Bad Thinking. Something From The Past

I found this half note/half post in the drafts. It was from before my hiatus so I can’t remember where it came from and I appear to not have made a note of that. I’m going to go with it anyway.

In defence of my position, let’s see how well I can speak to the points made by this blogger:

Since my Atheism Dilemma series of posts have been so popular, I have decided to continue writing more posts.  These posts exist to show the incoherence of atheism as a belief system.  In this post, I will focus on the Atheism Dilemma of Appeal to Assertion.

An Appeal to Assertion is a fallacy that entails a premise to be true just because it was stated and repeated.  Atheists are guilty of this fallacy.  They assert many things regarding God, Faith and Religion.  Here are a few and my response to them.

Assertion:  God is Imaginary
Many atheists claim that God is imaginary or exists solely in the imagination of the human person.  At first, the assertion seems coherent; God is invisible, no one can hear Him, see Him etc.  Kids have imaginary friends and these friends seem to have this characteristic of invisibility.  However, there is a problem with this assertion: proof.

Objection:
In order for this assertion that God is imaginary to be taken seriously, the one making the claim must provide evidence of this.  For God to be imaginary, God must be shown to exist in the synapses within the Thalamus and Neocortex.  To date, no such evidence of this exists.  Moreover, imaginative beings cannot affect the material world.  God as an imaginative being cannot heal, answer prayers or manifest Himself in the external world outside of the human brain as an agent that can manipulate matter.

There is a problem here. The first assertion made is that god is not imaginary. This is the assertion that all believers make by virtue of believing in a god. This assertion is unproven. I know that this sounds like a game of semantics but you can’t assert something and then ask me to prove you wrong if you offer no evidence. There is no reason to believe that gods are not imaginary. Of course they skip right over the fact that they have made the original assertion and in the objection goes on to state even more unsupported assertions. Pot, meet kettle.

Assertion:  God is a myth
Atheists assert that God is part of mythology.  While gods such as Zeus, Thor and the like are considered mythology, atheists include the God worshiped by monotheistic religions are part of mythology.  Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Jesus are all considered mythological beings.  The problem with this assertion is that there is no proof.

Objection:
In order for something to be considered mythology, it must have a human origin. Mythology is a collection of stories or apothegm that originate from an author or authors.  We know that mythological gods have an origin in specific authors and can classify them as such.  In order for God to be classified a myth, an author or authors must be present.  In other words, for God to be a myth, He must have His origin in human authorship.  No atheists have provided evidence that God was authored by a particular human author.

Here we see the blogger say that all other gods are myths, but the christian god is not. No proof or evidence is offered, simply the assertion that their god is real and not a myth. In the objection we find a really convoluted piece of reasoning. The problem is that we can show the books and have named the authors of the holy texts of monotheism. Even more damning is the fact that there is literally no physical evidence to support the first 5 books of the Judeo-Christian mythology. These religions, and by inference Islam, look exactly like myths.  While there was some help here and there, clearly the OT is based on the works of Jewish clerics and the NT is about half the work of Paul of Tarsus. I think that nails it down pretty tightly as being authored by humans.

Assertion:  Which God?  There are many Gods to choose from, they all cannot be right.
When theists mention God for a particular reason, atheists often respond: which God?  They do this in an attempt to equate God with other folk versions of gods.  This is done to present God as a deity competing with other deities.  The problem with this assertion is that there is a clear lack of comprehension between folk religion and revealed religion.

Objection:
While there are over 3,000 different designations and descriptions of gods in human society, this does not mean that God is automatically disqualified.  Man has always had belief in a supreme being or creator.  This is a common trait found in every culture throughout the globe.  We are even wired to have belief in God via the VMAT2 gene.  Throughout human history, man has attempted to define and classify this ultimate reality of a supreme being.  Man has used language with its limits in order to describe God.  Some defined God via their understanding of nature or natural phenomenon.  Others defined God via what is experienced in human life such as emotions, sex, pleasure, and so on.  These gods are all manifestations of the limited ability of man to describe the ultimate reality of God.  There is only one God and man in his limited capacity has tried to define him based on the limits of human experience and language.  The 3,000 + gods we know are how man has attempted to describe the one reality called God.

Here we get the ‘oh, but you’re not using my description of god’ bit. With over a million versions of god there is absolutely a reason to ask ‘which god’ or ‘what do you mean when you say god’. To assert that this is a fallacious assertion of some kind is just begging the question… what do you mean when you say god?

In the objection we get the fine print: all gods are just descriptions of the real god, which is apparently not describable. Quite how this blogger knows they are all descriptions of their god is left to our imagination. This blogger can know but the rest of humanity is sadly in the dark. They did mention ‘revelation’ so maybe their god spoke to them to tell them all the rest of us are wrong. Who  knows. Basically this boils down to the blogger saying that atheists can’t know anything about the blogger’s god because god is indescribable… yet the blogger knows somehow. This revelation things is tricky. It sets things up where you can’t tell them they are wrong because their god didn’t tell you, it told the blogger and nobody is allowed to argue with this because that is blasphemous.  The blogger also ‘knows’ that mankind has always had a belief in a supreme being or creator. It’s a dubious claim since writing was not invented for a very long time. Just the same humanity always had a belief that the Earth is flat and the Sun is perfect sphere and the universe revolved around the Earth — well, until science took hold. Now we know better. For someone wanting to point out fallacies, this blogger isn’t doing so good.

These are some examples of assertions made by atheists that are fallacious and said due to lack of education.  When one critically examines the assertion and compares them with facts, one will see how easy they are to refute.

Appealing to assertions may be a quick method to stump theists who are not well prepared in arguing logically; however, they backfire when cross-examined.  Atheism has another dilemma here that does damage to the claim that atheism adheres to logic and reason.  It is obvious that atheism possesses neither of these.

The last sentences just make my head hurt. This blogger made more assertions than they refuted? Apparently making unsupported assertions is because of poor education. I don’t know what to tell you on that one.

The problematic part of this blogger’s post that I like best – the assumption or assertion that atheism is a monolithic group, and well defined world view or something similar. Clearly they do not understand what the word atheism means or have gone to particularly great lengths to expound on what they think is wrong with what they perceive to be ‘atheism’.  In either case, atheism makes only one claim: there is no credible evidence to support belief in gods or the supernatural.

This is not the sum of those that support belief but it is a significant part.

2013

09/22

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