Ahtiests are without excuse.

I attack only UNFAIR or Ill-framed questions and arguments from a Logical view-point because most questions asked here come with an implication. An implication is open for debate or a logical test.

I eat blue frog legs, why can’t you eat them too?
How can one answer such a question, the flaw must be pointed out to the questioner before debate can begin.

Other questions come as presuppositions, again they are loaded to promote an opinion or conclusion of the person asking. Example:

Why are frogs blue?

Those are the only types of question or arguments I raise issue with. The Questions you just asked above is the result of peeling away the wrong or unfair parts of a question and ending up with a dialog that may get somewhere. You still have not given us the proper foundation for you not believing it but at least you have created a fair question.

Your first question is where is the evidence of the Resurrection? Eye witness accounts verified by various people and recorded in the Holy Bible. Many other supporting evidence may be offered such as prophecy of the event, the spiritual culmination of the ritual of sacrifice among others.
Now, here is a problem with any evidence you examine on this or any subject.

First of all, evidence is relative to the observer or jury and you may demand more of it, or a certain kind of it, than the next person. Evidence then becomes your out if you choose not to look fairly at the evidence.

Most people have a very hard time looking at historical evidence such as the Bible, they conclude that because it may have a few errors in minor places that the whole book must be wrong or that there isn’t enough evidence, or evidence to the contrary exist and conclude against accepting the first evidence.

There is hard evidence and there is a soft type of evidence called circumstantial evidence. Sometimes hard evidence is what juries see that cause them to put a person in jail, others are convicted on circumstantial evidence.

Unfortunately, as I have stated, evidence is a relative term. Hard evidence also let OJ Simpson walk a free man. A good lawyer can bring sufficient cause for a jury to disregard any type of evidence. A video can be faked, a person found with a smoking gun in their hands could have been framed.

Therefore, if you want evidence to convince you of the resurrection, you will find none you can believe in 100%. You will need a culmination of many things in your life to come to the conclusion that the resurrection happened. One of the things you will need is faith in the evidence. If the Simpson jury had faith in the prosecutions side, they would have won, but they lacked it due to a small error of one man.

Will you let some small errors in the Bible or in the evidence let the master criminal go free in your life? To let him convince you that everything is wrong in the Bible?

I have attempted to answer your question by showing you it may not be the right thing by itself to be judging and looking for in making a decision on the resurrection. Since you didn't tell me why you disbelieve it, I am at a loss as to focus on the real reason for your disbelief. This is why it is important for you to ask the proper question in a proper format. Otherwise we will never focus on the "real" issue.

 

If I have your question right, you are saying that you don’t believe that a person can believe in something unless they have evidence that it is true.

I accept your challenge: I and most other people have known others who in the course of a relationship were told without equivocation, that the relationship was over and that they did not love that person any longer, in fact, some had already developed another relationship, etc. YET, the jilted person still believed that the other still loved them.
So one can believe in something when there is material evidence to disprove it. Additionally, one can believe in something when there is no evidence to prove it in the least.

I don't think that is really the point you were trying to make but that is what you said. Here is what I think you were getting at and correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption.

While your attempt to show why you would not believe in X, unless you could reduce it down to a mathematical fact was a valiant try; you started with a wrong assumption. In this case, a presupposition that all valid belief must based on material evidence. A false proposition. Let me clear it up for you.

A person may only have a small amount or no amount of hard (material) evidence but does have some or a lot of circumstantial evidence to make them believe. That is all they need to have sufficient evidence to establish faith in the Bible, Jesus as well as any other belief.

Let's use you in the next example:

What material evidence do you have that would make you believe that your Great-Great-Grandmother would have loved you if she were alive when you were born? Material Evidence only, otherwise your claim is that you can’t believe that it is even a possibility that she would love you.

[ March 12, 2002, 03:44 AM: Message edited by: post-it ]

 

Before I address the rest of your post, I found this statement quite fascinating. Let me ask you a question first.

