Cold Case Christianity: Dear Mr. Wallace, stop trying to prove Christian crap without the bible

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Are There Any Good Reasons to Believe in Heaven 

(EvenWithout the Evidence from Scripture)?

There Are Good Reasons to Believe God Exists

If so, you have to first get over the impossible problem of incoherency.  Nothing depends so critically on the fallacy of special pleading, than the god-hypothesis.  You say God "sees" me, but he doesn't have physical eyes.  God has beliefs about me but doesn't have a physical brain.  Given there is not even one confirmed case of non-physical intelligence, your god will always remain an incoherent idea until you find a haunted house whose bumps in the night cannot be explained naturalistically.

While this may seem controversial to those who dismiss the existence of God out of hand, there are several lines of evidence supporting this reasonable conclusion. The reality of objective moral truths,

Go ahead and name whatever moral you think is binding upon all people at all times.  Let me guess:  "Don't torture babies solely for entertainment", right?  Why do you believe this to be binding on all people?  Because the bible says?  Because the Pope says?  How far in the toilet would this argument get you, if you were presenting it to somebody who thought torturing babies solely for entertainment would be morally justified in certain situations?  It's an absurdly weak argument that the only way you can establish it is if your opponent agrees with it?  And some would argue that because God is all-powerful and thus can achieve whatever purpose he wants for children without causing them to be tortured, God's torturing of the baby born to David and Bathsheba, could not have been for any other reason than God's good pleasure.  God could have killed the baby immediately, he didn't have to cause it to suffer severe illness for 7 days first:

15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died.  (2 Sam. 12:15-18 NAU)

Finally, Calvinists are Christians who say God causes people to commit all the sins they actually commit, so since some people torture babies solely for entertainment, Calvinists say God is responsible for such heinous acts, which destroys any argument that baby-torture-solely-for-entertainment is objectively immoral.  Read Isaiah 13:13-18 (God causing pagan men to rape Hebrew women and beat Hebrew toddlers to death) and Ezekiel 38:4 - 39:6 (using hooks-in-your-jaws metaphor to describe the degree to which God controls the choices and actions of men, specifically in causing pagan men to attack Israel), before you insist that baby-torture is surely not something God would ever cause.

Wallace continues:

the appearance of design in biology,

But a) the design is also full of defects, yet you only wish to credit god with the design and not the design's defects, yet you have no objective reason for suppressing the latter, which means the defective design argues that whatever intelligence is responsible for them, is not perfect, and b) the argument that all complexity required design, requires your god, who must himself possess at least as much complexity in order to produce complex stuff, to have been designed by an intelligent mind.  Simply insisting that biblical monotheism forbids you from riding the logic train all the way to the end, doesn't mean the train actually stops where you need it to.  As an atheist, I love using the argument from design to falsify the biblical teaching of monotheism.  If extremely complex things like the human brain strongly imply an intelligent designer, then the infinitely more complex god who created the human brain, was even more likely the result of an intelligent creator.

the existence of a universe that has a beginning

The evidence for the beginning of the entire universe is absurdly weak.  First, the big bang doesn't prove god even if it is true.  That theory doesn't say the singularity popped into existence from nothing, but says the universe we know resulted from the pre-existing singularity exploding.  How the singularity got there, or whether it always existed, isn't answered by the Big Bang.  Second, if Hubble inferred taht red-shifted star light implies stars rushing away from the earth, then starlight at the other end of the spectrum, blue, would logically require blue stars to be rushing toward earth.  The Andromeda galaxy is blue-shifted.  But if the big bang theory be true, something must have caused that galaxy to slow down and eventually turn back toward the place where the big bang occurred.  Only gravity could cause that, but alas, there is nothing between us and the Andromeda galaxy that would create the massive amount of gravity needed to make it do a u-turn.  So redshift and blueshift likely do not speak to whether the star is moving, hence, redshift, does not support the big bang.

and the presence of transcendent laws of logic are best explained by the existence of God.

One law of logic is the law of identity ("A = A").  If God exists, he would already be subject to the law of identity, which means he could not cause, or be prior to, the logical law of identity, and therefore, at best, logic governs god, god does not govern logic.  If God is the reason the law of identity is valid, then he could conceivably exist before it and without being governed by it.  Now how reasonable is the idea of a being who is free from the law of identity?

