Aurenkin ,

No worries, take your time to reply. I appreciate the detailed post. Let me get into it the best that I can to see if I can articulate my position on what you presented here.

I don't know if it's worth getting into Pascal's wager too deeply. If you're going to buy into that reasoning I think the logical thing to do is not to believe the bible, but to believe in the religion with the worst possible hell. Either way it's not a method for determining what's true or not.

I actually disagree with you when you say we have medium to poor quality evidence for a god and no evidence of no god. Once again it comes back to the burden of proof. We don't have evidence that there are no dragons, because that's not something you can prove and the burden is to provide evidence of the positive claim that there are dragons. I'd also like to clarify my position, I don't claim to know that there's no God, I actually don't make any claims as an atheist, I'm simply not convinced that there is a god because I don't think there is any evidence to warrant such a belief.

Hopefully that helps to clarify my stance a bit. Now as to why I don't find your reasoning there compelling, it seems like you are using the bible to prove the bible. Or in other words assuming the bible is true, and basing your arguments on that at least when it comes to the resurrection claims. As far as I'm aware and please do correct me if I'm wrong here, we don't have any first hand accounts from disciples of the resurrection, with the possible exception of Paul. The gospels themselves are anonymously written texts claiming that these people witnessed a resurrection, and I find it far more likely that they are inaccurate rather than someone rose from the dead and ascended to a heaven which requires quite a lot of assumptions.

To summarise, I believe you are missing another possibility which is that the bible itself is a fictional work even if some of the people may have existed historically, and as such does not count as a claim from the disciples of Jesus because they did not write it. To be honest I even think aliens is even a more plausible explanation anyway than a god existing, but I think what I outlined here is the much more likely explanation unless I'm mistaken in any of my assertions.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by making a case for life on Earth. Maybe it comes down to what I said in an earlier comment about some God's being logically inconsistent and therefore actually in a way disprovable because the claim is not internally consistent. Personally I believe the Christian god falls into that category along with any other claim of an all knowing, all loving and all powerful God. That said, I'm not claiming anything, simply rejecting the claim that a God exists which is why I didn't go down that line if reasoning.

As I said, I don't find the evidence to be satisfactory, in fact for me personally it's pretty far from satisfactory for such a huge claim but I'm also happy to dig more into my specific criticisms of why I don't think the Christian God is logically consistent if that's of interest to you.

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