If I get a guess, I’d guess you got that line from ChatGPT. 
Believing in God or God’s non-existence is a leap of faith. There has been a couple millennia of efforts in apologetics to try to make the steps appear smaller or ‘reasonable’. For some, it’s a small step or not one at all. For others, it’s a gap too far. You benefit no one by presuming motive or mindless compliancy, through projection of stereotypes. People are diverse & different, stupid & smart, thoughtful & not in many different ways & dimensions. If one wishes to piss and moan about stuff one finds aggravating, that’s fine. That has it’s place. I do that all the time! But if you want to truly understand and engage with those ‘others’, it helps to ‘trying meeting them where they are, not where you want them to be’. [/moral scode tone off]
We really live in the age of the “death of God”
What God wills, happens. Similarly, what God doesn’t will, doesn’t happen.
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Lol. It’s ‘mu’ – A Zen thing refrased as “unask the question” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Aside: I don’t think the book is what inspired me to ride & repair motorcycles but it helped. What got me to give up motorcycles were smartphones the inattentive drivers they created.
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They suggest no such thing. That is a non sequitur.
Using an analogy from mathematics might be helpful. Suppose I assign my students the equation 2x = 4 to solve and this is the response of three of them:
• Xander: “You need to multiply both sides by 2 and x = 8. ”
• Willow: “You need to divide both sides by 4 and x = ½.
• Buffy: “You need to add 2 to both sides and x = 4.”
All three students are incorrect, and their math teacher should probably find a new
occupation. But what if all the students agreed with Buffy (she is the chosen one)? What if they formed a club with other math students all around the world and they all agreed x = 4. Several students might even bring in their sacred scriptures and say, “Look, the book of Numbers was written by the great Sohcahtoa and verse 3:14 reads, ‘When 2x=4 then x must equal 8. So declares the lord. ’”The verdict does not change. All of these students and their holy book are incorrect.
Objective facts are such that they remain true even if everyone in the world disagreed with them. As an example, if every human being alive today thought it was objectively true that the moon was made of Cheese Whiz, they would all be mistaken.
Many people also have a tendency to overstate the diversity (what you call active diversity). If I wanted to know what most relevant experts thought on climate change, I would not ask botanists, cosmologists or scientists in general. If I wanted to know the latest on origin of life research, I would not ask theoretical physicist working on super-string theory. Likewise, I wouldn’t go to a mechanic or optometrist when an obstetrician is called for.
By my count, 70% of the philosophers of religion (the so-called experts on this subject) accept or lean towards the existence of God. Only around 20% of them identify as atheists or lean away from God.
I am not big on appealing to authority. But the diversity you seem to be using to make a fallacious leap in logic doesn’t even exist. I understand many of these theists might disagree with one another on some arguments. But most experts in the field are theists or lean towards it.
Vinnie
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That’s the point I was making: great efforts have been made to make the belief in God appear infinitely less reasonable than it is. And unfortunately they have succeeded in the west. The same could be said about the resurrection of Jesus but UNFORTUNATELY FOR THEM things here have gone in the opposite direction as the third quest has demonstrated that the sources where far closer to the events than previously believed and the critical scholars also came to the conclusion that the apostles were really convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus (even though they can’t affirm the reality of the resurrection because of methodological naturalism)
But before the third quest the common view was that the Gospels were as historically relevant as Esopo’s tales and that the divinity of Jesus was a later and forced construct that was developed through the centuries.
This didn’t have the objective to destroy faith but to make it as less reasonable as possible.
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There is an enormous difference between God’s positive will and God’s permissive will…
Philosophers of religion are kind of a self-selective population. An interested metric is what proportion started in philosophy of religion as believers (I think that survey has been done). And “having personal belief” is not the same same thing as asserting that philosophical arguments are conclusive. The subjective ‘personal’ is not the same as what we hope is more objective, ‘professional’, rules of logic and argument assessment where you “show your work to the rest of the community”
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It’s unclear whether the God of Philosophers can have that difference. The God of the Old Testament might.
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I can do that, as long as there is good faith. But when, for example, I encounter a hyper-empiricist atheist who begins doubting even the existence of his own mother if he hasn’t seen her for more than a week (I’m being hyperbolic of course), and then that same person goes on to affirm completely unprovable theories such as the multiverse, simply because they feel the need to explain, through chance and meaninglessness, the otherwise astronomically low odds of the universe being the way it is, then I’m not dealing with someone arguing in good faith. The multiverse, which is essentially a kind of cosmic Darwinism, allows them to claim that the dice have been rolled trillions upon trillions of times, and therefore a universe like ours was bound to occur eventually. But there is no proof for it, and I don’t accept seeing it embraced so enthusiastically by people who otherwise struggle to believe even what they see. Or better yet, I accept it but the inconsistence and ipocrisy is there for all to see.
Luke 16:8: “For the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the children of the light.”
And I know that fairly well because I was a child of this world too.
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This is not relevant since. I don’t argue from consensus. Your error was two-fold.You made a logical leap based on diversity (active debate) that does exist or exists in such a fashion that it does not carry the force your comment needs it to.
Whether philosophers of religion are self-selecting are not is irrelevant. The same could be said of non-philosophers of religion. At best your argument from diversity would be akin to claiming a bunch of botanists deny super-string theory. I would recommend exploring other avenues upon which to evaluate the strength of super string theory.
