> There are thousands of years of mythology

Whoa, whoa whoa. This is an unverified and unverifiable opinion statement, not one of fact.

> I'd like to keep this conversation from sinking into an epistemological quagmire

I'm glad you recognize that epistemology is indeed a quagmire. There's so much I want to say, but I'll be gracious in return for your restraint, and we just won't go there. Suffice it to say, knowing is a pretty iffy thing and "evidentiary" itself is vulnerable.

> I do not see the biblical record as either sound or coherent

Not surprisingly, your opinion and mine diverge at this point.

> It is full of multiple direct contradictions

I always get a kick out of this one, with so very little to substantiate it.

> Reliance on references to real history and geography for veracity is also specious in the same way that Harry Potter being based in the real city of London does not make that story nonfictional.

While the fictional account of Harry Potter is truly based on the real city of London, there's nothing else about the stories that have any notion of truth or historicity to them. The Biblical authors, on the other hand, considered that they were writing historiography and a reliable theological interpretation of the actual events. It's a far cry from anything Harry-Potteresque and doesn't belong in the same consideration. All history is interpretive. Anyone who writes a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, has to be selective, choose what he will use, what perspective he will take, and interpret MLK's life and the events of his life in the telling of his story. It's no different in the Bible, but that doesn't make the Biblical accounts fictional or my position specious.

As far as your list of problem areas, again your bias is showing with little to stand up to substantiate your disregard for the biblical account. This forum doesn't allow the space to deal with ten areas of illustration, but I can do a Reader's Digest condensation, enough to address your subject areas and open myself to tremendous argument for not having been thorough enough. : )

ADAM & EVE, ORIGINAL SIN, YOUNG EARTH CREATION: Recent analyses by Dr. John Walton suggest that the creation account is an account of functional creation, not one of material creation. It's a fascinating take on Genesis 1-3 that negate your entire complaint.

YOUNG EARTH CREATION: Ah, I'm not a young earth creationist either.

RESURRECTION MYTH: This is a much longer conversation, but actually the resurrection has a lot of logical and historical evidence going for it to make it more than reasonable to assume that the resurrection is a plausible explanation for the event.

MIRACLES: This is a long discussion, but miracles cannot possibly be scientifically studied (they are not repeatable in controlled conditions), and there is no scientific evidence that the universe is a closed system, incapable of experiencing forces from outside of the range of scientific inquiry. It also depends how you define "miracle", and that affects the whole conversation also.

GOD INTERACTING WITH THE WORLD. It depends what you mean by "verifiable," and what you mean by "interacting." But I'm guessing that you're using the wrong standard of measure to determine fact, like trying to use degrees to measure miles per gallon, or meters to weigh a chicken. If you think you can verify God by scientific means, you're using the wrong standard of measure, like trying to use scientific means right now to tell me the outcome of next year's presidential election, or even the scores of this Sunday's football games. Or using science to tell me how the people of Russia felt during Stalin's years in power. Wrong standard of measure to get truthful information.

PRAYER. Prayer has too many statistical variables to be able to be scientifically falsifiable. Again, wrong measure. It's illogical to think that prayer is subject to statistical analysis and scientific study.

You seem to have a real problem of thinking that empiricism and the scientific method can lead us in all truth. Such logical positivism has been debunked by many people many times, and there are areas, such as history, jurisprudence, economics, politics, etc. that are not within the purview of empiricism and scientific study. And yet because you can't box theism in, you regard it as illegitimate. It's misguided thinking.

GOD OF THE GAPS. You are making an assumption that I would make a weak argument of the God of the gaps. Not so.

SLAVERY. This is another long conversation. Dr. Paul Wright, the president of Jerusalem University College, says, "There is no evidence of chattel slavery in the ancient Near East. While slavery was known in many cultures there, the type of slavery was debt-slavery, punishment for crime, enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves." Slavery in the Bible is not what people often think, and they are often guilty of anachronistic cultural bias in putting the horrors of antebellum American slavery back into the ancient world.

EVIL. The problem of evil has been hashed over by theologians and philosophers for centuries, and is easily handled. The existence of God and evil at the same time is not a contradiction or really a problem.

What seems apparent to me is that you have a bucketload of presuppositions yourself upon which you are arriving at your conclusions. The problem is that all of these areas are huge discussions that cannot all be hammered out within the limitations of the format here. It would be far better to meet for coffee and deal with them reasonably and adequately, and I regret that is not an option here.

I would argue that very few Christians simply presuppose that god exists and that god is good. There are thousands of years of mythology built around convincing followers that the claims are logical, rational, and coherent.

I'd like to keep this conversation from sinking into an epistemological quagmire, so I'll attemp to avoid directly challenging the presuppositions.

> The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself.

As you have correctly surmised, I do not see the biblical record as either sound or coherent. It is full of multiple direct contradictions and fuzzy allegory that has yielded thousands of denominational branches of Christianity. That alone fails the coherency test. Reliance on references to real history and geography for veracity is also specious in the same way that Harry Potter being based in the real city of London does not make that story nonfictional.

Other Christian claims have contradicted reality and required rigorous apologetics and reinterpretation to maintain the same narrative, sometimes changing the narrative altogether.

Adam/Eve creation myth
Original sin myth
Young earth creation myth
Resurrection myth
Miracles are indistinguishable from statistical events
No verifiable evidence of god interacting with the world
Non-falsifiability of prayer
God of the gaps
The problem of slavery
The problem of evil

> Having arrived at those conclusions from both the presuppositional and evidentiary branches, then I accept the Bible as a reliable revelation of God's character

Considering the issues outlined here, I propose that you have arrived at your conclusions despite the evidentiary branch.

All questions of existence—or, more accurately, knowledge of existence—are fundamentally presuppositional. We have to make at least a few assumptions to get on with it, or we cannot even begin. If nothing else, I must presuppose that I can reason, and that reasoning can bring me to a place of considered truth. In order to know a thing, we have to know what it is, and we also have to know HOW we know what it is. As has been said: to know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know know whether it really does succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are left to recognize some presuppositions.

You can't verify your procedure without first having knowledge, but you can't get any knowledge without first verifying your procedure. I'm all in on Kant, which means I would say the only option is to pick one or the other and run with it (choose a procedure that you assume but cannot prove will yield true knowledge, like positivism does with science; or choose some tenets of knowledge that you assume are true even though you can't verify them, which is called foundationalism and is the process used in nearly all of philosophy). The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself.

In other words, I am not merely presupposing the existence of a god, because I think the arguments for his existence are far stronger than the arguments against his existence, and the arguments in favor of his existence are abductively sound. Beyond the recognition that theism is a rational pursuit, the credibility of the biblical record (with which I am confident you disagree) and its coherence with known facts about history and geography, as revealed by archaeology, and its making sense of the world and of life (among other things) convincing me of the veracity of Christianity, a specific theistic worldview. Having arrived at those conclusions from both the presuppositional and evidentiary branches, then I accept the Bible as a reliable revelation of God's character, part of which is his absolute goodness, and consequently the basis of morality. Therefore the argument does not collapse. My evaluation of God's actions are still based in judicatory reason and the evidence that time affords (the record of the Bible as a valid interpretation of history), and not just on presuppositions alone.

> In other words, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma because there is at least one other alternative: God's commands reflect his perfectly good nature. It's not good just because God commands it, and it doesn't become good if God commands it. Instead, his commands flow from his perfect good nature; they are neither arbitrary nor separated from him.

I do not find that explanation convincing because it presupposes the goodness of god. If you accept the presupposition, then that argument basically collapses to the 2nd part of the dilemma: it is good because god commands it because god only commands that which is good.

That is the point of the dilemma: you are incapable of judging god's actions once you have defined that all actions that god can do are good.

> The argument is flawed. The second premise contradicts the first. Rape cannot be simultaneously ethical and unethical. [...] it is impossible that God, as the basis of morality, commands immoral acts (or performs them himself).

A more valid resolution is that god is not the basis of morality. Premise #2 is not the problematic premise there.

> It is patently untrue that if "no matter how heinous we might find an act, that if God performed the act, it would be moral, since God is the basis for all morality." Such a statement is both self-contradictory and self-defeating, represents a false dilemma and gives an unfounded and untruthful picture of God.

I do not see the problem here from a Christian perspective because once you've defined god as inherently good, then all of his acts are therefore moral and good. There is no dilemma, though plenty of false premises.

Thank you. It is a great example of a logical fallacy, which was exactly my point. It's a false dilemma because there are other options, as you stated, one of which is that there is no God. I chose to ignore it because it's really a separate discussion, rather than focusing on what I interpreted to be the intent of the original post.

> he likes to do bad things

In your sarcastic ridicule you missed what I was saying and what the Bible teaches, that God does not and cannot do bad things. No tricks, no illogic, but an absolutely good nature.

> God killed innocent children

You presume to know the moral and spiritual state of the children so much so that you can pronounce them "innocent." I dare say that you are overextending your capabilities. You also seem to be defining innocent in a certain limited way. Innocent can mean "free from moral defect; immune to the possibility of moral defect; legally blameless; not experienced or worldly; freedom from evil or sin; not guilty of a crime." Again, you seem to have taken it upon yourself to choose which definition you prefer without consideration to the definition God uses. That would explain why you don't understand what the Bible is talking about, and presume fault on God's part.

