Challenge to atheists, God Argument, debate me

fund filled friday

If you recall last time I posted a prolegomena to an argument from laws of nature. In other words, an argument for existence of God based upon laws of physics and nature. That article was just thinking getting ready to make such an argument, Here I am making it. I encourage the reader to go back and read the article fist if you haven't already. The point is two fold:  the folks on Secular Outpost were so dubious of any such argument  and the presentation that set them off so deserved their ire (designed by Campus Crusade for Christ) [1], that I felt like I had to try to (a) prove to the atheists there is a potential argument there and show my fellow Christians how to find it, at to offer  direction in which to move.

The bad argument on the website was purely a "god of the gaps" argument:

How is it that we can identify laws of nature that never change? Why is the universe so orderly, so reliable?"The greatest scientists have been struck by how strange this is. There is no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone one that abides by the rules of mathematics. This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn't have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence."[2]

The only rational upon which the argument turns is the mystery concerning how laws work. That is a god of the gaps argument by definition, textbook. My arguments begins by stating a rational that, while it may hard to prove, is at least not a gap in knowledge, at least not only a gap. The problem with gaps is that they close up. Yet if we can demonstrate that mind is a more solid basis for the seeming law-like regularity of the universe that night make for a better explanation.[3] The argument:

1) mind is the most efficient and dependable source of ordering we know,

(2) Random ordering is usually inefficient and the odds are against it's dependability.

(3) The Universe Displays a Law-like efficiency and dependability in the workings of it's natural machinations.

(4) Such efficiency and dependability is indicative of mind as ordering principle (from 1,3), therefore, it is logical to assume mind as the best explanation for the dependability of the universe..

(5) A mind that orders the universe fits the major job description for God, Thus mind is the best explanation, assuming the choices are mind vs random chance.

\

 the background for this argument is a post I did here last May Day.


[1] Bradly Bowen, Adamson's Cru [de] Arguments for God part 1, Secular Outpost, (April 25, 2016) blog URL:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/04/25/adamsons-crude-arguments-for-god-part-1/
accessed April 28, 2016

[2] Marlyn Adamson, "Is There a God," Every Student, Published by Campus Crusade for Christ
On line resource, URL: http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html
She sites fn 11:Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about Christianity; (Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2007, chapter

[3] I recently posted on criteria by which to judge best explanation.
 

 

FFF:Klatoo Nicto Acharya: Fun with Jesus mythers

Thank God it's Fun Filled Friday! what could be more fun than the loveable antics of the Jesus myth crowd?

Acharya S: "Well, I can tell you I've had beings around me too and they are telling me to put this information out there.

J.P. Holding sent me this file on Acharya S, Jesus myth apologist, based upon his own experiences in dealing with her.

When, I first came across the work of Acharya S in an article by Glenn Miller that dealt with the assertion that the Gospels borrow from pre-Christian pagan mythology (http://www.christian-thinktank.com/copycat.html), it was already under heavy fire. Glenn pointed out that Acharya does not use any recent scholarly works or deal with the primary sources on the lives of the god-men that allegedly provided the framework for the story of Christ. He went on to investigate the Acharya's list of similarities, and came to the conclusion that her work was extremely erroneous.

I followed the link to her site that he provided, and came across her e-mail address so I decided to send her a letter. After stating that her work was "interesting", and that I had a few questions concerning some of it that I'd like her to address point-by-point, I sent her an excerpt from and a link to Glenn's site. I received no response from Acharya S. I did however receive this letter from a friend of Acharya named Lee, insisting that I disregard Glenn's work because Glenn is a Christian:

Acharya sent me the following question of yours. She is quite busy.

What else do you expect a Christian to say? Beliefs need to be justified, don't they. Use your head.

If you are trying to decide whether to buy a Honda or A Buick, do you go to the Honda dealer and ask him about Buicks, or vice versa?

No way, Jose, not unless you are braindead and stupid.

I do a lot of research on the Old Testament, and New Testament, especially the definitions of the Hebrew words and the transliterations into Greek. I will never go to a Christian or Jewish source for definitions, never that is the road to stupidity. I really solely on secular academic sources, because they are the least biased.
However if you have a need to believe, in anything, then you will believe and all you will look for and acknowledge are arguments which will salvage your beliefs. On the other hand if you know that we live in a world of Borg or Serpents People (groups of people controlled by words) then you know instinctively that you can't trust the words of Word Controlled Humans, or the Borg.The question is then personal to you. Are you an individually sovereign person, who is in charge of your own personal cosmology, your own identity, your own thoughts, your own ability to reason or think, or are you a braindead part of a hive, a collective of Borg.

Lee Markland who is not a drone.

