A debate on what Lewis believed about evolution

Is Reasonable Faith an Oxymoron?

 Faith does seem to involve believing in spite of something. Atheists jump on this and say that what believers are talking about is believing in spite of having no good reason to believe it, and good reason to not believe it. 

However, we can, for example, trust that a spouse is going to be faithful even though the spouse is out of our sight. In fact, the Apostle Paul contrasts faith with sight, not reason. Unless seeing is the only way we can have a good reason to believe something, it does seem to me that we cannot say that reasonable faith is an oxymoron by definition. 

Russell's Teapot

Russell's  teapot, along with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is supposed to be very improbable in the absence of strong evidence that it does exist, and since we should consider the existence of a floating teapot to be highly improbable initially, we should reason in the same way for God. 

We do know that matter doesn't ordinarily arrange itself into the shape of a teapot unless there are persons around who want to heat and pour tea. How this is supposed to bear on the probability of something existing which , ex hypothesi, is not derived from natural processes, is something I don't understand. 

What is an argument?

What is an argument? Actually there is a little bit of an ambiguity in the use of that word, because it can mean 1) and unpleasant dispute, or 2) a set of statements designed to give someone a reason for believing something. This famous Monty Python comedy sketch exploits this ambiguity brilliantly. Michael Palin is expecting an argument in the second sense, but John Cleese just keeps contradicting him, assuming that that is what an argument is.  But when we talk about argument in philosophy, what we have in mind is an attempt to show that something is true. Logic is, to a large extent, the attempt to analyze arguments, to determine how strong they are, and if they commit any fallacies, that is, faulty reasoning patterns.

Why Bother With Philosophy?

Because we can’t help but make choices in those areas. Do we follow one of the world’s established religions, or do we live our lives without religious considerations? How do we decide what’s right and what’s wrong? How do we know the things we know? What is the best way to govern a country?

These questions are hard to escape. We can ignore politics, but politics doesn’t ignore us. We have to decide what is right to do. We claim to know certain things. I once say a bumper sticker that said “Sleep in on Sunday and Save Ten Percent.” Should we do that, or do we live in accordance with the teachings of a religion? Not to decide, is to decide. Our actions speak for us, even when our words do not.

It's deja vu all over again

It's the Giants and the Patriots in the Super Bowl this time. I think we've seen this one before. Different result this time?

Not such a good day for the Harbaughs.

Replying to the "Who Made God" argument against cosmological arguments

There are a couple of ways in which defenders of the cosmological argument can develop the argument so as to avoid the consequence of God having to also have been made. One way is to use a principle that whatever has a temporal beginning of its existence has to have a cause of its existence. God, as understood in the tradition, never had a beginning, but Big Bang Theory strongly suggests that the physical universe had to have had a beginning. Therefore, the universe had to have had a cause of its existence, but God doesn't need one.

The other way in which defenders of the argument avoid the problem is by saying that what needs a cause are the sorts of things that, if they do exist, might or might not exist. In other words, these things are called contingent beings. Physical things are contingent, but God, if God exist, is the sort of being who, if he exists, couldn't fail to exist. So physical things need causes, but God does not.

These are well-known maneuvers (though they certainly have rebuttals), but people like Dawkins seen to be unaware of them, and that weakens his case for atheism. 

Tim McGrew's reply to Drange's Argument from Confusion

A redated post. 

Tim McGrew put a couple of responses up to Drange's two arguments against Christian theism, the argument from confusion and the argument from biblical defects. Since they seem to be buried in the previous post, I thought I would put them front and center here. This is the first one

There are multiple problems with AC. To start with, the plausibility of A2 is inversely proportional to the level of detail packed into “G-beliefs.” If the beliefs about the nature of God are to include the metaphysics of a Chalcedonian formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, then A2 is obviously false. And something similar goes for the details of the fate of the wicked in the afterlife, for discursive knowledge of the requirements for salvation (as what is important is, presumably, that one meets them, not that one be able to discourse about them), for the precise details of the metaphysics of the eucharist or the mode of baptism (since again, clearly, what is important on the human end is that one in fact be obedient and take the eucharist and be baptized, by whatever mode), and for the details of one’s theory of inspiration, belief in which is nowhere in scripture made a requirement for one’s having a relationship with God—for the good and sufficient reason that the first Christians at Pentecost predate the writing of the New Testament.

In each of these cases, one can back up to a far more minimal conception of what is required. But then it is very difficult to go anywhere with the argument in its subsequent steps. If B can be accepted only in a fairly minimal sense, then it is not at all obvious that D is true. Conversely, in the sense in which D is obviously true, A2 and B are just as obviously false. So the argument gains no traction.

To say this is not to say that it would not be desirable for Christians to have better, fuller knowledge on some of these points; nor is it to say that such knowledge is not available. But the hinge of the argument is the claim in A2 that Christians would need a set of G-beliefs in order to have a personal relationship with God. And Drange gives no good reason to think that this claim is both (a) true and (b) substantive enough to support his subsequent chain of reasoning.