Yesterday I got a chance to have a good apologetically-oriented discussion with a few people on irc. It started out with someone asking if I believed that homosexuality was a sin, and I replied that yes, homosexual acts are sinful. It then sort of spiraled into a discussion on biological determinism, naturalism, and the nature of the soul. My basic argument was that:

1) It doesn’t matter how many theories are continuously propounded for biological factors which determine sexuality, because narturalism has still never given an adequate explanation of the mind and consciousness. If it turns out that you, your ego, are not your material brain then the whole house of cards tumbles.

2) Arguments offered from the existence of homosexual animals are nonsensical for the reasons above. It wouldn’t matter if we were 100% biologically identical to rats, if it were also the case that we were mentally different and that mental state contained the seat of desires, beliefs, etc.

The discussion then disintegrated into how one of the persons believed that God could not exist, but since the existence of God is irrational he could never provide a reasoned argument for non-existence. I pointed out that he could still make arguments for the irrationality, and also probabilistic non-existence arguments, which he partially assented to. Then I made the point that if he truly believed God did not exist but he could only ever provide mere assertions (which were numerous), and not a reasoned, full argument, then he was chained to an irrational belief for which he has no good reason to hold on to so dearly.

After that the claim was made that Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, had arguments that this person thought were good enough to make a case either for the impossibility or improbability of God. I said that if the persons opposing me would all assent to the arguments proffered by Dawkins, then I would read the book (which I just got last night from Amazon) and give a response.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And I will probably end up posting responses to chapters or sections on this blog so I can receive comments and constructive criticism. The book is almost 400 pages, however, and appears to have quite a bit of content so I imagine this will take a long time. Look here for updates to come.