The laws of logic are not transcendent, they are a function of language.  The logical law of identity says "A is A".  When you ask where logic came from, you may as well be asking why a thing is what it is, and why it isn't something other than itself.  If you don't see the stupidity of asking why a thing is what it is, then it is little wonder that you think asking where logic came from is just as legitimate as asking where burritos come from.  Just because this world is full of physical things that were caused by prior means, doesn't mean that just anything you can possibly put into words, needs to have a cause.

Logic, being axiomatic by being required for even the absolute starting point of all chains of reasoning, is thus itself immune from the question of its origin.  To properly ask where logic came from, you have to employ logic itself, which means the matter in question is being presumed in the question before the answer is given, otherwise known as the fallacy of begging the question.  To avoid the fallacy, whatever produced logic must not be logic itself, which means the causal mechanism can exist without being bound by logic, just like a woman exists before, and is not bound by, her child.  You would also avoid the fallacy by framing your question in a non-logical way.  But while that would protect you from begging the question, the non-logical question doesn't function as legitimate inquiry.  Nothing is more reasonable than refusing to answer questions that defy logic.

Some apologists point out that even if there were no intelligence in the universe, a square shaped rock would still be logically distinct from the other one that is shaped like a circle, so that logic seems to pervade reality even in the absence of intelligent minds.   But this rebuttal backfires, however, since if the universe had no intelligent life, then "god" wouldn't be there either, in which case one rock maintaining its logical distinction from another, despite the absence of god, would show that logic exists even in the absence of god. 

There Are Good Reasons to Believe God Is Good (In Spite of the Problem of Evil)
Skeptics sometimes point to the problem of evil (in one form or another) to argue against the existence of God (or His good, all-loving nature). But when examined closely, the presence of moral evil, natural evil, Christian evil, “theistic” evil, or pain and suffering fail to negate the existence of God, even as they fail to blemish His righteousness.

God causes pagan men to rape women and beat toddlers to death, Isaiah 13:13-18.  There's no mystery of evil, its what humans do.  If your god exists, then, by his own admission, he is responsible for all the evil.

There Are Good Reasons to Believe Humans Have Souls
In addition to this, there are many good reasons to believe humans are more than simply physical bodies. The arguments from private knowledge, first-person experiences, part-independency, physical measurements, self-existence and free-will make a powerful, cumulative circumstantial case for the existence of our souls.

Maybe for Christians for whom just any damn thing you say will be deemed a powerful argument.  But not for atheists.  Nothing could be more obvious than that mental states are entirely dependent on brain states.  If the bible hadn't alleged the existence of immaterial souls or spirits, you wouldn't be wasting anybody's time with this sophistry.

And indeed, some Christians are dichotomists (they believe the bible teaches man is only two things, body and soul) and other Christians are trichotomists (they believe the bible teaches man has a body, a soul and something different called "spirit").  Then there's the inconvenient fact that you sit around pretending the immaterial nature of the soul is just as obvious as is the existence of trees, when you don't have one single confirmed case that souls even exist.

There are Good Reasons to Believe Souls Are Not Limited to Physical Existence
While our physical bodies are obviously limited to their physical existence and cease to function at the point of material death, there is no reason to believe the immaterial soul is similarly impacted.

If the soul wasn't affected by the body, we'd expect people not to undergo the personality changes and memory lapses they do after severe head-trauma.  The injury is obviously physically affecting the mind, and only Christian apologists, crazed to defend biblical inerrancy at all costs, would trifle that "maybe" the immaterial soul seems affected by the physical, for reasons other than the soul being physical.  If the bible had said the ultimate basis of muscle-power is spiritual, you'd be insisting that just because there is a physical explanation for muscular power, doesn't necessarily prove there's no spiritual causal mechanism at work.

If we are truly “soulish” creatures, our immaterial existence can reasonably be expected to transcend our physical limitations.

And since you haven't the least bit of evidence for such a thing, I sleep well at night in my confidence that immaterial things are about as coherent as flying elephants.  The possibility of an eternal hell doesn't exactly give me insomnia.

There are Good Reasons to Believe a Good God Would Not Make Justice, Satisfaction and Joy Elusive
All of us, as humans, yearn for justice, satisfaction and joy. These are good goals and ambitions.

