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Originally Posted by tame_deuces
"God works in mysterious ways"
... in the sense that human understanding is not exhaustive. Does God not exist if we don't have comprehensive knowledge of His ways? Or rather, as I posed to David Sklansky, can God even be God if we fully understand Him?
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"You can't attribute human traits to God"
... exclusively human traits, e.g., limited by time and space.
... by what authority would you judge Him? If we posit the God of the Bible exists, then on what grounds may the created, fallible being judge the Almighty?
... in the same way He's mysterious; His ways are higher than our ways, His knowledge higher than ours (Isaiah 55 says this explicitly).
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"Maybe God has his reasons that we don't know"
... in the same way naturalists contend there is an answer for the origin of the universe. Just because we don't know all the answers doesn't mean we don't know anything at all.
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My claim: If these statements are genuinely taken to heart, then the inevitable conclusion is that neither the Bible nor revealed religion in general should be taken seriously.
Discuss?
It seems yours is a question of epistemology. I don't see any of these as precluding the ability to know God-only the extent to which we are availed to all possible details. Just because we do not know to the extent of omniscience doesn't mean we don't know anything, or know plenty. The argument from Christian Theism is that God has demonstrated Himself in at least these ways:
* The created order - nature, man's conscience being a general understanding of right and wrong, sociology in the observing of people demonstrating reflections of God's attributes such as love, kindness, justice, mercy, sacrifice, etc.--albeit marred, etc. This is known as Natural Revelation.
* special revelation - The Scriptures-the 66 works collectively known as the Bible are the revealed word of God.
* God's providence - God's moving in everyday life.
* the Incarnation - Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, entering history, fulfilling multiple prophecies predicting this part of history.
* the death of Christ - His sacrificial death on the cross, also prophesied in great detail hundreds of years before it occurred-evidence of both the supernatural nature of the Bible and visible proof of the God-man.
* the Resurrection - "God has furnished PROOF to all men by raising Him from the dead." (Acts 17)
* the Holy Spirit who moves to convict man of sin, to illuminate, to help walk according to the will of God, to move in the Church.
There are questions of how one knows the Bible is the right/only holy book or one at all, isn't it fallible man who wrote it, aren't all religions the same, isn't it all made up, etc. etc., always by people who haven't studied these things. In faith people make assertions, but the reason 10's of millions are still Christians is because almost 100% of the time, a straw man is attacked and this is not relevant to us. There are literally thousands of books written on these topics for literally hundreds of years. It is beyond ignorant to try to dismiss Christian apologetics in a few remarks, and this is one of the great failings of skeptics.