Re: Why I Am Not A Christian by Dr. Richard Carrier, Part 1 of 5

1. The author begins by playing the victim. He claims the Christians call him "cognitively deficient". They apparently can't believe that he can reject the Christian God even while being so well informed about Christianity. I respond that even if he were well informed and cognitively deficient that wouldn't matter because salvation doesn't depend upon wisdom, but faith. It remains to be seen how informed he really is about Christianity.
2. He jokes about his book being a good candidate for being burned at the next Nuremberg rally. I say that this is the first of many unnecessary jabs towards Christians. As he claims to be a philosopher he should know that is a fallacy and he would do better to stick to the facts, at least his alleged facts.
3. The author claims that Christians often don't examine the implausible excuses for their faith implying that they would rather believe a possible lie than to explore the other options. He further claims that Christians interpret the world through their theist lens and assume they are right and the evidence somehow fits. In contrast he claims that is the opposite of what "we" (presumably referring to atheists) do, that they start with evidence and follow wherever it goes. Thus religious dogmatism meets atheistic or naturalistic empiricism. I respond that I know for a fact that atheists and agnostics are not exempt from presuming or assuming the foundational tenets of their position. They don' t always start with the evidence because they are not always scientific experts and thus they tend to accept the accounts of their favorite scholars and experts. Therefore, the atheistic empiricism may very well become as dogmatic as the canons of the Council of Trent. This was yet another fallacy from the author.
4. The author then goes back to role playing as a Christian and calling himself clinically insane, an irrational madman, suffering from evil psychosis since no one could possibly examine all the evidence and still reject God. On the contrary, the Pharisees were quite learned and yet they still rejected the true God, and so there is an answer for the wise not having faith. It is called the reprobate. If not reprobate, then the author has all the opportunity in the world before he dies to change his mind.
5. The author then asserts that there is justification for caution when it seems that all religions' view of God is anthropomorphic of human nature and the concerns of the cultures which birthed these religions. I say that the observations may hold for all religions, but this doesn't refute Christianity in particular because humankind is made in God's image and therefore it should not be surprising that the perspective of God is man-like because man was created God-like. In other words is it anthropomorphism or is it deomorphism (my own word)?

The preceding is the first of five installments of a critique of Dr. Richard Carrier's book,  Why I Am Not A Christian.