Richard Swinburne on doubt and faith

Here. 

Susan Blackmore on the Hard Problem of Consciousness

How can objective things like brain cells produce subjective experiences like the feeling that ‘I’ am striding through the grass? This gap is what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem.’ ...It is a modern version of the ancient mind/body problem – but it seems to get worse, not better, the more we learn about the brain... The objective world out there, and the subjective experiences in here, seem to be totally different kinds of things. Asking how one produces the other seems to be nonsense. The intractability of this problem suggests to me that we are making a fundamental mistake in the way we think about consciousness – perhaps right at the very beginning.

 Susan Blackmore, ‘What is consciousness?’, Big Questions in Science, in Harriet Swain (ed.), Big Questions in Science, (Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 29-40.

Supervenience and its discontents

Terence Horgan was one of the original defenders of supervenience as a way of cashing out nonreductive materialism. However, he is one of its critics. See here. 

He now claims to be ambivalent about materialism.

Almeder on the scientific proof of materialism

After all, where in the scientific literature, biological, neurobiological, or otherwise, is it established either by observation or by the methods of testing and experiment, that consciousness is a biological property secreted by the brain in the same way a gland secretes a hormone? Better yet, where in the history of science has it been established that consciousness exists, but cannot be a substance very much unlike any substance we ordinarily deal with in contemporary physics or biology? In short, there is no scientifically well-confirmed (much less robustly confirmed) belief within science that consciousness is a biological product of the brain. We do not see the brain secrete consciousness in the same way we see a gland secrete a hormone. Consciousness is nothing like a hormone.

Almeder's paper is here. 

Threats to religious freedom

Here. 

Apologetics and the Academy

By Kelly Burton, who teaches philosophy at Paradise Valley Community College in the Phoenix area.

Why science makes theism likelier than atheism

Here. 

Why the Resurrection wasn't fabricated

Here. 

Hinman on Carroll on atheist cosmologists

Here. 

But see also Donald Page's guest post on Carroll's blog.

Do evolution advocates violate the establishment clause?

According to this, yes. 

And please, spare me the "A Discovery Institute person said it, so you know it has to be wrong." That's called, you know, the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy.

NOMA and the Jones decision

The Jones decision absolutely reeks of NOMA, and it only works as an establishment clause case on the assumption of NOMA. Were questions of design refuted by Darwinian biology, or were they set aside as metaphysical issues outside the purview of science per se? Did the methodological assumptions of science change over time to preclude design inferences? Are there weaknesses in the Darwinian story that are constantly being papered over? Is Darwinian theory being protected by leaders in the scientific community, using the phobia of creationism to silence honest, and secular criticism of the standard theory? The guy from China said that while in China you can criticize Darwin but not the government, over here you can criticize the government but not Darwin. 

If you go by the Jones decision, then biology textbooks are going to have to be checked to make sure they don't have antireligious content in them. Otherwise they violate the establishment clause in just the same way that the Dover statement violated it. How much do you want to bet that you could find lots of violations in many biology textbooks? 

What I believe on the other days of the week is that NOMA is true, biology should be metaphysically neutral, and science textbooks should indicate that questions of intelligent design lie outside the purview of science and cannot be settled one way or the other by science. So, evolution is affirmed because science has to work that way, and you can legitimately ask the question of design, but as an extrascientific question that science, per se, cannot answer.

Creationism, Evolutionism, Intelligent Design

When people say that intelligent design is just creationism, it is hard to see what they mean exactly. Meanings of terms like these have a bad habit of sliding around.

Creationism can mean the belief that God created the world, the belief that God created the world in six days, the belief that science can discover that God created the world, or that science can discover that God created the world in seven days.

Evolution can mean that the earth is old, or that there is common ancestry, or that speciation occurred without design, or that life and speciation occurred without design.

Intelligent design means that at least some life on earth was designed (by a nonhuman designer), or that science can discover that life on earth was designed. It typically means at least the second of these things.

All creators are designers, but some designers are not creators. Plato believed in design but not creation. ID advocates say that science can discover design but not creation. But most believe in creation, and hope that those who come to accept design will come to believe in creation. Is this enough to make them creationists, in the perjorative sense?

With respect to the public school controversy, it is true that ID was used by many creationists to bring as much of what they believed into the public school classroom as they could. Insofar as leading ID advocates took an interest in public education, they aroused the ire of the scientific community. But someone could support the idea that, at the higher education and research level,  researchers should be free to pursue design hypotheses, but until those are further developed, they should not attempt to push theories that contradict the consensus of the scientific community in the public school classroom. This is my position, at least on some days of the week.

