I've heard this phrase before, and although I'm not really a good debater regarding deeper subjects, I thought I'd go ahead and ask him just what he meant. He said that an atheists position is illogical on the basis that in order to negate somethings existence entirely an atheist must have experience all things entirely including past, present, and future things. Or the atheist would have to be told by someone (an honest and truthful person) who knew all things past, present, and future.
And accordingly the only person who could experience all things would be God making the atheist wrong anyway. To make matters worse for me, I objected that there is such a thing as weak Atheism, which doesn't believe in God due to a lack of evidence. Now in many parts of the discussion my definitions were lacking, although he seemed to be very familiar with what I was saying. My apologies if my definitions for Strong Atheism (Deny existence of God) and Weak Atheism (Don't believe in God because of a lack of evidence) pushed his answers in the wrong direction.
His rejoinder to this was that weak Atheism leans towards Agnosticism, for the exact reasons I forget. Either way he said that it was a useless position.
Anyway I thought about what he said today and I thought of an objection. I figured that if an Atheist has to experience all things in order for his position to be true, then what absolves a Christian from needing to know all things in order for their position to be true? After all, if you're going to claim God exists you should have to be able to know all things if your position is going to be true. I sent a message to him on Facebook, and he replied:
No, your argument is not fundamentally flawed [That as a Catholic, if I firmly say there is a God am I not running into the same logical problems as an Atheist]. You can simply claim in your belief that you have experienced Him or encountered Him.
Simply you can claim, "I encounter Him in prayer. Or: I encounter Him in the Eucharist or any of His Sacraments."
Now, one might, in the end, claim that your argument is indefensible or unfalsifiable- and then say it is a weak argument because of that- because that one may claim that your argument has no "empirical evidence" other than through your "eyes of faith" and thus has no real evidence. But that is rhetoric, nor pure logic- simply because the point may be made that one cannot even "prove" -in the sense they wish- that one even exists, to ones own self (which thusly banishes that one's own proposed notion of "proof" and "evidence.")
In the end, however, for one to claim in the existence of something, one only needs to validate it by claiming that they have encountered it. This claim alone validates it. At best, one could only make the aforementioned objections (in Sophism as you pointed out last night). This only provides ground for "Skepticism" not "Atheism." Thus, the only logical solution to Skepticism is to be "Agnostic."
To negate somethings existence, entirely, it must be derived from a principle that either they have "experienced all things of all times and even of times yet to come at on and the same time," or to be told by one who is incapable of lying and untrustworthiness and who has "experienced all things of all times and even of times yet to come at on and the same time." However the one who has"experienced all things of all times and even of times yet to come at on and the same time," men properly call "God." Thus, one must be Eternal (and thus God) to be able to aptly claim a logical Atheism. However, this one, in fact, would entail the one asserting the claim to in fact be the proof that abolishes his own claim: that there is no God.
I added the brackets, naturally. Now, I could think of two more objections here.
1) If all it takes to validate the existence of something is to say that they have experience it, how do we trust that what these people say is true?
2) By the same logic of personally experiencing something -> validation, then what of another big question such as the existence of aliens? Is it "simply" true in that same way?
I believe I actually had two more distinct objections, but I lost them as was writing. Whatever.
An interesting tidbit, although unrelated slightly: I had raised objections against sophism last night, and he did ask me to prove that I was sitting there right now. I repeated, as I had read so many times here, that what does it matter if I cannot? If I can see you, and another guy nearby can see you, that's good enough for me.
I also mentioned that science probably couldn't work either under sophist principles. He didn't have a response to that per se, however he managed to use my objections of uselessness against atheism. Sadly, I didn't follow him but this was my first time discussing Atheism with him, and that I was unprepared and then caught off guard by how prepared he was!
Basically I'm asking is that how do you respond to sophism employed in his way? And how do you respond to his claims?
That's the worst use of logic evar, I do believe.
