Do you believe in God?

Many of you atheists are just as rigid and fundamentalist as those you criticize.

How so? I’ve never heard a single theist (other than Mormons) seriously maintain that Jesus appeared at any time or place other than Israel in the 1st century AD. I’d be willing to give it consideration if someone did claim otherwise, so long as there is some evidence of it. There would seem to be none. Indigenous people living in the geographic areas I listed were non-Christian until they began coming into contact with Europeans. One would think that if Jesus had appeared in any of these places there would have been SOME converts, but nope not a single one. Almost all Christians I have ever spoken to also believe that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus. Since the people living in these areas before contact with Europeans had zero knowledge of Jesus, apparently they had zero chance of salvation. That’s the logical consequence of Christian beliefs plus the absolute lack of any evidence for Jesus’ appearing at any place and time other than as described in the Christian Gospels. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that any atheist believes.

Or was your post just “whataboutism” and unconnected with the point I was making? If so, that may be true for some, but evidence for any theist position is seriously lacking. Theists even make a virtue out of this - you have to believe because of FAITH, not evidence. For some reason God gave you the intellectual capacity to think critically and evaluate evidence for and against competing claims, but he wants you to ignore that capability and just blindly believe what someone told you to believe.

But if this is the case then decisions(or any mental states) are simply events downstream from other events(epiphenomenal at best). There is no kink in the causal chain. We have complete and total explanatory power without appealing to agent causation.

Why did the meteor kill the dinosaurs? Did it "want" to? Did it "decide" to? "Ought" it have done otherwise? No! It did what it did because of the features of it's physical makeup interacting with the fixed laws of nature. But physicalists conveniently abandon this language when talking about humans they want to critique. They forget that they too(or more accurately their interlocutors), just like the meteor, behave in lawlike ways, whether our common language reflects this or not.

The problem here is that if there is a complete and total physical explanation for every action then the belief in determinism itself(an action) has simply a physical explanation and not an explanation along the lines of "I reasoned through 2 options using working memory and other executive functions to came to the conclusion that determinism is true". This is certainly not what happened. They were given one choice and one choice only. This undercuts the epistemic warrant for determinism itself.

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This post is full of assertions that almost no theist would accept and represents either a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of your interlocutors. You should attempt to make arguments your opponents would sign up for and respond to those arguments, not whatever it is you're doing here.

You seem to believe there is some deterministic set of rules that means that meteor was destined to strike the Earth. That is false.

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Agree to disagree. Unless you're saying there's "randomness" or something at the quantum level which may or may not be true, but irrelevant to the discussion we're having as the randomness itself is out of the control of the agent, or meteor, or whatever. From the perspective of a certain thing at a given time there is only 1 option available. Any preceding randomness is besides the point at a specific Time- T

Then correct me. Do Christians not believe that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus? If not, does that mean Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, Jews, atheists and others who reject the notion that Jesus is the messiah will be saved and go to heaven? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case; I’ve certainly had more than one “loving” Christian tell me that I’m damned to eternal
hellfire for being an atheist. Did Jesus actually appear elsewhere and elsewhere than 1st Century AD Judea? If so, where and when did he so appear? What evidence is there that he did so? How many Christians were there among native populations when European explorers began encountering them?

Or is not having heard of Jesus before you die a free pass into paradise? Is the difference that I’ve heard of him and reject him so I get tortured eternally while those who lived in 5th Century Canada get off free because they never did? Why is that by the way? Was your God unable to communicate with a world wide audience before humans invented mass communication methods? Most Christians maintain God is omnipotent, so that can’t be it. Why did God then not want 5th Century Canadians or 14th Century Australian Aborigines finding out about Jesus? If they get into paradise why does God love them more than someone like me who thinks critically and evaluates evidence for claims, rather than just believing what I’m told to believe because “faith”? Or if they don’t get into paradise, why not? Does God not love these (and many other) groups of people less than he loved Europeans who actually heard about Jesus?

TL;DR - if what I posted was wrong, how so? Why did Jesus only appear once and at one location? Why did God not communicate better? What happened to all the people who never heard of Jesus? What is your evidence for these answers?

And BTW, what I’m doing is critical thinking and making an argument of my own, rather than just parroting back doctrine that I’ve been taught by my parents or some other authority figure. You should try it some time. If I have misrepresented your individual belief in any way, I do apologize, but the beliefs I’ve used in my argument do seem to be ones that are pretty common among mainstream Christians, at least ones I have had the opportunity to communicate with.

