Dr. Victor Reppert Is Our Gullible Person of the Day, Part 3

This is the final post of three on Victor Reppert, our ignorant gullible person of the day. [See the "Gullible" tag below.] Reppert again, about the gaps to god argument:
Look, when I raise this kind of question, I mean show us by providing evidence. Yes, God could sovereignly perform the act of causing Loftus to believe by going "Loftus, believe," and the next Sunday, Loftus will show up in church on his knees praying to God. But providing evidence is by definition not coercive. Of course God could shove belief in his existence down your throat if he wanted to. But could he give us a good reason to believe in his existence, such that no matter how disinclined we were to want to believe in a being greater than ourselves (so that we would have to admit we were not the supreme beings) whose commandments to us are our moral duties (however much we would like to avoid performing them). Wouldn't there be an escape clause available, no matter what we did?
Reppert says he has reservations about coercive belief, that his god only wants non-coercive belief. For one thing I don't see anyone refusing to believe in Reppert's god because he's bigger than they are. What utter indoctrinated ignorance that is!! Would Reppert say he rejects the existence of Allah due to the fact Allah is bigger than he is? I do however, see a good reason to disbelieve in any god that has commanded and taught the kinds of morality ISIS does, which can also be found in this religion. Any god that allows or commands or regulates slavery, or allows or commands or regulates how that women are to be treated as chattel, is not one I could stomach, much less believe.

Perhaps more to the point of non-coercive belief, if Reppert's god coerced belief in Moses, the Egyptian Pharaoh, Gideon, doubting Thomas, or Paul on the Damascus Road, which the Bible says he did without abrogating their free wills, then he could do it again and again. Surely Reppert knows of Theodore Drange's argument (from memory) that if there are people who want to know the truth it's not coercive to provide them with what they want. I find it extremely difficult to accept the faith-based claim that only a small number of people want to know the truth, such that only evangelicals like Reppert receive the needed evidence to believe.

Reppert one more time:
The so-called refutation of God of the Gaps reasoning provides this, it seems to me. It says we should always prefer an unknown naturalistic explanation to saying godidit, NO MATTER WHAT. This not only could be applied to our present scientific situation, but it could be used in response to every scenario that atheists come up with concerning what it would take for them to believe. "Turn or burn, Parsons This Means You," N. R. Hanson's Michelangeloid face, answer the prayers of all Christians and give them all exactly what they want, have Bibles that give electric shocks to unbelievers and only unbelievers, etc. If God were to cause any or all of these things, the skeptic could still say that saying godidit for any and all of these things would be to commit the god of the gaps fallacy, and that we should always, always, always, prefer an unknown naturalistic explanation to a known supernatural one. Shoot, there's a guy in Dante's inferno who remains a materialist and doesn't believe he's been damned.
Note that Reppert said,
It says we should always prefer an unknown naturalistic explanation to saying godidit, NO MATTER WHAT. This not only could be applied to our present scientific situation, but it could be used in response to every scenario that atheists come up with concerning what it would take for them to believe.
Well now, this faith claim of his is massively ignorant. In the very thread he commented I had linked to several atheist answers as to what would convince us to believe. I titled it, What Would Convince Atheists To Become Christians?; The Definitive Answers! These posts are written by atheists Daniel Bastian, Greta Christina, Adam Lee and myself. My essay was written ten years ago in 2007, which I expanded on for my magnum opus. Repeatedly I have linked to it in response to Vic saying these same things over and over. Between the time I first wrote it and the 3-4 times a year I link to it in response to Vic, he has been confronted by it repeatedly. Yet he still spits out the same ignorant nonsense above, and it is indeed ignorant nonsense. For me it's like a worn out song played over and over until one gets nauseous when hearing it again. So let me directly link to what I wrote ten years ago once again, HERE. Never let Reppert say such things again, for the gaps to god argument gets little or no traction in our atheist essays.

On June 17th 2010 Reppert even admits to having read my essay RIGHT HERE. But no mention of it in his comment above, or that he is wrong to say such things again, or no change in his claim:
It says we should always prefer an unknown naturalistic explanation to saying godidit, NO MATTER WHAT. This not only could be applied to our present scientific situation, but it could be used in response to every scenario that atheists come up with concerning what it would take for them to believe.
This folks, is an example of willful ignorance, in which he's either lying or his subconscious brain is lying to his conscious brain, telling his conscious brain he never saw or read such things. With a brain like that Reppert should stop pretending to know things he cannot know. It's an obvious case of willful ignorance. So there are other cases. He should join with knowledgeable people who have become skeptical people due to their knowledge and eschew faith-based reasoning by becoming more skeptical of his indoctrinated faith. He should see exactly what atheists are saying about science and a good place to begin is with my anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World's Largest Religion. Perhaps that will be the book providing him the knowledge to break free from his indoctrination, who knows? But he won't read it. It's not his specialty, you see. So he'll remain a laughingstock like other ignorant Christian apologists, and they are all ignorant, as I've said.

0 comments: