Demolishing Triablogue: Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms

This makes a point which dovetails with a point I've made on more than one occasion. The argument from evil is typically formulated against a very abstract concept of God, a concept derived from some version of classical theism or philosophical theology, rather than a more concrete, specific concept such as biblical theism:

Then I must be doing much better than the atheists you prefer to pay attention to.   Your God causes men to rape women (Deut. 28:30, 63;  Isaiah 13:13-18).  While for most Christians rape's absolute immorality is a non-negotiable, Calvinists like yourself are required to call it just as good as Christian worship of Jesus, since both constitute something God is making people do, and you are more committed to God's acts being good, than you are in common sense, apparently.

Jeanine Diller (2016) points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.

That's true about me and my atheism.  The gods of the bible , including everybody from Yahweh to Dagon, do not exist except in the imagination.

Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are.

But atheists like me are keenly aware of the fatal problems ensconced in your biblical god.

For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion. There are also the Gods of specific Western theistic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, which may or may not be best understood as classical or neo-classical Gods...Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances.

And less informed atheists would be more rational to throw up their hands at all this confused bullshit, than they would be to just carry around a "what if I'm wrong" as a motive to ceaselessly examine every stupid claim possible.

Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify (Diller 2016: 11–16).

Not at all, the argument from religious language:  You cannot define god in a way that "coheres" with known scientific reality, hence your God is an "incoherent" concept and that's alone sufficient to win the debate.  No, you cannot show that any such thing as "disembodied intelligence" exists, even despite anything you might find in “The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters”, J.P.Moreland, Ph.d,  Moody Publishers, 2014.  So the whole idea of your god runs afoul of the evidence that claims the most successful empirical demonstration.  Your god is no more likely to exist in some place I haven't checked, than Vishnu is.

Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.

Then count me out of the criticism.  The argument against God from religious language is conclusive against ANY life form existing without a physical body.

Nor have they reflected on what criteria must be satisfied in order for a concept of God to count as “legitimate”,

"Legitimate" would minimally require "subject to detection by empirical means".  You couldn't show that criteria to be too demanding without your own resort to empirical means to establish the rebuttal...so apparently requiring empirical confirmation really is reasonable.

let alone on the possibility of legitimate God concepts that have not yet been conceived

Disqualifying YOUR particular god from the race is all I care about.  If in fact there is some god out there not yet known, you run the risk of being in more trouble with him than I.  According to your own bible, misrepresenting god is worse than general disbelief.  Atheists might be "fools", but damnation is assured for those who teach about God wrongly  (Gal. 1:8, James 3:1).  So your own presuppositions counsel that steering clear of "God" altogether are likely the safer route, than would be taking the chance, "accepting Jesus" then flipping a coin to figure out which of the thousands of denominations isn't engaging in the sin of misrepresenting god.

and on the implications of that possibility for the issue of whether or not global atheism is justified. Furthermore, the most ambitious atheistic arguments popular with philosophers, which attempt to show that the concept of God is incoherent or that God’s existence is logically incompatible either with the existence of certain sorts of evil or with the existence of certain sorts of non-belief [Schellenberg 2007]), certainly won’t suffice to justify global atheism

Your "rebuttal" to the skeptical theory of god's incoherence, is something less than frightful.

Nor is it obvious that evidential arguments from evil can be extended to cover all legitimate God concepts, though if all genuine theisms entail that ultimate reality is both aligned with the good and salvific (in some religiously adequate sense of “ultimate” and “salvific”), then perhaps they can. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case.

Not worried; your bible god causes men to rape women and children, and causes men to to beat children to death.  I plan to have a glorious career successfully motivating Christians to use what the bible says as a perfectly reasonable justification to say the Christian god is a moral monster and thus not likely anyting more significant than the wishful thinking of the biblical authors.

PeaceByJesus12/21/2017 9:27 PM☍It seems that at least for the militant atheists who make Hitler a Christian but deny atheism had anything negative to do with chairman Mao etc,

I am in agreement with apologists that you cannot judge a belief system merely by what you find its converts doing, since they could very well be acting contrary to their belief systems.

and presume omniscient morally superiority to God when railing against Him to exterminating terminally wicked cultures (when they are not blaming Him for not dealing with the wicked), then it seems that the God they have such animus to may be a supernatural version of their own father, since it can seem so personal. Which is the nature of us after all.

Then count me out;  my reasons for calling your God a piece of shit are strictly biblical, and the fact that most Christians have had problems with the divine atrocities of the bible forbids  you from grounding my views solely in spiritual blindness or some other esoteric bullshit, unless of course you too are a Calvinist.  But if so, then because God predestined me to be blind and I cannot resist it, you'd have to call that act of God good.  Hence, atheism is good because it is an act of God who blinds men's minds.

In any case, this imaginary god is from the devil, who, right from the beginning, presented God (to Eve) as a malevolent tyrant who selfishly kept her from what was rightfully hers, thus making her a victim of injustice by God, who needed to "share the wealth" - not in mercy or grace (which is antithetical to the ethos of the devil), but as a matter of justice.

Your idiot god could have avoided the problem of the Fall by keeping the Tree of knowledge out of their physical reach.  I would advise that your god is rather stupid and mentally ill since he apparently wasn't satisfiied with the way things were going in the pre-creation state, otherwise, he'd have been content thereto and thus would have had no motive to go complicate his life.

And which was an extension of the "share the wealth" demand behind the first "occupy movement," that of the devil presuming to occupy the position of God, not at a matter of grace to an object of mercy, but as his right, as the first of the liberal self-proclaimed elites, who "climb up some other way" (Jn. 10:1) to obtain what God gives in grace in recompensing the obedience of faith, and seduce souls with the idea that they are victims of injustice if they do not have what others obtained by merit. And to such these political psychologists present themselves as saviors, though they typically will not share the plight of their victims, but present themselves as examples of what can be obtained if they are given or maintain power.

Sorry, but fools like you are beyond help, with how blindly you trust in the truth of an ANE story where a snake talks to a woman.  Snip:

I guess i got carried away, but the atheists are apostles unawares of the Evil One.

And your hero Steve Hays, a Calvinist, blames God for their "unawares", and blames God for causing men to rape children, yet inconsistently, despite his calling all acts of God "good", he refuses to say God's act of forcing men to rape children is "good".