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I think it is not the sub as a whole, rather it is a large but not majority fraction of the sub.
But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" thing going on with Christianity in this sub. The Christians and other Christianity-supporting participants on the sub generally do not attempt to argue that Christianity is true on the object level, even if they believe that it is. And the rest of the sub generally does not direct the same kind of object level skeptical analysis towards Christianity that it does towards woke beliefs like "disparate outcomes between men/women or whites/blacks are mainly caused by oppression".
The sub is a relatively free discussion forum that does not have any specified ideology but leans anti-woke, so there are both a bunch of anti-woke atheists and anti-woke Christians here.
Sure, I'll try my hand.
Let's start with the existence of God. What's seemed the strongest argument to me is just the question, why is there something rather than nothing?
Why does anything exist? What caused the big bang? The only answer that doesn't lead to an infinite regress, so far as I can tell, is that something must necessarily exist. The main candidates for this that I've heard of are a God of some form, or a Tegmark IV multiverse—the extreme of mathematical platonism, where everything possible exists.
(What about just things happening utterly randomly and causelessly? I'd be really worried about that breaking induction—why doesn't that happen again. To be clear, I'm not talking about the constrained randomness of quantum mechanics. What about a loop or an infinite regress? I'd think we can just collect all the terms and ask if that has a cause.)
The first hypothesis seems more likely than the second, because it seems to better explain why I'd find myself in an orderly world. There are many more ways to disorder something than to order them—e.g. there's only one world where the laws of physics continue as usual, but a much greater number where they broke down 3 seconds ago. I'd also be worried about whether things like Boltzmann brains could end up being common enough to harm our epistemology—not in itself a measure of likelihood, but one hurting pretty severely the ability to do epistemology, since again, the law of induction becomes pretty broken. I'm also unsure whether consciousness harms the ability encapsulate everything mathematically, which the Tegmark hypothesis would seem to require.
Let's say there's some a pretty good chance there's some necessarily existent thing out there. What sort of thing might it be? One perfect in every way seems like one of the relatively more likely possibilities, though it might be hard to say what's a perfection. Not sure how to do anything more exact here, but a pretty decent a priori probability is enough to matter, I'd think.
Okay, that's all towards some form of theism. What about Christianity in particular? The largest obstacle, I think, to most people is that miracles seem really unlikely. This is mitigated to a pretty substantial extent if you think that a god exists. Once there's a mechanism to account for miracles existing, that seems to raise the probability a good bit. If you will, it's no longer something beyond some unbreakable laws of physics, since it's something allowed under the true laws of physics that aren't usually in play. (If you still find it hard to believe that this sort of thing can happen, do you also treat the simulation hypothesis as absurd—at least, if it thinks that there could be intervention once in a while.) But in any case, some documentary evidence and some accompanying historical evidence seem rather sparse to believe in a resurrection from the dead. I think the accompanying teachings of the christian scriptures significantly raise the reasonableness of thinking that it took place, since it places it in a context where this is at least something not improbably, where this is the way to accomplish some aims. This is especially the case since descriptions of what took place were written hundreds of years beforehand—see Isaiah 52:13 through to the end of Isaiah 53. The gospels and epistles are also better than average for ancient historical texts in some other respects—they're written not too long after the death of Jesus, within the lifetime of those who knew him when he was alive. Paul, at one point, refers to 500 people who witnessed Christ after his death.
Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one. Ethics or purpose seem a good bit easier to come by, which, by no means necessary, do mean that those worlds might be ones that you should concern yourself with more.
It is not necessarily necessary for everything to have a cause. There is nothing fundamentally illogical as far as I can tell about the notion of an uncaused phenomenon. And if you believe that everything must have a cause, then that applies just as much to God as it does to the universe, so bringing God in does not actually solve the problem.
Why we find ourselves in an orderly world can be explained by the anthropic principle of "if the world was not orderly, we would not be here asking the question".
Miracles actually are not something that I reject. By the very nature of some phenomena, they can be both true yet also either fundamentally or at least in practice beyond the reach of scientific investigation. For example, let us say that I remember 20 years ago seeing a rock shaped like an arrowhead on a certain trail, but I do not remember exactly where the trail was. Let us say this actually happened, the rock was real. Yet there is in practice no way to prove that it was real. More fundamentally, there is the hard problem of consciousness, which I think quite possibly will be forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. So it is not that I think it is impossible that 2000 years ago a man multiplied loaves of bread and rose from the dead. I just think that given the available evidence for it, there is no reason to be so convinced that it happened that one fundamentally orders one's life around the belief that it happened.
This is probably the worst of the atheist arguments against a creator, because it seems to result in a failure of basic comprehension. Theists (and deists) are saying “God is, by definition, the exception to the rule that all things must have a cause. He is the Unmoved Mover, and the Uncaused Causer.” And you’re saying, “But wouldn’t an Uncaused Causer need a cause too?” No, obviously not, that’s literally what makes him the Prime Mover. You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument, whereas the reality is that you just refused to acknowledge that they made it.
It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?
For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.
God's active, doing things, but not changing, exactly. Maybe changing in relation to other things, but not in relation to himself. If you think that's unbiblical, I have a quote for you: "I, the LORD, do not change." And another: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever"
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
I do think that Jesus Christ moves, just not in respect of his divine nature. For humans to change our actions, we generally need to move our bodies—throwing something involves tensing of muscles, shifting of weight, etc. There's no equivalent for God, just direct acts. Your possibility that everything could be motionless is a good point! I can't articulate any reason way it would be impossible that everything exists necessarily. Indeed, there's at least one system, a version of mathematical platonism, where that's the case. But I have concerns with that system (it seems to mess up induction, for one). More arbitrary systems are less plausible to me. I don't know why e.g. the phone I'm typing on might exist from itself, but a single necessary being with God-ish properties seems more plausibly necessarily existent.
You're entirely correct on the biblical quotes, I should have checked better that what I was saying worked. They're only weakly persuasive, not strongly so. James 1:17 seems slightly stronger. Predestination's probably a point in favor as well, since that's clearly biblical. Declaring the end from the beginning, predestining all things according to his council, etc. fits pretty well with a God who doesn't internally change. (to be clear, that isn't conclusive on its own, but it's evidence in the right direction)
The problem with singling out Jesus as special (or as some kind of flesh robot remotely piloted by god) is that these are heretical (the former would be a kind of Docetism the latter similar to Apollinarianism), Jesus is supposed to be real god and real man.
The problem with making "motion" have a special meaning is that the argument is generally taken to proceed from self evident, observable properties of the universe and making "motion" be some metaphysical property would take that away. I'd argue that the distinction between per se and per accidens already does that but whatever.
Predestination is a whole other can of whorms with the free will problem, the soteriology problems, etc.
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