A response that demands a response

Close on definition. Atheism is either the lack in belief of God or the denial that such a being could exist. The first one does not, and could not take faith, but we will deal with the secnd one because that is what I am.

Strong atheism looks at the universe and points out that it is inconsistant with the idea of the divine. For starters, the universe exists. An all powerful God has no reason to create a universe.

Science is a process. The process has provided answers to many questions people had. I do not have faith in science. I trust that science works because it achieves results in the real world and provides information that fits together in a coherant whole.

Science is designed to be able to explain things. If it is possible to test, observe, examine- if it exists in other words, scientists will be able to examine it.

Just because something can't answer all questions is no reason to ignore it. I can't answer all questions because I don't know everything. The process of science can't answer all questions because some are meaningless, some it doesn't have the tools for yet and some are unknowable (do you see green the same way I do?).

Um... I don't "believe" in self. You are coming to straw manning. I don't believe in mind over matter- I am a strict materialist, naturalist and humanist. I believe in people- the sheer overpowering numbr of people we call humanity.

Actually, if you look at the belief in God, there are no good argument s for it. People continue to believe because they shut out opposing arguments. Hence close minded.

It means you have found another person with the same name. If you insist it is The Warren Buffet, we will point out he doesn't look like him. If he is a body double, he might be able to pull it off... until the police catch him for fraud.

Because being skeptical of atheism is meaningless? Atheism is the ground state- it can only be compared to religion. In and of itself it is as meaningless as not believing in astrology.

This is a comment to an earlier post that I had a few weeks back. I think that this is something that demands a response, otherwise, it won't be fair to the person, who claimed himself to be Samuel Skinner, and it won't be fair to me. To not post this comment would mean that I am implicitly conceding that he's right, which I dun think so. To post this comment but not comment on it would go to mean that I have no response to him.

I am actually quite amazed by the comment at first, thinking that it's a thoughtful comment. Indeed, at least, it's not as emotional as I have anticipated. The comment sounds fair also. It seems that I may not be able to fault it.

To give some dignity to the argument, I shall change the basis of the argument, while retaining the essence, which is the debate about atheism. Because atheism is a religion, I will still insist that it is a religion, that requires empirical and substantial proof to prove/disprove the existence of God, I will have to abide to this demand, and show that the framework for atheism defeats itself, therefore leading to my initial decision to be cynical and skeptical about atheism. Being a historian in training, evidences to argument is very important to me. In fact, argument without evidence is just talk. While I shall not go into Skinner's comment too deeply, I realise that his argument lacks this aspect, which tend to make it incomplete. In any case, I'm going to provide evidence for my case now.

Now, let's start from somewhere I'm more comfortable with: history. History is in essence a study of what happened in the past. Coincidentally, Christianity is a religion (if one may call it a religion) which depends a lot on actual historical events. The birth and resurrection of Christ is historical to the whole bible. The 4 gospels are essentially biographies of Jesus. So naturally, the key foundation stone to establish the validity of Christian claims is to look into what Christians claim to have happened 1900+++++ years ago. To be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Christ walked this earth, and that He died and resurrected will mean a great step in proving the existence of God.

I will ask a few questions that people commonly ask:

1. Can the biographies of Jesus be trusted?
People can see the Gospels as merely religious propaganda, tainted by overactive imaginations and evangelistic zeal. But Craig Bloomberg of Denver Seminary, one of the greatest foremost authorities on the biographies of Jesus argued that the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony and bear the unmistakable earmarks of accuracy. The records of the Gospels have been too early to be explained away as legendary inventions, as discovery of manuscripts showed that the Gospels were written within the lifetime of the people who lived through with Jesus, and would have certainly saw the errors that the Gospels have if they were fabricated lies. These people, of course, include His enemies as well. As Bloomberg said, within the first two years after the death of Jesus, significant numbers of Jesus's followers seem to have formulated a doctrine of the atonement, were convinced that he had been raised from the dead in bodily form, associated Jesus with God and believed that they found support for all these conviction in the Old Testament. A study have shown that there wasn't enough time for legend to be formed, and wiped out a solid core of historical truth.

2. Do the biographies stand up to scrutinies?
Bloomberg argued that the gospel writers intended to preserve reliable history, were able to do so, were honest and willing to include difficult-to-explain material, and didn't allow bias to unduly color their reporting. These facts include the testimonies of women, the distress of Jesus, etc. The harmony among the Gospels on essential facts, coupled with divergence on some incidental details, lends historical credibility to the account. The fact of divergence means that the writers were unable to cahoot together to write identical reports of Jesus's life. What's more, the early church could not have taken root and flourished right there in Jerusalem if it had been teaching facts about Jesus that his own contemporaries could have exposed as exaggerated or false.

