Hmm, I don't agree with the way this is going.
You and me both. This is supposed to be the 'formal debates' section. This thread was dumped in here by an admin, and against my better judgement; and the section has been turned into the Fran Show (including, but not limited to, this forty-nine-page train-wreck), despite that there's next to nothing in the way of formal debate going on in
any of the threads in question.
Frankly, I'd rather the entire lot was dumped back in GRD where it belongs, and then it and Fran would be out of my hair.
We've all been asking Fran to make the case that the supernatural/God is a better explanation than advanced aliens for the resurrection of Christ (granting for the sake of argument that it happened more or less as described, as Anfauglir has). People have been carping at him to provide a response for some time now. I don't think it's legitimate for a moderator to come in and basically decree it to be against the rules for him to do so now that he's finally responded, and start threatening to delete his posts.
Getting into the realms of the KCA is going
far adrift from the claims made in the thread, which centred on the 4MF. I can see where this could end up going. There'll be arguments about the KCA and other apologia, followed by accusations of bias levelled at anyone who declares them "less reasonable" than aliens. It is an utterly fruitless exercise.
WRT the "plagiarism" issue, Fran has repeatedly stated that he's citing WLC and Habermas as the source of the argumentation he's using, and never claimed to be the inventor of the 4MF argument, or the Kalam Cosmological Argument (which he's using now). Please, let's not go for the "Argument From Moderator Powers" ("I can delete your posts and ban you, therefore, you lose").
It's not about winning and losing. It's about the purpose of this section. I do reserve the right to kill off
argumentum ad nauseam if it turns out that one's argument essentially consists of
every single apologetic argument there is. Sorry, but this thread is not a substitute for entire forum sections. I'm not inclined to see this thread become a
hundred-and-forty-nine-page train-wreck.
And frankly, if Fran was going to pull out the KCA and other stock arguments, he's an old enough hand on this board, and knows the Rules well enough and knows well enough that we've seen them all before that he could have simply linked to the damned things. The Forum Rules are clear on this. Failing a link, he could simply have listed them: he could simply have said "Kalam Cosmological argument; teleological argument; moral argument; argument from abstract concepts" and saved everyone a TL;DR.
The further problem with such copy-pasta is that it leads to its own inconsistencies. One cannot give Fran a bye on point #4 of his list ("God provides the best explanation for the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus"), given that
this is the very point under discussion on this thread! His response, therefore, relies at least partially on circular reasoning, unless that was simply lazy editorialization on his part. That sort of thing suggests that he's not even
trying.
And finally, it is doing an injustice to one's fellow forum participants if one is putting none of one's own effort. Simply regurgitating, by pasting and paraphrasing, other people's apologia is not what this forum section is for.
Fran has to use apologetic arguments here. That's what he's been asked to do--demonstrate why "God" is a more reasonable explanation than "aliens" for the resurrection of Jesus. To do that, he has to try to establish that "God" is or could be a reasonable explanation for anything. I don't see how he could do this without presenting arguments for God's existence. Do the arguments fail? Sure. But they're all he, or any theist, has got.
In order to dispense with Fran's apologetics without wandering off into off-topic discussions (e.g. refutations of the KCA), all Anfauglir has to do is point out that the majority of philosophers and cosmologists are not convinced as to the validity of Fran's arguments for the existence of God. The consensus among cosmologists for a naturalistic origin of the Cosmos is at least as overwhelming if not more so than the consensus among New Testament scholars as to the historical validity of the 4MF.
Fran has been using the "Consensus of scholars! Consensus of scholars!" argument so frequently in this thread that he's in no position to reject it now when applied against his arguments for God. Especially since the cosmologists can show their work with maths and observations of Universe (e.g. cosmic background radiation).
I think you fail to understand what Fran is up to here. That does no harm to Fran's argument. His argument isn't that his apologia are
true. It doesn't even matter if they are
not all that reasonable. All that matters is whether they are
more reasonable than the existence of aliens. Which he will happily run into another several pages, no doubt by way of accusations of bias each time the reasonableness of the stock-arguments is seriously challenged. As I have said before, the terms of the argument are deliberately framed in such a way such that the proponent will wear away at every single point made by the sceptic on the matter of what constitutes a "better explanation", and shapeshift their arguments accordingly; they are set up for sceptics to lose by default through exhaustion, at which point the proponent of the argument can triumphantly list all the points that weren't adequately covered or addressed.
