Viciously Circular

At Debunking Atheists, Dan posted a video debate and claimed victory of the Christians over the atheists.



This debate is on whether the Christian god exists. The affirmative started by claiming reasoning is god given and that atheists have no ground, but circular reasoning to use reasoning to justify whether there is a god or not. The opposition did not mount a strong attack, cited the contradictions, inaccuracy of the bible. Since the bible is flawed, the god claimed in the bible is hence also false and non-existence.

If I were the opposition, I will respond like the following:

The affirmative is stating their case based on the Bible and claims, according to the bible that all knowledge arises from god. If men do not worship god, men would worship anything. Well, the affirmative can claim whatever they like. God exists because the bible said so. The bible is the words of god. Now, that's circular. Their claim of the source human knowledge is the bible. So we need to look at the bible and determine if the bible is the authoritative book as the affirmative asserts.

[I will insert the rest of the opposition's argument of the inaccuracy of the bible here.]

Since the bible is factually inaccurate, any assertion from the bible need to be evaluated on its merit. Saying that the bible said human knowledge must come from god is an unsupported assertion, just like I say all human knowledge must come from the Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Today's debate is whether the Christian god exists or not. The affirmative completely missed the point in questioning how we can logic and the source of the human knowledge. It is a fact that we exist and we can reason. Whoever and however the reasoning comes from, it is how we can determine truth from non-sense. If we do not apply reasoning, we may as well believe that Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.

The Christian god is described by the bible. We have shown that at many places, the bible is factually wrong, without additional evidence, it may as well the claim that god exists is wrong.

For those interested in this line of argument, read some of the twisted thinking of William Craig at his website. Understanding how the argument is mounted will help you clearly understand the circular nature of his argument.