If he existed, could there be a valid point in believing in Him? And if so what?

 

You're suggesting that God is not omnipotent, after all? Think about it.

God takes Adam through the Garden, to check it out:

"O.K. Adam, it's all yours to take care of, and enjoy. You can have anything you want, except for the fruit from that tree over there. No, not that one, that one. Yeah, that one over there. Don't you dare eat from that one."

You want us to believe that God didn't know what was going to happen next?

 

Before I address the rest of your post, I found this statement quite fascinating. Let me ask you a question first.

If he existed, could there be a valid point in believing in Him? And if so what?</font>[/QUOTE]Well, the valid point in believing in him is so as not to go to Hell (or so as to go to Heaven, depending on how you look at it).

I thought that was pretty obvious.

And don't bother with Pascal's wager here, please </font>[/QUOTE]Pascal’s Wager? You must have me confused with my old Sunday School teacher. I won’t let you off that easy here! You will have to be on your toes with me - so don’t get lazy and answer in the flippant ways you have already started, it will force you into Equivocation or a Red Herring and I will call you on that too. You have taken the space of one whole day to respond with the answer to my question and yet seems to be lacking. I must now take your answer as your complete proposition to my question since you have left me with no choice, either on purpose, or by design. I will assume, it was because you know not to swim too far from shore…just in case you might be wrong and need a fast way to spin out of the argument you are about to lose.

Thanks for giving me your definition of the point of God’s existence in relation to man’s belief in him. I also will assume (with your permission), that hell for our discussion is simply the death of the body and soul (assuming there is one). In other words, the purpose of hell is the complete annihilation of every trace of a person – it is not the torture chamber of fire. In essence, it is very close to just dying the way you already plan on dying. Your awarness as a person vanishes forever.

You have proposed that - if there is a God, man’s belief in him has no value other than being given a free ticket to heaven, and eternal life. You infer that if God exists - not believing in him, means death by annihilation.

I assume that since you don’t believe in God, you don’t believe in an after-life. You have no problem accepting that you will have no after-life since you have no control over it.

You now come here and state that, since you have seen no valid evidence for God, there is no point in believing in him. Yet you have no point for believing in him even if I were to produce evidence to prove his existence since you already accept your own annihilation at death. There is no just reason for you to believe in God or any kind of after-life in heaven. You might have already told yourself you had rather not exist than to have to live in heaven singing Gods prases for eternity.

Your mind has now made a shift to the attitude that you don’t want there to be a God. And if there were it wouldn’t really matter anyway. You have no point in needing a God or an after-life. You won’t believe any evidence I or anyone else could ever show you. You gave yourself away in your original post when you said, “If you have evidence, then I would be happy to examine it.” Instead of saying, “If you have material evidence of his existence, then I will believe in God.”

Under your current thought process, if I could bring God himself, before you - you wouldn’t believe the evidence and could find logical reasons for not believing that he was God. You are incapable at this time of believing in God with the current evidence that you have been presented with in the past from others.

However, since you haven’t proven that God cannot be proven, and just because I nor anyone else can’t prove God does exist to your standard of required evidence. God could still exist and we could have the truth of his life on earth recorded in the Bible.

And you could be wrong in your lack of belief in God unless you have carefully eliminated each and every evidence for God's existance. The evidence has be presented quite well in many places, documents, lives, and books. To require perfect evidence can be illogical too, and usually is.

 

Your question only makes sense as the antithesis of David's, if God exists and I know he does.

If God existed, and I knew he did, then of course I'd believe in Him. I mean - I wouldn't have to "believe" in Him [as a matter of faith], I'd simply have to recognise His existence. The real question is - what do I do about it? Given the punishment, I agree with David - follow Him / worship Him of course.

As David said - are we going for Pascal's Wager here?</font>[/QUOTE]My question was a valid question in that God could exist and one may not know he exists, but one could believe that he exists with minor evidence.

