Very well put Bboy. I sometimes wonder whether these devout believers have ever read any of Hitchens' or Dawkins' work. Their arguments never seem very logical to me. Science and investigation of the universe has never held all the answers, but as further research continues, we begin to understand how we developed rather than inventing some deity to rationalise our progress over the billions of years life has been on this planet. In the same way that television would never have been believed even 150 years ago. I am certain that science, if it is allowed to continue, will provide answers we would never have considered, in the next 150 years. The "believers" in this discussion should always remember that atheism is not a religion because we do not believe in anything supernatural and do not have to draw our morality from anything like it.
The Bible is NOT the word of God. It is the word of man in much of its contradicting and often immoral absurdity.

It's pretty simple to state graham's argument as a quick syllogism

P1) There is no supernatural. Nature (i.e. matter and energy - aka material things) is all that exists (The atheistic claim)

P2) Morality, Purpose, Meaning are not material things.

Conclusion) Morality, purpose and meaning do not exist, thus fictions.

The conclusion is a valid logical conclusion. To defeat it, you have to show the premises are wrong.

P1 is the atheistic claim
P2 is defeated, as soon as you can identify the material substance that makes up these things. No one has even bothered to try.

All the whining in the world doesn't address this simple argument.

FYI, Graham quoted Pojman as an example. Perhaps all you people who think Graham is attacking a straw man should bother to read him.

Chade,

Sorry for this slow response - unusually I have been busy today!

I have clashed with runner many a time, and I think that he and I are pretty much 180 degrees apart in most things. Yet I would not ask for him to be banned. I do not agree with him in any way, but I respect his staunch adherence to his beliefs (although I consider his beliefs to be muddle-headed). I hope your comment was tongue in cheek, but even so it was unsafe. Free speech is, after all, paramount.

Again - how is it possible to understand free will, consciousness and setience on materialist and determinist grounds? How is it possible to explain such phenomena except by resort to the 'transcendent'?

Finally - why do we assume that materialism and determinism necessarily have a monopoly as 'credible science'?

Perhaps, one day, Indian and Jewish understandings of the soul will be able to be established beyond reasonable doubt.

In the meantime, intuitively I think we know we are more than 'complex biological machines'.

I can't take this article seriously. It claims that it is about "Taking atheism seriously" and then states "in the absence of any absolute moral values it is not possible to make moral progress or to even have any genuinely rational moral debate"

On the contrary, it is absolute moral values that put a hold on rational moral debate and progress as history shows time and time again. Try having a debate about morality with a fundamental theist. They cannot change their point of view on the subject because to them, morality is a divine revelation, not something that human beings develop as shared and consensual standards of behaviour.

CJ Morgan,
You have right, human beings have collected so much experiences, know so many things, can do so many advanced things and they do not need any goshes, any fake stories to understand our world and undertake their responsibilities. They are not idiots, they know what is good and what is not good, they know what is useful and what is dangerous, they know what to do and what not to do. We have the schools to teach the basic rules of our society, of our world, we have the courts and prisons for the people who do not like to respect the basic common rules. We can improve and we improve our system from the very begin. Various religious not only are fake human stories but sooner or later they block the improvement of human society and we have to ignore them or their leaders to change the interpretation of their religious. Smart religious leaders use smart interpretations to comply less or more with their civilization and modern sciences. But we know that humans created the gods and of cause humans will demolish them!
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide