Religion is wrong.

Thanks to Not.Aname for his last post, but I'll ask for organisation in the remaining rounds, as I’ve been doing, to facilitate its readability. I also note that he’s once again dropped some of his prior points. Faith My opponent has made both unwarranted and flat-out incorrect assertions. For example, he defines sensory experience as “a way of cognitively thinking and rationalising objects and outcomes.” This could not be farther from what a sensory experience actually is: a sensory experience is the collection of sensory information and its subsequent interpretation. When I say “interpretation,” I mean the mental act of converting sensory information into a form our minds can access, i.e. our experience of light as an image. My opponent’s definition is a flawed, misunderstood description – indeed, “cognitively thinking [what other kind of thinking is there?] and rationalising objects and outcomes” is an exclusively internal affair, whereas sensory experience is communication between the mind and the external world. It’s not surprising then, that the rest of my opponent’s response is a complete misrepresentation of my point. Regarding my example of a sensory experience concerning a mug never reaching epistemic certainty, my opponent writes, “the mug however is a physical object and can be rationally broken down into its components, it can be also analysed from a sensory point.” I’m not sure how reducing the mug into its parts is relevant at all, but my opponent seems to believe that because the mug is physical, he’s reached epistemic certainty and thus satisfies his own definition of justification. It doesn’t take much to see where this line of thinking fails: the mug is still external to the mind, and is still a belief you reach a posteriori, so under my opponent’s definition of justification, he still wouldn’t know the mug is there. My opponent then writes a baffling statement, “If were arguing against the actual existence of the mug, then we agree that we don’t know if it is really there.” My entire “faith” section in the previous round concerned how we CAN still know the mug exists, without certainty, because our senses are prima facie justified until we’re met with a defeater that forces us to reexamine our knowledge. I said that we don’t have epistemic certainty that the mug exists (as that would impossibly require us to desert our mind to view the world as it is) but we can still have knowledge in that our belief is still justified intrinsically by our senses. This statement serves to show that (1) my opponent has misrepresented my position, and (2) my opponent subscribes to some kind of absurd skepticism that would leave us with only a priori knowledge. Under this view of certainty necessary for justification, my opponent would be irrational in his belief that religions even exist external of his mind. Concluding his faith section, my opponent writes, “God’s existence is not a constant for the whole of humanity whilst the mug is. It would lead to suggest that the existence of God is actually unknown.” The idea that all humans would see my mug the same way is absurd considering color-blindedness, the visual impairment, and other optic conditions, not to mention subjective interpretation. That others see my mug differently has no apparent effect on my knowledge of its existence, though a majority opinion that my description is false could serve as a defeater of my otherwise justified sensory experience. The same with God – I can infer God’s existence from the external world (such as with the teleological and cosmological arguments, or with divine revelation) and I’m as justified in this basic belief as I am with the mug. My opponent next writes, “Ethically speaking in truth values is not based upon strong a posteriori knowledge. It is mainly upon sensory experiences and Intuitions that God is perceived.” Not.Aname, sensory experiences are a posteriori. Moreover, there’s no need for epistemic certainty – my senses are prima facie justified until I’m met with a defeater. I can infer God’s existence through the complexity of nature in just as justified of a manner as I can infer my microwave oven is finished cooking through its obnoxious beeping. I have justified knowledge in both situations that a certain proposition is true. Lastly, my opponent declares, “On the basis that the existence of God is based upon a feeling, sense, or experience it cannot be justified to exist entirely.” Well, that’s presupposing my opponent’s own skeptical view of knowledge and justification, one which he hasn’t substantiated. To readers, I’ll say you are prima facie justified in believing there’s a computer in front of you. My opponent still has not bridged the gap between unjustified knowledge and wrongness, even if his skeptical view is the correct one, and has not responded to the idea that we can still know God’s existence through a priori modal logic that would satisfy his very own epistemic conditions. (On a side note, most of this has little to do with faith; I’d like readers to review my initial argument on what faith actually is – simply a strong belief that something is true, which can be sufficiently supported with reason as shown in the Bible). Ethics My opponent states, “God’s existence is a crucial part to this debate. For it is the reason why Religions exist,” and later, “religion itself cannot prove the existence of God.” I’ve provided three arguments for God’s existence that my opponent has failed to respond to. Moreover, if my opponent’s view of what constitutes proof is at all related to his view of what constitutes knowledge, then we’re again left with only logical and mathematical proof. His next statement, “Anyone on this planet can teach right and wrong at the same time. It is humans after all conducting sermons and teachings across all religions, based on the back of previous human perceptions and feelings,” is self-contradictory at worst and ambiguous at best. When I said in the last round that my opponent contradicted himself, I was referring to religious doctrine concerning ethics – he asserted that “religion tells people the obvious,” but later, still with respect to ethics, “religion is wrong because it dictates false information.” At that point, he hadn’t shown a single bit of religious doctrine to be wrong, even ignoring his contradiction, though to be fair he attempts so in his following statements. My opponent writes that the lack of “proof” for the existence of God leads him to believe that religion has very little truth. I’d once again like to direct my opponent to my arguments for God. Moreover, flat-earth theory obviously has little truth (or factual correctness within this context), but does it follow that flat-earth theory is morally wrong? Obviously not. With regards to ethics, my opponent writes that stoning, contraception, and homosexuality are condemned in religious doctrine, but gives no evidence as to why this is wrong. As a Catholic Christian, I view homosexuality and contraception as morally wrong, but I have justification – natural law – for my beliefs as to why these are objectively wrong (it’s not my burden of proof, either). Stoning, however, is not a representation of religion as a whole any more than abortion clinic bombers are a representation of the pro-life movement as a whole. Is religion a force for good in the world? I think so, and I’ve provided a source that declares the Catholic Church to be the largest charitable organisation in the nation, with literally billions distributed as a result of its ministry. [1] I’d also like to add that under my opponent’s view stoning, homosexuality, and contraception can’t be right in the moral sense either, because his worldview excludes any kind of objective standard for what is right and wrong: under his view of the world, my view of homosexuality can’t be any more wrong than his.Sources1. “Earthly Concerns.” The Economist. Retrieved 21 October 2012. (http://goo.gl......)