After weeks of arguing with Lee, I decided to end the correspondence due to her inability to directly address any of the points Glenn had made. She apparently thought it was enough to plagiarize anti-Christian rants from skeptical web-sites and tell pornographic jokes about Jesus. I e-mailed Acharya, informing her of the red herrings and intemperate remarks made by her friend, but received no response. Having lost all hope of communicating with Acharya, I decided to buy her book, The Christ Conspiracy, to see if maybe there she could support any of the claims made on her web-site. Her book, especially the list of "savior gods", was not even as well documented as her web-site and I found the majority of the information to be either ridiculously out of date or just plain ridiculous. After running into several skeptics who described her as "brilliant" and her book as "the truth about Christianity", I decided to beg JP Holding to put her up in the Rogue's Gallery. Though he felt Acharya's work was not even worthy of a response, I mailed him the book and told him about all of the skeptics I had come across who were buying into it. He agreed to rogue her, even if just for the sake of humor.

A few weeks later, a friend of mine sent me the following link to an audio file of Acharya's appearance on the show "Sightings" hosted by Jeff Rense. This can be found at

http://www.audionet.com/shows/endoft...05/end0527.ram

Towards the last quarter of the show, a caller is discussing the existence of "alien beings", and Acharya makes what I thought were some rather interesting admissions. The conversation is as follows:

Caller: "I wanna tell the lady that I think there's a heavy..uh…extraterrestrial connection..ummm…involved with a lot of our ancient activities. Um, I believe a lot of its missed...um…in relation to missing information or information they just weren't given but but you can't deny the fact of...um…eyewitness accounts throughout the Bible and extra-biblical texts…especially uh, the apocryphal texts…involved with beings who have hair white like wool and eyes like flames, because um…eh…they are throughout our history and um, they have some integral part they're playing…involved with various different religions. Uh, there's too much of them seen…and uh um…involved with the high priests of various different religions, to be just a myth, because um…uh…if you read the Jewish Kabballah…uh, it talks of seven planets with seven cultures there. One of em called Thebel (sp?), which is a sun in our solar system…far away from the sun. Uh, all these things are written down and somebody had to give them the information. There's just too many eyewitness accounts that there's definitely a connection there!"

Acharya S: "Well, I don't know what you mean by eyewitness accounts but uh…quite a few of the artifacts that people are taking to be…um…alien visitation…uh…legends, like for example there's the story of Ezekiel. He's describing…when he talks about the wheel within the wheel…he's talking about the zodiac. Ok, so if you're gonna be looking for characters, the first thing you have to realize however is that many of the myths that we're discussing do record astronomy and astrology. Now as far as other influences upon those stories, that's another factor. I have not denied that there have been contact with strange entities. I think there's definitely been so. In the Tibetan world, they claim on-going contact with people who live inside Venus…Venusians."

Caller: "What about the…even if you look at the book of Revelation the first chapter there…as John turns around, and he knows its, for instance Jesus, he says 'Aha'…and the being says 'Aha, its me…yes I am, the one…the hair white like wool and the eyes like flames'..The same thing with the book of Enoch, when Noah was born…"

Acharya: "Ok the eyes of flame and the white wool is the sun, itself. So the whole book of Revelation is basically Zoroastrian and its astronomical. Much of what's being described in there is interplayed in the heavens."

Caller: "Ok Mohammed also met one of them in a cave…a similar type of being. And also in the book of Isaiah, Daniel…all the extra-biblical texts talk of the same type of beings and other cultures talk of the same type of beings. I'm wondering how they all would describe the same thing…"

Acharya: "Well, I can tell you I've had beings around me too and they are telling me to put this information out there. So I'm not disagreeing that there are beings. But it takes a great deal of knowledge and refinement of that knowledge to realize what you're looking at and unfortunately most people don't have the platform from which to be viewing this information necessarily. So they…there's all kinds…The speculation that starts getting in becomes quite tortured…"

Caller: "Can I say one more thing?"

Host: "Sure"

Caller: "Um…I have a…um…family history of…a very interesting family background and um… uh, my biological mother had an actual contact with one of these beings and the information she was giving was quite astounding. So..in my…the only thing coming from is I absolutely know that they're real. So, anybody can take that for what it's worth. What I'm telling you…as far as I'm concerned, I know they're absolutely real and the things that I know of are absolutely astounding…so we should uh…There may be myth…There may be myth in everything else but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm…that I can tell you….that they are absolutely real."

Acharya: "Well, I think I just said that I have also experienced many beings, many many times."

