Arguing Atheism

Another Kent Leslie post, based on his column titled "Atheists are jerks. So are we when we adopt their tactics."

The headline is quite a bit misleading, but it is a common technique of his to overly provoke, but be a little bit more reasonable. The scope of the blog entry is that one cannot apply logic to questions of faith, whether it is atheism or Christianity. There is much that is highly arguable in the whole thing, the largest one being that Christians inevitably argue God as being equitable with the entire Christian theology; and that atheists do the same thing.

Christian (Kent): Jesus healed the sick, therefore God exists.
Atheist (not Kent): Thor doesn't exist, therefore Jesus didn't heal the sick.

Kent's point is that faith is experiential and not logical, and that any logical attack on religion or atheism would be fruitless. I mostly agree.

But ... My response: Isn't it possible that the question of a divine source of morality and creation is independent from human theology -- that our understanding of the nature of God is a separate issue from the existence of God.

My more controversial point (beware!) is that the existence of Jesus is dependent on the existence of God, and not the other way around.

On the issue of logic, it is actually possible to apply pure logic to questions of faith using Socratic techniques. Unfortunately for atheists, the result is never that the absence of an effect disproves the cause; it only disproves the effect. Godless philosophy is fascinating, but in the end is based on a faith-based premise: if there is no creator, then ...