Strong Atheism is a Sound Position

A priori stance of Non-Existence Pro says "So here I have ruled that assuming God more likely to exist than not a priori is absurd, and also as likely to exist than not is also absurd. Hence we are only left with the antithesis, that God is unlikely to exist a priori." So his argument is that if we can"t assume A or B, we have no choice but to assume C, which is similar to saying if we can"t assume B or C, we have no choice but to assume A. Pro fails to see that we simply shouldn"t assume anything, but follow the evidence where it leads. Pro would have us think that if we shouldn"t assume something exist, we must assume it doesn"t exist. He claims "There is no middle ground here due to the law of the excluded middle, God"s either likely to exist, or is not likely to exist." But this likely hood cannot simply be assumed before examining evidence. For BOTH positions, before evidence for and against is examined, we simply say "I don"t know." Agnosticism is the default position, not atheism. Maybe he exists, maybe he doesn"t, I don"t know, and I don"t have a probabilistic statistic " that"s the default position before evidence is examined. Only after hearing arguments for and against God"s existence, can we determine how likely it is for God to exist or not exist. We can"t do it by philosophical presuppositions without considering evidence. Pro"s premises simply assume a further secondary premise, that we have to assume that evidence doesn"t exist before checking to see what the arguments for God are. This again is probabilistic because one could have assumed there is no argument against God before considering the evidence. Theological Fatalism Pro"s illustration with poisoning a friend simply doesn"t accurately represent my position. If the salt runs out, yes, poisoning his friend is the only option, but if God knows what choice I will make in the future, this in no way implies that my choices have run out? Pro is simply asserting that just because God know positively what I will do, means that I did not have a choice. This simply doesn"t follow. If you knew what choice a child was going to make, and you turned out to be right, does that somehow mean the child didn"t have choice? Of course not. Pro also ignores the fact that other futures besides the one that actually does exist, could have existed if the choices we were about to make had been different. We could choose differently, in which case God would be living in a radically different future. This wouldn"t impinge on his foreknowledge, since he would be in that future that our alternate choice created, and thus would be aware of our destiny. I never affirmed that an evil person cannot do otherwise. An evil human being could become good tomorrow. But what I did affirm is that unlike humans, God in his nature is unchangeable, and therefore being already good, he cannot become evil. So while God"s choices are limited by his good character, so that he can only respond in certain ways to events, ours is not so limited by our character because our character is subject to change. Just as we can"t go back in time and do other than what we already did, its obvious that we can"t do anything other than what we will actually do in the future. This in no way implies there is no free will. It simply implies that if indeed I will choose A, then I can"t choose other than A; not because I couldn"t choose B, because if indeed I will choose B, then I couldn"t choose A. The fact that the future exists doesn"t show we don"t have choice, only that what choices we will make, in that future time, have already been made. What if God told me that I will get killed tomorrow? So I ask when and where, and I avoid the place, trying to defy God"s foreknowledge. But then I"m kidnapped and taken to that place. In my struggle to escape, I get a gun and have it pointed at the man who captured me. All I have to do is pull the trigger. I can choose to kill him and prove God wrong, or have mercy on him, and risk his trying to kill me. God already knew what choice I would make. God knew me so well, that even if he didn"t see the future, he knows I don"t have a bad bone in my body, and I wouldn"t have the guts to shoot someone in cold blood. Does that therefore prove I don"t have a choice? I can pull the trigger even if its out of character for me. People do things out of character from time to time, especially in extreme situations. But the man pleads for mercy, and I lower my gun for a second, which allows him to draw a gun from behind his back and shoot me dead. Now, if God didn"t see the future, and was simply telling me what I would do in a situation like that based on what he knows about my character, it wouldn"t mean I didn"t have a choice. So if God sees the future, his seeing what CHOICE I would make, doesn"t show I did not make a choice at that time. Therefore, it doesn"t prove we don"t have free choice right now. No matter what choice we will make, God will exist in that future to see which decision we will make, thus, his foreknowledge is absolute, with no conflict with free will. Non-Cognitivism of "God" Con assumes that if God was made of energy the energy would have to be limited in nature, why? He gives no reason. Why can"t energy be unlimited? Why can"t God have an endless amount of a primary attribute? Pro hasn"t shown that infinities cannot exit. Distance is infinite. There simply, logically, cannot be an end of distance. Even if all matter and energy ceases to exist, the very emptiness of the void would have eternal distance. Just because Pro doesn"t know what God is made of he assumes he cannot exist. I will let the readers decide on this. Moral Argument P1) If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist P2) Objective moral values exist C) God exists Pro objects the existence of objective moral values on the grounds that the Nazi"s and Jews had different views of what was moral. Pro is thus saying that the holocaust was not actually wrong. It might have felt wrong to the Jews, but it wasn"t really, truly, wrong. It"s just like in the animal kingdom when a lion eats a zebra. It might feel wrong to the zebra, but that"s just the illusion of the zebra"s subjective feeling. The lion isn"t doing anything intrinsically wrong. Stuff just happens, its neither right or wrong, good or bad, it just is! And I ask the readers to judge for themselves if they accept this as true. That love, and compassion, and justice, and equality, and generosity, are not truly good, but are just illusions. That actions like rape, and child abuse are not truly bad, and evil, but simply acts in nature no less than a bird eating a worm. I argue that the man who pins down, rapes and tortures a 9 year old girl isn"t simply acting unfashionably, he is a moral abomination! If you agree that your sense of morality doesn"t mock us, that some things, are really, objectively right, and others are simply evil, please vote Con. If there is no right or wrong, then we have no right to condemn anyone for anything. All the criminals in prison are there unfairly and should be released into society because they aren"t doing anything wrong, except maybe defying the subjective imagination of men. If right and wrong are illusions, why don"t atheists want to be freed of these illusions? If fairness and truth don"t have any real value, why fight for them? There must be a higher source for such moral values, and a Creator to set the standards of right and wrong seems more logical than Pro"s idea that we evolved altruistic behavior out of the cold, hard, unmerciful, pitiless, indifference of blind nature that neither cares for us or about us. Now since Pro said he won't get to rebut my final arguments, instead of going into the fine tuning and so forth, I will finish off on this argument from objective moral values. So, do objective moral values exist? Well, consider how we know that the physical world exist. We know there is a physical world outside our minds because we experience it every day, we touch and interact with it, similarly, we know that moral values exist because we experience them, just as we experience love, and hate - no one will deny these exist. Now there are people out there who have a warped sense of morality, just as there are mentally or physically sick people who cannot experience the reality of the physical world, but that is no reason to deny its existence, is it? In fact, morality is objective because it tends to transcend cultures and religions in many respects. " Nearly universally across human cultures, there exist the same basic standards of morality. In addition, there exist in all cultures truly altruistic acts which lead to no personal or genetic benefit. The majority of people who explicitly deny the existence of objective morality still act as if objective morality exists. There exists a nearly universal human intuition that certain things are objectively right or wrong. The majority of philosophers recognize the existence of objective moral facts. Many naturalists (like Sam Harris or Shelley Kagan) affirm the existence of objective moral facts, despite the problems inherent in grounding these facts in the natural world. " http://www.google.com... Even the Nazis who thought what they did to the Jews was OK, also wouldn't want it done to them, showing that they still didn't perceive this action as being intrinsically good. In other words, they decided to do something they knew to be "wrong" to the Jews, cause if they thought it was "good," and "right" they would choose that suffering for themselves. Laws require a law-maker, so where did these moral values come from?