The Wars: God or not

hawn Herles (7,838 comments) says: 
April 4th, 2015 at 11:44 am

“The supernatural cannot exist because we can only gain knowledge of real things through our senses.

Unless the atheists can evidence that we can only gain knowledge through our senses, they cannot argue in this manner. This argument is based on a belief in absolute materialism, which has not been evidenced.

People believe in God because their parents raised them to do so.

Unless the atheists can evidence that people believe in God because their parent raised them to do so, they cannot make this argument. This argument is also contradictory since there are atheists who raise their children to be atheists.

God cannot exist because religion breeds violence and intolerance.

Unless the atheists can evidence that it is religion that causes violence and intolerance, they cannot use this argument (this is not even to deny that “religion” does so). This argument ignores that violence and intolerance are caused by religion, politics, territory, atheism, material goods/resources, racism, sexism, wealth and poverty, science, atheism, etc., etc. Since there are various reasons for violence and intolerance religion cannot be excluded as the only, nor the main, cause. Whenever anyone gets in power, regardless of what they believe, or claim to believe, they tend to abuse their position. Since atheists have likewise done this, their argument is hypocritical. The Encyclopedia of Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2005) was compiled by nine history professors who specifically conducted research for the text for a decade in order to chronicle 1,763 wars.
The survey of wars covers a time span from 8000 BC to 2003 AD. From over 10,000 years of war 123 wars, which is 6.98 percent, are considered to have been religious wars.

It is arrogant to push one’s beliefs down someone else’s throat.

Unless the atheists can provide an absolute standard by which it is arrogant to push one’s beliefs down someone else’s throat, they cannot make use this argument. They must also offer absolute guidelines by which to determine when a person really is pushing their beliefs down someone else’s throat. This argument is hypocritical because the atheists hold to a belief that it is wrong to push one’s beliefs down someone else’s throat and they push this belief down everyone else’s throats.”

http://www.truefreethinker.com/articles/arguments-atheists-should-not-use

Kimbo (1,994 comments) says: 
April 4th, 2015 at 11:45 am

@ Shawn Herles

A good debunking of many of the standard atheist arguments here:

…I particularly liked this one;

“Atheism is not linked to Communism”

wat dabney argues forcefully in these parts that atheism is a relatively benign and low-key belief, with no inherent ideological baggage or demands such Nazism (actually arguably a form of religious paganism) or Communism. In comparison, if you believe in God/gods, a moral imperative to see his will spread and enforced ensues, and thatinvariably degenerates into violence and intolerance when it encounters opposition.

Maybe.

But it looks awfully like a variation on the “no true Scotsman” fallacy to me. I’m not sure you can have it both ways – arguing that religion does and must inexorably lead to evil…and then argue atheism doesn’t do the same.

Fletch (6,918 comments) says: 
April 4th, 2015 at 11:58 am

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S Lewis ponders the issue of whether truth is true of its own nature, or whether it is only a custom passed down by parents to children.

Other people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?” I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.

There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can recognise the same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this.

When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.

The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said “New York” each meant merely “The town I am imagining in my own head,” how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply “whatever each nation happens to approve,” there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.

I conclude then, that though the differences between people’s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite.

C. S. Lewis (2009-06-14T22:00:00+00:00). Mere Christianity (Kindle Locations 219-248). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.