In a discussion about the fact that Science has discovered many things not known to the writers of the Bible, one believer stated that I made:

“a fundamentally illogical error, which impugns your premise. Do explain how a backwoods sheep herder could identify the only visible gravitionally-linked constellations 3500 years before the advent of the telescope, or how said backwoods sheep herder could identify microscopic biological processes dangerous to be consumed 3500 years before the advent of the microscope. Evolutionary science dictates that such a concept, such a possibility is linearly, physically impossible.

In other words we don’t need science because god already explains all things in the bible. Indeed, ancient observers, looked at the sky and linked the constellations and gave them many animal names.  These points of light however, although they look to be side by side, are not in the same plane and many are not gravitationally linked.  These “heavenly” observations became the “science” of astrology and did not lead to an understanding of gravity. Hygienic laws were also developed by trial and error. Through observation and experience people learned, the hard way what was poison or unhealthy and found out which herbs had a positive effect and so on. Fermenting and preserving food were experimentally established. Pork spoils quicker than goat, marrying a virgin prevented the scourge of venereal disease.

This was actually the beginning of the scientific method, learning through trial and error. When the writers of the bible wrote these rules in the bible (other ancient books have such information as well, see the ancient Chinese Medicine Books) they wrote down actual knowledge already obtained by applied science and not because god whispered in their ears.

The last sentence in this rant is total nonsense: “linearly, physically impossible”? “Dictated by evolutionary science?”. We weren’t even discussing evolution so why throw that in.

The above  post, by a believer, shows that they go to any length, by using pseudo scientific words to  give their arguments a “scientific” patina to impress gullible people.

Where do we find some information about religions before they were recorded in writing. There are many religions in North America that were not written down until the Europeans arrived and started documenting what they found.

The natives in America migrated across the Bering Straight approximately 16500-13000 years ago (Settlement of the Americas, Wikipedia). They brought the religious practices from Asia with them. By looking at these religions, only recently documented, we realize that because of these practices were passed on orally by shamans, they not only changed nearly every generation but also changed from tribe to tribe. Until religious rituals and practices were written down they vary greatly but some ideas do echo faintly throughout the religions of the world and some similarities can be recognized.

Many Native myths have versions of the origin of the moon, the sun and the stars indicating that just like the other religions, including the ones described in the Bible, astrology (ancient astronomy) played an important role in all ancient religions. Moon and the Sun were thought to be persons (Religion of Aboriginal People, Wikipedia).  It’s apparent that these religions had a common basis that goes far back in time and probably as far as the beginning of human kind. Myths and folktales, developed over time, differ greatly but they all have ethical (moral) dimensions. They also have a common belief in some life after death, the concept of soul (spirit) and the existence of supernatural powers. Many groups tell of a world flood, probably reflecting a disaster that happened in a very early time before dispersion throughout the world.

By studying the native religions we can envision how older myths influenced the ancient writers when they started recording them. So it is very likely that ancient historic- and religious books, reflect much older stories passed on by oral traditions. Oral traditions could adapt them selves to changing circumstances and discoveries. Since the event of recording these myths, often including the morals, rules of behavior making it possible to live together in the tribe, greatly eliminated personal conflicts, in writing, they are written in stone and much harder to adapt to new knowledge and circumstances.

Empirical Evidence is the result of observation or/and experimentation. Science demands empirical evidence before a hypothesis is accepted.  Thomas Kuhn, a 20th century philosopher has argued that empirical evidence can be influenced by prior beliefs and experiences. It is in every ones nature to do that to some extend.

I can agree with that. Two scientists doing the same experiments might not come to the the same conclusions, that’s why in science experiments have to be repeatable and many other scientists involved. Eventually there will be a consensus by most scientists but there always be a few who will cling to their own interpretations because of prior beliefs.

Then there is Rational Evidence. In this view only reason and /or reflection can be used as evidence for  proving  a proposition to be correct or not.

We have  six senses and these are used as the source of empirical evidence. Rational evidence, however, does not demand observational or experimental experiences.

“Rationalists believe reality has an intrinsically logical structure. Because of this, rationalists argue that certain truths exist and that the intellect can directly grasp these truths.” and “Rationalists have such a high confidence in reason that proof and physical evidence are unnecessary to ascertain truth”

One of the comments I received in the discussion about my observation that since there were so many Gods, Past and present (about 4200) and it is a fact that many claim they were the only correct one, and other observations such as the inability of all humans to have heard from the ‘correct‘ god one can empirically conclude that god does not exist.

His reponse as a rationalist was: “I do not reject information as received by my senses, but, I do believe that the rational takes precedence over the empirical.

