Does God Exist? Part 3

Thanks for your response. You brought up a lot of good issues. I hope I will have room to address them all. I wish to start by respectfully pointing out that you did not answer my questions. I have done my best to directly answer your questions with what I believe. You seem to be avoiding giving direct answers to my questions. I am very curious and I would really like to hear your direct answers: 1. What is your definition of good? 2. What is your definition of evil? 3. How do you know your definitions are true? 4. How should people live according to your worldview? It will be very hard to continue this discussion unless I know some of your beliefs. I will answer your questions, but first I’d like to ask you about a few contradictions I saw in your last argument. You wrote about moral truth that, “we should all let people choose for themselves.” But later on you wrote, “Truth is not a democracy.” So which one is it? I agree that truth is not a democracy – that is the entire point of my argument. This brings us back to my original question. If truth is objective, like your second statement suggests, then who defines that objectivity if there is no higher authority? For the good person/bad person argument, you say you were trying to make your point clearer, but then you say “it doesn’t really matter.” So if the point doesn’t really matter, why try to make it in the first place? Again, it seems like you’re trying to avoid directly answering my questions. You keep claiming that you are a good person and I am a good person and other people can be good people, but when I asked you to explain that you said “it doesn’t really matter.” That is very confusing. Your example for the “I don’t know” answer supports agnosticism, not atheism. Agnosticism views reality as unknown or unknowable – like you claim string theory is unknowable to a 3rd grader. I agree that it is ok to say “I don’t know,” but my point is that does not make a very effective or convincing argument. Finally, you said you have almost 0% knowledge of the New Testament. That is confusing because it means you are arguing against something that you know nothing about (because Christianity is based heavily on the New Testament). Please don’t project beliefs on me if you don’t really know what I believe. Christians do not hold to the Old Testament Law about marrying multiple women and eating shellfish. We follow the New Testament teachings of Jesus. You ask why God’s morals don’t match up with yours. The New Testament teaches that God’s morals are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Do these morals not match up with yours? Ok, now to your questions. Morality I cannot continue our discussion about morality until I know your answers to the four questions I asked you earlier. There is still a deeper point to my arguments that you are missing. I am probably explaining it poorly, so I will try again: Yes, you can be “good” without God. I never claimed that you need God to behave well, or that religion makes you a “good” person. You can decide to act however you want. My point is this – without God, the way you decide to act is simply your personal preference and opinion. There is no longer an objective definition of “good” and “bad.” You admit this yourself when you wrote about the Nazis that a man can question things “and reach his own conclusion.” That is the very definition of subjectivity. You incorrectly assume that everyone will naturally reach the same "good" conclusion if they really think hard. You have questioned things and reached the conclusion that it is bad to steal, kill, and rape. Other people (called criminals) reach the conclusion that it is ok to steal, kill, and rape. Without a higher power, people “choose for themselves” and “reach their own conclusion” just like you said. That is not objective morality, that is personal preference. I 100% agree with you that believing in God does not make you a better person. It makes you a forgiven person. You're right, Christianity has not vanished crime from earth. Neither has any other philosophy, moral code, or law system - including atheism. Christianity is not trying to vanish crime from earth, it's trying to offer forgiveness for those crimes. Proof of God You talked about needing proof to believe. To this I ask you what solid proof you see in atheism? You already said that you don’t know how atheism/evolution proves some of the things we discussed. You talked about Bella, Ra, and Odin. For this argument to work, you must assume that all ideas about God are equally likely to be true. That is a false assumption. Think of it this way: The concept of the Judeo/Christian God is about as old as Ra. So we have two belief systems that are roughly the same age. Over time, no one believes in Ra anymore, but billions of people still believe in the Judeo/Christian God. If you explained the stories of Ra, Odin, Bella, and Yahweh to each person in the world and asked them which one was likely true, virtually no one would choose Ra, Odin, or Bella. Billions would choose Yahweh. If each story was equally likely to be true, we would logically expect equal numbers of people to choose each one. We must conclude then, that there is something about the Judeo/Christian God that is more believable. No one would agree to die for your belief that you saw a flying spaghetti monster at the supermarket. Thousands (maybe millions) of people have died for refusing to recant their belief in God. Not every idea about God is equally likely to be true. Historical Evidence I don’t have much more room to get into this, but your history is a bit inaccurate. The truth is actually the opposite of what you said - if you wanted to be accepted by Roman society and not be hunted by the government, you had to REJECT Christianity. According to Roman historian Dr. Joseph Hughes, “The bigger the threat to Roman security and stability, the more Christians were persecuted. Christians were official scapegoats for whatever problems remained. Christians who did not burn incense before the emperor’s statue, or swear oaths against the Christian faith, were executed.” Rome did not ban all other religions. The law you are referring to is the Edict of Milan. According to Dr. Hughes, “Contrary to popular belief, the emperor Constantine the Great, 306-337 AD, did not make Christianity the state religion of Rome. [The Edict of Milan] decree made Christianity one of the empire’s officially tolerated religions, and it officially permitted Christians to serve in public life [1].” So, we clearly see that the Romans simply said Christianity was one of many acceptable religions, they did not force people to follow it. You are right, people claiming things does not necessarily make them true. However, our knowledge of human history before the invention of cameras relies on people’s written accounts of what happened. We accept these written accounts of historical events as reasonably accurate as long as there is evidence to suggest they really happened. Christianity is no different. Jesus is thought to have died around 30 AD. The Gospel of Mark was probably written around 68-73 AD. This means Mark’s account was only 40-50 years removed from the events of Jesus’ life. Surely witnesses of everything were still around 40 years later when Mark was written. Such witnesses would only have been as old as our parents and grandparents are compared to us. Also, Peter addresses a group of these very witnesses In Acts 10: “We ourselves are witnesses of everything He [Jesus] did in both the Judean country and in Jerusalem.” There were thousands of eyewitnesses to Jesus' life an ministry. To name a few: the crowds he preached and healed in front of, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who presided over the trial and sentencing of Jesus. In Matthew 27 and John 19, he hands Jesus over to the crowd for sentencing. This entire crowd of people were also eyewitnesses. There is also Simon of Cyrene, who was made to carry Jesus’ cross (Mark 15:21). There are the soldiers who gambled for his clothes and pounded the nails (Mark 15:24). There are the soldiers who speared his side, (John 19:31-37). The Roman officer who confirmed to Pilate Jesus was dead (Mark 15:45). The local people who watched him die and helped bury his body (Mark 15:46). The list goes on and on. Thousands of people from all walks of life witnessed the life of a man named Jesus. If it all never actually happened, it would only have taken a single credible person to come forward and say “that’s not what happened” and the game would be over. When I said it would have been easy to destroy Christianity early on, I did not mean killing all the Christians (although they certainly tried that). I meant that all they had to do was either produce Jesus’ body or get one of the thousands of eyewitness to come forward and say it was all fake. This never happened. There are also a few references to Jesus’ life and death outside the Bible. The Jewish historian Josephus mentioned Jesus on two separate occasions. In his book The Antiquities, Josephus wrote a passage about, “a man named James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ. . .” Josephus mentions in a second passage called the Testimonium Flavianum, that “About this time there lived Jesus . . . He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified.” Here we see, plainly written in secular history, a man named Jesus was condemned to be crucified. In another account, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote as he described early Christians: “[Christ] from whom the name [Christians] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one on our procurators, Pontius Pilate. . .” I’m sorry but I have no more room to write. [1] Dr. Joseph Hughes, Lecture on Roman Government, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down