Such as pedophiles, who think America's current laws on sexual age of consent are unfair and need to be lowered?  That's the stupidity your argument leads to.  Not all senses of injustice justify inferring that justice is some divine thing.

A good God (if He exists) would make these expectations attainable for His beloved children.

Are you drunk?  You just made a good argument that God does NOT love any followers who have suffered for years and died due to breaches of "justice".  Preaching to your trusting audience of Christians that God will someday set justice right, doesn't answer this criticism.

There are Good Reasons to Believe Complete Justice, Satisfaction and Joy Are Elusive in Our Temporal, Material Lives
Our daily experience demonstrates a simple reality, however: justice is not always served here on Earth (bad people often get away with their crimes), and while we continually pursue satisfaction and joy, we find they are fleeting and elusive.

Irrelevant.  And a person's sense of justice changes as they age.  The young Christian get made at god for being unable to find work and the resulting homelessness.  The older Christian is more likely to conclude that being homeless is, spiritually speaking, a good thing because it works spiritual maturity and causes you to make more conscious efforts to depend on God.  So the human sense of justice/injustice is sufficiently ambivalent that there's probably not an objective standard of right and wrong sitting in back of it.

There are Good Reasons to Believe a Good God Would Provide Complete Justice, Satisfaction and Joy in the Eternal Life He Offers Beyond the Grave

Well gee, if you already presuppose that god is "good", then obviously....you could rightfully expect him to correct injustices at some point.

If these worthy desires for justice, satisfaction and joy are unattainable in our material existence, where could they ultimately be experienced?

For some people, never.  Like the Canaanites attacked by Moses and Joshua, such people were fatal victims of crass injustice.

If God has designed us as dualistic, “soulish” creatures, these innate desires could eventually be realized in our eternal lives beyond the grave. If a good God exists (and there are many sufficient reasons to believe this is the case),

And every single of one of them evaporate in light of your own bible teaching that God causes men to rape Hebrew women, Isaiah 13:13-18.   Now what?

the expectation of an afterlife is reasonable.

It is the hope of the hopeless in their god and his mud-pit profit.

Heaven is the place where God will accomplish everything we would expect from Him and everything we (as living souls) desire.

Preaching to the choir.  Dismissed.

I don’t have to be a Christian in order to take this kind of reasonable approach to the issue.

Yes you do, unless you are convinced by Isaiah 13 that the god of the bible is a piece of shit.

Maybe that’s why many non-Christians have developed similar views on the nature of the next life. Long before Christianity, ancient Egyptians believed the afterlife was a place of final satisfaction and joy for those who were able to obtain a life with the gods in the “Sekhet-Aaru of the Tuat”. The followers of Zoroastrianism believed those who died would eventually be brought back to life and judged so final justice could be served. There are many similar examples of such expectations of an afterlife throughout the history of humanity. Even those who knew nothing of the truth of God’s Word held an intuitive understanding of what the next life might be like. This is still true today.

And since those religions came before Christianity, its pretty clear who is borrowing afterlife concepts from whom.

Our non-believing friends and family have an instinctive sense there is more to this life; a sense there must be a place where justice is finally served and where joy and satisfaction will finally be found.

And that argument gets beaten down from the fact that many convicted pedophiles sincerely believe the current American laws are unjust.  So under your logic, we should seriously consider that in heaven, pedophiles will joyfully experience the righting of the wrongs they suffered under prudish American law?

Or did you suddenly discover that not all human senses of injustice imply a pie-in-the-sky wonderland where everything will be made all better like the end of a fairy tale?

They have an innate expectation of Heaven, and they are simply waiting for God to reveal the truth to them. Maybe they’re waiting to hear about Heaven from us, if only we are willing to begin a reasonable discussion.
And as usual, you have no confidence in the power of the sovereign Holy Spirit at all, since at the end of the day, you equate your apologetics dreams with his activity in your heart, when for all you know, the Holy Spirit's goals are diamentrically opposed to Christians pretending that convincing unbelievers Christianity is true need not involve the Holy Spirit's work any more than does convincing a jury that a criminal suspect is guilty.

Clearly, Wallace, you are horrifically dissatisfied with the idea that God doesn't need your help.  What will be the title of your next article?  Maybe "If you don't learn how to defend your faith forensically by purchasing my books, Jesus might go back into the tomb!"