Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
1. The claim, put forth by believers, is that Yahweh exists.
2. The burden of proof rests upon the person making the claim.
3. The evidence presented for the existence of the deity is the Bible, a book we know was written by men, but the believer insists was divinely inspired by God.
4. The information contained within the book contains numerous contradictions and demonstrably false information.
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I don't think you're fully assimilating my argument that God could just be a liar. You are making a logical leap from "The Bible cannot be true" to "The God of the Bible cannot exist". Your error is between steps 3 and 4 - there is nothing stopping God from divinely revealing falsehoods and contradictions. Therefore, the Bible could be false while the God of the bible be true.
Further, if your conclusion is that the bible isn't evidence of anything, that applies both for and against: you can't say "the Bible proves God *doesn't* exist". By saying the God of the Bible (and not the Bible itself) is "demonstrably false", that is exactly what you are doing.
A further error lies in your assumption that "the Bible" admits of only one interpretation of God which is the "Christian" viewpoint. This is a (admittedly subtle) straw man argument, where the straw man is the vision of God as a benevolent omnipotent actor concerned with humanity and its travails; there are sects who believe God will save only the elect and punish everyone else, sinners or not, and their vision of God is more along the lines of a jealous, amoral, arbitrary killer, and these sects can also find ample scriptural backup for their preferred vision.
All you can really say is that the Bible cannot be literally true at all points, and that it is open to just about any interpretation of its supposed author.