My question stemmed from that statement. I was not seeking a play on words to corner anyone as many skeptics try to pull. That is not a true persuasive debate.

 

It would have been a straw man if you hadn't given me the basis of the argument. Since you did answer my question with a single proposition and nothing else, I used that as the basis of the argument, therefore it is not a Straw man.

However, your accusation that it was a straw man argument was in fact a Red Herring on your part, as you should have known that is was not a straw man. Therefore, you diverted my argument without just cause either purposefully or out of ignorance of what a straw man is defined as.

Here is a summary of what our argument has accomplished so far.
1. You asked for evidence
2. You have obviously seen evidence before and rejected it.
3. You continue to ask for evidence (for what purpose? I don't know)
4. You have admitted (implied) that you have no problems with your own final death. You don't need any spiritual help in this life, nor do you think God could offer you any if he did exist (as you only see him as a gatekeeper to heaven). You don't need or want for God to exist and that becomes a core psychological reason to reject any evidence that does.
5. The main argument I made was that you have already chosen to reject a God that may exist, despite the evidence you have seen. And you have that right and choice. What you can't do is say that my evidence or other people’s evidence is insufficient for our belief.

In conclusion, I would like to use an analogy.

You are like a man standing on a highway yet never having seen a Paving Machine. I tell you that the highway was built by this Machine; therefore it must have at least existed. But since you have no proof of it existing now, you will deny it ever existed. I cannot offer you any type of evidence other that the fact that (asphalt) gravel and tar have been placed together and paved in a nice long line. (The foot prints of God is our evidence) You reject my argument and claim that because asphalt and tar exist, it does not prove a creator exists.

There is no hard evidence I can draw from rock and tar to convince you of the complex machine it took to create the road.

[ March 13, 2002, 02:51 PM: Message edited by: post-it ]

 

Actually tulpje, we have much more evidence than just the Bible. The problems with evidence and atheists are that logic can rip-apart any evidence if used unfairly and that is what the skeptic does. That is why OJ went free. The truth had nothing to do with the argument and logic used in the court case, which allowed a jury to find him innocent. It can equally be used to defend our belief and against their unproven attacks on the existence of God.

 

That has been the major part of my argument. I'm sorry you skipped over it. I now understand why you have trouble understanding my response

So you agree with some of my argument so far on why you don't feel you need to live forever, yet you are saying now that you would like to live forever and would like the fact that there be a God, and would like that we could know about that God on earth by some religious method on earth. Do I have that right? I'm not building a straw man; I am trying to get you to provide some propositions with which I can continue a worthwhile argument.

I now understand why you are an atheist. If one bases his or her entire belief in God just on that one proposition, I think everyone would be an atheist. There is a multitude of additional evidence that you missed. Although, I don't really think you missed it as much as forgot it, blocked it, and rationalized it all away. Like most ex-Christians have done. I don't hold that against you, it is the nature of man to do so when changing belief systems. Its something God put inside everyone, something evolution could not, since evolution doesn't address the human belief concept.

I don't get annoyed with people posting their expressions, in fact I ask that you post more than you did. I haven't even started producing evidence yet, nor will I until I can get you in a frame of mind to fairly look at the evidence I produce. I will not waste my time showing evidence to a person that doesn't need to see evidence, a mind can be made up and no amount of evidence can change it. Surely on that we can agree.

I gave you the opportunity to answer a direct question. In your very brief answer you gave me the bases to conclude certain other implications. Since you did not address those implications until after I made the argument, it was not a straw man fallacy. If you are having problems understanding what a straw man fallacy is, I will allow you that option as it seems to have made you a bit hostile, and it is not important to our debate.

] If you decide you cannot reasonably defend your position, I will allow an even draw to occur between us. Just let me know. But I must point out your illogical behavior when I see it. I told you I would before we got into this debate. You now seem to want the ability to point out my error but I can't do the same without a threat from you. You may want to learn a little more atheist propaganda and their ways of arguing before continuing with me here. Nothing I have said should have angered you.