From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 10:35 AM
To: 'Kevin Lo'
Subject: RE: Debate atheism pls

in my beliefs, such mysteries are not
meant to 'deliberately fool us', or 'hide things', but
God gives us these mysteries to find and  discover
truths in our own quests to know Him more. 

So if these prima facie contradictions weren't in your sacred scrolls, you would say "the Bible is really great, but to be perfect it just needs a handful of prima facie contradictions so that we'd have some mysteries to help us in our quests"?

> you've all too quickly retreated to the position that debating the
> evidence is essentially pointless.

i don't consider my current position a retreat.

Does that mean you never intended to debate the evidence in the first place?

You are not open to debate.  scholarly answers that side
with the gospels and the bible are immediately
dismissed by you as irrelevant.

I made an argument that they are irrelevant. You "immediately dismissed" my argument with absurdity about "mysteries" and "quests". You "are not open to debate".

when one has already decided
there is no god, 'debate' about the Christian God is impossible. 

I haven't decided that gods cannot exist. Are you saying that it's possible to debate Christianity only with agnostics and not atheists?

first, one needs to accept that it's more likely
that there is some sort of being than not.

We can debate theism/supernaturalism if you want. But don't pretend that my position on that debate is what decides my position on the Christianity debate.

why do i believe theism over atheism? mostly, from the
design arguments.  you must be familiar with the newer
ID movement that's being proposed.  while some
detractors claim it is rehash of old junk science, ID
is really quite fascinating. i'm interested more in
the discoveries made in microbiology, not the 'perfect
harmony of the cosmos' argument.

That's too bad, because the cosmology-based argument is a stronger one than the biology-based one.

if evolution was the way man came
about, i'd be quite ok with that, except that i
believe that some supernatural being was in control of it.

Aren't you saying that your belief in supernatural design is unfalsifiable?

i don't find random natural selection ->
macroevolution arguments all that convincing.  there
is just so little evidence, and what evidence there
is, seems circular reasoning to me.

The evidence and arguments are in fact so strong that neutral reference texts (and many Christians) consider it a closed matter. That's why I don't debate ID, just as I don't debate the flatness of the Earth.

i think that the theism/atheism debate does center
around origins of man discussions.  this is why most
atheists (in my experience anyway) base their
atheistic views on 'science'.  natural evolution is a
wonderful belief system that allows people to feel
comfortable 'knowing' that there is no god.

It's true that Darwinian science has removed the last compelling god-of-the-gaps argument. But to say that atheism is therefore "based" on science is like saying atheism is "based" on the discovery that the Book of Mormon is fraudulent.
I read through your links about people objecting to
the design argument... well, one of your articles
quotes Antony Flew and an article he wrote.  Flew WAS
a very reknowned atheist.
Before you cite a deconversion to support your side, you should read http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/AtheistDeconversion.html.
are you so certain that there is no god? that there is
no supernatural being that might or might not be
benevolent?
Why do you ask this, when I already gave you a *quantified* answer at http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/GospelProbabilities.html?
it's too bad i've been put on the back burner. i
thought we were about to get started.
If you want to "get started", just take up one of my two challenges:
1) Assign numeric probabilities to each of these explanations (or to a similarly-detailed set).
2) Submit or identify a document that satisfies my cage match challenge.
one other note about christianity too, is that it's
extremely personal.  why do i have faith in the bible,
and Jesus and God?  it's all in how He has affected my
life.  it's really quite amazing.
You probably have no idea how much this undermines in my eyes whatever arguments and evidence you claim to have. Now I have to worry that your arguments and evidence are just rationalizations for a belief-system that you actually value just because of its effect on your personal life.  There are all kinds of mutually contradictory belief-systems that regularly have amazingly positive effects on people's lives. These effects obviously cannot prove that any of these belief-systems are true.