*Sigh* If anybody would read the extremely long debate between us so far, we only accused one of your STATEMENTS of being ignorant. That's different from us accusing YOU of being ignorant.

Just wanted to clear up that falsehood so people don't spread lies about me ^_^. THANKS! Lol

@HaigLaw - I see I was right on the mark when I theorized that you rely on magic instead of logic and evidence (a.k.a "the promise of Isa.  55:11" you just mentioned above).  Ignoring the problem, asserting your conclusion, and counting on your invisible friend to do the rest is the reason why atheists don't listen to your "answers".   I reviewed a debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein a few months ago for those "lurkers" in the audience that might be interested.

ARU

@Agnostics_R_Us - Well, welcome back, ARU.  You said:

"Ignoring the problem, asserting your conclusion, and counting on your invisible friend to do the rest is the reason why atheists don't listen to your "answers".   I reviewed a debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein a few months ago for those "lurkers" in the audience that might be interested."

I ignored nothing.  I answered all your points.  But it is true you ignored all my answers.  Thx for the review of the Bahnsen/Stein debate.  I look fwd to reading that.

-Grampa D

@HaigLaw - Well, the original post was on the scare tactics of Yahweh in regards to threatening to send wild beats to devour women and children if they didn't tote the line and you claim your presuppositions are just so bad ass that we should be blown away by your loving theistic interpretation and adopt them immediately. Sorry, not getting that dial tone with the Holy Spirit on that one.   At face value, this should be a no brainer.  I don't know how outraged it is to merely notice that a loving god could probably do a lot better than that.  Omnipotent hands are always tied behind an immaterial back for no apparent reason and it’s an argument to the better explanation that it is more probable that a priestly class decided such a story made for good cultural control rather than a plausible people management tool of a perfect super mind.  Idle threats are much easier to come by when your invisible friend is as real as he is seen.   I don't recall seeing you respond directly to this.

The entire Bible from start to finish is a travesty of Biblical proportions with one shepherding disaster after another.  Everyone since the Garden of Eden is stuck with the raw deal we didn't pick out and you call this the definition of fairness.  Not the word I’d pick.  Let's see, out of the millions of people alive before the Flood, God's amazing people skills managed to convince 8 to be saved.  I’m sure Tom Cruise has convinced more people to be scientologists and that Lord Xenu really did bring human souls to earth in 747s.  Generations of Hebrews were stuck in slavery for 400 years that had nothing to do with whatever sin that got them there in the first place.  Two people (out of two million supposedly) survived the Exodus to the Promised Land.  Instead of miraculously turning the Arabian Peninsula into a fertile place to live, we start the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a host of human rights violations.  Hurray, the warring never stopped in the Middle East and everyone always has a great excuse to jump back into it.  That’s long term planning.  In the hay day of Israel when you’d think all that came before would amount to something good, King David is up to his eyeballs in what seems like constant blood shed.  And King Solomon surprise, surprise goes off the deep end the other way and marries every piece of ass to the ends of the earth and back.  If you can’t beat em, join them in matrimony, right?  From before that time to the end of the prophets apparently your invisible friend was competing with inanimate objects (stone idols) for religious affection.  To use the Biblical motif, I would suggest this couple obviously needs counseling (God and his whore).  I will give God some points on converting 11 out of 12 of his immediate disciples (such a small sample range though), but this is where we find the worst punch line of all time.  In Matthew 7:14, we find out that most will be damned to hell for all eternity thus making the "good news" statistically speaking really more about the worst possible news for most people ever born.  Does that about do it?

That's the "atheist bible" in a nutshell and if you go read the Christian Bible, you'll find they are identical.  You find the Bible self-authenticating and I find the Bible self-refuting.  If I've distorted any of the facts, please let me know.  If the Bible is God's resume, I would never in my wildest dreams put my eternity in this deity's hands if I had a choice in the matter.  No amount of “blaming the wife” is going to cut it since it takes two to tango.  Since when does a parent get off for churning out 6 or seven hell spawn out of 10 potentially good kids?  And they aren’t even super beings.  Does King David pat himself on the back when he only brings back 30% of his sheep?  Does he blame the fallible sheep?  I don’t see why you have to be a god yourself to make a reasonable assessment of the situation.  And your presuppositional rhetoric to that end is offensive and inflammatory, fyi.