Jewish philosopher Saul Kripke on materialist prejudice

“I don’t have the prejudices many have today, I don’t believe in a naturalist world view. I don’t base my thinking on prejudices or a world view and do not believe in materialism.”

Saul Kripke. 

Materialism and the Illusion of Following the Evidence

Brain processes are physical events. They occur in accordance with the laws of physics, not the laws of logic or laws of evidence. Our brains follow the laws of physics automatically, we obey the laws of logic or laws of evidence, when we do, only when the laws of physics dictate that they do so. If you think this way, then I fail to see how William Hasker's conclusion is avoidable: the laws of logic and evidence, or as he puts it, the principles of sound reasoning, are inoperative.

Some atheists (Jerry Coyne is a good example) think that the idea of free will is a useful fiction; we should keep it around even though we know it's false. I think that if naturalistic atheists are consistent, they have to say the same thing about their claim that they believe what they do because the evidence is superior. But this would be an awfully damaging admission. They perceive themselves as following the evidence, but if their own world-view is correct, their thoughts are brain processes ultimately subject, not to the rules of evidence, but to the laws of physics. Their beliefs are caused in exactly the same way as a fideistic religionist who believes in God as a matter of faith.

You are only a Christian because of your birthplace!

Gee, where have we heard that before? Saints and skeptics answer here. 

Advice to Christian Apologists, from William Lane Craig

Here. 

The is part of a paper I am writing to extend the debate with David Kyle Johnson

The debate appears in Gregory Bassham ed. C. S. Lewis's Christian Apologetics: Pro and
Con. (Brill Rodopi, 2015).

Now I think it important here to point out one very important area of disagreement between myself and Johnson. Johnson firmly accepts supervenience and causal closure, but he thinks that insisting that the supervenience base mechanistic is in fact a non-standard definition of naturalism. He writes:

In reply, Reppert might insist that property dualism is not a naturalistic theory because it is also violates his first tenet of naturalism by including mental properties at the basic level of analysis. But this simply reveals that he has chosen a (non-standard) definition of naturalism to load the dice in his favor—to preclude naturalism from doing the one thing he says it must do. In reality, this tenet does not actually express a necessary component of naturalism (which is that nothing exists beyond the natural world). Not only is naturalism not necessarily mechanistic (a possible world of chaotic matter would still be naturalistic), but neither a mechanistic world nor a naturalistic would preclude mentality existing at the basic level of analysis—as property dualism and the identity theory reveal. Simply put, the mental is not necessarily supernatural, as Reppert seems to assume.

            Well, I would simply have to ask how mental causes came to start operating in a naturalistic world. Given theism, minds operate in the world because they are products of divine creation (even if there was an evolutionary process involved). Or perhaps there is an Absolute Mind that is not distinct from the physical world, so that what appears to be nonmental really is not nonmental. This is the perspective of Absolute Idealism which Lewis embraced when he was first persuaded by Owen Barfield of the difficulties the Argument from Reason poses for naturalism. Or mind might be fundamental to the universe in some other way, and Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos and elsewhere has been casting about for how that might be. But it should be noted that, while being very explicit about avoiding supernaturalism, he is being ferociously attacked by advocates of standard naturalism, precisely for trying to fit mind into the foundation of his view of the universe. As one commentator points out,

The critics have focused much of their ire on what Nagel calls "natural teleology," the hypothesis that the universe has an internal logic that inevitably drives matter from nonliving to living, from simple to complex, from chemistry to consciousness, from instinctual to intellectual.

In short Nagel is upbraided by many of his collegues for his failure to adhere to the what I am calling the doctrine of mechanism, the doctrine that the mental must be excluded from the suprervenience base.