It seemed to me that Acharya was speaking about alien "beings" here, as was the caller. I provided the link, and showed the transcript to a fan of hers, and he immediately ran back to her asking what she had meant. He first reported that Acharya claims she was just joking about the "beings", but when I questioned him about the fact that no one else on the show seemed to think so, he claimed that the "beings" she was referring to are human "beings", i.e., her friends. Somehow, the new explanation just didn't square with the language she uses in the interview so I decided to e-mail her anonymously and ask her myself. This was her response:

…concerning the "beings" business. I've gotten a few messages concerning the idiotic and retarded claims of my detractors, who have no credibility. Nor do they have any true spirituality or empathy. That comment was made on Jeff Rense's show, "Sightings." It is truly pitiful that these morons could listen to that interview and remain fixated on that one comment, entirely unaffected by all the profound information I relayed. They are really sick. My point was that I could feel the suffering of all those who were hideously tortured and murdered in the name of this disgusting ideology and its repulsive godman. I spent the first decade of my life literally barfing over man's inhumanity to man and other creatures. That is the reason why I do what I do: I am extremely empathetic, and I feel for people all over the world, as well as for those who have died horribly. Such is a true spiritual experience, which these chowderheads think they're having with their garbagey cartoon character god. In any case, I don't believe in anything, including that there are only three dimensions. I've had many experiences in other dimensions, which is why I am not a hardcore skeptic.

First of all, Acharya didn't relay any "profound information" on this show. She simply read the same old erroneous list of god-men and their alleged attributes out of her book. Secondly, this explanation is extremely hard to swallow, as it would be completely out of context in the conversation with the caller. Regardless of what it was she actually meant, from the quality of her work and statements like those above, it seems obvious that we are not dealing with a "scholar", as she refers to herself, but someone who has spent too much time in the New Age section at her local bookstore. I'm not sure what kind of scholarly standards exist in the other realms Acharya visits. But here in this dimension, its necessary that she provide the primary sources that predate Christianity to establish the alleged borrowing she insists the early Christians engaged in to create their "garbagey cartoon character god."

Bottom line: Though I feel like I'm (pick one) a) calling in the Air Force to take out a fly; b) using Excalibur to lance a boil on the face of modern Biblical Scholarship; c) using a shotgun to break a pinata, I leave it to my friend, J.P. Holding, to reduce Acharya's laughable theories to rubble, and her mindless fans to the quivering amoeba they are. Of course, she'll never know it happened. This is the same woman who accused Glenn Miller of "turning wheels" in response to his devastating refutation of her work on the dying and rising gods. Needless to say, the S doesn't stand for Smart. I will thoroughly enjoy watching Acharya's wacky would-be scholarship get thrown to the lions of Tekton Apologetics.

Fun Filled Friday: My Zen Bigfoot Sighting: The Time I did NOT see a BF

Patty Patterson

Since I did the Review of Boggy Creek recently, I thought it would be fun to tell my own Bigfoot story, or non story. The time I did not see one. What's so fun about that? First it was at summer camp. secondly, I did not see it but I was with those who saw something, I can tell by their reaction it was something that scared the hell out of them. Now this is an absolutely true story but I don't know what they saw and I have always wondered. I'll never know. I male light of it but it is serious. Nevertheless pull up a campfire, make some smores and here we go:

Summer of 1967 I was 11 years old. Summer camp with my twin brother, Ray. We were at a church camp at Lake Texoma. Between Texas and Oklahoma, on the red river, Back then it was very remote. Just for comparison they did pull a hoax. It was badly done we knew it was the counselors dressed as aliens. Lights hooked up to car battery on the hill at night was a landing space ship. It was fun it was "gott'cha" and "you should have seen your face." The situation after the nature walk was very different,. Rather than a gott'cha moment it was a "we don't talk about that" moment.

Every evening after our hilariously fun day, swimming, arts and crafts, sneaking into the bushes to smoke, I would go to edge of the light right by the woods just before lights out. I was also considering baptism (I was baptized in Lake Texoma that summer). One night I heard something. It was distant so that I wasn't sure I heard it, it was out of place I had to notice. It was fait and distant, a scream. It sounded like a woman screaming. I heard it again the next night this time a bit clearer and closer to camp. The next day I heard kids teasing another kid. I learned they were mocking him because the claimed to have heard a woman screaming in the woods. I told them that I heard it. We all agreed it was probably a bob cat. At least probably not the same woman screaming every night. There were no bob cats around there but we had no concept of Bigfoot. I had never heard of it, no idea such a thing was rumored to exist.

The next day they lined up the boys and we all went single file in to the woods on a nature hike. We saw the remains of the car battery from the great invasion hoax. We walked into a little path through the woods. In those days Lake Texoma was remote. There's big town now but there was nothing there then. It was surrounded by woods for miles. We walked down the path, trees on both sides. There was a little incline you go down, then a rise then broke into a clearing. I estimate we might have been 150 yards or 200 maybe into the woods.