Vinnie
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Does anyone have any good suggestions for resources? This conversation has got me thinking a lot, and though I still have some things to work through, would like to know if anyone has any books that are well written and have helped their faith. I would especially appreciate it if someone had any books that involved the intersection of faith and religion (especially written by Evolutionary Creationists) or in the reliability of the resurrection accounts (especially responding to criticisms thereof).
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For classical Christian theism I would recommend anything by Ed Feser. Five Proofs, Aquinas, Scholastic Metaphysics, Aristotles Revenge, etc. He also has a proper understanding of science. For the resurrection, I think many like Mike Licona. If you want to see a balanced approach by a critical NT scholar, Dale Allison’s The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. I really like Allison but he is not going to tell you everything you want to hear. But his conclusions are a lot more sober than much of the field. For Jesus in general, Brant Pitre’s, The Case for Jesus is solid. So is Jesus and Divine Christology by Pitre. For the problem of evil, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, by Brian Davies (it will present a classical understanding via privation). John Walton’s Lost World Series has good info on early Genesis. And just as an FYI, many take Adama nd Eve as purely mythically and reject or reformulate original sin, but this is not necessary and if you have never truly read Genesis 1, this might help.
Vinnie
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Thoughts on Lee Strobel or John Lennox? (I kind ask about John because I’m still a bit nervous because of what this Jorge guy had to say about him).
I just have one question on this. Doesn’t this count as “ignoring” the opposing viewpoint? What this be an illogical way to determine whether my view is correct or not? I’m not trying to be stubborn, I think I just for some reason have this really big skeptic attitude that has developed because of poor apologetics. However, I’m also nervous to try and jump into these arguments (I’ve had to talk myself down from looking at this man’s posts in God bidding himself or John Lennox “appearing” respectful because I wondering if a logical counterpoint was made but then was afraid of the same thing). I completely agree that looking at books would be a far better use of my time, but I’m always afraid that if I do that instead, “could some basic man have actually figured out the truth to reality? What if he brings up a point that no other atheist has?” I think I just feel really uncomfortable with uncertainties like this, because it always makes me afraid that it could always mean that I’ve been blindly following a lie.
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- That’s a very honest concern, and it’s a good one to talk about.
- Not examining every hostile argument on the internet is not “ignoring the opposing view.” It’s recognizing that human knowledge works through representative arguments and serious scholarship, not every individual blog post.
- Think about science. No scientist reads every internet critique of evolution or quantum mechanics. They engage the best arguments made in serious venues. That’s how rational inquiry works.
- Your worry seems to be: what if some unknown person has discovered the decisive argument?
- I suppose, hypothetically, that could happen; but historically, major intellectual breakthroughs don’t remain hidden on personal blogs. They spread because other experts recognize them and engage them.
- So the rational approach isn’t to read everything. It’s to read thoughtful, careful sources on both sides.
- Also, uncertainty is unavoidable. Every worldview, including atheism, lives with unanswered questions. The goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty completely. The goal is to have good reasons for what you believe while remaining open to learning more.
- And right now, if reading a particular writer causes anxiety rather than clarity, it’s reasonable to step back.
- BuffaloMax, you asked how someone deals with the fear that they might be blindly following a lie. I can’t answer that question for everyone, but I can tell you why I am a Christian. Some years ago I wrote a short personal account, an Apologia pro vita mea, explaining how I came to see my own life in light of the Christian faith. I’ll share it here in case it helps you see how faith sometimes grows through lived experience rather than through internet debates.
Apologia Pro Mea Vita
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Thank you for the advice!
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Honest opinion? I read a lot of critical scholarship and there will be a lot of assumptions many scholars outside of seminaries disagree with such as who and when the gospels were written. Most will tell you the gospels were written late in the first century by anonymous Christians and given they show incontrovertible signs of literary dependence, they don’t even qualify as four distinct witnesses. That is the starting place for a discussion today. Not why don’t you believe these two eyewitness and Mark (who relayed Peter’s teaching) and Luke who knew Paul and carefully researched things.
I’m not saying you can’t defend some traditional dates and even traditional authorship of some of the works but each one of these is a book length argument and unlikely to convince someone on the opposing side.
I don’t consider Lee Strobel a reliable source at all. Brant Pitre is a mainline NT scholar. Lee Strobel, John McDowell, they are just bad conservative apologists. I don’t know John Lennox.
I’m not debating this or pointing out their flaws. They engage in mostly evangelical question begging. Anyone with. Rudimentary understanding of basic Biblical criticism can knock down a lot of their arguments rather easily.
I recommended Licona on the res because even though he is working though an evangelical framework, he is a credentialed NT scholar.
Vinnie
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Okay. Thank you for the advice!
Are you a Christian or an agnostic? I’m a Christian. We need to try to be better people by following the example of Christ and growing closer to God. We need to try to spread the good news, not argue with people on the internet. The Christian life is about far more than arguing with people. Like volunteering at a food kitchen or senior center. We should be more concerned about ignoring those in physical need than ignoring atheists online.
You have also been told by a few people you should be immersing yourself and studying what your own religion believes before arguing against caricatures online and possibly offering your own in response. I applaud you in wanting resources. Realize you might thoroughly change the babble that you think you mean. We all do. The reality of Christ in our life should hopefully transcend this. All your arguments and mine are just words, words to be led out into battle against other words. If you aren’t secure in your faith, trying to argue with everyone on the internet is like a recovering alcohol working as a bartender. I’d recommend against it.
Vinnie
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Ok. I wasn’t planning on arguing online at all. I simply was looking for answers on this matter. But you are right. I very much consider myself a Christian and hope to do good in the world.
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