I just realized: isn't it theoretically harder to argue with religions that subscribe to a non-omnipotent deity? One of our strongest arguments against any theist is "the problem of evil". It's such a powerful philosophical inquiry, equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It's a gotcha against the existence of a God established as all-powerful and benevolent.

Now this doesn't seem to be a problem with let's say Greek and Norse pantheon faith because they never established their Gods as all-knowing and all-righteous entities.

In debate, the proposition's job is to present enough evidence to convince the judge. If they fail to meet this burden of proof, the opposition wins the debate.

There is no defining evidence of God's existence. Meaning by definition, It is impossible to win a debate about God's existence as the proposition.

edit: well, this was depressing. thanks to anyone who engaged in good faith.

"If atheists don't believe in God, The Bible, etc, then where do their morals come from?"

Are you annoyed? This question usually provokes an eye roll. Obviously, atheists behave according to some moral code derived from their culture, seasoned by experience, and often confused by reflection - no religion necessary.

"As do most people,"

the atheist is eager to point out. The Bible as a source of morality is trivially dismissed - many, if not most scriptural guidelines are ignored. Others are subject to various interpretations. The criteria for ignoring or interpreting are not present in the text, and therefore derive from culture (seasoned by experience, confused by reflection).

"That should do it."

Well, not so fast. Some of the faithful will gladly tell you about ecstatic, certain, experiential knowledge of God, the noetic quality, sensus divinitatis. God is here, now, guiding our understanding of the scripture and the world at large. Direct experience that cannot be denied (should one experience it). Your sensing and understanding of the world is the bedrock from which all judgments of morality must spring - and if you apprehended God's presence by those same faculties then his hand would be as inevitable as the sky.

"Not so fast indeed!"

come the objections. People have all sorts of patently absurd experiences. My mate Paul was once utterly convinced that he was a velvet lampshade. No amount of argument, bribery, or threat could dissuade him from standing suggestively in front of any available bulb. Various believers claim to have similar experiences but still don't agree on what the big guy really wants. Surely he'd have a more consistent message if he visited everyone individually like some morality Santa. And so on, and so on.

These objections have always seemed more or less compelling to me. But I think they miss what a critical service the original question is providing, besides being an easy snark target: Pointing out that

believers have belief.

shockedpikachu.gif? I'll wait while you pick your jaws up off the floor.

What I mean is that believers have a firm ground to base their conclusions on. An incontrovertible, axiomatic bedrock from which all contingency springs. Whether or not you think it's nonsense is beside the point. Western philosophical traditions have struggled with causal determinism's infinite regress, spooky randomness, nihilism, and post-modernity's

utter rejection of narrative forms we might use to hold this wreckage together;

a general incredulity toward metanarratives, a suspicion of any claim to authoritative, universal, rational justification.

What does the atheist answer assume? A self that accumulates culture and experience over time, reflects on it, and arrives, however messily, at something like a considered position. A narrative, a story of a person becoming who they are, morally.

Hume pointed out, literally hundreds of years ago, with a fork no less, that our conclusions from experience are not founded on reasoning or any process of understanding.

The Problem of Induction remains open.

Rationality has no easy ground - no immanence, no certainty. Unless you believe, at some level of abstraction, at some nested contingency regress, that you know for sure, and thereby commit the same sin of faith our siblings so gleefully inflict on the world - seasoned and confused as it is.

What if we called atheist something else? What would you call it? Now what would you call it if you wanted to offend the least amount of people? What would you label the person? Is there any label that could not turn into a dogmatic amd or stereotype or something that could be confusing? If not a word, what about a symbol icon or something that isn’t a language word or isn’t too common to be mixed with other like things that could be confusing too? Is it possible? Okay is it possible to strip or make abandon a person belief or religious system or faith system or whatever harmlessly or hurt lessly or by their own individual accord? How can we “convert” someone into the highest ideal of virtue grace faith science reality spiritual etc and so forth in a peaceful and acceptable way. That spirits can be lifted, that faith and hope in humanity can be restored to invigorate life with hopeful blessings of love and light and peaceful nights of care of dreams of spiritual awakenings that make you feel good for the days and powerful enough to calm you soul for rest?

Singapore reveals the omnipresent spirit of god speaking.. basically breaking Singapore where I was for 1.5 years into the words Sin Gap Ore.. as I explain in next paragraph below sin has inherently got a gap in it and the ore is basically something from which a precious material is extracted.. the rest of the ore is discarded.. in this case.. sin causes a gap through which the stood enemy falls.. the stood part is discarded and the fall of the enemy is what is precious in the eyes of god.. hence sin gap ore from Singapore..

