Coel, your link provides nothing of value, what was it intended to show? I simply asked you to define religion and you could not, just sidestepped the issue with your belief in Jesus Christ. Then you asked me if I was certain of my views and how I came to be certain. Well, through observation of human behavior and human history we see that many people have different views on things and they are all certain of them, so which is right? how can one prove certainty when you cannot even prove your own existence to me? I don't you can prove that you exist and that you are not just a computer program set up by the Trilateral commission to bother me on my day off?
I'm more confused now than when I started this thread. Are we saying that even if God doesn't exist, sin does exist, because religion created the idea of sin? Let's go further and say that no God and no religion exists. Would sin then = morality based on the groupthink of certain societies, where in one society evil does not equate to evil in another society? Are there some specific examples of this that people can think of?
I agree that it is impossible to "reason" one's way to "god" since "god" and "reason" are completely antithetical. While the nonreligious cannot "disprove" the existence of "god," the religious cannot "prove" the existence of "god." Belief in god depends entirely on faith without evidence, by definition. In fact, the application of reason to the problem of ontology ineluctably leads to the inference that god does not exist. See David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. I suggest that the Christian does not want to follow the path of reason in his walk of faith because reason will ultimately crush faith, leading to despair, Søren Kierkegaard notwithstanding, if reason is pursued to its logical conclusions. Better to believe "just because," rather than attempting to assail the fortress of reason by constructing rhetorical "insinuations of god" (as the proponent bearing the burden of proof). "I believe because I believe because I believe" is the safest policy for the faithful, in my view. For in reason lies the wasteland for the pious.
If reason and God are antithetical, then it must follow that reason disproves God, a possibility you reject in your next sentence:
I don't understand why you think being opposites means that one must disprove the other. Should God also disprove reason? Does good disprove evil?
But you would agree, I think, that there is a difference between “being opposites” and “being in opposition”. I might say that Joe and Jan are complete opposites, but that would be something different than if I were to say that Joe and Jan are in opposition to one another. The first situation describes two things that have opposite qualities; the second describes two things that are actively opposed to one another. And if reason and God are opposed to one another, as Xover claims, then one’s affirmation means the other’s annihilation.
There's a pretty big logical difference between 'affirmation of X means you can't believe in Y' and 'X must disprove Y if they are truly opposed'. Even if the affirmation of reason implies non-belief in God, I still don't see how this would require reason itself to disprove the existence of God. Do you believe that diametrically opposed things must always disprove each other, or is it enough that one cannot believe in both at the same time? Or do you believe that diametric opposites can coexist? For example, is it impossible to believe in God and Satan at the same time? Must God disprove Satan? If you don't believe that God and Satan are diametric opposites, can you please list a pair of things you do consider diametric opposites?
When you say reason must disprove God, it seems to me that you are claiming that the onus is on reason to prove that God does not exist, is that what you are trying to say? Just because one idea is diametrically opposed to another doesn't mean that it can or should be able to disprove the other. Good and Evil are diametrically opposite ideas, but it is nonsensical to claim that one must therefore disprove the other. I would argue that faith and reason are antithetical (they are opposite belief systems), must faith disprove reason? Also, I am really confused by the statement that you believe in a unity of faith, science and reason -- what do faith and science have to do with each other?.
So you believe reason says God does not exist? Because that is the only way your argument makes any sense to me, and XOVER specifically said in the same post that reason couldn't disprove God. In a similar vein, rationality and irrationality are opposites, but rationality does not disprove irrationality.