In other words: “what  I sense is OK but on the other hand I rationally believe in a god (outside the six senses) and that belief takes precedence over the empirical therefor  You are wrong.”

Well I rather stick to empirical evidence since you can make up a “rational reason”  such as God must exist because of the complexity of the universe around us, or Thor must exist because we have thunder and lighting. I leave it up to you whether you believe in empirical- or rational evidence and which seems more “true” to you.

J Lee Grady is a former editor of CHARISMANEWS and on 3/20/2014 he "proved" that God exists. Grady here forwards he following “things” as proof: 1-Babies, 2-Thunderstorms, 3- Flowers, 4- The Bible, 5- The global spread of Christianity, 6- Jesus, 7- His personal friendship with God.

I am not going to describe what is wrong here and why it does not prove anything, but I think that any person, not blinded with faith, can accept these “things “ as proof. Secondly he takes it for granted that Christianity is the only religion which we should consider.

I stated that, since unbelievers’ requests from believers to proof the existence of God have resulted in statements such as the ones in Grady’s Blog, or an admittance that it cannot be proved and that we cannot prove the non-existence of God either, I tried to do just that which generated a vigorous debate in the comments that followed.

My argument is as follows: Since there are many different religions, currently and in the past, and every religion claims their God is the only real one and all others are false, one can logically conclude that they are all false. The comments were furiously attacking the conclusion.

You seem to continually come back to the argument that you can logically prove that no God exists by reasoning: Because there are multiple religions and they all claim to be correct and the others wrong, therefore all of them must be incorrect.
Please explain this - why cannot one be correct?

  One of them correct? which one? yours of course, but all the others say you are wrong. If you were right, then most of humanity living and dead would have never had a chance to get "the message".

I still don't get your reasoning. How is it logical that none of the religions can be correct / true? Why cannot one of them be true? How do you come to this conclusion LOGICALLY?

We then got in a discussion about “Logic”, Deductive logic, Boolean logic, probability theory, acceptable facts, Schrodinger’s cat. Many strawman arguments. I at first , argued that you can not apply mathematical logic (true and false) to fairy tales that any writer can dream up or write down, myths passed down orally from a more distance past, but later I accepted that any proposition can be true or false even if some of these are preposterous. So by applying Boolean Logic, there is an infinite small chance tat ANY proposition is true.

There are not only many different religions, but many factions in any particular religion and even many individuals with a different concept of god, so the probability that one of them is right is correct except it is vanishing small. There are many children who believe in Santa Claus, so if any proposition, as the commentators claimed, are candidates for applying logic, that same rules then will allow for  all of them. There is indeed a vanishing small chance for all propositions to be true. God, Santa, Zeus and so on. So I will agree that the probability that god exists is as probable as the possibility that Santa, Zeus, Thor etc. exists. But although the probability is there and not zero, it is close to zero.

Then there is the further argument that if god existed and makes him/herself only known to a select group of humans out of all of the humans created since the beginning, it isn’t conceivable (yeah, I know, we cannot understand god’s mind) and is very unlikely, so we can come to a logical (see the dictionary definition: natural, reasonable, sensible, understandable; predictable, unsurprising, only to be expected, most likely, likeliest, obvious) outcome that the probability of god existing is infinitely small (i.e.Zero)

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Christian people, when we ask them of proof of God’s existence, usually request that we should “prove” The non-existence of  God. The following discussion is about an article that recently appeared in CHARISMANEWS, titled “7 Things That Prove God Exists”. It talks about, babies, thunderstorms, flowers, the bible, the global spread of Christianity, Jesus and personal friendship with God. None of witch shows any factual proof of god’s existence.  Here follows an exchange with one of the more rational posters, which is much more interesting than what some of the other “it’s in the Book” believers posted.  

I've been following your posts, and I am going to jump in here a bit. You seem to continually come back to the argument that you can logically prove that no God exists by reasoning: Because there are multiple religions and they all claim to be correct and the others wrong, therefore all of them must be incorrect.
Please explain this - why cannot one be correct?

Welcome to the debate, the more the merrier. To answer your question? How are you going to chose the correct one? If there was a god they would all be substantially the same logically speaking. Go pick one and convince me that's the one.

Ok, so what are you now saying? Can one of them be correct or not?

