Oh come on Xianity. Give me a break.

How am I supposed to know these answers are reliable when the name of this all knowing text box is not revealed?

What?

1. Of course the reply to Plantinga is that neither our senses nor our sciences give us truths about nature.

They can give us highly informative falsehoods. (Mathematics provides no inviolable empirical truths; it provides no empirical propositions at all.)

In accordance with Tarski’s semantic definition of truth: df (‘p’ is true if and only if p), how we (know that p) can only be ascertained by the testing procedures belonging to the methodological procedures of the relevant sciences. As long as p resists falsification then ‘p’ is accorded the always honorary accolade (‘p’ is true).

But no testing procedure can determine that any proposition is true without exception. There is no induction -- there are no laws of nature -- there are no concepts in nature -- science is a cultural construct, a very peculiar construct but that’s another matter.

2. As for the xian religion, the Jesus figure (and even more so the Pauline Christ) is a mythological construct -- no better and perhaps worse than Perigrinus in Lucian’s delightful tale and certainly inferior to the entertaining, deified Heracles.

Jesus is either a fiction made of whole cloth like Heracles or Sherlock Holmes or Batman or he was a minor historical figure enlarged into Christos by the hysterical minds of Paul of Tarsus and the writer of the material which later appeared as the so-called Gospel of Mark.

The mythological enlargement of Siddharta Gautama into the Buddha of the Dharmapada and later into a Buddha figure of the Diamond Sutra should be a less anxiety fraught mental journey for Western apologists of xianity to deal with.

the anti-supernaturalist

Nernoff: I have read the Bible carefully, especially the New Testament. Paul says your faith is in vain if you do not believe in the Resurrection.

I am a retired pathologist, and was board-certified in forensic pathology. Therefore I have some expertise to analyze the claims presented by the New Testament with regard to the alleged resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

First, to be resurrected from the dead, one must be first, indeed dead. Was any EVIDENCE brought forth in the case of Jesus that he was indeed dead? No.

The reports of the case of Jesus were by anonymous writers whose original writings were long ago lost. We have only copies of copies of copies of the assumed originals. Even these reports indicate that Jesus was on the cross for a mere 3-6 hours, far short of what historically was need to produce a death by crucifixion, and even there, in the "Holy" scripture, there is disagreement of the number of hours supposedly suffered.

There is only the CONCLUSION that Jesus was dead. There are no medical findings such as:

1. Rigor mortis
2. Livor mortis.
3. A body temperature reading indicating cessation of metabolism.
4. A determination of the lack of reflexes: corneal irritation causing an eye blink. Muscle reflexes by hammering certain areas such as the patellar area causing a kicking reflex, an so on....
5. Obviously a total lack of radiologic studies such as CT or PET scans to show lack of brain activity. If "God" could produce a universe, he could have made a scanning device to aid the disciples in determining whether a body was indeed dead.
6. Sludging of red cells (erythrocytes) in retinal blood vessels.
7. An EEG reading showing total lack of electrical brain activity.
8. Lack of breathing.
9. An absent heart beat.
10. And so forth....

The fact that none of these findings (or rather lack of findings) was specifically listed in the accounts of Jesus alleged death on the cross shows that the story reveals only an ASSUMPTION or CONCLUSION (by an unidentified centurion) that he died, and totally lacks any evidence that he actually was dead. No death no resurrection. Your faith is in vain. Christianity is bogus.

The argument that nothingness can obtain, that it is or was, necessarily relies on assigning it an identity or ontological status. It tries to accomplish this by using the verb to be. Attempts to word it otherwise will still rely on it implicitly. We call that use of the verb the is of identity. Anyway, that argument reifies nothingness (the absence of ontological status) into a positive something (the presence of ontological status) and therefore contradicts itself.

Another use of the verb, called the is of predication, also causes problems when applied to nothingness. You can only assign predicates to things with an ontological status, which means that this form of the verb can also reify nothingness into a positive something. The ham sandwich argument illustrates this point. (Axiom) nothing is better than God; (axiom) a ham sandwich is better than nothing; (ergo) a ham sandwich is better than God. The first axiom reifies nothingness by using the is of predication by assigning it an ontological status. Those who argue that "nothingness is a possible state" appeal to the same fallacious reasoning.

On the contrary, simple observation suggests that the universe is not well suited to life such as ours.

I think it's a bit relative. In terms of the equations governing the universe, there might not be much wiggle room in the parameters & initial conditions for life to appear eventually. In other words, this universe is about the most fortunate you could get from plugging values into the overarching equations. (Of course, when you bring in other possible world structures, such as cellular automata, things get a little twisted.)

Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle).

Uh, that depends first on whether there was any "coming" done at all, which seems unverifiable/unfalsifiable to me. This reminds me of the humorous deduction that a ham sandwich is better than God. (NotExist(X: X>God) & Sandwich>Nullset => Nullset>God ?)

Why is there something rather than nothing? - What makes everyone think there was ever any kind of event that decided between the two? It's absurd to posit a deciding factor because that factor must itself be "something" and would have decided its own existence! Therefore, the existence of "something" is just a brute fact which is not contingent upon any other fact.

Please explain how matter, life, brains and moral senses come from an immaterial mind source.

This relies on a false dichotomy; if the atheist cannot provide a great answer, the theist expects to win by default.

Ask yourself whether the theists have given a satisfactory answer to this. So God created everything else. That doesn't answer the question, it just transforms it into why is there God instead of nothing? What remains is just as difficult.

I have an invisible pink unicorn in my hand. What, you don't see it? Ha! That proves it's invisible!