This debate seems silly to me. God is not an entity that is subject to scientific evidence. God is an experience that you either have and recognize or don't have (or at least don't recognize.) To debate the existence of God as if God is a newly discovered planet is to miss the whole point of what God is.
If your goal is to show that the immature fundamentalist understanding of God or the Bible is logically flawed, then big deal. That is pretty obvious. This debate may tell you a lot about the fundamentalist with whom you are debating, but it tells you absolutely nothing about God.
The theologian Paul Tillich described it like this:
"I do not want to criticize any of the creative activities of the secular mind, the sciences, the arts, social relations, technical activities, and politics. These disciplines have their own criteria and their leaders apply these criteria with severity, honesty and self-criticism. In all this the secular mind is mature and religion should never interfere with it, as mature science would never interfere with religious symbols, since they lie in another dimension of experience and reality. To discuss the existence or nonexistence of God as a being alongside other beings betrays the utter immaturity on both sides. It betrays complete ignorance about the meaning and power of the divine." (The Eternal Now by Paul Tillich, Chapter 14.)
Don't worry. Sacerdotus appears to be certain he has some scientific evidence for the Christian god so it shouldn't be nearly the problem for him you seem to fear.
I would be interested though in how you know about this god by non-scientific means.
Rosa Rubincondior, I'm not worried about Sacerdotus. I'm worried about the people who might fall for the logical falacy of the "falacy falacy." The falacy falacy is the falacy of assuming a proposition if false because the logic used to argue the proposition is logically flawed. As to your question, how do I know about this God? I only know because I experience a strong connection to a larger beyond. I seem to share this experience with many other people. Some of us use the word "God" to describe this experience. Some of us find the Bible gives us a better understanding of this shared experience and how this experience is calling to us and working in our lives. It is possible that this shared experience is simply a hallucination, but given how widespread and how consistent it is, it appears that we are experiencing something real. But this experience is not clinically describable and certainly not scientifically provable. It simply "is."
I cannot wait to see how this pans out. No doubt @sacerdotus will be eligible for a Nobel when he successfully proves the existence of the Christian God. It will be exciting to witness him dismantle the myriad arguments that heathen "scientists" put forth for the non contingency of a deity, and then make the perfectly logical leap to proving that deity is in fact the God of Abraham, and not one of the other thousands of gods that misinformed people made up in the 6000 year history of our universe.
All sarcasm aside, this should be hilarious.
@bydleft
If @Sacerdotus challenged you to the debate, he is the one who must make the terms, not you. He had posted the link on your other blog and you have yet to post an argument: http://rationallyfaithful.blogspot.com/2012/08/debate-rosarubicondior-vs-sacerdotusr.html
Rosa, I invited you to debate me, I have the say on how it is conducted. It was my idea. There is no need for this fanfare. Please stop the stalling attempts.
Once you accepted the debate, I immediately made a blog posting specifically for us to post on and have been waiting over 24 hrs for your first argument. I even posted the link here so you would not claim that I never sent it to you on Twitter. I've done everything, now it is your turn to step up and present your arguments. I was polite enough to give you the first shot to an opening statement/argument.
This is not a boxing match, there is no need for a referee. I want a simple debate that everyone can read and make conclusions from without having to deal with "fillers."
All I ask is for you to keep your comments free of vulgarity, ad hominem and stick to the topic. Your arguments should be coherent and not be all over the place.
We all live busy lives and understand if it may take a day or so to reply on the debate. The winner will be the one who successfully provides a strong argument for/against God.
Sacerdotus >Rosa, I invited you to debate me, I have the say on how it is conducted. It was my idea.< And I have accepted. What is it about the terms and conditions which is making you afraid? Are you maybe afraid you won't be able to provide the evidence to the satisfaction of a neutral referee, the fact that you won't be able to prevaricate, divert and obfuscate or otherwise use apologetic tactics over substance or is it that you know your claim is false you won'r be able to substantiate it? If you have the evidence and you are sure your argument is sound, you should be leaping at this chance to prove it beyond doubt.
I am not sure how closely you folks are following academic debate etiquette. But typically the person who answers in the affirmative offers the first argument. A proper title for the debate would be "Does God Exist?"
Currently you have two questions, "Can it be proven that God does exist/Can it be proven that God does not exist?" Which leads to contradictory answers and therefore it is impossible to determine who should give the first argument.
In contrast, with "Does God Exist?" one will answer yes, and the other will answer no. The person who answers with the affirmative gives the first argument. So I am confused about why you are asking Rosa to send the first argument.