How many questions do you think is fair to ask someone in one post? That was a lot... Either way your questions seem to boil down to "Why did God do x this way as opposed to that way" and the answer is that he wanted to, or it pleased him, or whatever. I'm not sure what other answer would even be logically possible.

Most of your toy scenarios as to what God ought to have done would directly threaten human agency, overwhelming humans with his presence could potentially threaten autonomy of the human agent(to drug a woman into loving me violates her agency and doesn't amount to anything like love) but admittedly this last part is controversial. The concern here isn't with what God is capable of doing. It's what God wanted to do.

Embedded within Christianity is the idea that if you look to the majority for what’s true and what’s real, then you get filtered out.

“Here is what the majority of Christians claim, so that means this is the full truth of the Christian story” -> death sentence

This is just false. It is a scientific fact that an electron exists as a probabilistic distribution around an atom and that uncertainty is intrinsic in our Universe.

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It is not a scientific fact. It is debated amongst the greatest thinkers in the world. Many physicists think there is an unabated causal chain flowing directly from the big bang. I've taken no side on the issue and don't need to. But even this fundamental indeterminacy were true the agent(or the meteor) is forced into taking x action due to features of the universe outside of their control, so it's irrelevant to my point. I'd recommend reading literally metaphysician on the issue if I'm not explaining it clearly because quantum indeterminacy is nothing more than a red herring on the issue of agent causation.

It clearly is a scientific fact. Like cause and effect isn't really in the equation when you are dealing with this. Just because something does happen does not meant that it was destined.

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Do you believe the Universe obeys superposition?

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Whether talking about ethics or about deterministic laws, human beings are unique.

When I violate an ethical boundary established by a lower will of God, or lower version of God, I’m not doing it through a will separate from God, as I already said. I’m doing it ontologically by unifying with a higher will of God or a higher version of God.

This means even when I’m rebelling against God, I’m simultaneously doing the will of God. This ability to choose is reconciled because I’m operating on two different ontological levels. It’s what makes humans unique from other objects in the universe which are determined.

Theosis, or the reunification with God, is an ontological journey. We are meant to know God at different levels of being.

The idea is something like you are ready for the next ontological level only when you are able to rebel against the current version of God. It’s like a father preparing his son for manhood by creating a rite of passage.

The journey is much more than just this, but this is part of it.

Can you give me an example of a human action that is uncaused by a previous chain of physical events?

An addict who fails over and over and over, but then goes through a transformation — this person made a choice at an ontological level even if they are not aware of it.

This is of course true but I also believe in free will in the libertarian sense. A determinist would be incoherent to express it in the way you just did though.

I’m a subjectivist so I don’t deny the truth of libertarian free will. From my current POV, I would say God only wants the fully free human being to choose to do his will.

This is a secondary argument. I have an argument for this but let's resolve the prior topic. The Universe is indeterminante and uncertainty is intrinsic.

Cause and effect implies that a pendulum should always follow the same path with the same initial conditions. A nonlinear pendulum has an indeterminant path. It is unique each time. Each time it runs, it is not destiny. It is just what is.

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"Yeah, I know the religions make up magical miracle supernatural stories over and over and over. But not mine."

Why is theirs the true one? Well, basically because it is the one they are in and they believe it. And this type of "answer" prevails across the thousands of groups.

All are mythological/fictional type stories posed as attempted explanations. Their claims of exclusivity of truth are no more valid than the religion itself, so that they all can be seen as a combined assault on the nature of things, mostly, of course, from an ignorant and superstitious framework pre-science.

We can keep and combine some of the sentiments of the various religions, and drop some of the barbaric immoralities. And hold it as a moral story, not as metaphysics. Amen.

Without the metaphysics you saw off the very branch you're sitting on. Without the metaphysics the morality you peddle is nonsensical. Without the imago Dei adjudicating between the behavior of deterministic matter as "moral" or "immoral" becomes absurd and arbitrary. The deal you offer is too expensive.

We contemplate and develop a system of morality ... just like we do a system of mathematics, medicine, engineering, etc. We don't posit a magic supernatural giver of mathematical truth and say any other system is dubious. No we think, learn, develop and evolve the system through contemplation. The presupposing god so you have an ultimate authority and don't have to learn or be responsible is bogus. We don't appeal to supernatural beings to understand any other field, so we don't do it with morality either. The argument from "We need an ultimate authority that we can never question" is bogus on its face.

Your position loses.