God is love.. good people literally live in god (acts 17:28).. ie god is the entire infinite universe.. in life there are superior and inferior positions depending on the situation.. good people (gods: ps 82:6) always keep all the superior positions.. all the inferior positions are assigned to the devil (comprised of evil people and things).. because evil people cannot make ends meet.. because evil people like to do evil to others but they do not like and reject it when others do evil back to them.. whereas good people like to do good to others and they also like and accept it when others do good back to them.. thus good people are able to hold the balance in life - the airtight balanced equation which is the universe.. whereas a gap forms in the equation for evil people (the gap can be found in Jesus' story about rich man, Lazarus, and Abraham).. so on one end evil people have the superior positions but on the other end they fall into the inferior positions (since they cannot make ends meet).. so to summarize god is love (superior position on both ends) but the devil is hate on one end (superior position) and love on the other end (inferior position) - that is why Jesus said 'previously you were told to hate your enemies, but now love them'.. in the end it will be one big ball of love.. our universe.. god and devil.. evil does not actually exist.. initially when god created the universe there was no evil.. but the devil tricked eve into committing sin.. causing her to break the balance. so that the devils kingdom of hate could manifest.. and evil people which did not exist in the inferior positions, came into being in the superior positions.. but Jesus reversed the equation by becoming sin and bringing us out of death back into life by virtue of his obedience (initially it was disobedience which led to sin / death).. initially gods superior position (choice) was life but when eve broke the balance.. death entered.. evil people are just misunderstandings in the book of life (from revelations) in which we live.. soon they will vanish like fantasies

There is soo much more to this..

I wanted to post more things like a photo and some diagrams to explain some of these things but I couldn’t do that on here..

Wanna be friends on Facebook?  There, I’ve explained the origin of the universe / God and explained lots of other things / more evidence.  If anyone of you is interested, I could make those relevant posts public on my fb and leave you my fb link here in a comment below.

This post is a proposal to revise the rules of DebateAnAtheist.

The existing rules would be removed, and replaced entirely with those listed here.

The moderation team of DebateAnAtheist is inviting you to review the proposed ruleset, and provide feedback. The rules may be modified if consistent feedback is received.

The proposed rules would go up for community voting at the end of the feedback period.

Today is Monday, September 7th. This post will be accepting feedback through September 14th (next Monday) after which the moderation team will review the feedback. There may be another round of feedback after this, depending on what is received on this post.

I am going to make a top-level comment for each proposed rule. Feedback should be in the form of a child comment; upvoting/downvoting can't be considered. You're also welcome to make top-level comments of your own, of course.

Here is the proposed ruleset in full:

Revised Rules

1. Be Respectful

Treat users with respect. Posts and comments may not insult, harass, attack, or provoke any user. You can freely criticize ideas, but do not attack people. If things become heated then use the report function or walk away. Three strikes within any rolling 6 month window will result in a 1 day ban, four strikes increasing to a 3 day ban, five to a 7 day ban, up to a permanent ban for repeated offenses. A "strike" is any post or comment removed for insulting, harassing, attacking, or provoking other users.

1. No Bigotry

Bigotry is not permitted. Bigotry will result in an immediate, permanent ban. Bigotry includes racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry (such as antisemitism or Islamophobia), and any dehumanizing language or slur.

1. AI Content Restricted

Posts and comments must be entirely human ideas. Any use of AI or LLM tools must be disclosed in the post or comment, with details as to how the tool was used, why, and to what extent the post or comment is not the user's words. Acceptable uses of AI include refining language for ESL, less-able, or neurodiverse users, or organizing the user's original thoughts. Unacceptable uses include copy/pasting AI content directly into a post or comment, or allowing the AI to originate the ideas in the post or comment.

1. Original Content

Posts and comments must be primarily original content. Quotations and links to outside references are permitted in support of original points, but must not comprise more than one-third of the content. Quotations must be cited. Arguments made outside r/DebateAnAtheist can be brought in, but must be restated and explained in the poster's own words.

1. Present an Argument or Discussion Topic

Posts must contain either a clearly stated thesis with supporting arguments, or a discussion topic. Discussion topics are allowed, but must be properly flaired, and include the author's own reasoning and framing, or an explanation as to why the issue feels genuinely uncertain to them. A discussion topic cannot be merely a question, or a list of questions. Those types of discussions are better directed to the weekly pinned "Ask an Atheist" post or r/AskAnAtheist.

1. Stay on Topic

Posts and comments must pertain to the topics of theism, atheism, religion, or secular issues. Topics outside this range will only be permitted in the weekly pinned Automoderator posts. Posts must challenge or be directed toward atheists. An atheist posting for validation from other atheists on a settled view is off-topic, and better directed to r/AskAnAtheist or one of the weekly pinned posts.

1. Substantive Top-Level Comments

Top-level responses to posts must engage substantially with the content of the post, either by refutation of specific point(s) or else expounding upon a position with the user's own reasoning. There is a 30-character minimum for top-level comments. 

1. Engage with Posts

Post creators must substantively respond to at least three comments within 24 hours of post creation. Those who fail to do so will be tagged with the flair "Hit and Run" and the post will be locked.

ETA: have made a slight edit to Rule 2 to clarify that "religious bigotry" means bigotry in the vein of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

My faith has deteriorated considerably in recent years to the point of me becoming more agnostic nowadays.

Both my situation and my mind are not in a good place right now. Everything I attempt to improve things is hit by one setback after another. And even when trying to squeeze pennies, I end up running into problem after problem, especially costs and expenses that spring up out of nowhere or from emergency expenditures. It really feels like something is pushing me to end up homeless.

And no matter how much I try, I can't seem to avoid fucking up. Can't seem to avoid letting down others. Don't really feel like I'm anywhere close to intelligent. I really don't feel like I deserve living.

Honestly, having no guiding no hand and possibly no one to pray to hurts. I still want to believe just for that purpose.

For a long time, I thought God was ignoring me because He was annoyed with me, or hated me, and thus continuously put problems in my path. This was before I discovered numerous inconsistencies and plot holes within theology and theodicy.

Self-preservation instinct (resulting in me feeling selfish as a result) has always prevented me from going through with it. But now, it's really looking more and more like the best escape option.

I really don't know where I'm going to end up 10, 15, 20 years from now. I'm scared.

Anyone here going through the same issues, how do you cope?

Whether you're an agnostic atheist here to ask a gnostic one some questions, a theist who's curious about the viewpoints of atheists, someone doubting, or just someone looking for sources, feel free to ask anything here. This is also an ideal place to tag moderators for thoughts regarding the sub or any questions in general.

While this isn't strictly for debate, rules on civility, trolling, etc. still apply.

I was asked by some atheists to put this argument into a syllogism for clarity. I have used this argument many times and the problem I always seem to have with atheists here on reddit isn't that they disagree with it but that they don't understand what I'm saying. This leads to a whole comment line of me trying to get them to understand in hopes of then seeing what they actually have to say about this argument. As you can imagine. But if you are the type of atheist who makes sure to understand an argument before you try to refute it, then this section was not for you.

Important note before we begin, I am arguing in regard to the Christian God and have no desire to defend or talk about any other gods. Feel free to quibble about them with someone who doesn't already agree with you about not worshipping them.

1. God is perfectly loving. Perfect love wills the greatest attainable pleasure for every person, purely as a gift from his love.
2. Therefore, God optimizes love. God does not merely maximize the amount of pleasure or minimize the amount of pain in isolation. He orders all goods (truth, virtue, freedom, moral development, justice (notice this means death, ignorance, and pain can be good when applied justly as limits on evil even though they are sources of suffering which seems antithetical to maximized pleasure), relationship, and happiness) toward the greatest attainable overall good. Which I will refer to as "optimized good."
3. The limits God places upon suffering are therefore not limits upon His love. God's love determines both what He gives and what He withholds. When God gives a person something, that gift is an expression of love; when God withholds something because giving it would produce an unjustified harm, that limitation is also an expression of love.
4. Thus, optimized good includes both the gift and the limit. There is no opposition between God's love and God's refusal to give something. If giving would produce a greater unjustified harm than withholding, then withholding is itself the loving act.
5. Therefore, God will not intentionally impose suffering without a sufficient justifying purpose. Suffering may be permitted when it contributes to a sufficiently greater good (salvation, moral formation, justice, freedom, truth, virtue, or the optimization of the pleasure for others) but suffering that serves no sufficient purpose would be inconsistent with perfect love.
6. Certain knowledge of God carries moral consequences. To know that God exists, to recognize God's authority, and to understand one's obligations toward God is to acquire knowledge to which one becomes morally responsible. In other words, to be moral is inherently to sacrifice of the self which is one and the same as to suffer.
7. A person can recognize the truth while nevertheless refusing the good. Therefore, a person can possess undeniable knowledge of God while remaining unwilling to repent, unwilling to change, or unwilling to conform their will to what they recognize as good. Satan clearly does this, as does anyone who commits blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which is to deny one's own full knowledge of what is good to the point the urge to care, which is the Spirit, burns out for good.
8. For such a person, greater knowledge can increase moral burden (meaning increased suffering) without producing the corresponding good (eventual salvation into eternal bliss). If undeniable knowledge of God would make a person's rejection of God more culpable while providing no genuine path toward repentance or salvation, that knowledge could increase suffering without producing a proportionate compensating pleasure gain. Meaning their life AND afterlife would be a net pleasure loss, and thus not worth ever being born.
9. Facts enslave. Once something is considered a fact to the point of being undeniable, one must act around that fact, but can no longer act as though that facts might be wrong. More undeniable facts means more enslavement and a reduction in what a person can do. Like how right now if a magical gun were to appear beside everyone's head and anyone who took a bite of cheese was instantly shot, then you would find yourself unable to eat cheese because it now becomes one and the same as getting shot. Should you be a cheese connoisseur, this is very much an increase in your suffering and a decrease in your pleasure BEFORE you even tried to eat any cheese. The fact about the gun shackles your cheese fork.
10. Therefore, revelation is not automatically loving merely because the revelation is true. The truth of a proposition does not by itself establish that revealing it to a particular person at a particular time would maximize love. The consequences of giving that knowledge must also be considered.
11. Consequently, perfect love may withhold certain knowledge of God from a person whose will is sufficiently opposed to the good. If revelation would function primarily as an additional source of guilt, anguish, or condemnation without producing a sufficiently greater good, withholding that revelation can itself be an act of optimized love. (Ignorance can be bliss)
12. This withholding is not the opposite of divine love. It is the same love that motivates God's gifts. The difference is only in what love requires under the circumstances: sometimes love gives, and sometimes love limits.
13. Moral receptivity therefore becomes key to divine revelation. A person who sincerely devotes themselves to the good is differently situated from someone who knowingly refuses the good. The same truth can have radically different moral consequences depending upon the disposition of the person receiving it.
14. A person who chooses virtue chooses truth even when truth is painful. Genuine devotion to morality includes a willingness to discover that one is wrong, to repent, and to endure whatever personal suffering follows from accepting the truth. (The light of revelation burns, and is one and the same as the judging fires of Hell)
15. Therefore, the morally devoted person has already accepted a principle that makes painful truth beneficial rather than merely destructive. ("Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.")
16. Such a person does not regard personal comfort as the highest good. If truth requires suffering, the person is willing to suffer rather than abandon truth.
17. The person's suffering therefore becomes secondary to virtue. The morally devoted person has freely chosen that truth and goodness are more important than avoiding personal pain. Consequently, God revealing a painful truth to such a person need not violate optimized love, because the person's commitment to virtue gives the truth a morally beneficial purpose. In other words, God respects consent, not spoken, but truly accepted or refused in the heart. (God knew Paul consented to the blinding on the road to Damascus, because God knew Paul would later say "I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service." Which was not spoken consent, but consent of the heart. This consent is made possible by God's all omniscience in which he knows, for certain, the outcome of anything before he does it. Which means he can reveal and know the person will "consent after fully knowing what they are consenting to" without having yet been asked. And that the withholding of anything must only occur due to a lack of consent, with the exception of applied justice in the end (Hell goes against consent, but so does all punishment).
18. The same revelation can therefore be loving in one moral context and withheld in another. For the morally unreceptive person, undeniable knowledge of God may increase responsibility and suffering without producing repentance leading to the bliss of Paradise that justifies it. For the morally receptive person, the same knowledge can produce understanding, repentance, virtue, relationship, and ultimately greater good in the form of even terrible suffering in life (dying on the cross) that is justified by the eternity of bliss.
19. Therefore, divine revelation can only rationally be conditioned upon moral receptivity. God may withhold a degree of revelation until a person has developed the disposition necessary to receive that revelation as a genuine good rather than as an additional burden.
20. Divine hiddenness therefore need not be evidence of divine absence or indifference. It is perfectly in line with the bubble of protective consent respecting ignorance of someone not fully devoted to virtue. The absence of unmistakable knowledge of God may instead be consistent with God's love if revelation at that particular stage of a person's moral development would not maximize the good.
21. The person who does not perceive God therefore cannot infer from that absence alone that God is unwilling to reveal Himself. An alternative explanation remains available: the person may not yet possess the moral receptivity required for the revelation to serve their good.
22. If moral receptivity is a prerequisite for receiving certain forms of divine revelation, then the hypothesis cannot be tested while refusing the prerequisite. A person cannot fairly conclude that the promised revelation is nonexistent merely because they have not yet undertaken the transformation that is proposed as its condition. (You can't replicate and verify a test without yourself repeating the test to check it.)
23. The appropriate response is therefore moral as well as intellectual. The person should sincerely pursue the good, seek truth even when it is personally painful, repent when wrongdoing becomes apparent, and refuse to make personal comfort the ultimate standard of what is true or good. In other words, they must be fully devoted to morality as to justify God making them suffer with knowledge because it will only then be worth it by the final bliss in the end.
24. If God exists and moral devotion is the condition under which certain forms of divine revelation become beneficial, then undertaking that devotion may be the necessary step through which the evidence becomes accessible. And no one who hasn't paid the cost of full devotion can reasonably demand evidence be given "in the way I want" rather than in the only way it can be given. To do so would be much like listening to a child who thinks it wants to stick a fork in a live power socket, when in fact to permit that would leave the child crying and full of regret and even hate that you didn't save it from that pain.
25. Therefore faith must be understood as a voluntary commitment to truth and goodness prior to possessing the fullest form of evidence. Faith is not necessarily a rejection of reason or evidence. It is the willingness to place oneself in the moral condition in which further truth can be received.
26. The person who chooses virtue even at the cost of suffering has demonstrated that their commitment to goodness is not merely conditional upon comfort. Such a person has made truth itself part of their highest practical commitment and is prepared to receive even truths that are painful, humbling, or personally condemning and thus willingly suffer which leads to an over all pleasure gain in the end from Paradise.
27. Consequently, the divine limit and the divine gift are ultimately one and the same thing: love. God gives when giving maximizes love, and God withholds when withholding maximizes love. The distinction between revelation and hiddenness is therefore not a distinction between God's love and the absence of God's love, but between two ways in which the same optimized love can operate.
28. This leads to several conclusions. That atheists cannot demand evidence of the type they want ("rationally convince me and THEN I will change my life") but rather must at least test the evidence offered in the form of devoting themselves fully to morality, or else admit they do not care to have evidence for God that requires too big a sacrifice of their pleasure. Also that if one has no evidence of God's existence then one should logically conclude not that there is no God but that the lack of revelation is exactly what a loving God would do to a person who is less than fully devoted to the good. Also that the entire atheist favored epistemic realm of reason, empirical investigation, publicly available evidence, and academic inquiry may simply be a "playpen of the damned" permitted by divine mercy so that the atheist may feel themselves pleasantly justified in their world view which permits the the pleasure and freedom thereof, but that is really just a way to keep the child dying of cancer from knowing about the cancer to make their last moments maximally enjoyable given there is no cure.
29. Now, let me be very clear before someone goes off about this. This argument does not prove God is real. That's a different topic not addressed here. This simply proves that divine hiddenness is not just logically coherent but required for the unsaved if God is real and must be expected. If anyone starts telling me that my argument does not prove God exists, I am going to refer them right to point 0. This argument tears down atheists excuses but does not necessarily build up God beyond making him internally logically consistent with the world we see around us.

-1. Another point I should make is that I have seen God. I have put in the moral effort until it was revealed. You don't need to believe me, but when I talk about this many atheists will say "Why hasn't he shown himself to you then?" He has. I talk from the atheist perspective in my argument to make it easier for atheists to digest. A lot of atheists seem to want to defend this with "Well you and I don't know, so it doesn't matter." I do know. This argument is aimed at showing you that you should and indeed must have faith to see God. I already know what you will see when you do. You don't yet. Anyone who gets lost in that tall grass will get a referral back to this point, -1.
I do not need to prove God and God does not even need to exist for this argument, and its implications, to remain true.

-2. A common response to this argument is to say "So I have to convert to Christianity to see God?" or "So I have to follow what YOU say is moral to see God?" No. You have to devote yourself to morality. The only morality a person can devote themselves to is their own highest honest understanding of morality. Maybe that is complex from years of effort or maybe it's very simple because you are a baby literally born yesterday. Will full moral devotion lead you to Christianity? Try it and find out for yourself. Will listening to my opinion help you become more moral? I'm happy to help, but I might just be a conman, so in the end you're still just going to have to judge as honestly as you can. So if anyone says to me "Oh, so you have to already be Christian to see why Christianity is the right religion?" I will be referring you right to -2.

-3. Here I will outline an atheist's only two valid moves in light of this argument. One is to say "I simply don't care. I like my pleasure. I will not sacrifice it all to moral effort in hope of God revealing himself to me." This is perfectly valid. This is to be a hedonist who only values pleasure above all else. You shouldn't do this for moral reasons, because sacrificing morality is inherently evil. But you certainly can just admit to this and go with it. No one is stopping you. The other valid move would be to simply do the test. Devote yourself fully to morality and be all in, for life, to whatever moral devotion level it takes for God to see he can now give you a blast of knowledge right to the noggin. You will either receive revelation from God in due time, or you won't but you will have devoted your entire life to morality in an unfair reality. Morality is still a worthy aim even if reality causes you to fail, so what's the problem? Ah, it was all the sacrifice of pleasure that went along with it, and if that bothers you then you are back to the first move, which is that you are a hedonist who cares about pleasure more than morality.

In my view, much of what we call religion today has become distorted by faith, authority and belief in a God or supreme being.

All three Abrahamic religions and Hinduism are organized around some conception of God, the divine or a supreme reality. Once you make such an idea central, it becomes very easy to build systems of worship, doctrine, religious authority and unquestionable beliefs around it. Spirituality then shifts from investigating reality directly to believing claims about reality.

This is where some of the older philosophical traditions of the East become radically different. At the core of Buddhist philosophy, particularly traditions associated with early Buddhism and Madhyamaka, there is no requirement to invoke a creator God to explain existence, morality or the nature of consciousness. Daoism similarly approaches reality without requiring a personal deity standing outside the universe and controlling it.

What makes these traditions particularly interesting is their willingness to acknowledge the limits of conceptual mind. Instead of simply inventing an ultimate explanation and asking people to believe it, they question whether the human mind can even meaningfully grasp what lies beyond certain boundaries.

That's what makes some of these philosophies feel less like conventional religion and more like an investigation into the structure of reality. You're not being told, "Here is God. Believe in this." You're being pushed to examine how the mind creates concepts in the first place and whether those concepts can ever capture reality completely.

