Reason/s & Belief

well-supported by the evidence

at present the best explanation of all the facts

if Christianity were really true, there would be no dispute as to what the Gospel is.

There would only be our free and informed choice to accept or reject it.

We would not face any choice to believe on insufficient and ambiguous evidence, but would know the facts, and face only the choice whether to love and accept the God that does exist.

It's a simple fact of direct observation that if I had the means and the power, and could not be harmed for my efforts, I would immediately alleviate all needless suffering in the universe.

That's what any loving person would do.

A Christian can rightly claim he is unable to predict exactly what things his God would choose to do. But the Christian hypothesis still entails that God would do something.

it is enough to note that we do not observe God doing good deeds, therefore there is no God who can or wants to do good deeds

a loving being by definition acts like a loving being

The only possible exception here is when a loving person is incapable of acting as he desires--either lacking the ability or facing too great a risk to himself or others--but this exception never applies to a God, who is all-powerful and immune to all harm.

Even the most limited and constrained person there is can at least do something that expresses their loving nature.

Failing to act in a loving way would be unbearable for a loving being.

From having the desire and the means to act in a loving way, it follows necessarily that God would so act. But he doesn't.

Christians have no evidence any of these excuses are actually true.

the Christian theory is either empirically false, or self-contradictory and therefore logically false.

it does not matter what plans God may have, he still could not restrain himself from doing good any more than we can, because that is what it means to be good

He would be moved by his goodness to act, to do what's right, just as we are.

anything God would refrain from doing can be no different than what any other good people refrain from.

Christianity quite clearly makes very extraordinary claims: that there is a disembodied, universally present being with magical powers; that this superbeing actually conjured and fabricated the present universe from nothing; that we have souls that survive the death of our bodies (or that our bodies will be rebuilt in the distant future by this invisible superbeing); and that this being possessed the body of Jesus two thousand years ago, who then performed supernatural deeds before miraculously rising from the grave to chat with his friends, and then flew up into outer space.

The same moral rules that are supposed to apply to us must apply to every good person--and that necessarily includes the Christian God.

if it is good for me to alleviate suffering, it is good for God to do so

When we have every means safely at our disposal, we can only tolerate sitting back to let others do good when others are actually doing good.

A man who calls himself a friend but who never speaks plainly to you and is never around when you need him is no friend at all.

first we come up with a hypothesis that explains everything we have so far observed

then we deduce what else would have to be observed, and what could never be observed, if that hypothesis really were true

then we go and look to see if our predictions are fulfilled in practice

every element of a theory has to be in evidence

every element of the theory must be proved with evidence that is independent from the evidence being explained

every required element

independently confirmed

empirical evidence

The underlying premise must still be proven.

We must have evidence

before we can believe any theory that requires this particular claim to be true

I would have to prove them, too.

If I added further premises

I cannot credibly assert these things if I cannot prove them from real and reliable evidence.

an actual theory capable of testing and therefore of warranted belief

the evidence required for that kind of claim is far greater than for any other.

Every time we accept a claim on very little evidence in everyday life, it is usually because we already have a mountain of evidence for one or more of the general propositions that support it.

And every time we are skeptical, it is usually because we lack that same kind of evidence for the general propositions that would support the claim. And to replace that missing evidence is a considerable challenge.

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

God would not make excuses, for nothing could ever thwart his doing what is morally right.

We have never observed any evidence for any "disembodied being" or any person who was present "everywhere."

We have never observed anyone who had magical powers, or any evidence that such powers even exist in principle

We have no good evidence that we have souls or that anyone can or will resurrect our bodies.

I do not mean these things are not logically possible.

What I mean is that we have no evidence they are physically possible, much less real

Even if we could prove a single genuine miracle had ever really happened, we still would not have evidence that God caused that miracle

To confirm God as their cause would require yet more evidence, of which (again) we have none.

since there is no way to tell whether your feeling is correct and theirs is wrong, it is just as likely that theirs is correct and yours is wrong

A theory like "nature just exists" is by itself no less likely than "a god just exists."

a beginning of space-time at a dimensionless point called a singularity is actually physically impossible

we can no longer prove the universe had a beginning

logically, even if the universe had a beginning, this does not entail or even imply that an intelligent being preceded it

If God can exist before the existence of time or space, so could the nature of the universe

the appearance of time and space may have simply been an inevitable outcome of the nature of things

"intelligent design" is not the only logically possible explanation for the organization of the universe, and so we would need empirical evidence for it

needed copious amounts of evidence before justifying a belief

the mere possibility is not enough--we need actual evidence that an intelligent engineer was the cause

we don't have anything to judge his character by

some argue "God gave us life" as evidence he is good, but that presupposes God is our creator, and so is generally a circular argument

a mindless natural process can also give us life, and even an evil or ambivalent God could have sufficient reason to give us life

the harsh kind of life we were given agrees more with those possibilities than with the designs of a good God

presumes

Until each one of those propositions is confirmed by independent evidence, there is no way to use this "theory" as if it were "evidence"

the same deed could have been performed just as readily for different motives

insufficient support to justify believing it

even if it is true, we still don't have enough evidence to know it is true

We can only believe what we have evidence enough to prove.

Would you believe me? Certainly not. You would ask me to prove it.

So I would give you all the evidence I have.

No one trusts documents that come decades after the fact by unknown authors

Every reasonable person expects and requires extensive corroboration by contemporary documents and confirmed eyewitness accounts

we've found some cases of forgery and editing in each of their stories by parties unknown, and we aren't sure we've caught it all

the only way life could arise by accident is if the universe tried countless times and only very rarely succeeded

Lo and behold, we observe that is exactly what happened: the universe has been mixing chemicals for over twelve billion years in over a billion-trillion star systems

The fact that we observe exactly what the theory of accidental origin requires and predicts is evidence that our theory is correct.

until the Christian can prove these additional theories are true, from independent evidence, there is no reason to believe them

The evidence that all present life evolved by a process of natural selection is strong and extensive.

scientific consensus on this is vast and certain

billions of years of meandering change over time

vast time involved

meandering progress of change

needless imperfections in our construction

The possibility is not enough. You have to prove it. That has yet to happen.

Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos