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The Christian Atheist Pdf Download
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For some time, Žižek has been reading the gospels as an argument for atheism. Žižek goes so far as to claim that the only path for atheism to have developed was through Christianity. In his view, Christianity sowed the first seeds of an atheistic worldview. Christ was abandoned on the cross. When Christ turned to God, he came to the realization that there was no God.
In sum, the present studies aspire to (1) expand our understanding of interreligious interactions and polarization as a function of (ir)religious belonging, (2) reveal converging and diverging patterns among established (Christians and Muslims) and emerging identities (atheists), and (3) develop the methodological application of topic-sentiment analysis.
With rare exceptions, the videos were typically uploaded by third-party YouTube channels from 2008 to 2016. Most of the featured debaters were prominent figures within their respective communities: atheist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens; Christian theologians and apologists such as Frank Turek and William Lane Craig; and Muslim preachers such as Shabir Ally and Ahmed Deedat. These figures are frequently referenced in the commentary sections of the respective videos. However, it was not uncommon to see references to them in other commentary sections, a fact that hints to the possibility that some of the users were habitual interreligious debaters.
Next, a Chi square analysis of independence was performed to test H1. Based on common knowledge and/or empirical findings, factors such as T02 Jesus the savior, T05 morality, T08 Bible, T09 creation, and T10 truth claims would be expected to be more prevalent among Christian than atheist users, and vice versa for T04 scientific theories.
Turning to H4, atheists were expected to be associated with fewer instances of intergroup bias than Christians. Once again, the results offer only partial support. Indeed, atheists exhibit no instances of positive in-group bias, but considerably more negative bias compared to Christians. It can be argued that, in this stage of identity development, atheist users find it easier to define themselves as what they are not than what they are.
A topic-sentiment map (Fig. 2) was produced based on a topic-by-sentiment contingency table of the data from the Christian-atheist commentaries and the subsequent Chi square distances. The graph is plotted symmetrically and the distances among topics and sentiment levels indicate the degree of their association.
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Presumption of Atheism. Theists have complained that the usual arguments against God's existence do not pass philosophical muster. One of the most commonly proffered justifications of atheism has been the so-called presumption of atheism. At face value, this is the claim that in the absence of evidence for the existence of God, we should presume that God does not exist. So understood, such an alleged presumption seems to conflate atheism with agnosticism. When one looks more closely at how protagonists of the presumption of atheism use the term "atheist," however, one discovers that they are sometimes re-defining the word to indicate merely the absence of belief in God. Such a re-definition trivializes the claim of the presumption of atheism, for on this definition atheism ceases to be a view, and even infants count as atheists. One would still require justification in order to know either that God exists or that He does not exist.
Having abandoned the internal problem, atheists have very recently taken to advocating the external problem, often called the evidential problem of evil. If we take God to be essentially omnipotent and omnibenevolent and call suffering which is not necessary to achieve some adequately compensating good "gratuitous evil," the argument can be simply summarized:
What makes this an external problem is that the theist is not committed by his worldview to the truth of (2). The Christian theist is committed to the truth that Evil exists, but not that Gratuitous evil exists. Thus the atheist claims that the apparently pointless and unnecessary suffering in the world constitutes evidence against God's existence.
2. Christian theism entails doctrines that increase the probability of the co-existence of God and evil. The atheist maintains that if God exists, then it is improbable that the world would contain the evils it does. Now what the Christian theist can do in response to such an assertion is to offer various hypotheses that would tend to raise the probability of evil given God's existence: Pr (Evil/God&Hypotheses) > Pr (Evil/God). The Christian can try to show that if God exists and these hypotheses are true, then it is not so surprising that evil exists. This in turn reduces any improbability which evil might be thought to throw upon God. These hypotheses are various Christian doctrines, so that the Christian's claim is that the observed evil in the world is more probable on Christian theism than it is on mere theism (or, alternatively, that these doctrines should lead us to revise upward Pr (Evil/God) in light of the realization that Pr (Evil/Christian God) is not so low after all). Four Christian doctrines come to mind in this connection.
These four Christian doctrines increase the probability of the co-existence of God and the evils in the world. They thereby serve to decrease any improbability which these evils might seem to cast upon the existence of God. In order to sustain his argument the atheist will have to show that these doctrines are themselves improbable.
3. There is better warrant for believing that God exists than that the evil in the world is really gratuitous. It has been said that one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. The atheist's own argument may thus be turned against him:
So the issue comes down to which is true: (2) or (2*)? In order to prove that God does not exist, atheists would have to show that (2) is significantly more probable than (2*). As Daniel Howard-Snyder points out in his book The Evidential Problem of Evil, an argument from evil is a problem only for the person "who finds all its premises and inferences compelling and who has lousy grounds for believing theism." [7] But if one has better reasons for believing that God exists, then evil "is not a problem." [8] The Christian theist might maintain that when we take into account the full scope of the evidence, then the existence of God becomes quite probable, even if the problem of evil, taken in isolation, does make God's existence improbable.
Premiss (1) is a modest version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It circumvents the typical atheist objections to strong versions of that principle. For (1) merely requires any existing thing to have an explanation of its existence. This premise is compatible with there being brute facts about the world. What it precludes is that there could exist things which just exist inexplicably. This principle seems quite plausible, at least more so than its contradictory. One thinks of Richard Taylor's illustration of finding a translucent ball while walking in the woods. One would find the claim quite bizarre that the ball just exists inexplicably; and increasing the size of the ball, even until it becomes co-extensive with the cosmos, would do nothing to obviate the need for an explanation of its existence.
It is open to the atheist to retort that while the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation lies not in an external ground but in the necessity of its own nature; in other words, (2) is false. This is, however, an extremely bold suggestion which atheists have not been eager to embrace. We have, one can safely say, a strong intuition of the universe's contingency. A possible world in which no concrete objects exist certainly seems conceivable. We generally trust our modal intuitions on other familiar matters; if we are to do otherwise with respect to the universe's contingency, then the atheist needs to provide some reason for such scepticism other than his desire to avoid theism. Moreover, as we shall see below, we have good reason to think that the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature.
Consider premiss (1). To speak of objective moral values and duties is to say that moral distinctions between what is good/bad or right/wrong hold independently of whether any human being holds to such distinctions. Many theists and atheists alike agree that if God does not exist, then moral values and duties are not objective in this sense.
Some philosophers, equally averse to transcendently existing moral values as to theism, try to maintain the existence of objective moral principles or supervenient moral properties in the context of a naturalistic worldview. But the advocates of such theories are typically at a loss to justify their starting point. If there is no God, then it is hard to see any ground for thinking that the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens is objectively true or moral goodness supervenes on certain natural states of such creatures. Crudely put, on the atheistic view humans are just animals; and animals are not moral agents.
Second, the nature of moral obligation seems incompatible with Atheistic Moral Realism. Suppose that values like Mercy, Justice, Forbearance, and the like just exist. How does that result in any moral obligations for me? Why would I have a moral duty, say, to be merciful? Who or what lays such an obligation on me? On this view moral vices such as Greed, Hatred, and Selfishness also presumably exist as abstract objects, too. Why am I obligated to align my life with one set of these abstractly existing objects rather than any other? In contrast with the atheist, the theist can make sense of moral obligation because God's commands can be viewed as constitutive of our moral duties. 2ff7e9595c