JG: You need to stick to programming and bow out of theological debates. Even my close atheist friends would laugh at this website. This is a disgrace to your cause. You only give skeptics a bad rep.
BH: For you to blurt out such ridiculous hyperbole suggests that my writings have seriously shaken the foundations of your worldview. If you really know any atheists who would laugh at my body of writings, I invite you to have them send me feedback.
JG: You shake the foundations of nothing in my life Mr.. Holtz. I have not addressed 95% of your arguments because of time. I am the CTO of a company and am stretched thin. I did not mean to sound offensive in my arguments
What "arguments"? Your earlier outburst was not an "argument" at all, but some kind of desperate (and psychologically revealing) attempt to insult me. Don't worry, you have the power to only amuse, not offend. (And I'm still waiting to hear from your "close atheist friends" who would laugh at my website.)
JG: I am guessing you are an atheist
Your powers of inference are astonishing. :-)
JG: Since you are a programmer this should make sense to you. Lets say that you created Pearl from the ground up
It's called Perl. What company are you CTO of, and how can I short your stock? :-)
1) You would have to be able to operate in and outside of all rules
Unlike Yahweh and Jesus, the actions of whom are so obviously constrained by human imagination characteristic of the Mediterranean Iron Age.
2) You would have to be able to make changes on the fly without changing "core essential code"
If this is some kind of excuse for the many instances of incompetence that your sacred texts document about your deity, then you're going to have to lay it on thick, because there are a lot of them.
3) You would have to be all knowing
And yet Jesus managed to be mistaken about his imminent return. As for Yahweh, the Torah speaks of him repeatedly as not omniscient, beginning with Gen 3:9.
4) You would have to be able to prove your authenticity
Your deity has manifestly failed to prove his authenticity, and indeed perceptive Christians have retreated to the argument that the evidence is intentionally disputable so as not to coerce our belief in Yahweh. I guess you haven't gotten the word yet. :-)
5) You would need a unique language to communicate with
Would that be Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek? Or how about "Pearl"? :-) The obviously universal language is that of science and mathematics, but Yahweh and Jesus flunked those subjects.
JG: Denial CH 9 880 days until Jesus arrives
The alleged prophecy in Daniel is of course not taken seriously by non-Christian scholars. As Lippard concludes:
L: The Daniel prophecy is not nearly so convincing as it might initially appear to someone presented only with one of the interpretations that "works." It is not surprising that with four choices for beginning points (the decrees of Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes, plus the letters of Artaxerxes for Nehemiah), several possible choices for end points (the birth, ministry, and crucifixion of Jesus), and at least three ways of counting (ordinary years, "prophetic years," and sabbatical cycles) calculations have been found for which Jesus fits the prophecy. There are good reasons to reject each of these interpretations. [..]
You continue:
JG: Genesis 1-1 says the universe is expanding which was has only recently been confirmed by the cosmologists
Genesis says nothing about spacetime expanding. It's laughable to suggest that the myths in Genesis have received cosmological, biological, archaeological, or historical confirmation. On the contrary, the Bible has been in headlong retreat from science for centuries now.
Job 26- 7 At this time the modern world thought that Atlas suspended the earth or an elephant or a turtle depending on what polytheistic idol you chose to follow, but Job somehow knew the earth was suspended on nothing.
Job 26:7 is wrong: the Earth is not "suspended" by God or anything else; it's in freefall around the Sun. The Earth is not "over nothing"; the local gravitational field points down toward the Sun.
Isaiah 40 - 22 He knew the earth was round not circle and flat as the world thought.
The reference to "the circle of the Earth" is not a statement that the Earth is spherical. See http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1990/1/1flat90.html
Job 36 -27 -28 Job defines the hydrological cycle, jet stream. This was discovered by a British guy only 250 years ago.
Job 36:27-28 is wrong: water doesn't evaporate in "drops", and evaporation is hardly "beyond our understanding" -- it's a mechanical process that requires no supernatural intervention.
You've made a copy-paste error from whatever source you're uncritically parroting -- the "jet stream" reference is supposed to be Ecclesiastes 1:6,7. But Eccl 1 is incompetent science too: there's no distinguished place of sunrise that the sun has to "hurry back to"; streams don't return to their place of origin; and no mention is made here of high-altitude jetstream-style winds at all.
Timothy 3-16 He somehow know that space and time where bound and the universe was finite. These things have only been recently discovered.
