So, you ignored the post to which you felt compelled to reply?.. 
… Uh, okay, I give up. What’s the punchline to the fucking joke? (Oh, damn. My bad. Now I suppose you will ignore this post, too.)
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The hilarious irony of this statement just struck me with full force.
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I don’t regard dishonest evasion, trolling, and relentless dishonesty as civility. Physician heal thyself…
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No. Some rational beliefs are demonstrable and yet without reason. The justification is in their utility. They work and justify themselves through their utility.
The assumption* of the laws of logic is a fundamental aspect of human reasoning. These laws, such as the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle, provide a framework for understanding and interpreting the world around us. You would in fact need to use the laws of logic to refute them in any way.
Bullshit. There is zero evidence for this. Lennox is a pedlar of crap apologetics.
Your inability to work this out doesn’t mean “Magic Man did it”.
Poppycock. Already dealt with this earlier. And there is no reason to think magic is needed. Grow up.
Hawking and Hertog state otherwise. Read the scientific paper.
Mere blind assertion. Hawaking and Hertog ae laughing at you.
Fixed it for you.
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No no no, they’re rational because they are preceded by another belief, all the way back to an initial belief, who knows where that came from… 
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Just speculating: Might this be where a certain participant in this thread trips and falls? There is a distinction between the statements “I do not believe X exists” and “I believe X does not exist”. The former express the lack of belief in the existence of X, as a shorthand form of “I have not been presented with any evidence compelling enough to convince me to believe that X exists, so until I get that evidence, I withhold my belief”, while the latter is close to an assertion that X is not real.
I think I see a pattern in the mindsets of the religous people that I have been discussing/arguing with over the years. There is a clear tendency for them to make a false dichotomy out of the belief issue - either you believe their god exists and worship it, or else you poitively believe their god does not exist, with no nuances possible. They tend to not see “I withhold my belief until compelling evidence surfaces” as the qualified statement it is, but instead shoehorn it into the “I believe X does not exist” category. I do not have enough data to say if this is a general trait among religious people, or if it’s just those among them that choose to argue their points against non-believers.
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Always guilty of the black and white fallacy and never capable of adjusting belief to fit the evidence. “BINGO!”
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Absolutely, that seems to be exactly what he keeps doing. Imagine a line and true or false is either side of that line, forgive me for the clumsy analogy, now if we are dealing with an unknown then asserting the claim is true or untrue is epistemologically unsound. However disbelieving the claim is not, as this need not involve a claim either side of that line. Of course weighing evidence is another matter, as this can be much more complex. Though of course the more extraordinary the claim, the higher the standard for evidence of that claim, hence sufficient objective evidence. No one I think can fail to see that sufficient is relative to the extraordinary nature of the claim, and that the more objective evidence is the more reliable it is, else the methods created to remove subjective bias, like logic and science, would do no better than holding purely subjective beliefs.
Precisely so.
Yes, i have noticed, as have we all I imagine on here, that this is true, indeed this type of false dichotomy used to create an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy to shift the burden of proof onto atheism, seems to have gained a lot of popularity among apologists. I have seen lane craig use this in a debate with Hitchens, and even after Hitchens who himself went further and claimed he believed no deities exist, explained atheism was not a contrary claim to theism, Lane Craig tried to persist, I can still remember hims saying then you’d be talking about (he mispronounced it exaggerating the A) Ahhhh-theism, and the Hitch smiled and said like ahhh-moral and ahhhh-sexual then? The crowd laughed, and I mean loudly, LC just looked baffled at the laughter.
Obviously they known this puts the burden of proof firmly onto their claim a deity exists. It also means they have thousands of comparable claims for deities they must be claiming don’t exist by the way, since the claim only one exists is also a claim none of the others do, a burden of proof atheism per se does not incur.
I also think the importance they attach to their belief, gives them a blind spot in understanding that i attach no more significance to my lack of belief in deities than I do unicorns, it’s just that no one is trying peddle unicorns along with archaic patriarchal Bedouin morality from the bronze age.
That’s a lot of research right there, but if the apologists that come here, and the professional apologists are any bench mark, it is definitely a popular misconception upon most apologists.
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This should give you pause, and make you re-examine your claim that beliefs can only come from beliefs. Also your dismissal of the idea that beliefs are formed when our brains start to store memories, and the evidence I linked to support this idea, which you just waved away.
If I make a claim, as with most of the atheists here, and that claim was demonstrated as either erroneous or dubious, I would certainly consider retracting or amending that claim, if one is open minded of course.
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So how can saying “justify themselves through their utility” (a reason for believing them) be reconciled with “and yet without reason”?
How can you say some beliefs are held for no reason and then give an example that shows a belief that’s believed for the reason it has utility?
If belief X has utility then hold belief X - that’s rational belief ONLY because it has a reason.
If avoiding controversy makes for an easy life then believe that controversies should be avoided.
Let’s try another way to get through then, I’m sure it will sink in eventually, just keep trying.
Give me an example please of a rational belief you hold and the reasons why you hold it.
Irrelevant, as you asserted that:
Then when I asked you where this initial belief came from you asserted:
If you have no idea, how then can you assert it must come itself from an initial belief?
It is you who needs to let that contradiction sink in.
I can’t make this any simpler for you, maybe a venn diagram? You made a claim about where ALL beliefs come from, now you admit you don’t know where our first or initial belief comes from, do you see the problem yet?
Your conflating the necessity for X and the origin of X, these are not the same thing, hence your confusion.
No I am not, and I quoted you verbatim. lets try again then:
It was you who made a claim about the origin of ALL beliefs, but admit you don’t know what the origin of our first or initial beliefs is. I have conflated nothing, just quoted your claims verbatim, so please don’t just shift the goal posts dishonestly.
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Do you disagree? do you disagree that a rational belief must include one or more premises? answer this question it will help me see where you are coming off the rails.
We can regard a premise as itself being a belief, and we can see that every rational belief has to include some prior belief.
To avoid infinite regress therefore we can conclude that the human mind must hold at least one initial belief, how that belief became established is a great question but it cannot be based on some other belief because it is the first belief.
That first belief might be irrational or self evident, but it cannot be a rational belief for the obvious reason that rational beliefs are built on top of prior beliefs.
Straw man fallacy, you made an assertion about ALL beliefs requiring an initial belief. Here:
When I asked where that initial belief came from you admitted you did not know, here:
Do you see the problem yet? Focus on your claim, and leave straw men designed to shift away from that claim alone.
Sorry, I can’t help you any more, your on your own from here.
Your is a possessive pronoun, not an abbreviation of you are.
I don’t need any help here, you made a claim that all beliefs require an initial belief, then when asked where our first or initial belief comes from, you admitted to not knowing, so you can’t you support an absolute claim about the origin of all beliefs, when you admit you don’t know where our initial belief came from.
Quod erat demonstrandum…and this one is justified, as it has been demonstrated.
I’ll quote your assertions again for you, as I am sure the answer must eventually come to you, as it is very simple and very obvious:
Think hard now.
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Instead you offer this nonsense:
Yes you did, here:
Here you admit you don’t now where those initial beliefs come from, you cannot RATIONALLY claim where they come from, and claim not to know.
That’s two contradictions you made right there, and you seem to think you can ignore the fact this makes your claims irrational, while creating straw man non-sequiturs about how we form logical beliefs.
Ignoring irrational contradictions in your claims is not a very compelling stance for all neutral observers you claimed you could convince, anymore than lying you hadn’t made the claim about the origins of initial beliefs.
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