Agnosticism can not support its claims with facts and evidence

Rebuttal to Agnosticism Further Defined My opponent accuses me of “re-defining” the definition of Agnosticism. However, I gave the correct definition off of the Oxford dictionary. In fact my opponent affirms his position that the Oxford dictionary defined as he says right here “As a philosophical position, agnosticism maintains that God or gods are unknown, meaning that agnostics do not know whether or not they exist.” However, my opponent errs in 2 ways. 1. He assumes that he does not share the Burden of Proof. 2. He assumes that one can hold Agnosticism along with Atheism and Theism. My opponent must shoulder the burden of proof as to why he believes “he doesn’t know” or as to why “we can’t know”. Second, you cannot hold to Agnosticsm/Theism or Atheism/Theism at the same time. Theism is not the ‘default’ position. Also Theism is the belief that God does exist. Either you hold to the position that God does exist(Theism). God does not exist(Atheism). Or we don’t know if God does or does not exist(Agnosticism). You can’t affirm two opposite positions at the same time. Rebuttal to The Plausibility of Agnosticism My opponent mentions Bertrand Russell inventing the LONC. Bertrand Russell was an atheist, and the LONC destroyed his own belief because Atheism is self-defeating as well as Agnosticism. My opponent accuses me of committing a straw-man here, by using the LONC to show how Agnosticism is self-defeating. However, as I clearly showed before, Agnosticism says that we can’t know if God does/does not exist. It doesn’t matter if my opponent affirms a strong or weak position. What matters if the justification for that position. His position is a conclusion based upon “X” amount of evidence. If he believes that his conclusion: “I don’t know”, then he needs to give positive arguments for why he doesn’t know. Rebuttal to Agnosticism: The Perfect Reference Point Con just assumes that Agnosticism is superior to Christian Theism. However, Con does not give any arguments for his position of Agnosticism. He again just simply argues against my position and makes baseless assumptions that have no facts to back them up. Rebuttal to Science Supports Agnosticism, Not Faith My opponent argues that we can’t know if God exists because we can’t test God through empirical evidence. My opponent also says that we can’t use the direct Scientific method for determining the Resurrection of Jesus. However, there are other things that the Inductive Scientific method can’t prove like: History, Forensics, Mathematical Proofs and Philosophy. In Forensics for example, a Forensic Pathologist wouldn’t go to a crime scene and say “Oh let’s run this experiment again to see who murdered the victim.” Such thinking would be absurd. The question “Does God exist?” is not a scientific, but a philosophical question. When we evaluate the 4 facts: The Burial, the Post-mortem Appearances, The Burial of Jesus, and The Origin of belief in the disciples, we would deduce the 4 facts and come to the most logical inference or conclusion, which is that Jesus must have risen bodily from the dead. Also my opponent uses the old pagan parallel myths to Jesus. However, these have been refuted by scholars and historians 100 years ago in the 19th century because there was no connection.[6][2]http://www.youtube.com...; My opponent also accuses me of saying the Bible is a Science book. However, I made no such claim in my opening argument although I will go ahead and address Con’s argument. Genesis 7:12 states that “the floodgates of the heavens” opened, and rain fell for 40 days and 40 nights. In other words, hard rain fell in the region continuously for 40 days. Meteorologically, these factors constitute an unprecedented rain event in a region that averages only 10-20 inches of rainfall per year. No natural explanation exists for a storm so large, intense, or persistent in this region. This would obviously prove that God provided the elephants and animals with enough water and food for 300 days. Remember Elephants also store water in their trunks and bodies, so it wouldn’t disprove the flood even happened. The Hebrews were just as able (and by extension of the same scheme used with grasshoppers, katydids, etc) to regard the back legs of other types of flying insects as being of a different order, of being something different, so that only the first four were called plain old "feet" as only the first four on the hoppers, etc. were called feet, while the others were given a differing name such as "legs above their feet". So there is no conflict in that passage between what we have in science. My opponent needs to read these things in context first. Also, the fact there are other flood accounts would prove that the Biblical story actually happened because the Biblical flood can be verified since we have the exact dimensions of the boat that would support a flood. Other flood accounts fall short and are not verifiable.[1][4][5] Rebuttal to Meaning and Life My opponent doesn’t really give any objective reasons as to why human beings exist on an Agnostic Worldview. He simply just gives a subjective illustration of believers and non-believers having fun on a beach. I agree that it would be fun to hang out on a beach, but that doesn’t explain our existence on this planet “objectively”. Rebuttal to Agnosticism and Morality: My Opponent seems to have a huge misunderstanding of the Divine Command Theory. The DCT, s essentially teaches that a thing (i.e., action, behavior, choice, etc.) is good because God commands it to be done or evil because God forbids it from being done. However, the purpose of the DCT is to show that there must be an objective moral-law giver in order for objective moral values and duties to exist. The DCT does not argue for a particular Religion or God. WLC is not the founder of the DCT. WLC just argues a form of the DCT. There are many reputable philosophers like Ravi Zacharias, Alvin Plantinga, Saint Augustine, Robert Merrihew Adams,etc. Whenever you raise the problem of evil, you must include God in the paradigm because if you assume there’s such a thing as evil, you must assume there’s such a thing as good. If you assume Good and evil, then there must be a moral law or standard by which to differentiate between Good and evil. If there is a moral law, then there must be a moral law giver(God) who gives human beings that moral law. What I did was take the DCT one-step further and applied it to the Judeo-Christian God because the Judeo-Christian God is the one true God. My opponent hasn’t really offered any arguments for the foundation of objective moral values and duties on his own worldview of Agnosticism. He just simply argued against mine. My opponent also accused God in the bible of atrocities; however, he never cites passages to support his point. Morality on an agnostic and atheist worldview would be “Arbitrary”. The atheist philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, confirms this point: "The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation, no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when someone says, "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory."[3] J.L. Mackie, one of the most outspoken atheists of this century agrees, "Moral properties are most unlikely to have arisen without an all-powerful god to create them.”[3] Sources: [3] http://www.michaelhorner.com...... [2] http://www.youtube.com... [1] http://www.reasons.org... [4] http://scienceblogs.com... [5] http://www.tektonics.org... [6] http://www.youtube.com... Conclusion: My opponent hasn’t really given any positive arguments for Agnosticism. All we have seen are arguments against my position of Christian Theism. I have provided objective facts and evidences to support my claims. I gave historical and philosophical evidence. Con has not given any facts or evidences to support his position of Agnosticism, which he was supposed to in this debate. I therefore conclude that Christian Theism is sound because it has a point of Reference to Morality, Logic, History, Prophecy, Science, and Reality.