An introduction

In the past, a few theist bloggers have been featured on this site for different reasons but mainly because they either censor comments they don’t like or engage in a hit and run game where they make outlandish claims about atheism and when these are questioned they don’t respond. Today I am introducing an apologist, Debilis, who I must say is not guilty of the above crimes and to her credit I must say she engages with anyone who comments on her posts.

She is being featured here, as you will notice when you visit her blog, because of her obsession with creating a caricature atheist whom she then argues against and obviously ends up showing that atheists generally and new atheists specifically are either dishonest, uneducated on Christianity and many other faults she can find.

Having read most of her posts, I think her greatest failing is a misunderstanding of atheists and atheism in general. Atheists are like every other human being, maybe a bit more rational, but victims to the same frailties and flaws attendant to members of our species. We are only united in lacking a belief in gods, that is it. Again to use Dawkins, Dennette, Harris, Ayaan Hirsi and the late Hitchens as a standard of measure of who atheists should be is simply ridiculous. It should interest her that the many books I have read on atheism are not written by the above group and that if she, as she claims to be, were intellectually honest she could look further than she has done. In several posts, she has offered response to Russell’s why am not a Christian and has used it as a launching pad for attacking New Atheists[whoever these are]. In her posts you will notice her vitriol is aimed at New Atheists though she doesn’t say where these group of atheists differ from old atheists.

She says this of atheists

The confidence and scorn with which they attack all religion is wildly out of proportion with the (lack of) evidence and logical rigor they provide as support for their claims.

and does not provide evidence to support the claim that we don’t provide evidence. On the discussion of whether god exists, the theist has failed to define a coherent god [ she believes in the god of classical theism; this will be addressed at the end of this post], having failed at the definitions they have failed to show evidence for this god[this is impossible without a coherent god], and lastly have failed to show that theism is true.  The atheist [talking for myself and those I know] have to be confident because we know what we are talking about and can defend it. So she must indeed show where we fail or withdraw.

[…] a sense of loss when I think about the shallowness of the modern discussion on religion.

What shallowness is she referencing here? Who is being shallow? And how deep does she want us to get?

And the New Atheists, for all their sloppiness of thought, their commitment to rhetoric over rationality, and their refusal to understand the subject being discussed, have forced the Church to think.

Anytime a person in the church dares to think for themselves they end up quitting. As proof of this there is the Clergy project, an online group of former church ministers who no longer hold to supernatural beliefs. I have linked posts by Eric at Choice in dying, a former church pastor who writes mainly about the right to assisted dying but also on atheism. So to call atheists sloppy without providing proof is condescending to say the least and an insult to our [atheists] collective intelligence.

That is, a group of raging atheists calling Christians moronic, while using arguments that just a little study could overcome…

What arguments are these? Atheists have been classified as being second only to rapists, so don’t worry being called moronic at least they[atheists] can defend their use of invective against Christians and whilst saying this, I hardly meet atheists calling you moron.

They may well have set in motion events which will lead to theism being stereotyped as the intellectual position.

When this happens it will no longer be theism.

In order not to make this post longer, allow me to discuss the god of classical theism and its problems. I know this is the god she refers to her in her posts[ she told me].

The god of classical theism has the following qualities

1. Transcendence
2. Omnipotence
3. Omniscience
4. Omnipresence
5. Absolute benevolence

 The following five qualities can not coherently be held by one person/ being. Transcendence means out of time and space and omnipresence means he is everywhere all the time. So either this god is beyond time and space and impersonal and having no need to create the universe[immutable and self-sufficient] or he is everywhere all the time.

Can god do something that is logically impossible? Or better still can god create a stone he can’t lift. If he can’t do this, it rules out the omnipotence argument and all we then can say that of this god is that it can only do logically possible things which again it has failed to do e.g it is logically possible for an all-powerful god to prevent an earthquake, something this god has failed to do even once.

If god knows everything, that is the present, the past and the future, then  he can’t change it. Whence then is the omnipotence? The three qualities, that is, omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience can’t be coherently possessed by one individual.

As I said in the beginning of this post, the Christian apologist has their work clearly marked out;

1. They have to define a coherent god
2. show that such a god exists