I can’t count how many different ways I’ve asked all you Abrahamists out there whether you can provide any cogent rational justification for your beliefs (particularly in particular texts having divine origin), or simply asked you for your best cogent rational justification for you beliefs… but I can count how many cogent rational justifications I’ve ever seen for your beliefs: a big, fat, zero — nothing.
I’m coming to the conclusion that there is not a single open and honest person among you; if any one of you were open and honest, I’d have an answer, would I not? A valid answer could take one of two forms:
1. An admission that you do not, in fact, have any cogent rational justification for your beliefs
2. A cogent rational justification for your beliefs
If I get nothing but dishonest idiots attacking the man and not the ball, can I then reasonably conclude that there’s not an open and honest person among you?
Anyhow… since you lot are so reticent to even try to present anything in support of your twisted fantasies about your invisible pen fiend, I thought we might look together at the very best case your camp has ever made and see why it fails so horribly.
So… what’s the best case that your camp has ever provided?
Well… very often your camp, when asked to justify your faith in particular “holy” texts, begins by addressing a different question entirely: is there good reason to believe in God [and here this is a bit of a bait and switch, since you were basically asked about the god of the Bible (or the Tanakh, or the Qur’an, or the Book of Mormon) and are now seeking to instead defend some very general conception of deity]… along those lines many of you will present some variation or another of the well-worn cosmological argument… it goes something like this:
- Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
- The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the universe has a cause.
This is not a good argument for a number of reasons, but the most significant reason being this: it doesn’t even mention any gods; other problems include that in order for it to carry any water we would have to agree on definitions of “begin”, of “exist” and of “cause”… moreover, we’d have to agree on models of time and of causality… but really, there’s little point in diving down those dodgy (or should that be ‘Dodgsony’?) rabbit holes because, as I already noted, the argument doesn’t get you to any god, EVEN IF I GRANT THE ARGUMENT.
If any of you can be persuaded to offer an argument in support of your belief in the divine provenance of certain collections of words, the best argument I’ve ever heard is one from prophesy… but just as the cosmological argument doesn’t get you to any deities, the argument from prophesy, EVEN IF I GRANT THE ARGUMENT, doesn’t get you to where you’re trying to go, as we’ll see… let’s unpack that together:
A poster here recently admitted that their best argument for believing that the Bible was the word of God involved Isaiah predicting Cyrus’ actions by name many years before the man was even born. There are so many problems with this argument, and to make it carry any water the poster would really have to demonstrate that the writings associated with Isaiah that mentioned Cyrus by name were composed before Cyrus was born… I think we all know that the poster is singularly incapable of demonstrating that with any degree of certainty but let’s just grant them that aspect of their argument, for the sake of argument.
So… if somebody (possibly a real person by the name of Isaiah — I can even grant that for the sake of argument) once accurately predicted events from his future… does that mean that writings by unrelated folk from an unrelated religious group at a time far later again must be inspired by the same deity that inspired him? Well, no… and the astute amongst you might note that it doesn’t even establish that Isaiah was able to get his prediction right by dint of deistic divination in the first place.
So… where are we at?
Your best argument in favour of a deity existing doesn’t establish that a deity exists, even if I grant it.
Your best argument in favour of a deity having anything to do with any holy texts doesn’t establish that a deity had anything to do with any holy texts, even if I grant it.
You lot have a fistful of fuck-all. Are any of you honest enough to admit that, or willing to present, finally, an actually cogent reason for a rational person to believe as you do?