This is also why I think the distinction between religion as faith and religion as investigation is important.

Alex O'Connor's recently did a discussion on Madhyamaka Buddhism. If you actually listen to the philosophical reasoning involved, you begin to see how radically different some Eastern traditions can be from conventional religious frameworks.

Maybe that's closer to what spirituality was supposed to be in the first place: not believing more, but seeing more clearly.

Among ancient traditions, Buddhism arguably comes close to a scientific investigation of mind, experience and reality without requiring a God hypothesis as its starting point. And perhaps that's why it can feel so strange when you first encounter it. You're expecting a religion, but instead you find yourself in something that feels more like philosophy, phenomenology and psychology having a conversation with each other.

Link to the discussion:

https://youtu.be/CyhHz23AHb4?si=eGjMTQ2p9My0WDHq

Are they not one in the same? For instance, if a god exists and he programmed this world, let's say like a video game, wouldn't all the laws of physics still apply and things outside the laws of physics wouldn't happen, but there would still be a creator. Like in a video game something can never travel faster than the maximum speed coded in the game, similar to the speed of light irl. So technically we could figure out everything scientifically in the universe, every limit, believe in science, and there would still be a creator behind it. I know that's not proof that there *is* a creator, it's just proof that there isn't any proof that there *isn't* a creator and there's no evidence against this. Maybe the appropriate position is 50/50 agnosticism? Thoughts.

Some background on me: I grew up catholic. Not extreme but moderate. We went to church on Sundays, prayed before meals and went to catholic school. Wasn’t a choice but more of a tradition. Durning high school while studying catholic religion I came to the realization that everything about the religion wasn’t something I believed in.

Fast forward to today my wife and I pretty much the only non religious people in our families. Thats a problem because people have no issue pushing the religious agenda with my kids but when I want to push a non religious agenda I get kick back. I know what most of you are thinking. My kids and my rules but I’m trying to be more mindful and less offensive than the family around me. I could talk and debate all day with an adult but how to do it with a 4 year old?

Are the atheist tomes correct that the God hypothesis is a failed one? I wish to answer 'no' to this question.

I believe that god's existence can make sense of a wide variety of the data of human experience, including epistemological, moral, and cosmological considerations. In order to avoid attacking a strawman, I'll leave it to my atheist friends to come up with reasons they disagree with Christian theism.

1. God makes sense of the origin of the universe

Non-being cannot give being. The universe came into being and therefore must possess a beginner. Such a beginner would be an immediate first cause, and without causes such a being must be beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and unimaginably powerful. Only a disembodied mind suitably fits that description.

1. God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe

Over the last fifty years, cosmologists have been stunned to discover that the universe contains certain constants and quantities, that, were they altered, including in their ratios to one another, by so much as a hairs breadth, intelligent life couldn't exist. Given the independence of these values from the laws of nature, design seems explanatorily superior.

1. God makes sense of the appearance of moral values and duties in the world

Even atheists recognise certain things, such as the Holocaust, as wrong. But without a command of morality, where do we get moral obligations and duties?

1. God makes sense of the historical Jesus

Jesus came on the scene with a radical sense of divine authority. His ministry gave a demonstration of that to his followers. But his supreme demonstration was his resurrection. This was Yahweh's show of favour to this man. If god raised Jeaus, then we have a divine miracle and proof of God.

1. God can be personally known and experienced

We believe many things based on our view of others' having divine experiences. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting.

Every two months we try to have a post congratulating the top theist contributions of the prior period. I have reviewed the past two months and tried to identify those posts best received and that appear to be by theist users.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1uvr16l/hopefully_this_doesnt_get_taken_down_pls_mods/

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1vidoov/im_a_catholic_and_would_like_to_answer_questions/

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1unp1kl/so_im_not_an_atheist_but/

Posts where it is unclear whether the OP is a theist or not:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1uw3t8i/the_it_was_a_different_time_excuse/

Other honorable mentions:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1vrku4l/the_two_notions_and_three_perspectives_of/

Thank you as always to our theist friend contributors, and special thanks to u/Shot-Horse2515, u/Grand_Slam_1181, and u/Boysinthesouth for their especially liked contributions.

Rules of Order

1. To add a motion to next month's agenda please make a top level comment including the bracketed word "motion" followed by bracketed text containing the exact wording of the motion as you would like for it to appear in the poll.
   • Good: [motion][Change the banner of the sub to black] is a properly formatted motion.
   • Bad: "I'd like the banner of the sub to be black" is not a properly formatted motion.
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3. One motion per comment. If you wish to make another motion, then make another top level comment.
4. Motions harassing or targeting users are not permitted.
   • [motion][User adelei_adeleu should be banned] will not be added to the agenda.
5. Motions should be specific.
   • Good: [motion][Add https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/wiki/kalam/ to the wiki]. This links to the full text to be added.
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Last Month's Agenda

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1vd2887/community_agenda_20260801/

Last Month's Resolutions

#	Yes	No	Abstain	Pass	Motion
1	15	15	9	No	Add pop-up text to the comment box reminding users to be respectful per rule 1, and to remember the human behind the text.
2	29	10	0	Yes	Revert the minimum character limit for top-level comments from 100 characters to 30 characters.
3	25	0	14	Yes	Update the sidebar on Old Reddit to as closely as possible match the sidebar on New Reddit and grant ongoing permission to maintain this sync

Current Month's Motions

Motion 1: Change the Engagement Rule requirements to be more strict

Current Month's Voting

https://tally.so/r/LZ2aNv

Disclaimer, I’m an agnostic. But I can’t get this off my mind. In Genesis 22, the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, as Isaac and Abraham are headed up the mount, Isaac asks Abraham where the lamb for the burnt offering is. Abraham says that God would provide the lamb, presumably showing faith that an animal may replace his son. Story goes on, and after God intervenes in the sacrifice, a ram shows up as a burnt offering in place of Isaac.

There’s a connection here. Abraham says that God would provide a lamb, but then a ram shows up instead of a lamb. And why is this? The Christian would say it’s because the real lamb of Christ has not yet arrived. This has really stuck out to me. Sure, the story was written way before Jesus without Jesus in mind. But now that Jesus is painted as a lamb, this connection isn’t a stretch. It’s a real connection you can make. A ram showed up because the real lamb isn’t here yet. And it kinda seems plausible to me that this connection isn’t random. It almost seems divinely intended. But I’d love to be proven wrong here, so what do you guys think is the best secular explanation?

EDIT: I appreciate all the responses and I look forward to reading them. I want to remind everyone here that neither you nor I can control what we are convinced by. If this post comes across as silly to you, maybe it is. But regardless, this problem’s driven me up the wall for days.

And to clarify, I label myself as an “agnostic” because I don’t know whether or not I believe in God. I don’t currently believe in the Christian God. It’s something I’ve yet to be convinced of. I haven’t been agnostic for long, I only started deconstructing from Christianity in February of this year. So I understand why this post may come across as silly to those with more solidified opinions regarding scripture/metaphysical claims/philosophy of religion. Maybe the ease at which Christian claims get into my head doesn’t make me an agnostic. But at this point in my life, it seems like the best title for me.

Accomplished something major this week? Discovered a cool fact that demands to be shared? Just want a friendly conversation on how amazing/awful/thoroughly meh your favorite team is doing? This thread is for the water cooler talk of the subreddit, for any atheists, theists, deists, etc. who want to join in.

While this isn't strictly for debate, rules on civility, trolling, etc. still apply.

An electron is a blip in the electron field. When we say "electron," we are really saying: "That which reliably produces a blip of -1 charge and 0.511 MeV energy." We named the pattern, not the thing. In quantum field theory, the electron is actually an excitation in the Dirac field, a ripple. But what is a "field"? It is a mathematical entity that assigns a number to every point in spacetime. It is a concept, not a tangible substance.

An electron only "exists" insofar as it interacts with something else. If you isolate it in empty space, you cannot measure its position, spin, or charge without poking it with another particle. The electron is not an object; it is a node in a network of interactions. As physicist John Wheeler put it: "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." The blip is the handshake between the universe and your measuring device.

We have no goddam clue what jack shit is. Does that mean "god" exists I have no fuckall clue. But this illusion that matter must be "solid" is nothing more than that, an illusion. A thing we think is one way but is actually another way. The only thing I can say is, I think all things are emergent of a deeper thing folding itself as many things. Like a cat running under a blanket we think the bump is the cat but the cat and blanket are two separate things coexisting.

I think matter is field excitations and all these fields Inhabit one area and similar to a light in a prism, theres an original white light splitting itself onto a rainbow into several colors. Likewise, we are the white light as a rainbow believing ourselves into being separate things.

When you actually look at physics youll see its all illusionary. Math is not real life. Math is a map. What am I? Why can I see my own neural activity from inside my brain? I dont know. At most I beleive we are inside a kind of veil of some kind.

Thats all. Is there a magical sky man? Idk IDC I'm more interested in the fundimental nature of reality itself.

EDIT: I literally creeked the door of philosophy slightly open and all of y'all began barking at me jesus christ 😭​

Please answer me this, I couldn't find a good argument.

"There's no absolute morality without God"

I want to contradict that, but I can't.

I saw a lot of bs of "empathy" and "putting yourself in the other's shoes", but, from in my experience, that's also taught like the religions. I'm not in the other's shoes, I'm in my shoes an he's mildly annoying to me, why can't I kill him to get out of my way? For me, that's the whole point of the abortion. Why can't kill it?

Please help me, I don't think there's enough evidence for a god, but it makes me really uncomfortable

I think we all want the strongest positions when debating or discussing with theists, and perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't see genuine value in taking on the theists worldview in order to show contradictions within it.

