After finding out my lack of religious affiliation, my father bought me the book "Proof of God." I would like help in refuting its claims.

Glad to help. But allow me to push a little further with some unsolicited advice:

If I were in your position, I wouldn't share any of this information with my dad. It's too confrontational. Reasoning skills tend to diminish (or disappear) when one is defensive. And that's not your goal, is it? To provoke defensiveness?

Your best arguments will likely fall upon deaf ears. (see: Backfire Effect) Near-death experiences, apologetics, or the specific claims of holy books... these are irrelevant trivia when talking about god claims with a believer, because that's not why they believe.

A Christian does not believe because Dr. Eben Alexander had an extraordinary experience. If it were proven to them, conclusively, that Dr. Alexander lied about that experience... would they stop believing in God?

No. And if honest, they will agree. So why discuss it at all?

Concentrating on Dr. Alexander's specific circumstances, I neglected to mention a far more useful rebuttal - People of other religions have near-death experiences (NDEs), too. Guess which gods they see?

A quick Google led me to the testimony of one Vasudev Pandey, who, after being presumed dead, claimed to have seen Yamraj, the Hindu god of the dead.

Such experiences are filtered through lenses of upbringing and culture. Christians see the Christian god, Hindus see the Hindu gods... This would seem to indicate that NDEs are subjective.

Are only the NDEs of Christians legitimate?

Some will gladly affirm, but most understand the inherent arrogance and bias in such a belief. So they'll go another direction:

Maybe there is a supreme deity whom no one fully comprehends. Maybe NDEs are interpreted through a cultural filter, but maybe each individual is seeing some little piece of a larger truth, ala the blind men and the elephant.

This is a popular explanation for why different cultures have different near-death experiences. And to those devout Christians who have adopted this reasoning, I would ask:

Is it possible the Hindu is more correct about God than you are?

No matter the answer, now we're on the right subject: epistemology (How you know what you think you know).

How do you know the Hindu is less correct?

How could the Hindu discover their mistake, on their own?

I've written more about this. Check out /r/StreetEpistemology and look for the post stickied up top. There, I give what I believe are useful strategies for productive dialogue about contentious religious issues.

Also, Anthony Magnabosco's videos are highly recommended to see examples of this conversational technique in action.

/r/atheism Thread Parent