Or, perhaps there are emergent laws, such that, once biological systems get complicated enough to produce brains, the matter in those brains stop acting like the matter in the rocks flying down the hill toward my head, and instead start acting as if they had purposes they were fulfilling. But the individual parts of my brain don’t obey logical laws, so it looks like this form of emergentism not only involves emergent properties and emergent laws, it also seems to include emergent substances. This certainly is going to be regarded as blazing heresy by the mainstream naturalists, who agree with Francis Crick:

 ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

            The mainstream naturalistic position is that mentalistic explanations are not allowed in the supervenience base. That is the essence of Darwin’s dangerous idea. Long before writing Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett spelled out the fundamental commitments of naturalism when he wrote:

Psychology of course must not be question-begging. It must not explain intelligence in terms of intelligence, for, instance by assigning responsibility for the existence of intelligence to the munificence of an intelligent creator, or by putting clever homunculi at the control panels of the nervous system. If that were the best psychology could do, then psychology could not do the job assigned to it.[10]

And again:

Darwin explains a world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle that is entirely independent of "meaning" or "purpose." It assumes a world that is absurd in the existentialist's sense of the term: not ludicrous or pointless, and this assumption is a necessary condition of any non-question-begging account of purpose.[11]

In fact, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he explains the difference between cranes and skyhooks as follows:

"Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process."

In fact most of the book is spent upbraiding not religious believers, (who he probably considers marginalized anyway)  but thinkers who say they are naturalists but have not fully and completely applied the dangerous idea, such as Chomsky, Penrose, Searle, and Gould.

            If we think about it, if we are naturalists, how did things happen in the world before brains came on the scene? What principles of causation were operative? Presumably nonmental ones. Wouldn’t it take a miracle for brand new principles of causation to enter the universe? And miracles are, of course, anathema to the naturalistic mind.

What the argument from reason criticizes

The viewpoints that the argument from reason criticizes are variously called naturalism, materialism, and physicalism. The idea is that nature, or matter, or physics, is all there is. Behind all of this is the attempt to exclude the supernatural, such entities as God, angels, or the soul. But in order to know what supernatural is, you need to know what natural is, so that supernatural can be “super” that. But what is naturalism more precisely? After all, I could attempt to qualify as a naturalist, or even a materialist or a physicalist. I could say to my materialist friend that we are both materialists, only I believe in some different kinds of material entities than he does. I believe in psychons, which used to be called souls, angelons, which used to be called angels, and one triune theon, who used to be called God. I suspect that any materialist worth his salt is going to point out that I am misusing words here, and that whatever we mean by material has to exclude God, angels, and souls. Bu this means that we need a principled analysis of these concepts in order to get them to work, and we need to keep them from sliding around when it is convenient for them to do a little sliding. 

Belief without evidence is crucial for knowledge

Here. 

The key quote is from Swinburne:

n the introduction of his book The Evolution of the Soul, Philosopher Richard Swinburne lays out some key principles we all use in our reasoning. The first is the Principle of Credulity. Swinburne defines it as "in the absence of counter-evidence probably things are as they seem to be."1 This principle holds that we should basically trust what our senses tell us. While sometimes our sense can be wrong, we trust them to tell us true things about the world, for that's simply how we observe the world. As Swinburne points out:

Without this principle, there can be no knowledge at all. If you cannot suppose things are as they seem to be unless further evidence is brought forward—e.g. that in the past in certain respects things were as they seemed to be, the question will arise as to why you should suppose the latter evidence to be reliable. If ‘it seems to be' is good enough evidence in the latter case, it ought to be good reason to start with. And if ‘it seems to be' is not good enough reason in the latter case, we are embarked on an infinite regress and no claim to believe anything with justification will be correct.2

Believing in God for pragmatic reasons

What would you say to people, for example, who say that if there is no life beyond this one, there is really no hope for human existence, and it is vain to continue. In answering this question, it is important to realize that many of us are members of the educated class, and our lives probably have more creature comforts than most people in the world have. Most people cannot afford to be part of the great brave new world of science or philosophy like Dawkins or Dennett. Can you really object to people who say, quite honestly, that they believe in God because it makes them happy? What are you going to give them, some altruistic argument?

I would have to say that I could never do it this way. But I think it is vain to just say that these people are weak. I don't live under their circumstances. That is why I don't think Bertrand Russell's answer works.

“To refuse to face facts merely because they are unpleasant is considered the mark of a weak character, except in the sphere of religion. I do not see how it can be ignoble to yield to the tyranny of fear in all ordinary terrestrial matters, but noble and virtuous to do exactly the same thing when God and the future life are concerned. There is to my mind something pusillanimous and sniveling about this point of view, which makes me scarcely able to consider it with patience.”

― Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth Seeker and Break the Chain of Mental Slavery (1944).

Richard Bauckham on Lewis's Fernseeds and Elephants

Summarized here.  Bauckham is a leading biblical scholar, who sees a great deal of value in Lewis's criticism of his discipline in an essay I know as "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism."