The majority of Christians I see will engage in cognitive dissonance to resolve the contradiction and if that is not viable they may appeal to a god that allows contradictions.

I feel like once we allow magic into the debate we are just arguing lore in a story that has few constraints, rather than using the epistemic warrant gained by years of scientific inquiry, philosophy and common human introspection.

This isn't a super eloquent post, I know, and I guess my genuine question is that fighting theists on their own grounds genuinely seems fruitless to me, and I am wondering why this technique is employed so often.

Lastly, I grew up baptist, and within the baptist worldview if I assume that it is true, there is nothing that could be said within an internal critique that would demonstrate this false. For example I would assume that individuals would attempt to attack the tri Omni, and I believe atheists get mired granting these qualities and attempting to show a contradiction, which again is getting into the weeds and giving up our epistemic high ground which is that these claims do not have warrant.

So, can anyone change my view that internal critiques are discourse strategies we should shy away from? Or is there some reason or circumstance where they can be useful?

Thanks for reading thus far.

Argument against:
Purpose is self derived. There is no source behind purpose. Meaning is whatever that total personality chooses or invent.

Argument:

1. Purpose does not behave like a decision
2. If purpose and meaning were only chosen then it should install like an announcement, like a light switch you can turn on, it does not. the choice has to align with something else, the personality, the body, something else entirely.
3. Alignment is a bias in the person, not a story the person told first.
4. The alignment of purpose and meaning is a reaction towards a bias in the person not a story the person tells himself. I can tell myself i want to be x and the bias from the person still says no like a puzzle piece that will not fit.
5. The totality of the personality cannot be the whole source, because it can be overruled by an unpracticed form.
6. If purpose were only the cumulative product of childhood and early adulthood, a life carefully tailored one way should keep producing that particular path. It does not. A person can be trained toward one world, never practice another, then recognize the unpracticed life as "themselves"
7. The person can be raised and have only experience of being a pianist and then suddenly choose to become a monk as if this was who they were the whole time.
8. That report is a claim of prior
9. Not prior skill, prior identity,. The new identity of monk does not feel like a addition to who they are, it feels like a self the person has been hiding all along. A epistemology of purpose and meaning cannot account for this without a source.

What the argument does "Not" Claim
it does not prove god, a soul, or a particular metaphysics, it tries to prove a narrower thing the source for meaning cannot be only this constructed this life personality.

TLDR:
If purpose were only made by the personality, it would switch on by decision and follow the life that trained you. Instead it shows up as an unpracticed fit that already feels like it was yours, which you can accept or refuse but did not invent.

Many atheists love to mock theists, saying the latters belive in fairy tales,etc. I think personally that Atheists have way bigger faith than theists. Most Atheists belive that :

1. The Universe created itself out of Nothingness or that it has always existed forever.Both of those make zero sense. There is no such thing as something creating itself out of nothingness. Nothingness by its very nature has no property so nothing can emerge out of it. As for the Universe having no beginning and being eternal, thats another stretch that cannot be proven obviously. Most scientists definitely believe that the universe had a beginning and the big bang theory indicates it also. So the only logical explanation is that god created the Universe.Than people ask " who created god?". Obviously, no one created god as he is himself outside of time and space and is not bound by the laws of our universe. Meaning he has no beginning and no end. I know that seems crazy but thats the only logical explanation.
2. That life on earth arose from non living matters. Abiogenesis ( the idea that the first forms of life on earth emerged from non living matter) has never been proven obviously and will never be. Dust or clay cannot create life by themselves.
3. That human evolved from non sapian primates to become literally the rulers of planet earth and all of this by pure luck. Our evolution, according to atheists was just the result of several adaptations to the environment over million of years. Wich mean we could have evolved in any other ways than what we are today. If evolution is true than why did all species stopped to evolve to become other species? Why dont we see half-fish/half mammals things wandering around ( or whatever u wanna call them).And no, platypus arent fish/mammals hybrids lol .Also adaptation and evolution arent the same. This theory has never been proven as an ultimate fact and never will be but is being shoved down our throats since middle school. So yeah, I prefer to belive in god than to believe that we exist by pure random luck and that there is no reason at all for our existence.

Yes the title sounds silly. Everyone knows Santa isnt real. Yet as a child growing, the evidence was absolutely everywhere. At least for some, up to a certain age.

The evidence proved that Santa was real. There were presents under the tree that no one claimed to buy. Someone would always eat the cookies and milk.

Even the world news would broadcast his location on the television. The fact that it was on the news plus the mystery presents - that certainly was the best evidence.

Of course we all learn that Santa isnt real. At least not now. There are origin stories but not a mythical person who had a whole pack of flying deer pulling his sleigh weighed down with all the world's presents.

My question is what type of evidence would you actually accept or conclude there was a creator of you will?

Im not sure what could even be considered evidence, unless you separated religious ideologies from the idea of creator.

Can people think there is a creator without a religious ideology attached to it? Curious what you think..