Dr. Bart Ehrman v. Kyle Butt: Does Suffering Prove the God of the Bible Doesn’t Exist?
A captivating debate. It does begin to spin out of control come time for the question/answer session, especially when they get to the topic of moral prerogatives.
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book
Below are all my review of A Shot of Faith to the Head, a good book with a bad title:
Intro
Part 1: Is Belief in God Irrational?
Intermission: The Art of Rational Self-Defense
Part 2: Does Science Prove that God Does Not Exist?
Part 3: Does Evil Prove that God Does Not Exist?
Conclusion
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Conclusion
As Mitch Stokes reasoned in his book, there are three evidential reasons for why belief in God is rational:
_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Part 3: “Evil and Suffering Show There’s No God”
“Many of the atheists’ grievances are moral ones, founded upon an acute sense of ethical superiority,” says Stokes. Sometimes it’s not about science at all, or at least not primarily. Sometimes it’s about the heart. Atheists have decided that the world is not to their liking, and that it is either God’s fault, or he’s not real to begin with.
[See the last post on whether science proves God doesn’t exist]
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Part 2: “Science Has Shown There is No God”
An official statement from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences:
“Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.”
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Intermission—Argumentation and Defense
“Objections”
But wait. Aren’t we ultimately saying, if we follow the line of reasoning from our previous post, that the Christian definition of faith is belief without evidence? Recall that everyone operates on faith of some sort. Also recall that not in every field does absence of evidence prove evidence of absence.
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_A Shot of Faith To The Head_: Bad Title, Great Book: Part 1: “Belief in God is Irrational”
Evidence
Mitch Stokes is bold. He begins his “shot” into our heads by challenging the notion that rational beliefs must be supported by evidence, a belief known as evidentialism. This might at first sound like a bad move, as if to say to tell Sherlock Holmes that you just have to believe you know who stole the diamond, and that’s ok. But retrace the steps of human reasoning. Go quiz the philosophers (and even the scientists) on this issue. We have always used reason as long as we have used writing, and earlier. What is evidence, though? And how does it factor into our reasoning? Is it just a matter of things that are there for us to find, things that obviously point the way toward true things, so long as we are rational? Simply put,
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My brother bought it for me as a Christmas gift, this book I had never heard of, A Shot of Faith to the Head, by Mitch Stokes. It was an accidental discovery, for him and for me. I didn’t know it would become a book that I would want to hold on to, one that surprisingly bolstered a faith in the very existence of God I already thought was solid enough.
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CALEB COY 