One of them correct? Which one? Yours of course, but all the others say you are wrong. If you were right, then most of humanity living and dead would have never had a chance to get "the message". I presume you are one of the Christian factions, if not , it still holds. Your religion is very "young" at 2000 years If the earth is 8000 years old that would mean most people, and if it is older, nearly all people, who died before would not have a chance to believe in your god and the conditions he set to enter heaven and will end up in hell. Doesn't seem logical that any god would think that a fair choice now, doesn't it, so, repeat that kind of reasoning to all religions and factions of those religions you can only come to one logical conclusion. No god.

Sorry Ben, I still don't get your reasoning. How is it logical that none of the religions can be correct / true? Why cannot one of them be true? Hypothetically, lets say a murder was committed and only 10 people could possibly have done it. Now if all of them claim that "I didn't do it." and you apply your reasoning, then "logically" none of them did it...
Or what about science. We sometimes have different theories for the way things work, and if you apply your reasoning - then they are all false because they are contradictory. Just because there is contradictory claims about truth, does not necessarily mean there is no truth.
How do you come to this conclusion LOGICALLY

Doesn't fly. Your proposition already has proof that Only 10 people could have done it, so it is than logical that one of them did. Now take ten people where you don't know that any of them have done it. Why would you pick out those ten people. Suspicion is created by some facts, not pure randomness. Logical conclusion? No suspect even! Second Example Science, Now you are assuming that there are no facts that point to any of the assumptions then there are no conclusions to be drawn and they are akin to speculations (like religions) Thus totally useless. They will not be called "theories" A theory is based on facts and when all the facts are not known theories are formed to be able to lead to directions to do more research then some theories are discarded or strengthened. The word theory is misused as being speculations which they are not. Speculations can be made out of thin air (often done). Theories must have a basis of facts to start out with. No religion has such a basis.

Ben, forget about the hypotheticals and address the point. How do you conclude all religions are incorrect because they contradict each other? How does this exclude the possibility that one can be correct? Similarly, one of the ten could have done it, or one of the scientific theories could be correct. Just because there are contradictions, it does not automatically follow that they are all false...

I don't know if you know about “probability theory" (not “speculation”, but I will try to explain using your example. If you take ten people at random out of the world population, what is the probability that the "murderer" is among them? About 8,000,000,000 to 10. and that is presuming that you know as an unshakable FACT that a murder took place. So if you don't have that one fact, the probability is Zero. (same for any ratio, even 2 to 1). None of the religions have one unshakable fact, although many "believe" they do, such as the writer of the Seven Things That Prove God Is Real in the CharismaNews magazine, but these "facts" do not convince anybody, who does not believe. Opinions, feelings,speculations, fantasies, hallucinations, mass hypnosis, are not rational facts.

The dictionary states: ‘An atheist is a person who does not believe in God or gods”. I wish that people would realize only that definition. They do not .The religious community especially, do not view Atheism as described above. They immediately, view an atheist a s bad, evil and an enemy. The word has become a negative connotation and brands the person as a messenger from the devil. (I got news for them: Atheists do not believe in the devil either).

The words “non-believer” or “unbeliever” is a better indication if you do not accept anything supernatural and that includes a lot of things., God, Santa Claus, Ghost, spirits, souls, astrology, psychic  powers, fortune telling , prophesies, dowsing, tarot cards, lucky numbers, to name a few, until scientifically proven and then they’re not supernatural anymore.

I know some people who do not believe in god but do believe in astrology and pay sucker money to so-called psychics to divine the future. Figure that one out. The wish to know the future is very strong in humans, that is a well-known observable fact. We want to know what is going to happen to ourselves, to our society, and what happens when we die. We want to know what we can do to influence the future. It has probably been one of the great drives that made us so successful. We learned to read the signs: position of the sun predicts the coming seasons, position of the moon predicts the tides. We read many atmospheric conditions and then try to predict the weather. That is natural, not supernatural.

 We know now that when the chemical and electrical activity of the brain dies, your personality and awareness dies, by observing Alzheimer stricken humans where the brain progressively dies (see my page on Life After Death). We observe that the body deteriorates after death. Embalming of the dead shows that people want to stave of that process as much as possible but it is in vain. Humanity has a hard time accepting the fact of death. In the past humans have concocted a life after death, many different ones as a matter of fact, because there was not an ounce of reality involved other than wishful thinking. The wish to have a life after death is so strong for many people that they can’t tolerate other people who dispute that and will paint such persons as bad, devilish people who threaten to take their fantasies away and are therefor dangerous, hence the negative impression when you make when you call a person an “Atheist”.

I am an unbeliever not because I am “ashamed” to come out as an atheist, If you promise to take that exactly as the dictionary definition then I am one, but if you mean all the bad connotations that has become attached to that word by the general public, forget it. I am an unbeliever.