1 Tim 3:16 and 2 Tim 3:16 aren't about cosmological topology, so you've got this reference wrong too.
JG: You see Brian as skeptical as you are there is a flip side to all of those coins with just as much overwhelming proof of the Bibles divinity.
Nope. If there were "overwhelming proof", then your position would win in the scientific marketplace of ideas. But your position loses -- every time.
If you want "overwhelming proof" about how unscientific the Bible is, start at http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/outline.html.
JG: I urge you to objectively look at both the pros and the cons and then make your decision as to biblical authenticity. It is to important of an issue to go into it only looking for discrepancies. Like a Judge you must take a look at both sides of an argument to make an objective conclusion.
That's what I do, and that's why I've sought out and cataloged the best arguments for Christianity and theism that I can find: http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/ChristianityIndex.html. That's also why we at infidels.org link to any rebuttals of our material. Can you identify any Christian apologetics sites that are confident enough to do the same?
JG: I assure you that all your questionable passages you bring up can and have been addressed.
You're in no position to give such an assurance. I've been at this for quite a while, I'm familiar with the available apologetic responses, and I've shown it's easy to rebut them. For an overview of the debates I've had with Christian apologists, see http://holtz.org/Writings.html#AtheistPolemics.
JG: This is why I say they are regurgitated and unoriginal.
As I said: "Where did you see me claim my arguments are original? They are indeed almost entirely non-original, because the evidentiary problems with Christianity have been obvious for centuries."
However, in my document I make a few points that, as far as I can tell from my review of the skeptical and apologetic literature, appear to be original. If your assurance above were valid, you'd be able to spot them. But I bet you can't.
JG: Brian you said "Even Jews whom persecuted Jesus admitted to him being a profit and having preformed the works of God. Several of them witnessed him performing miracles as well as Jesus' disciples."
Those are your words, not mine. This doesn't speak well of your reading comprehension.
JG: If you where alive when Jesus walked and you saw him claim to be the son of man, you would make one of two decisions. Either Jesus is the son of man or he is flat out CRAZY!
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Jesus was neither liar, lunatic, nor lord, but rather a probable schizophrenic with increasing delusions of grandeur over the course of his brief ministry. See "Delusional Schizophrenic?" in http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Christianity.html.
JG: Do you know any other messianic candidate who rode into Jerusalem ON A DONKEY, ON THE EXACT DAY as predicted by Isaiah and Daniel 500 years ago?
(Wow, you really are new to apologetics if you think this argument is worth all-caps treatment.) If there were any significance to riding a donkey, Jesus would have known it and could trivially have arranged it. And if there were an actual prophecy of the date, then the residents of Jerusalem would have known it, and the gospels would have reported them knowing about it. But they don't, because this "prophecy" is a post-hoc case of fitting the prophecy to the data (as my link above shows).
JG: Brian I don't mean to insult you
Perhaps you need to re-read the sentences from you quoted at the very beginning of this email.
JG: Paul says in Romans ch 1 the existence of God and his attributes can be observed in all creation. I believe he is talking about our own self replicating, redundant, error correcting code that is DNA.
Move over Watson and Crick, here comes Saul of Tarsus.
JG: Ask any information scientist where a code like that comes from. Chance? Natural selection? Or from an intelligent thought? They will all have the same answer.
"Any" information scientist? Your claim here is demonstrably false.
JG: If you want a good pro creation argument to balance your research check out "In the Beginning There Was Information" by Chuck Missler and Dr. Stephen Meyer.
Is their argument online anywhere? For a rebuttal of information-theoretic defenses of creationism, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/
JG: I will address all of the technicalities you listed above later this week.
Don't hurry on my account. I'd rather spend my time rebutting the material of first-rate apologists, and you probably don't want to be in my crosshairs. :-)
JG: I wouldn't waste time posting my email if I where you. I am not worthy of that. My knowledge, like yours, is good but certainly not as extensive as others
OK, I won't list yours as a serious attempt to take up my challenge. However, I routinely post all my polemical correspondence, so this will eventually show up at http://humanknowledge.net/Correspondence/.
JG:. Instead lets keep this conversation going. I think it is good for both of us. Do you agree?
It's not the best use of my time, but I stand by my policy of answering all such correspondence. If you want to maintain your faith, this correspondence may not be a good use of your time either. Continue at your own risk. :-)