Just have the courage to accept the perfectly fair terms and conditions, or explain why they are unacceptable, then we can begin. Once we have agreed a neutral referee you may post your opening statement in accordance with these terms.
Again, this is not a boxing match. There is no need for a mediator. You post your argument with evidence and I post mine. It is a simply format. It was my idea and I posted the rules already. You must comply or forfeit. I posted my opening statement already. I even gave you the opportunity to post first and you did not take advantage. You have 23 hours to post or be declared the loser.
I posted the terms on my blog which she agreed to: https://twitter.com/RosaRubicondior/status/237472676111867904 Now she is trying to impose her rules on the debate. It is not fair. She cannot invite third parties nor try to move the debate to her blog when this was my original idea and she agreed to my terms. She is a guest on my blog and must be polite and not impose her will on how my blog is run.
I am a Christian apologist. I have taken opposition to Rosa in several different instances. But I find this behavior bizarre. You are refusing to debate, except in that specific forum. I do not see why it matters where the debate takes place. I have had discussions using twitlonger. It really does not matter where it takes place. What matters is the content.
Having said that, your demand for Rosa to make the first move is unjustified. In a debate, the person who takes the affirmative makes the first move. Yet you are literally counting down the hours for her to make a case against Christian theism, lest it be considered that she lost the debate.
Considered that by who? Certainly not by me, and I say that as a fellow apologist. So in summary, there are two points that need to be dropped. 1 - The venue (literally could not matter less). 2 - The demand for Rosa to make the first move.
However I do think that the rules of this debate as proposed by Rosa are malformed. You guys need to come to a fair resolution. But if you are truly interested in having a debate and going through the arguments, drop the temper tantrum about the venue and drop the demand for Rosa to make the first move.
I tell you all of this, Sacerdotus, because I am rooting for you.
I understand your point, but I want this to be a simple debate where all can read the responses and evidence and make up their own minds. I offered Rosa the first opportunity to post but she stalled. So... I posted the opening statement and am waiting for her to post her's so we can officially begin.
She instead is tweeting on Twitter all kinds of ad hominem nonsense and getting her Atheist friends to flood my mentions - further stalling.
I am the originator of the debate. I provided the venue, link and rules and Rosa agreed. To come out of left field with a referee and all this nonsense is obviously a ploy to get out of debating me.
Rosa knows that I am not the fundamentalists she bashes. I hold degrees in the sciences and have numerous of times refuted her claims.
She is making a fool of herself on Twitter and it is unfortunate. I was expecting to find a true challenge in her. So far she has been dilly dallying.
You have the right to reply to the concluding points I made in the blog above.
After that, you are too dishonest and disingenuous to be taken seriously here again and you will not be welcome.
Thank you for helping me to discredit religion in general and your 'faith' in particular. I hope you eventually develop the emotional maturity, personal integrity and self-respect to feel some shame at the dishonest tactic you felt you needed to try.
I am glad you are accepting your defeat well. It takes a lot of courage to bow out of a debate, kudos to you! Or Cheers as they say in your land. :)
A lot of people were looking forward to this debate, but unfortunately you with your childishness and stalling tactics disappointed us all.
I was never dishonest nor disingenuous. The evidence is on Twitter and my blog. I even made a music video of it. :)
http://sacerdotvs.blogspot.com/2012/08/rosa-rubicondior-epicfail.html
You accepted to debate me and read the rules. It is unfair of you to impose your rules that would have favored only you. You even chose a third party to get involved - a Lesbian non denominational minister who I debated with in the past: how is that fair?
Hopefully after you prepare better you can try again to debate me. I am and will always be confident to defend my premise. I even told you to invite Dawkins and others to team up against me. :)
I'll just leave your comment here as a tribute to your almost complete detachment from reality and your ludicrously over-optimistic assessment of your own ability and importance. It looks for all the world like a case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome - something which has often been noted before.
The proposition which you ran away from remain to be refuted. You were unable to show that "There is verifiable, falsifiable, scientific evidence for only the Christian God for which no possible natural explanation can exist." If failure to establish your proposition in a debate through cowardice and unwillingness to engage it is victory then I wonder what defeat looks like.
The main feature of the 'debate' was, as most people who commented noted, your abject cowardice in refusing to accept the perfectly reasonable and fair rules, and in your desperate rush to claim to have won, even doing so before you had given me chance to see your phoney 'challenge' let alone respond to it. I assume your tactic was to hope the simpletons you normally try to fool were too stupid to know about time zones or that other countries outside the USA existed.
The most noticeable thing for me was your infantile behaviour and complete disregard for even the pretence of honesty and integrity and your very obvious awareness that truth an honesty were never going to be your allies.
What pride you can have in your 'skills' at dishonesty and deception is a mystery for me. If I had opinions which I knew could only be defended and promoted that way I would try to change them. The task for an honest person is to be right, not to trick others into believing something you know to be a lie.
Thank you again for you help with showing what a nasty little thing Christianity has degenerated into as the tool of the spiv, the cheat and the parasite which is used to take advantage of the vulnerable, the lonely, the credulous and the ignorant. It also shows how the memetic parasite or religion can corrupt the mind of its sufferer and provide it with excuses for any depth of dishonesty and depravity for the benefit of the parasite at the expense of its unfortunate host.
Your further participation in this blog is unwanted and will be unwelcome. You have shown yourself to be morally bankrupt and devoid of sufficient integrity to be taken seriously.
You sound like a scratched record. You repeat the same nonsensical rants which were already answered: http://sacerdotvs.blogspot.com/2012/08/rosarubicondior-sore-loser.html
Yes, of course I am not welcomed after I embarrassed you :) Poor thing... Hopefully you will have the integrity to keep this comment up. Remember, it will be photographed ;)
Thank you for reading and for your comment. All comments are subject to approval. They must be free of vulgarity, ad hominem and must be relevant to the blog posting subject matter.
If your goal is to show that the immature fundamentalist understanding of God or the Bible is logically flawed, then big deal. That is pretty obvious. This debate may tell you a lot about the fundamentalist with whom you are debating, but it tells you absolutely nothing about God.
The theologian Paul Tillich described it like this:
"I do not want to criticize any of the creative activities of the secular mind, the sciences, the arts, social relations, technical activities, and politics. These disciplines have their own criteria and their leaders apply these criteria with severity, honesty and self-criticism. In all this the secular mind is mature and religion should never interfere with it, as mature science would never interfere with religious symbols, since they lie in another dimension of experience and reality. To discuss the existence or nonexistence of God as a being alongside other beings betrays the utter immaturity on both sides. It betrays complete ignorance about the meaning and power of the divine." (The Eternal Now by Paul Tillich, Chapter 14.)
Don't worry. Sacerdotus appears to be certain he has some scientific evidence for the Christian god so it shouldn't be nearly the problem for him you seem to fear.
I would be interested though in how you know about this god by non-scientific means.
I'm not worried about Sacerdotus. I'm worried about the people who might fall for the logical falacy of the "falacy falacy." The falacy falacy is the falacy of assuming a proposition if false because the logic used to argue the proposition is logically flawed.
As to your question, how do I know about this God? I only know because I experience a strong connection to a larger beyond. I seem to share this experience with many other people. Some of us use the word "God" to describe this experience. Some of us find the Bible gives us a better understanding of this shared experience and how this experience is calling to us and working in our lives. It is possible that this shared experience is simply a hallucination, but given how widespread and how consistent it is, it appears that we are experiencing something real. But this experience is not clinically describable and certainly not scientifically provable. It simply "is."
All sarcasm aside, this should be hilarious.
@bydleft
Once you accepted the debate, I immediately made a blog posting specifically for us to post on and have been waiting over 24 hrs for your first argument. I even posted the link here so you would not claim that I never sent it to you on Twitter. I've done everything, now it is your turn to step up and present your arguments. I was polite enough to give you the first shot to an opening statement/argument.
This is not a boxing match, there is no need for a referee. I want a simple debate that everyone can read and make conclusions from without having to deal with "fillers."
All I ask is for you to keep your comments free of vulgarity, ad hominem and stick to the topic. Your arguments should be coherent and not be all over the place.
We all live busy lives and understand if it may take a day or so to reply on the debate. The winner will be the one who successfully provides a strong argument for/against God.
>Rosa, I invited you to debate me, I have the say on how it is conducted. It was my idea.<
And I have accepted.
What is it about the terms and conditions which is making you afraid? Are you maybe afraid you won't be able to provide the evidence to the satisfaction of a neutral referee, the fact that you won't be able to prevaricate, divert and obfuscate or otherwise use apologetic tactics over substance or is it that you know your claim is false you won'r be able to substantiate it?
If you have the evidence and you are sure your argument is sound, you should be leaping at this chance to prove it beyond doubt.
Currently you have two questions, "Can it be proven that God does exist/Can it be proven that God does not exist?" Which leads to contradictory answers and therefore it is impossible to determine who should give the first argument.
In contrast, with "Does God Exist?" one will answer yes, and the other will answer no. The person who answers with the affirmative gives the first argument. So I am confused about why you are asking Rosa to send the first argument.
Once we have agreed a neutral referee you may post your opening statement in accordance with these terms.
http://rationallyfaithful.blogspot.com/2012/08/debate-rosarubicondior-vs-sacerdotusr.html
Now she is trying to impose her rules on the debate. It is not fair. She cannot invite third parties nor try to move the debate to her blog when this was my original idea and she agreed to my terms.
She is a guest on my blog and must be polite and not impose her will on how my blog is run.
Having said that, your demand for Rosa to make the first move is unjustified. In a debate, the person who takes the affirmative makes the first move. Yet you are literally counting down the hours for her to make a case against Christian theism, lest it be considered that she lost the debate.
Considered that by who? Certainly not by me, and I say that as a fellow apologist. So in summary, there are two points that need to be dropped. 1 - The venue (literally could not matter less). 2 - The demand for Rosa to make the first move.
However I do think that the rules of this debate as proposed by Rosa are malformed. You guys need to come to a fair resolution. But if you are truly interested in having a debate and going through the arguments, drop the temper tantrum about the venue and drop the demand for Rosa to make the first move.
I tell you all of this, Sacerdotus, because I am rooting for you.
She instead is tweeting on Twitter all kinds of ad hominem nonsense and getting her Atheist friends to flood my mentions - further stalling.
I am the originator of the debate. I provided the venue, link and rules and Rosa agreed. To come out of left field with a referee and all this nonsense is obviously a ploy to get out of debating me.
Rosa knows that I am not the fundamentalists she bashes. I hold degrees in the sciences and have numerous of times refuted her claims.
She is making a fool of herself on Twitter and it is unfortunate. I was expecting to find a true challenge in her. So far she has been dilly dallying.
You have the right to reply to the concluding points I made in the blog above.
After that, you are too dishonest and disingenuous to be taken seriously here again and you will not be welcome.
Thank you for helping me to discredit religion in general and your 'faith' in particular. I hope you eventually develop the emotional maturity, personal integrity and self-respect to feel some shame at the dishonest tactic you felt you needed to try.
A lot of people were looking forward to this debate, but unfortunately you with your childishness and stalling tactics disappointed us all.
I was never dishonest nor disingenuous. The evidence is on Twitter and my blog. I even made a music video of it. :)
http://sacerdotvs.blogspot.com/2012/08/rosa-rubicondior-epicfail.html
You accepted to debate me and read the rules. It is unfair of you to impose your rules that would have favored only you. You even chose a third party to get involved - a Lesbian non denominational minister who I debated with in the past: how is that fair?
Hopefully after you prepare better you can try again to debate me. I am and will always be confident to defend my premise. I even told you to invite Dawkins and others to team up against me. :)
The proposition which you ran away from remain to be refuted. You were unable to show that "There is verifiable, falsifiable, scientific evidence for only the Christian God for which no possible natural explanation can exist." If failure to establish your proposition in a debate through cowardice and unwillingness to engage it is victory then I wonder what defeat looks like.
The main feature of the 'debate' was, as most people who commented noted, your abject cowardice in refusing to accept the perfectly reasonable and fair rules, and in your desperate rush to claim to have won, even doing so before you had given me chance to see your phoney 'challenge' let alone respond to it. I assume your tactic was to hope the simpletons you normally try to fool were too stupid to know about time zones or that other countries outside the USA existed.
The most noticeable thing for me was your infantile behaviour and complete disregard for even the pretence of honesty and integrity and your very obvious awareness that truth an honesty were never going to be your allies.
What pride you can have in your 'skills' at dishonesty and deception is a mystery for me. If I had opinions which I knew could only be defended and promoted that way I would try to change them. The task for an honest person is to be right, not to trick others into believing something you know to be a lie.
Thank you again for you help with showing what a nasty little thing Christianity has degenerated into as the tool of the spiv, the cheat and the parasite which is used to take advantage of the vulnerable, the lonely, the credulous and the ignorant. It also shows how the memetic parasite or religion can corrupt the mind of its sufferer and provide it with excuses for any depth of dishonesty and depravity for the benefit of the parasite at the expense of its unfortunate host.
Your further participation in this blog is unwanted and will be unwelcome. You have shown yourself to be morally bankrupt and devoid of sufficient integrity to be taken seriously.
Yes, of course I am not welcomed after I embarrassed you :) Poor thing... Hopefully you will have the integrity to keep this comment up. Remember, it will be photographed ;)