You can’t debate with a religious person because faith isn’t based on logic, “god” means anything and everything, the Pope is infallible, the Bible is absolute truth.
No one can debate under those circumstances. The debate rules only apply to the atheist, not the Christian. Case in point.
C: Complex things require a designer.
A: Who designed God?
C: God doesn’t need a designer.
Atheists foolish enough to engage in this non-debate deserve what they get. Dinesh is an expert in this stuff.
So logic, rightly understood, teaches that the world is self-existent and meaningless? Your being on FR isn't a very good witness to the ultimate meaninglessness of everything. Why not be a true Epicurean, quite worrying about ideology, enjoy the sunsets, avoid suffering, etc.?
BTW, I believe atheism has no place on Free Republic.
I disagree.
From the earliest instant, when even time itself had just come into being, the symmetry of the creation event was broken, and nuclear strong and weak/electromagnetic forces somehow therein also gave rise to gravitation which, though exceptionally weak by the other three, nonetheless gradually coalesced their parts into various galactic types and structures.
As we live in one out of billions of those spiral galaxies, two thirds of the way out from its dense center between whirling arms which are relatively debris and dust free; where metals are fairly well concentrated, but rarer in the Milky Way’s outer reaches…. Where too, were we further in, we wouldn’t be able to see the universe outside.
That we live in the habitable zone of a single G2V star, in a system with a large outer planet to sweep up a considerable amount of debris that might otherwise be drawn to the inner solar system and collide with Earth.
That we have a magnetic field which protects us from too much cosmic and solar radiation, and allows us too – geometrically by the more distant stars – to navigate around our planet. That we have a moon massive enough to stabilize our planetary axis, giving us tides, the seasons, and which perhaps also couples gravitationally to assist plate tectonics in recycling our oceanic crust and mantle, yielding a balance of nitrogen/oxygen and carbon dioxide to our atmosphere. That the laws of physics at both the macro- and micro levels should be so fine tuned - and unified! - allowing these processes to be carried out at all.
That we are alive in such a system!
The odds of just these, even omitting myriad other "coincidences" make it seem - to me - somehow inconceivable that there isn’t God who – being God sets the values of good and evil, and cares that we should prefer that Good.
"If I knew God I’d be Him." Though I’ll take Pascal’s Bet that He’s there.