God FAQ

It seems that every time there is a debate over the existence of god, or the need for religion, theists seem to bring up the same (refuted) points over and over. I was thinking there must be some collection of arguments and rebuttals somewhere on the net? Could someone be kind enough to direct me to such a place?

>>87 >>89
Paragraph 1: Assumption that this god is logical in who he smites, and that he is not smart enough to do so sparingly enough to avoid detection.
Paragraph 2: Assumption that a god who can control nature would, for some completely insane reason, choose to do something glaringly physically impossible rather than make extremely subtle changes that lead to the same result.
As >>87 pointed out, if the act is adequately rare, you can't determine anything.  My original thought experiment consisted of God using lightning to kill your friend once, after which he subsequently never appears again.

All of these are the same ludicrous argument told time and time again: "God works in mysterious ways." The very process of shutting off your brain and submitting to religion.

Why are you thinking of our technology as static, as though we won't be able to improve it? Eventually it's conceivable that we'll be able to predict weather patterns completely; that we'll have a full and complete knowledge of the movement of air so as to predict lightning years in advance. What then? Will God simply stop using lightning to smite us?

Think about how your painfully stupid argument applies to prayer. People pray all the time to heal the sick, thinking they're helping. Scientists have done experiments where they observe, say, a thousand sick people; friends, family, relatives, entire congregations and communities pray for half of those that are sick. The other half go unmentioned. In all cases, there is always found to be no correlation whatsoever with prayer and recovery.

The logical conclusion would be to say that prayer has no effect. Right? Now think about what you're saying. Think about what your argument is here. You're literally saying that God explicitly chose to avoid helping those people for the sole purpose of confounding scientists. He'd have normally helped many of these highly religious people; yet he let many of them suffer and die just to fool a few meddling scholars, doing nothing more than seeking knowledge.

The utter, staggering idiocy of this argument boggles the mind. I can't even fathom how a person can believe such lunacy. If you honestly think this is what your God does, then how on earth can you possibly respect him?