doesn’t mean that I have to agree. If I were you I would limit your claims to the limits of your own knowledge… something like “it is a reasonable tentative position that there are no visible dumb beasts with the appearance like unicorns shown in story books anywhere in geographical areas where you have lived.”

I don’t think you are engaging seriously here. I don’t care about the word play about how I “can” say anything. I have nothing to add…

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