<< To him...there is no point evaluating the Christian comments on their merits. >>

Before you talk about merit, keep in mind that your entire argument relies on the premise that a patchwork of middle-eastern stories written over hundreds of years is a reliable account of the actions of God himself, who did a whole bunch of damning and destroying, blessing peoples, giving commandments, raising his own avatar from the dead, and then removed Himself from the scene entirely, apparently happy to allow billions of people to conclude that He doesn't exist.

No matter how considered or exquisite your statements, you simply can't philosophise your way out of the fact that your religion is literally incredible, which makes it impossible to mount a persuasive argument.

Sancho,

I agree that it is incredible to the extent that it is amazing or astonishing but not to the extent it is implausible.

Changes in the gravitational force or electromagnetic force by one part in 10 to the 40th power reputedly would preclude the existence of our sun thus making life impossible. A decrease or increase in the speed of the expansion of the universe by one part in a million million when the universe was 10 to the 19th power degrees would have resulted in the universe collapsing or prevented galaxies from condensing.

That the universe could have ended up so fine tuned for life is quite incredible but there is abundant evidence to believe that life exists. I believe we need to consider things objectively not just go with a subjective first impression.

" I believe we need to consider things objectively not just go with a subjective first impression."

This made me LOL.

<< it is incredible to the extent that it is amazing or astonishing but not to the extent it is implausible.>>

But that's simply an argument in favour of anything unlikely, including the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Last Thursdayism. But you're not arguing in favour of an undefined "something"; you're arguing in favour of belief in the Christian bible, which is very specific and, yes, implausible.

<< That the universe could have ended up so fine tuned for life.. >>

The late Douglas Adams wrote about that sort of reasoning: "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, `This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'"

Humans are products of the universe we evolved in; the universe was not created to suit humans.

mjpb,

Thanks for your support. We are both Christians and our world-views are apparently not that much apart. However, that was not the point here. If we want to communicate with “unbelievers” we need to find a common ground, which includes a common understanding of the terms used. That is what my entry into this discussion was all about, not “evidence” or lack of it for this or that. As I pointed out before, one should not hijack evidence to support one’s starting point.

I can assure you, there is plenty of evidence for the statement “The k-th homotopy group and the k-th homology group of any (n-1)-connected topological space are isomorphic for all k&#8804;n.“ (Hurewicz Theorem); all those who did some postgraduate maths will agree, others will not understand. The difference to statements somehow related to religion is that in mathematics incomprehension does not lead to emotional reactions. But also a hapless student of math could react emotionally, if you force maths on him, if you want him to “see” what he cannot “see”.

There is no point in talking to a blind man about the difference between red and green, except that you teach him some physics and explain the difference in the wavelengths. But even then, you will never be able to make him grasp the beauty of a sunset or a painting. So you have to keep to the common ground, in this case electromagnetism.

Therefore we should be very careful with pointing to evidence that is acceptable only to the “initiated”. There is something called “scientific evidence” for some fact or statement, which all scientists can accept or reject (or be in the process of accepting or rejecting), philosophers analyse the concept, and many, perhaps most, people have a very naive understanding of it.

Something similar about “biblical evidence“: it has a different meaning for the initiated and a different for the uninitiated, so again it cannot serve as the common meeting ground.

If you are interested in atheism/agnosticism as atheists see themselves, I think even better than Veronika’s reference is http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/.

Sancho,

And Douglas Adams has an argument that is better made with a puddle but is nevertheless compatible with the fact that it is incredible. The fine tuned interaction of numerous factors it is quite incredible. Rather than the shape of a puddle forming it has been compared to having a lottery with a billion, billion, billion black balls and one white ball which you must pull out while blind folded to be alive. That doesn’t mean that Douglas Adams can’t use the argument. It is one of two obvious choices of arguments.

I’m simply saying that the life situation is incredible but verifiably real. Admittedly I did get sidetracked. You have a point. Nothing about the objectively historical appearance of the Bible will be important to anyone committed to disbelief in miracles. Indeed some atheists won’t bother reading further as they don’t have time for trivia.
Nevertheless I invite you to consider a discussion of the historicity of the New Testament anyway even if that factor is an insurmountable barrier to you. Hopefully it will be interesting.

George,

I hear you. However I think that there is value in airing the issue as some atheists adopt the Da Vinci Code or similar books as an article of faith. That is about where I am aiming to pitch in spite of the creationist sidetracking that I got myself into with Sancho. I consider what I am trying to achieve as being like bringing a discussion of electromagnetism to the blind recognizing of course the limitations of the analogy in that atheists aren’t necessarily disabled. The discussion probably won’t convert them but it might shave away some annoying bs.

Poly has fortunately increasingly cited scripture as historical evidence rather than something that is automatically authoritative to atheists. That gets dismissed out of hand. Someone I believe should take that ball. Heck otherwise he might retreat to just quoting scripture to the unconverted as an argument. Surely noone wants that.