The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
(2 Thessalonians 2:9-12) NKJV
Facultative means: of or relating to the grant of permission, authority, or privilege. For us it describes a mode of argumentation where atheists take the perspective that the Bible is true.
Since the premise of atheism is that the Bible isn’t true, the intellectual dilemma easily resolves because atheism annihilates itself.
- Matty: Why would God send a strong delusion if we’ve been given knowledge of the truth? Do you love the truth, or hate it? Some people don’t want it. You have a choice. You can believe anything you want.
- Twitter Arch-enemy: This is problematic for any description of the moral nature of God. “Sending strong delusion” is God engaged in actively deceiving people. Hardening Pharaoh’s heart and sending a lying spirit to Ahab are other examples.
- Matty: You appear to be imputing facultative authority to the scriptures: your premise is only valid if the Bible is true. Atheism just annihilated.
- Matty: The truth about our creator God is so obvious that no one has an excuse, but we all have free will. The strong delusion (the popular science narrative of godless existence) is a plausible alternative to the truth for those who want it.
You may or may not know about Hitchens’s razor, an epistemological train wreck which used to be used to make people of faith look stupid.
Hitchens’s razor is an epistemological razor asserting that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it.
– Hitchens’s razor, definition (Wikipedia)
It is frequently seen in the following form:
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
— Hitchens’s razor, meme
We dispatched Hitchens easily by pointing out that his understanding of evidence, and how it’s used, is flawed because it’s based on a meme which also fails to understand evidence.
Faith is belief without evidence.
– Mainstream science propaganda (SciPop)
Faith can’t be belief without evidence because we all have exactly the same evidence. This is Matty’s razor.
We all have the same evidence. Our choice of paradigm determines what we think it’s evidence of.
– Matty’s Razor
We find ourselves in a place where we get to define another term. The second an atheist quotes the Bible their argument is invalid, so what kind of razor is that?
Matty (Headwind) 