3. Were the biographies reliably preserved for us?
More reliably than any other manuscripts. There are about 5686 manuscripts of the NT added together and that includes the 4 gospels. Compare it to ancient documents like Homer (643), Demosthenes (200), Herodotus (8), Plato (7), Tacitus (20), Casear (10) and Pliny (7). The reconstruction from these manuscripts had allowed the NT to be accurate 98.33 percent from the original ones. The 200000 errors in the manuscripts can be either classified as variant readings or grammatical errors and also a variant spelling of one letter of one word in one verse in 2000 manuscripts, for example, is counted as 2000 errors. Furthermore, the reconstruction has not affected any major Christian doctrines, only 50 are of real significance but even so, not even one affected an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching.Compared this with Mahabharata of Hinduism, which is copied with only about 90 percent accuracy and Homer's Iliad was about 95 percent accurate. There is a lot to be explained here, boy.

4. Since Jesus's biographies have been reliably preserved for us, then how can we know if He's really resurrected?
To answer this question, we can attempt to draw our conclusion based on 5 minimal facts which majority of the scholars, liberal or conservatives, have to agree upon.

Fact #1: Jesus was definitely killed by the crucification.
By analysing the medical and historical data, Dr. Alexander Metherell concluded that Jesus could not have survived the gruesome rigors of crucifixion, much less the gapping wound that pierced His lung and heart. The idea that he somehow swooned on the cross and pretended to be dead lacks any evidential basis. Roman executioners were grimly efficient, knowing that they themselves would face death if any of their victims were to come down from the cross alive. Even if Jesus had somehow lived through the torture, his ghastly condition could never have inspired a worldwide movement based on the premise that he had gloriously triumphed over the grave. This can be proved by Josephus's account when he mentioned three friends who were crucified during the fall of Jerusalem. Although the 3 were removed from the cross before they died and given the best medical care, 2 died. According to scholar Licona, to deny that Jesus had died on the cross would be a great laugh in the academic world (Case for real Jesus).

Fact #2: Jesus' disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them.
There are three strands of evidence for this: Paul's testimony about the disciple, oral traditions that passed through the early church and the written works of the early church. To cut the long story short, as a very liberal scholar by the name of Paula Fredriksen had put it: 'I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That's what they say and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attests to their conviction that that's what they saw. I'm not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn't there. I don't know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian, they must have seen something.'

Fact #3: The conversion of the church persecutor Paul.
Whoever knows Paul would know that Paul had once been an avid persecutor of the church. Coming from a background many of us would drool after, and having the intellect and the future as one of most respected religious leaders of his time, Paul, from a church persecutor became one of the most powerful evangelists that ever lived, writting the bulk of the epistles in the NT. Well, the fact that he was willing to be persecuted for his faith in Jesus, and be martyred for it shows something and demand an explanation. The most logical explanation, according to Paul himself, is that he saw the raised Jesus.

Fact #4: The conversion of skeptic brother, James.
Again, read the gospels and know that Jesus was previously rejected by his own family members, including James. But in 1 Corinthian 15, it was mentioned that Jesus appeared to James. We know that James after that became the leader of the Jerusalem Church, from the book of Acts and Galatians. Both Christian and non-Christian sources have also attested that he diedas a martyr, convinced that his half brother is the Messiah.

Fact #5: Jesus' tomb was empty.
In Case for Christ, William Lane Craig presented striking evidence that the enduring symbol of Easter was a historical reality. The empty grave is reported or implied in extremely early sources - namely in the gospel of Mark and 1 Corinthian 15 creed, which date so close to the event that they could not possibly have been products of legend. The fact that the gospels report that women discovered the empty tomb bolsters the story's authenticity. Moreover, the site of the tomb was known to both Christian and Jew and Romans alike, so it could have been checked by skeptics. In fact , nobody had ever claimed that the tomb still contain His body. Instead, absurd stories have to be invented to explain away the empty tomb. The thing is this, if Jesus' tomb is not empty,the body could have been produced and all the hype about the raised Jesus would have died down as soon as it begins.

All these led to only one logical conclusion. That is Jesus really resurrected. There are a hundred more facts that can be listed here but 5 would suffice. The fact that Jesus resurrected had made it clear that He is indeed who He claims to be: Son of God, forgiver of sin, source of the living water etc. And indeed, this led to one conclusion: God exists.

This is my conclusion to Samuel Skinner. There are a thousand and one good explanations to the existence of God. You only need to find it.... but have you try hard enough? I pray that you will find it one day.