The Qur'an, is it the "literal speech of Allah"?

[sgttomas]

I'm not putting words in your mouth. I'm summing up what I perceive your position to be.

Okay. No problem. You're wrong.

Special pleading for God's existence equals the degrading denial of the requirements of reason.

Reason won't resolve anything. Reasoning is a methodology of consistency within a set of primary axioms. Your axioms are special pleading for the case of no-God. It is difficult for you to understand this, because your entire ontology, axioms, and methodologies for reason deny you the ability to articulate a meaningful utterance called "God". You can't understand God because it is an entirely empty notion. Therefore nothing provides evidence for it; therefore all of your reason presumes its absence. But this all has to do with your basic set of axioms that are simply incapable of articulating "God".

I know very well what it is like to not believe in God. This is an intellectual and spiritual position that I have encompassed within my own self. I'm not giving you these arguments from a position of ignorance. I found it really interesting that you used to be a Lutheran pastor. Which synod?

My God is the pre-eternal source of all existence and means of all sustenance. You don't have an argument against that except to deny that it is a meaningful assertion. That's fine. I assert it is meaningful. Special pleading is just an emotional case. Accusing someone's special pleading of invalidating their belief is ALSO SPECIAL PLEADING. It's a futile argument unless we already agree on what is appropriate to reason about. We have absolutely nothing in common about what is appropriate reasoning about God (except, I will guess, that we require reason to be consistent within itself).

There is nothing inconsistent in my perspective, therefore I have nothing that necessarily undermines my reasoning from the methodological perspective. Your special pleading simply falls away as having nothing to do with what I believe.

How can you approach "God" when nothing you say about God means anything?

Wrong. Conclusive evidence easily contradicts the position that no God/gods exist. The difficulty is that there is no conclusive evidence that God/gods do exist. So why believe against reason?

Bring me a no-God argument, if what you assert is worthy of being realistic.

No. You can't find evidence against my God. My God is Necessary Being. This is the most fundamental ontological assumption about reality. What is your ontology?

My reasoning is sound. My God is real. What can you bring against this? Your special pleading falls short.

-sgtt