> and raped a woman

This is actually humorous. I'm guessing you're talking about Mary. First of all, there was nothing in Jesus' conception that could be considered a sexual act, rather, it was a biological one. Secondly, you'll read in the text that Mary understood it to be a biological and spiritual action, not a sexual one, and consequently she was consenting. Your use of the term "rape" is dishonest.

> God doesn't get to blame the problem of evil on the devil, because god made the devil, and god is omniscient, which means he knew exactly what evil satan would bring to the Earth.

In the Bible Satan is a creature of free will. God didn't make him do anything, but he did it by choice. God is not to blame for the free will decisions of others, just as I am not to blame for any free will decisions of my children. I even work to persuade them otherwise, but they make their own choices. So also with God and Satan.

Your bias is causing you to be so filled with bitterness and ridicule that you seem blind to what the Bible is actually saying. There are many options that your attitude ignores.

> Is it good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?"

This seems to be a great example of a logical fallacy, as there are other options that this question ignores. My personal favorite of the choices you've chosen to ignore is that there is no God, so people are responsible for their own actions. Another one you've left out is that God is an ass, he likes to do bad things but he still wants our praise and worship, so he tricks us into thinking it's ok when he does things we know are wrong.

I may as well say, "was the war in Afghanistan good because the US invaded, or was going to war in Afghanistan the right thing to do, so the US invaded?" This seems silly because you are blatantly ignoring the strong possibility that it was wrong even though the US did it.

> Therefore, it is not possible for God to perform an immoral act.

Just because God killed innocent children, and raped a woman that doesn't make those acts moral. There is no way you are worshiping a moral and just god. God doesn't get to blame the problem of evil on the devil, because god made the devil, and god is omniscient, which means he knew exactly what evil satan would bring to the Earth.

Your question is known in philosophical and theological circles as the Euthyphro Dilemma: Does something become ethical if God performs it? It's called that because Socrates phrased the dilemma in Plato's Euthyphro: "Is it good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?" It implies what is known as the Divine Command Theory: something is or becomes morally good because God commands it to be so. Here's how the dilemma works: If God commands it because it is good, then good is independent of God, and God is not the basis of ethics. On the other hand, if it is good because God commands it, then ethics becomes arbitrary in the sense that God could command anything and it would become morally good. For instance, God could have commanded child sacrifice or rape, and such murder or rape would then become ethical.

The argument of the dilemma fails on several points. The Bible affirms neither of these alternatives (either that there is an independent reality of good outside of God's character or that commands are good merely because they come from the mouth of God). In other words, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma because there is at least one other alternative: God's commands reflect his perfectly good nature. It's not good just because God commands it, and it doesn't become good if God commands it. Instead, his commands flow from his perfect good nature; they are neither arbitrary nor separated from him. God's nature, then, is the standard by which all actions are judged as good, and God's nature is the objective basis of morality (called the divine nature theory).

Possibly you, and maybe the people you are talking to, may be assuming this argument:

1. If God were the basis of morality, it would be possible for God to command something immoral (such as rape), and hence rape would become ethical.
2. Rape cannot possibly be ethical.
3. Therefore God is not the basis of morality.

The argument is flawed. The second premise contradicts the first. Rape cannot be simultaneously ethical and unethical. If the basis of morality cannot command rape, neither can God command rape if his character is the basis of morality. This follows the law of noncontradiction, and it is impossible that God, as the basis of morality, commands immoral acts (or performs them himself).

To make sense, we might try...

1. If God were the basis of morality, then it is logically possible for God to command rape or murder. Thus it could be logically possible for rape to be ethical.
2. it is not logically possible for rape to ever be ethical.
3. Therefore God is not the basis of morality.

The second premise is still false. While it may be logically possible, it's still self-contradictory for the basis of morality to command immorality.

If rape or murder (say, the child sacrifice accusation of Genesis 22) cannot possibly be ethical, then it logically follows that the basis of morality has an immutable nature such that it cannot command or perform immoral acts. That's the 3rd choice. The conclusion that God can command or perform immoral acts by necessity, then, includes making erroneous assumptions or exegeting text falsely.

Therefore, it is not possible for God to perform an immoral act. His nature is wholly good. Nor would he command anything immoral, for that would be self-contradictory. Your online conversation partner is wrong: It is patently untrue that if "no matter how heinous we might find an act, that if God performed the act, it would be moral, since God is the basis for all morality." Such a statement is both self-contradictory and self-defeating, represents a false dilemma and gives an unfounded and untruthful picture of God.

Can God perform an immoral act? I've been having a back-and-forth with someone online who believes that no matter how heinous we might find an act, that if God performed the act, it would be moral, since God is the basis for all morality.

If you similarly believe that God is the basis for all morality, and agree that any act God performs would be moral, then I have a question: Is it possible for God to perform an immoral act? I understand that God may not do everything that he is able to do, but my question is not about if he would, it's about if he even can.