It always is fascinating to me when people will try to refute a theistic claim and then turn around and make a claim based on the very logic they are trying to use to refute the other’s claim. An example of this came up during a recent debate with Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The topic of the debate was “Is there Evidence for God?”
The truth has an interesting characteristic about it. If something is true, you can generally work the idea backward or forward and it just works. Let’s take a simple math problem, for example. If you add together 2 + 3, you get 5. Now, if you work it backwards and start at 5 and subtract 3, you end up back at 2. Most math teachers will tell their students that this is a good way to verify that they have answered a math problem correctly.
There are many arguments for the existence of God. Many of the best philosophers in the marketplace today will use various cosmological arguments, teleological arguments (arguments from design) and moral arguments among others. A common tactic from non-believers is to post some alternative explanation and claim that this eliminates the necessity of belief in God.
It is no secret that rhetoric can be very powerful when used the right way. It can be a very effective tool to persuade people to your point of view without ever offering any sort of argument or evidence to back them up.
It seems to be taking me an obscenely long time to read through Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. One reason for this is the fact that shortly after starting the book, I began to realize how utterly ridiculous Dawkins’ arguments were against theism. They were riddled with double-standards and self-refuting ideas.
There was a podcast that I used to listen to called The Atheist Experience. One of the hosts, Matt Dillahunty, was once a Christian and was planning to go into seminary until he eventually lost his faith because he felt it was not reasonable to be believe any more.