Fortunately, since Jesus, the Godfather is so interested in respecting free will, he's put a viable alternative on the table and made me an offer I can't refuse.  “Believe or burn.”  Perhaps you don't see clearly because you've been paying the “protection money” for soooo long?  You can zoom in on all those stories and find the meager redeeming qualities (the orthodox Christian party line) but I’m going to turn and compare the proverbial Christian (who treads water by slapping, “But God still forgives me,” onto any seriously dysfunctional setup) to the abused girlfriend that defends her sick relationship because she is addicted to the abusive roller coaster ride of it.  You can’t just sweep this picture under the rug and play dumb.  I’m not mining exceptions here…I’ve pointed out the over-arching framework of perpetual failure and that it has to reflect on God to be coherent.  I’m sure you are well aware that adults don’t hold on to excuses that are bigger than the content.  They set their personal feelings aside and side with what they do know and with probability.  Correct?  Isn’t that how you live your fallible adult life?  Can you do better than that?  Perhaps this is all just a big misunderstanding…but I really don’t have any good reason to think so…and I have many good reasons not to.  My wee little mind has better things to believe in than bending over backwards a hundred times over for such an impersonal amoral relationship awaiting me upon re-conversion.

ARU

A lot of Greg Bahnsen's writings can be found at the Center for Reformed Theology & Apologetics, including a link to the audio of the Bahnsen-Stein debate.

The text of the debate can be found here at the Bellevue Christian site. 

@Agnostics_R_Us - 

Again, ARU, I’m not going to obligate myself to respond to every phrase of your rant in comment #10 above, upon penalty by you of declaring yourself the winner of a point by default.  But I will comment on a few things, as time permits, such as:

“I don't know how outraged it is to merely notice that a loving god could probably do a lot better than that.”

I’ve already responded to taunts like that on EGM’s blog, but for the sake of my readers, I’ll comment here that God allowing humanity to sin and reject Him does not make Him responsible for every rebellious thing they do.  Theologians call this “the problem of evil.”  I don’t understand why it’s a problem.  God could have left the Garden of Eden perfect and not have allowed humanity to start sinning, and have avoided all this evil; but He didn’t.  You revel in your freedom of choice.  Evil goes with that.  You can’t have it both ways. 

“The entire Bible from start to finish is a travesty of Biblical proportions with one shepherding disaster after another.”

That’s really funny.  You simply cannot help yourself.  The very figures of speech you use to attack God and the Bible attest to their infusion into our speech and culture.  This is an illustration of something I shared on EGM’s blog, but which y’all didn’t understand – the illustration of the futility of taking a breath of air to curse the air and the creator of air.  You affirm the thing you attack, which you as a creature cannot help doing. 

Your dripping ridicule of Bible stories begs a lot of questions, but I’ll just ask one – is your world any less dysfunctional than what you ridicule?  As I’ve explained to you & EGM before, not everything in the Bible is cited as ethically normative, e.g., Jesus invitation to Peter to walk on water does not mean we all should walk on water.  Most of the stories are told to illustrate how NOT to do things; but you guys missed that part, and keep ranting on how bad some things are in the Bible, as if that’s all God’s fault.  I realize you keep not getting it, but see “the problem of evil” above. 

“If I've distorted any of the facts, please let me know.”

Tell you what – it would be easier for me to tell you if you ever get anything right.  Don’t hold your breath. 

“And your presuppositional rhetoric to that end is offensive and inflammatory, fyi.”

Oh, no; you & EGM were angry young men, fire-breathing against God and every believer, long before I ever came along to EGM’s blog.  I cannot claim credit for offending you about God or anything about God.  You were offended long before you ever heard of me.  You or EGM indicated on EGM’s blog that I prompted you to look up Vantillian Presuppositionalism on Wikipedia.  But you had already been ranting about Bahnsen’s debate, and Bahnsen’s thinking is totally infused with Vantillian Presuppositionalism.  Bahnsen is a 3rd generation presuppositionalist, having studied under Van Til at Westminster when Van Til was already quite aged.  Van Til left teaching at Princeton in 1937 and started at Westminster. 

“You can’t just sweep this picture under the rug and play dumb.”

Excuse me?  I’m not aware of sweeping anything under the rug, and as to whether you or I am making more sense, I’ll let the readers be the judge.  But even if I thought you were sounding dumb, I’d be polite and not say so.  If you wish to continue demonstrating that on your own, though, I’m not going to stop you. 

-Grampa D

@HaigLaw -

Are you referring to me on your edit portion? How exactly am I taking advantage of your "G" rating on your blog? I do not recall saying anything utterly blasphemous; all I said was that I'm getting very tired and weary of the fact that our debate just doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. You kept asserting that I cannot be the judge of Christianity or whatever, and you didn't assert why I couldn't. Is Christianity completely immune to scrutiny? Why? Do I not have a right to be skeptical of its claims? Even in some of your posts all you do is quote a bunch of arbitrary and random Bible verses and then declare that you've made a point and refuted me somehow. And you give a cute little anecdote concerning your conversion to Christianity instead of responding to my points made in one of my posts. I'll admit that you did respond later, however, which if I even have time I'll address later (or perhaps now).

You claim that you've been very careful not to be rude or arrogant, but in one particular comment you stated sarcastically, "It's really amazing to see how smart you guys are!" If that's not arrogant, then I'm really not sure what is.

In our overly long and drawn out debate, ARU gave his own criticisms of Van Tillian Presuppositionalism, but rather than responding to his points or showing him why he was wrong, all you did was appeal to the fact that you've been a Van Tillian for over thirty friggin' years! You did that instead of actually responding coherently.

You can call presuppositionalism "circular reasoning" all you want to, but you never have answered my challenge to admit your own presuppositions.

Actually, when I asked you to give me a reason or two as to why you think I hold my own particular presuppositions, you never answered me. To be fair, you must show how my Atheism requires presuppositions of its own in order to work. What if I said that Jesus claimed that he has three legs? You would certainly require proof for my assertion, right? Well, it's the very same standard that I hold for you. If you say anything regarding my belief system (or lack of belief or whatever you want to call it), then I have every reason to ask that you back up your assertion(s) regarding it. In any case, when I asked that you give a source or two concerning "my givens," you didn't provide a thing.

However, if you want me to admit what my "presuppositions" or as I prefer to call them, "assumptions," I'll be happy to.

1. The universe essentially obeys a set of rules that do not change, for example the laws of gravity, inertia, thermodynamics, etc. Scientists assume that these laws are unchanging and that they will not change in the future, since we have no evidence of them ever being changed in the past. What is true today will be true tomorrow.

2. We rely on our senses to determine all the information around us. I'm really not sure that we can truly trust anything else and I don't think that there is much else to rely on. It's the foundation of how we acquire data, how we acquire knowledge, and how we determine much of the course of our very lives.

I'm sure that in some way, you rely on these very same assumptions. It's just that you have one more (and I would say VASTLY more extraordinary) assumption than I do: the Christian God. Remember: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If that's not the case, then we have every reason to believe in anything that we want to, and I mean ANYTHING.  The so-called "proof" that you've given to Christianity is highly questionable:

To the contrary, Christianity, approached presuppositionally, contains a self-authenticating set of propositions derived from the Lord God adopting a rag-tag wandering tribe of people, leading them through several geographic moves, giving them victory over their enemies when they followed and obeyed Him, and letting them lose when they didn't...[rambles on about rules, the fact that the sacrificial system was a symbol for Jesus, etc.] He led his church leaders to write down His revelations, and those church leaders spent several hundred years hammering out which writings would be recognized as from God and which ones not.  These writings did not, as you imply, spring out of nowhere.  The fact that presuppositionalism starts with God and the Scriptures, does not mean that there is no self-authenticating foundation to them.  You may not be aware of, or respect that self-authenticating foundation, but your lacks do not negate them.

Now THIS is circular reasoning at its very finest.You useunproven assumptions to try to prove his belief system, i.e: God used the sacrificial system as a symbol for Jesus, and how He was the ultimate redeemer for their sins, etc. The "fact" that God led his church leaders to write down whatever He told them to in order to validate Christianity is an unproven assumption. That is apparently how it's "self-authenticating." That is essentially the overall problem with presuppositionalism... it's built upon circular reasoning.

