I’m no theologian, so I only understand (and read) a bit of theology. What I see is that many theologians take as a premise the existence of not just a god, but the god of their birth or culture: prima facie belief.

Those theologians that have attempted to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural — of a god — of the god — have provided far more interesting questions than (and I hate to be so harsh about it), those that pontificate not just on how many angels may dance on the head of a pin, but those who try to discover if angels engage in bowel movementsAn aside: Of course, if ethics that stem from belief in the supernatural work for you, that’s wonderful. Perhaps, if you believed otherwise, you would maim, steal, rape and murder others; thus your belief is a necessary thing, albeit unjustified in my eyes.
But I don’t think that’s true. I hope you can be just as ethical without a system of ethics that relies on, what seems to many nonbelievers, as magic beans.. (Of course, I’m speaking of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.)

If you’d like to work through, as one would with a scientific hypothesis, several of the classic ‘proofs’ of the existence of (1) the supernatural, (2) a deistic god, (3) a theistic god, let’s talk it outAnother aside: Of course, if any of these proofs should fail, that does not mean that the god you believe in does not exist. And if your proof should succeed some serious scrutiny from doubters, then it is a powerful argument. Either way, believers in this situation will not be put on the spot. If an argument doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; nothing more.
But if an argument works….

… or, Why Some Atheist are Wrong about what Matters Most.

Christianity makes broad claims about its power to change people and situations. The single largest disproof of our faith lives in its failure to do so, especially in the West. If our faith is proven by experience, then there in lies the realm of disproof. But please take into account the affects of nominalism in all truth-systems and the universal warnings against it in all wisdom traditions. At their heart, no faith endorses such living. There are even atheists that refuse to live by what they know to be true and good to the peril of us all. Nominalism, wherever it exists, is just a fancy name for cowardice, apathy, complacentcy, and laziness which are always contemptable and tradmarked by no system of thought. (Soulster, How to Talk to Believers)

Soulster’s ‘How to’ stands out as a fantastic piece on how to promote the development of atheist/believer relations.

Read it.

And Continue reading Erring on the Side of Truth: A Mistake