Monday, March 9, 2009

Let me summarize...

Vincent,
First let me applaud your conciseness. Now I will pare down your words until they are comically straw-like so I may blow them away...

Ahem.

Logic of paragraph 1:
Arguing about something makes it almost certainly untrue.

Logic of paragraph 2&3:
People disagree about what is Christianity; they can't all be right; probably none of them are right.

pp4:
I am either too smart or too dumb for religion.

pp5:
I do actually believe in the concept of Justice (of some kind) as evidenced here. Otherwise I would have no interest in having Charles perform an off-topic exercise, behind which is no meaning to us, as neither of us has ever seriously argued that we believe in those religions or wish to do so. A better exercise would have been to have Charles attempt to argue from my position.

pp6:
I am so dull or stubborn (or both?) that my best argument for Christianity can be applied to any religion and can have no particular evidence or falsifiability.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Vincent, Imagine that we were arguing about the existence of 'dark matter'. Imagine that you didn't think that it was there and I did. (I'm not actually convinced... but that is beside the point) What arguments would you give for its existence? You would probably go the ol' 'Kepler's Law' route. Kepler's Law works for planets, why not for Galaxies? Now that is a good question! One can now argue that it must work for Galaxies, and one can argue that it need not. (or that it need not be the whole picture) But the two can have an argument because they are talking about the same thing and they have found the point of divergence. In my hypothesis, I presumed you to be a reasonable person capable of this kind of discussion. I assumed that you know the Bible pretty well from years of instruction. That you've had experience with the Church. I know that if all of these things are true, that it is a sad state of affairs if the best you can say is " the best argument for Christianity is if God magically zaps you with the knowledge of its truthfulness" That might be the way that some unsophisticated person ends the argument of Christianity, but that statement itself is no argument. At this point bringing up other religions or doctrinal squabbles within Christianity are red herrings. I am asking you, JVT, what you think the best argument for Christianity might be.

No comments: