Posted: Mar 28, 2012 1:56 am
Bribase wrote:Welcome, Promethian!
What a well written OP. It's a shame that the entire thing amounts to an appeal to consequences. What you are saying is that within your rather myopic view of atheism, objective morality, contra-causal free will and love cannot exist and you couldn't stand a world like that. Therefore, somehow Christianity is true. Leaving aside the fallacious core of your argument, your "theistic response" does nothing to explain the phenomena but rather explains it away with an appeal to magic.
You have nothing to offer beyond "I don't think atheists can explain it; therefore magicmandunnit".
Thanks for your welcome and feedback.
Firstly my OP is not designed to be an argument to prove the existence of God or the validity of Theism. It is nothing more than a description of part of my journey towards the realisation that atheism is not all it's cracked up to be.
I don't believe my point amounts to an appeal to consequences. An appeal to consequences asserts that a premise must be false simply because the proponent doesn't 'like' the consequences of the argument, and is thus obviously fallacious. My argument is NOT:
P1) atheism means there is no free will, moral objectivity or love.
P2) I don't like the idea of there being no free will, moral objectivity or love.
C1) therefore atheism is false.
C2) therefore theism is true.
Rather my observation is simply that if you accept the hardline atheistic worldview an inevitable consequence of that is that the concepts of freewill, moral objectivity and love don't make any sense or do not even exist. However atheists (in my experience) all act and live out their lives as though these concepts did exist. This means many atheists are living lives that contain massive internal logical inconsistencies - whilst simultaneously claiming an intellectual high ground over theists.
As an atheist do you acknowledge that free will, moral objectivity and love do not exist?