They stopped us in the depression and told us to inspect the nature around u. The counselors kept going up to the clearing and looking at something and talking among themselves. Eventually I had began to realize we were stopped a long time. They were deliberating a lot and they seemed worried about something. I kept saying "what's taking so long?" First they said they had to check something out. Then that they had to make sure conditions were right. Finally when I asked again they said there was something they could not explain and that when this guy came (call him Dan) he would know. Apparently Dan grew up in that area, his last name was Boone. Not really but he was a regular Daniel Boone.

They just would not say what was confusing them, But they said they needed someone who knew a lot about the woods. I was so intrigued because they were being so mysterious. I told them that I knew all about the woods. I lied. But they did let me go up and see "it." This other guy went too. He said we had to get down, hide behind the bush and don't get out in the clearing and look over across it. I saw nothing. He kept saying be quite. I said what am I looking for? he said "you will know when you see it. I kept telling him I didn't see it so he looked and said it moved. We went back and I kept demanding to know what it was. They looked so worried. They were nervous. They said there was something and could not tell if it was a man or an animal. This just meant nothing. How could such a thing be? What the hell were they talking about?

Finally Daniel Boone came, took one look and said something half whispered to the head guy, I heard it. He said "we need to get these kids back to camp immediately. and don't make any noise." They told us to go in single file, and no noise, then marched us back. To the end of camp they would not let us talk bout it. Every time my brother or I brought it up they would say "Mr. (head guy) says not to talk about that. We never did any more nature walks. No one was allowed to go into the woods. At one point I snuck off to see for myself. Got half way back to the spot but chickened out.

We drove home,Ray and I, with a woman who worked in the kitchen and was a friend of my mother's. It was a large Church and everyone at the camp had some connection with it. On the trip hoe there was also one of the counselors. Most of the way back he talked to the woman about why he didn't believe in the Vietnam war. Ray and I found that interesting. There was a ou8l and suddenly Ray says "hey what was the deal with that nature walk? why did we have to turn back?" I said, "yea, we are not at camp now Mr. (so and so) can't control what we say here." The counselor said "we finally decided it was a naked hobo." A naked hobo? When he said "finally decided" that reminded me and I said "why would it be hared to tell if it was human? They said they couldn't tell if it was a man or an animal." He said "He was real tall and covered with hair, real hairy like all over his body, and he had no clothes." Ray said "so what makes it as hobo?" He said it "he walked on two legs and had hands." He also said it was trying to sleep under a tree most of the time but they did see it get up and move around a bit. So when I looked it was moving around.

After we got back I told our friend Barry about it. I've kept in touch with Barry all my life, and to this this day he remembers ,he remembers me telling him about it. So it's not just a reconstructed memory. I still have no idea what it was. I just excepted that it was a large harry hobo. Put it out of my mind, though I did think that sounded fishy. For one thing why were we forbidden to talk about it? What is so hush-hush abut a hairy hobo? I guess it was latter that summer the Patterson film came out. I saw it n the news and immediately thought "I wonder if that's what they saw?" But dismissed it because hen I asked my father he said if they exist they are only in the northwest like northern California, He didn't believe they existed. He grew up hunting the woods of East Texas and never heard of such a thing.

Flash up to 1972 the first feature lengthy documentary about Big foot was shown in theaters. We went to see it, my brother, parents and I. Because I had never connected it with Bigfoot I had put it out of my mind. I was not thinking about that when we went to the movie. The movie was called "Bigfoot: Neither Msn nor Beast." I did not find the topic particularly scary but when I got home I was terrified. I was afraid to go to my room alone. I was shaking. A deep-seated blind unreasoning fear settled on me and I was afraid that a Bigfoot was going to look in my window. I knew it was stupid. I kept thinking "I know there4 can't be a Bigfoot outside my house in the middle of Dallas, even if they exist, which they probably don't." At school one of my teachers and a couple of kids see it and through mocking it with them I was able to just forget it. I wonder if the title "neither man nor beast" didn't trigger a latent fear due to the phrase "can't tell if it's a man or an animal.".

I forgot about until years latter. Way up in the early ought's I had not though about it in 30 years, my brother and I mocked Bigfoot people and called belief in Big foot "wacy." I was one day looking at Bigfoot stuff on the net for fun and found a sighting at Lake Texoma and that reminded me of that event; do I believe in Bigfoot? What day is it? Friday? No my BF believing days are Tuesday/Thursday. I drought that they exist but I'm open to the possibility. I have researched it, the evidence is just good enough to justify looking. The bigfoot searchers are just silly enough to make it doubtful..