The Human Question

There is probably a way to say this without committing the tu quoque fallacy: when he accuses Christians of picking and choosing which things to take literally in the OT (which seems unprincipled) one might ask if he is not doing the same with materialism, denying God but affirming equality, etc. *** A better answer, of course, is to point out that the New Testament takes much of the Old Testament and transforms it, so that the latter can only be understood in light of the former.  The NT in a sense redeems the OT.  For example, the story of Abraham and Isaac becomes a foreshadowing of "God Himself" providing "the sacrifice." More specifically Christian ethics centers on the notion of man as imago Dei.  We are in a kind of family with God.  There's no room for divinely mandated genocide etc. in such an understanding of the human person.  If the OT seems to have interpreted God as having mandated this, the NT has a different understanding.  The questi...

Both sides would grant that if the Old Testament is true then God exists.  But it would be an appeal to ignorance by the theist to simply assert that it is true unless the atheist can prove otherwise.  That is, one may not say, "I am presupposing that the OT is true until you prove otherwise."  And the atheist would be committing the fallacy of denying the antecedent if he or she argued that because the OT is false, it follows that God doesn't exist.  Why?  Because there may be other reasons besides revelation for affirming God's existence: consider, for example, as the reasons that made Plato to affirm the existence of a kind of supreme being, which he called the Good, and the reasons that made Aristotle affirm the existence of a highest being, which he called Thought.  These and other reasons may be marshaled as parts of a longer argument that demonstrates that the same Supreme Being is provident (which is what both theist and atheist mean the word 'God' ...