[klmadfejno]

Appealing to history's greatest minds is a weak appeal to authority. Several of history's greatest minds also spent significant time on pursuits such as alchemy. It does them no disservice to suppose that given modern tools and knowledge they would have formed different opinions. But now we have the ability to explain evolution, brains, astronomy, energy, weather, etc.

Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence.

Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.

[fennecfoxen]

Excuse me. You will notice that I am not talking about authority. I'm talking about self-consistency in the theology of major world religious.

[yxwvut]

This is the fundamental problem, though. There's an internal consistency so long as all evidentiary evaluation is predicated on the underlying assumption that the attestations are true. Confirmation bias does not make a firm foundation for truth-seeking. Once you realize that your standard of evidence could just as easily support any number of (contradictory) belief systems (were you to start from the premise that that particular religion, not yours, was true) the whole thing begins to crumble.

[fennecfoxen]

You would think that putting Islam and Protestantism in the same comment would indicate to a reader that I'm well aware that the same standard supports mutually exclusive visions of reality but I guess that doesn't do enough to evangelize atheism or agnosticism or rationalism or whatevertheheck so go ahead and have a fun thread (without me)

[klmadfejno]

> which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized

This is an appeal to authority. "It's good cuz these people said so"