My friend SB has a good post, respecting reasonable certainty. I have no disagreements with him at all.
One of the goddites, Seth, writes in one of his comments
You are citing alleged actions of the Christian God — I was referring to His necessary qualities, e.g. immaterial, timeless, space-less, etc, which I believe are necessary qualities that would have to apply to any entity capable of creating the universe. What objective evidence would we expect from a being with these attributes?
And my first thought was, what the fuck do people smoke! Why do apologists regurgitate this nonsense of space-less, timeless and immaterial but he can create? Where do they get this idea from? Since I have other hobbies, has anyone of you who reads the bible met this description of god. I wanna know how a space-less and timeless god would be bothered about what animals should be sacrificed, how and by whom? How does one, whose belief in god is based on a book of myth, write the above and think they have contributed to a rational debate? Do they read these comments aloud to themselves and others near them?
And then he says
As for one valid bit of evidence… Not to put words in your mouth, but when legitimate, historical evidence is brought up that seems strongly to suggest that Christ rose from the dead, the fall-back position seems to be to discount the conclusion that the evidence suggests because the conclusion doesn’t line up with the naturalist’s assumptions about the universe; i.e., “We have no way to tell if it was really a miracle, hang what the evidence says.” It’s a no-win situation, and I’m skeptical of methodologies that essentially guarantee certain conclusions before any evidence is even looked at.
And yours truly wants to see this legitimate historical evidence. I want to see it, look at it for myself and decide on whether it is acceptable to me.
And this is true;
just because someone attributes an experience to God does not mean their attribution is correct — tildeb has pointed this out to me ad infinitum😉 If that’s true, then all sorts of things that seem contradictory about peoples’ experiences with God may not even be God at all. If my personal experience doesn’t count as positive evidence of God’s existence, then others’ should be counted as negative evidence against His existence either.
But I will add here that theist is pushing the evidence when they claim the experience is of god. The experience whatever they are cannot be of god, but are attributed to being experiences of god. Other godless people have similar experiences as those described by goddites but attribute them to either being high, fatigued or some other natural explanation. To therefore claim the goddite has some special connection to a timeless, boundless and immaterial existence is to push the limits of our possible experience out of the bounds of reason.
And he wants to have the deck stacked in his favour even before the discussion begins. He writes
I think making certain assumptions about God, at least for the sake of argument, is a very useful way to test the efficacy of a methodology’s ability to say anything definitive about Him. If you can, as I’m challenging you to do, start with the premise that God does exist, deduce from that certain objective evidences that would necessarily follow from those assumptions being true, and demonstrate that such evidences do not exist, then I think you’ve made a valid case against the likelihood of God existing.
And how is SB to do this? He has no belief in deities. What assumptions would he be making about it? It would be reasonable by first telling SB and the rest of us what god is. I do think if this is done coherently, the need for assumptions about god would disappear.
And to the stupid. I hope that link and the people who have commented on it are all kidding. That it is satire and everyone is roped in. Can people be so stupid? Is there any helping them?
Random thoughts 