Nancey Murphy - Arguments for Atheism?

Turn the tables on God’s existence. Start with atheism, not with theism. Atheists take their best shots at disproving God; theists in turn defend God, deflecting anti-God arguments. Atheists come harder still; theists resist, fight back. We keep the arguments tough-minded and the thinking critical.

Nancey Murphy is a philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the BA from Creighton University in philosophy and psychology, a PhD from University of California, Berkeley in philosophy of science, and a ThD from the Graduate Theological Union.

Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[HassanRadwan]

I'm not an Atheist, but her arguments were poor.

[DJH]

What I'm hearing is "I don't like reality so I'm going to make up stuff that makes me feel good".

[E-mergent]

The 1st minute: Anyone not convinced that her god exists, or not convinced that this god has set down a universal purpose for everyone, or not convinced that this world is the first stage of her god's plan for 'a new earth', then they are by definition guilty of "circular logic", and so can be "very easily dismissed"?

Has she ever considered that arrogant, illogical, unsupported claims and accusations only work when preaching to the choir?

[rickwyant]

I'm not getting any closer to the truth.

[josephdragan]

These are some of the weakest arguments made for theism. There are so many more convincing lines of reasoning for the existence of a god, and I say this as a life long atheist.

[pjaworek]

Where are the arguments for atheism? Another misnamed CTT episode.

[brothermine]

Why not focus on the scantness of the evidence that God exists and the scantier evidence that God intervenes, and the faith required by theism & religion due to the paucity of evidence? In particular, the faith about properties of God that make it something to spend time worshipping and praying to. If a person demanded to be worshipped, we would agree s/he is narcissistic and evil.

[TrejoDuneSea]

What's the difference between a supernatural claim, and a fictional story? How do you tell the difference? Is there even a way?

[jamescoolkid]

Is it just me, or is this woman, speaking word salad, apparently making things up as she goes along.

[CesarClouds]

Neither of the two have a good grasp of atheism, it's a position regarding the existence of a deity and not about cosmology.

[cvedeler]

Theism begs the question "what is God?" To argue for something to exist or not implies we have, at least some idea, of what God is. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of different interpretations of the nature of God. Which one are we arguing for or against? Does God have a human like personality as is depicted in the Bible? Does God intervene with the universe if we pray? Or does God simply set the Universe into motion and then steps back and lets it play out according to the natural laws put in place in the beginning? Is God and the Universe synonymous? I don't think there are too many serious people who believe in Zeus anymore. Most Christians today don't believe in the same God as the early Christians who literally believed that God lived in the sky. So clearly most peoples idea of God has evolved over the centuries. So which God are we arguing for or against? Some are easily disproven, while others more difficult given our current scientific understanding of the Universe.

The theist / atheist debate is so ripe with confusion. Until we define our core terms, the whole debate is pointless.

[HJM]

Her whole argument:
You can’t tell me I’m wrong
😑
Argh

[robnorwood]

God came to Earth as Jesus and failed his mission to convert the heathen, and must come again to get it right, is by definition a circular argument.
It's just white noise.

[emergentform]

To me, the presumption that there is NO god is just as silly as the presumption that there IS one (in the personal/human god sort of sense, I mean). We have no real evidence for the existence of gods, and it's impossible to prove a negative. So both ideas are equally silly. Non-theism (recognizing and admitting that we just don't know) is the only rational position, the others are engaging in fantasy. However, one might correctly presume that, since the gods aren't in contact with us, then they either don't exist OR they don't want us to know they exist, in which case their presumed existence is irrelevant and hardly worth thinking about.

[Azupiru]

Of course, another possibility is that Abraham didn't exist, and the Biblical theistic story was an attempt to establish the foundation of a West Semitic ethnoreligion. In fact, Abraham did not exist, and this should be apparent to anyone with knowledge of the naming conventions of the Old Babylonian period (the family was from Babylonia, specifically Ur). Names like Abram/Abraham, Terah, Sarai/Sarah, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob/Ishrael, Judah, Epher (from aphar, "dust"), Ishi (related to "salvation"), etc. were nonexistent. But if we imagine for a moment that a family southern Mesopotamians travelled to the Levant in the early centuries of the 2nd millennium bce, it actually does fit with one group, the 'Apiru/habiru, which means "dusty, " and is related to the Hebrew word for dust, aphar. These people actually did eventually make their way to the Levant by 1300 bce, and are attested multiple times in the Amarna letters as invaders, just like those led by Joshua and in the exact same period as the Hebrews claimed that Joshua (related to "salvation") lived. And if we suspend our disbelief even more and take some aspect of the names of the Abrahamites as accurate, we run into another issue. Abraham would have known cuneiform, which means the name Isaac would have been recognized as related to the Sumerogram 𒅖 (known as sahar and iš, among others), which was referred to by the Semitic word ṣihu ("laughter") at the time (whence Isaac), but it was also seen as the Sumerogram sahar, which was referred to by the Semitic word eperum ("dust"), and it was also present in the earliest cuneiform attestation of iš-ra-il, a name discovered in tablets at Ebla. The Sumerogram 𒅖 was also read as šadu, meaning "mountain, " and the name Shadday, as in El Shadday, is suggested as having been derived from this Semitic word for mountain that is not present in the attested Biblical Hebrew. So, Abraham habiru (the dusty) traveled from Babylonia to the Levant and named one of his sons 𒅖 (ṣihu), who named his son Jacob, but was renamed to 𒅖-ra-il, and two of Jacob's grandsons were Epher (dust, 𒅖) and Ishi, which at the time did not relate to "salvation" in any of the Semitic languages. However, if a group of nomads were crossing the desert for months, what would salvation look like? Salvation would look like a mountain, an iš/𒅖, referred to by šadu.

So this single Sumerogram accounts for two names introduced in Genesis 17, Shadday, of El Shadday, and Isaac. It accounts for the word Hebrew, introduced in Genesis 14. It is the iš of Israel and the source of salvation. Oh, and the name Iš-ra-il existed about 500 years before any hypothetical Biblical Israel. Apparently God was going around naming Semitic people Israel centuries before Jacob...

lol

[SandipChitale]

Worrying if there is any point to the universe itself and therefore not seeing the point of one's own life and what good one can do is a curious attitude of many. The later can and should be had without the former. Most Atheists do not think that there is no point or purpose to their lives.

Deriving ones life's purpose only if the universe has any purpose is an excuse.

[peterrobson]

Is there a God? Yes…prove it, I can’t …..Atheism

[SabbathSOG]

Blaise Pascal the great mathematician stated; it is mathematically feasible to believe in God. Mathematically it makes no sense to be an atheist.

[uavtech]

Opinions, views... irrelevant.
We know for a fact religion is just not correct.

[anwaypradhan]

Well, there is no evidence on the basis of any scientific philosophy whether God exists or not, better world should leave such argument in the hands of further scientific research and development.