A bit of a fish bicycle, eh? Or, a tautology? At best, the idea is not a truth, it is a way of looking at life. It either works or it doesn't. It's empowering or not. That's all. If used to make a personal sense of right and wrong into an absolute, it's been corrupted. Contradiction of preferences is decent evidence that the personal sense isn't absolute, but that doesn't bear on the existence of God. God made us different, that we might recognize each other. That, again, is Qur'an.

I wasn't talking about contradictory preferences between different people, but within one individual person.

I want to be famous but also want to not talk to people. I want to be strong and a hard worker and smart and also want to sit on the couch all day watching TV. I want to be happy but I also enjoy moments of extreme sadness. My preferences don't make sense at all, they're not coherent and they change over time and they're shaped significantly by my genetics and my childhood environment, so it's extremely more probable that they're the product of a random process like evolution than that they're the product of a God. If a God is responsible for my preferences, he is insane and incompetent.

Most arguments for and against the existence of God are rather equally silly. I used to lecture university students on Islam, and once an atheist proudly asserted his position, "I don't believe in God." I asked him, "What God don't you believe in?" I think he was already a bit confused, I forget his answer, if there was one. I then said, "The God that you don't believe in, I don't believe in either." He was speechless. He'd expected an argument. Of course, it was an argument, just one he'd never heard before. I wasn't being silly, and I was telling him what was true for me.

Your ability to confuse one naive college atheist isn't very strong evidence for anything. The atheist should have replied that he didn't believe in any gods. You weren't making an argument, just confusing him. Or if you were making an argument, then I've missed it, and I need the premises more clearly stated.

(I was more combative in those days. Now, I'm a little ashamed to tell that story. Did I actually communicate something to him -- or discover something with him --, or did I merely humiliate him? The fact that I don't know indicates something was missing.)

I think you probably confused him, or he was bad at thinking on his feet and responding to new ideas, but that afterwards he thought about it and figured out what his reply should have been. I would expect that "I don't believe in any gods" is a fairly obvious reply to most people. He was probably annoyed with himself, and abit upset at you for confusing him, and he might have been a little embarrassed too.

I didn't "ignore the Abraham data point." After all, I brought it up. To cover the Aqedah, though, could take more than I'm prepared to address today. I wrote, "my condolences," because that was truly a trial. Can you imagine?

That's fine, it's a big issue. I felt like you were lampshading it, but if you've got a lengthy complicated explanation of it that you'd rather not go into I sympathize and agree. I'd rather not go into detail with it either.