You may reply, as you have already, that I start with my OWN presuppositions. Well, you've essentially committed a false analogy. This link explains it perfectly and I'll take a clip from it that explains it much better than I could:

Van Tillian presuppositionalist John Frame, who wrote: "But are we not still forced to say, 'God exists (presupposition), therefore God exists (conclusion),' and isn't that argument clearly circular? Yes, in a way. But that is unavoidable for any system, any worldview. One cannot argue for an ultimate standard by appealing to a different standard. That would be inconsistent."

, ed., Steven B. Coven [(Zondervan, 2000), p. 217].

Then later:

"Here Frame commits the informal logical fallacy of

. He argues that rationalists must accept reason as an ultimate starting point, just as empiricists assume sense experience, and so on. So the Christian may begin with Scripture as a legitimate starting point. But these are not analogous bases. While the rationalist uses reason and the empiricist uses sense experience as

from which to construct their systems, Frame assumes both the

of special revelation and the

of Scripture, from which he develops his Christian theism. In other words, he assumes the reality of God's existence, his personal interaction with humans, plus a specific product: Scripture. Does Frame not realize that, in the name of everyone needing a presupposition, he has imported an entire worldview when others have only asked for tools?"

Thus the two "presuppositions" are ENTIRELY different from each other.

Even the ardent Christian apologist William Lane Craig admits,

, for it advocates presupposing the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could with a straight face think to show theism to be true by reasoning, 'God exists, therefore God exists.' A Christian theist himself will deny that question-begging arguments prove anything."

(p. 233).

Also, Haiglaw, bear in mind that I said in our debate that this particular brand of apologetics can be plugged into any other theistic belief system like Islam, for example. You replied, "Islam does not even claim a redeemer, so what else need I say?" I forsee two options. One, that it is a false analogy because Christianity claims a redeemer and Islam does not. Technically, you're wrong because Islam DOES indeed claim a redeemer named the Mahdi. Secondly, even if that wasn't the case, it is not a false comparison because Christianity and Islam are a LOT alike. They're both monotheistic systems that rely upon holy books (the Bible and the Koran) and they make very similar claims upon humanity in general. Two, that since Christianity claims a redeemer, it is therefore true. I do not see how this alone would prove Christianity, since almost all major world religions have aspects to each one of them that is unique in and of itself. Is Scientology unique because it claims that DC-8's fly into space? Is it therefore true? Is Atheism true because it is so unique in that no other "belief system" (I hesitate to call it a belief system since it is merely skepticism) dictates that there is no God? I doubt that you would come to such a conclusion.

Whatsamatter, afraid your presuppositions would appear less reasonable to the lurkers than mine?

Nope, not really, since your presuppositions are by definition extraordinary and mine are not. They are not analogous bases at all. Plus, you basically conclude that I have lost somehow because I haven't replied yet. This is the same thing that you accused me of doing, and it suggests a hypocritical attitude on your part, buddy.

I think that's enough for now. Lata.

@Agnostics_R_Us -

@Agnostics_R_Us - 

@Extremegoatmaster - 

@tendollar4ways - 

I've got some questions for you guys.  Let's see if you can answer them:

Do you think the question of the existence of God is a factual question, and should be answered in the same way as any other factual questions?

Do you think that every claim that someone makes must be treated as a hypothesis which must be tested by evidence, such as logical coherence and empirical observation, before accepting it?

Do you think that the use of logic or reason is the only valid way to examine the truth or falsity of any statement which claims to be factual?

-Grampa D

@HaigLaw -

Like Tendollar said, yes, yes, aaaaannndddd.... yes! Where are you going with this I wonder...

And you still haven't answered me concerning your little smear campaign. Who is the one that is taking advantage of your G rating, hmmm?! Or are you just being a liar?

@Agnostics_R_Us - 

@Extremegoatmaster - ARU made a comment that at one point was #10 and now is #9 here, which I felt some of my family members might consider offensive, so I placed a warning to them in as PS to my post above.  They don't have to read your stuff.  And if my granddaughters ask me why some young men are so rude and crude, I can simply say, "Sweetie, you don't have to hang out with guys like that."  And when and if you guys learn better manners, you might find it easier to get dates. 

In the meantime, though, are we to infer that information from your mom, EGM, is in some special category of what is knowable, or could it possibly be that information from her comes within the broader catebory of what I called "evidence, such as logical coherence and empirical observation"? 

-Grampa D

@Extremegoatmaster - That's the type question I've asked over and over -- how do you define "extraordinary evidence"?