The growth of Christianity

I'll go ahead and grant that it's rational for Christians to believe that the explosive growth of their religion is best explained by Godly inspiration holds if the following is true (this bit was shamelessly stolen from Cartesian in a thread on Common Sense Atheism).

Given two competing explanations X and Y where Y is purely non-agential and naturalistic, every subject S should accept Y unless she knows that the entities involved in X exist and could/would act in the way described by X.

Christians have some reason to think X exists so it appears that they have reason to accept God as an explanation for the growth of Christianity. However, I see a couple problems with this line of thought.

Given mutually incompatible deities and several instances of events that have the features of X as described above it's plausible that each support the existence of their respective deities. But there can in fact be only one God. So if we attempt to say that a given instance of X truly demonstrates a deity when only one can exist then we're forced to deny that every other instance of X is accurate. Therefore since trusting events with the features of X lead us to mutually incompatible beliefs and no way to choose between them it does not appear that it's a good principle to use.

Do atheists know that God exists?

I've been running into this idea lately and it's been confusing me. The most popular way to justify belief in a God and Christianity is the self authenticating witness of the holy spirit. Due to the harmful effects of sin this witness isn't always so obvious. But when an unbeliever is shown Christian teachings the holy spirit heals the effects of sin and allows the unbeliever to see the truth. I'm a little fuzzy on this point, at times I've seen it claimed that atheists know the truth of Gods existence all the time and simply chose to deny it. In either case there is a point were the holy spirit shows itself to an atheist.

Here's a quote from William Lane Craigs Reasonable Faith "unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem." He goes on to characterize the claim of intellectual difficulty as "not sincere" and "an intellectual smoke screen to keep from confronting the real issue: his[the atheists] sin before God." These are very common claims in Christian apologetics and theology.

Here's the problem. I'm an atheist, I'm daily confronted with Christianity and I do not feel this self authenticating spirit. Are Christians in general committed to the idea that I'm lying? Why would I do that?

This was actually a major reason I originally turned away from Christianity. I noticed the fact that there were a huge number of completely honest people out there on a quest for truth that arrive at completely different conclusions. It simply didn't seem likely that everyone except Christians were lying through their teeth. Not bad thinking for a 12 year old.

In any case, we've got a serious problem here. Either I'm a liar or God does not exist as described by apologists like Craig. Of course there's always option C were some convoluted apologetic justifies Gods actions. In the years since I first considered this problem I haven't found any plausible account of how this could be the case.

Introduction, purpose and all that jazz

This blog will mainly be about religion, atheism and philosophy. I'm not an expert in any of these fields so don't expect the last word on any given subject to come from me and whatever you do don't buy what I'm saying wholesale. There will be times when I'm very wrong and you shouldn't base your belief in the truth on the word of any single person let alone someone who's nowhere near certain himself. That brings me to the title of the blog. It's exactly what I want to do. I want to know what's true about our beliefs in gods, ideas about morality, meaning and purpose. What should people do? Why should they do it? Is there really an external world or has some deamon got me in his thrall? Hopefully I'll find out. If you're interested, you're welcome to join me.

The format will be as follows. I intend to read books on philosophy and religion, summarize what I think is important then comment on why it is (or is not) actually relevant. I'm going to follow other blogs on similar subjects and give my thoughts on them. I might get into politics as they relate to to the blogs focus but I'll try not to because I don't like politics much and know even less about it. Current events are likely candidates as well. Finally, sometimes I'll just rant on whatever thought has been running through my head recently.