Culpably Ignorant? In a deterministic universe?

I presented some arguments on Debunking Christianity a few weeks back and got identified as the 
Gullible Person of the day. Since I consider it a major step toward an unproductive discussion when the focus of discussions switch from subject matter to the intellectual viability of persons. I interact in the blogosphere under my own name, and my institutional affiliations are also known, so I find it offensive to be attacked personally, not just by Loftus, who also writes under his own name, but many of his commenters, who write under pseudonyms. Which is why, for the most part, I now avoid his site. 

But he said it was nothing personal against me. Well, why isn't it personal, I asked. He said it had nothing to do with my likability as a person, but as a Christian apologist I was culpably ignorant.. 

The attitude here seems typical amongst atheists. They act as if it is our fault that we believe what they consider to be nonsense, since we exercise faith and don't apportion our beliefs to the evidence and recognize the evidential vacuity of Christianity. They are moralistic about rationality, as is explained here.

But can they really say that we are culpably ignorant? On their own view, evolution spit some of us up as atheists, and others as Christians.. And deterministic brain processes determined that he should lose his faith and I keep mine. No one could possibly be culpable.

Consider Richard Dawkins: 

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Now, surely it would be inconsistent to apply Dawkins' logic to murderers but not to Christians. 

Jerry Coyne is also an opponent of moral responsibility.

Sorry, atheists, but on your own view, everyone is doing what they have to do. You can't blame us believers from believing in God, even if we were delusional. (Which we're not, but that's the other debate). 

Ockham's Razor and Ockham's Lobotomy

Now, the principle of explanatory exclusion is very popular amongst atheists and naturalists. It is simply a form of Ockham’s Razor. Atheists are happy to point out that the electrical explanation of electricity makes Thor’s hammer unnecessary, and that the Blind Watchmaker of evolution replaces the divine watchmaker. But in the case of the mental and physical explanations for, say, the mental events that produced Godel’s Theorem or even Darwin’s theory of evolution, they insist that while the thoughts of Godel and Darwin have a physical explanation, they also have a mental explanation. Otherwise, Ockham’s Razor becomes Ockham’s Lobotomy (thanks, William!), and the scientific thought processes that produced these beautiful theories and theorems could not have existed.

What to do when someone challenges your faith

Just say it's a matter of faith and by definition it can't be challenged? No. 

Kim's Principle of Explanatory Exclusion

Jaegwon Kim has argued that in order for there to be a workable account of mental causation, reductionism has to be true. According to his principle of explanatory exclusion: 

An event cannot have two separate and complete* explanations.
Take any human behavioral event M (A person decides to change seats, comes to understand a principle of physics,feels sorry for her little sister, etc.) For every M, there can be only one complete explanation. There cannot be two explanations which
a). individually provide a complete explanation of M, and
b). are unconnected to each other.
*An explanation is complete if the events or properties that it specifies are the only ones that need to be mentioned in order to fully explain the occurrence of that event.

Explained here. 

Anscombe's commentary on her exchange with Lewis

In 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe, then a student of Wittgenstein and a research fellow at Oxford, publicly challenged C. S. Lewis’s central argument against naturalism. In response to her criticisms, Lewis rewrote the relevant chapter of his book Miracles. Anscombe briefly acknowledged the revision in print as an improvement, but never wrote more extensively about it. In 1985, however, she gave a talk about Lewis’s revised version to the C. S. Lewis Society, discussing its strengths and remaining weaknesses. This chapter is a transcript of that talk.

Here.  I wish this transcript had been available back when I was writing my dissertation chapter on the Lewis-Anscombe Controversy. Now if I can just get my hands on it!

This is Gregory Bassham's summary of Anscombe's discussion. from Church History. 

One reading that will be of special interest to Lewis scholars is Elizabeth Anscombe’s talk on “C. s. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of MiraclesAs is well-known, Lewis and Anscombe engaged in a famous debate in 1948 over Lewis’s claim that naturalism is self-refeting (his so-called "argument from reason”). Confroversy has swirled over who won the debate and whether Lewis largely abandoned rational apologetics as a result of his perceived defeat. What we know for sure is that Lewis substantially revised and expanded his original argument in the second edition of Miracles (London: Collins-Fontana, 1960), and that Anscombe stated in the early 1980s that Lewis’s revised argument was a substantial improvement over the original formulation, iat we have not known until now is whether Anscombe believed that Lewis’s revised argument was substantially correct. We can now see that she did not. Anscombe examines Lewis’s argument in detail, and finds it to be rife with confiisions, ambiguities, and false assertions (16-22). Lewis argues that naturalism undermines itself, because naturalism can only be justifiably believed if it can be rationally inferred from good evidence, and naturalism excludes the possibility of rational inference by claiming that all human mental processes are wholly determined by nonrational causes. In other words, naturalism can be rationally believed only if reasoning is possible. But if naturalism is true, then reasoning is impossible. So if naturalism is true, it cannot be rationally believed (and neither can much else). Anscombe suggests that this argument rests on a confiision. The fact that a beliefor statement is felly determined by non-rational causes has no bearing on whether it is true or rationally justified. Consider, she says, the analogy of a printed book. Every word in such a book is wholly determined by the machinery that printed the book. Yet no one would suppose that this casts any doubt on whether the things said in the book are true or rationally defensible (16). As Anscombe sees it, the whole issue of causal determination is a red herring؛ even strict, reductionistic naturalists can consistently recognize the existence of reasoning and the possibility of rational beliefs. But Anscombe does find something of real value in Lewis’s discussion. Lewis raises the important and deeply puzzling question of how logical grounds can cause a conclusion to be drawn (18). As Anscombe sees it, Lewis’s “damnably obscure” claim that an inferred conclusion can be "determined only by the truth it knows” (22) does not do much to solve this problem, but Lewis was right in pointing to the deeply puzzling nature of mental causation.

As I noted in the first essay I wrote on Lewis-Anscombe, Anscombe is committed to a divorce between rational justification and the causation of belief that strikes me as implausibly strong, and one that would not have be embraced by most naturalists today, who would follow Donald Davidson in rejecting a strict divorce between reasons and causes (see his essay "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" in which he criticizes the standard Wittgensteinian position on this). Anscombe also has to deal with the ontological restrictiveness of naturalism. Whether an explanation is causal or not, it still has an ontology, and most philosophical materialists and naturalists will not accept reasons into their ontology without some kind of intertheoretic reduction or supervenience relation, and this is not part of Anscombe's critique at all. 

Laplace's demon and Godel's Theorem

I think we need to pause for a moment and reflect upon what mechanistic means here. Consider what happens as I discover, at the foot of a mountain, that I am about to be caught in an avalanche. Rocks are falling down, and to avoid being hit, I run. But before I can escape, a large boulder comes crashing down in the direction of my head. It will either hit me or not hit me, depending upon what? Depending on whether it thinks I should suffer a concussion or not? Of course not. It blindly does what the laws of nature say it will do. If we think about how events happened before the advent of life, this is how things happened in the world.  Even though the indeterminism of quantum mechanics complicates things somewhat, it does not really add anything conducive to rationality. Therefore, it is helpful to look at a naturalistic picture of the world from the point of view of Laplace’s demon:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

The point that has to be stressed here is the information Laplace’s demon has when he knows conditions, say, concerning conditions prior to the formation of planets. The physical information the demon has says nothing about purposes, nothing about a first-person perspective, nothing having to do with what anybody’s thoughts are about, and knows nothing about what his normative in any sense.

            Now consider the mind of Kurt Godel as he proves the incompleteness of arithmetic. The Laplacian demon knows the state of the physical prior to the formation of stars and planets, and therefore knows the positions of the material particles in Godel’s brain when the developed his Incompleteness Theorem. According to the naturalistic view, the positions of the material particles in Godel’s brain determine what mental states he is in, and those brain states are caused by a chain of prior physical states going back to a time when there were no brains, and therefore, according to naturalism, no mental states whatsoever.  So his act of knowing that arithmetic is incomplete can be comprehensively explained by factors that contain reference to no mathematical truths that Godel perceived, and could have occurred whether arithmetic was really complete or really incomplete. When a complete set of causes is adduced, the state of Godel’s brain can be explained without reference to any mathematical truths that Godel knows, at all.

What Lewis did to Miracles

Arend Smilde chronicles the post-Anscombe changes in Lewis's Miracles here and here. 

C. S. Lewis's revised chapter 3 of Miracles.

Here. 

Steps to marriage in the time of Jesus, with some reflections on our Valentine's Day culture

From William Barclay's commentary on Matthew: 

(i) There was the engagement. The engagement was often made when the couple were only children. It was usually made through the parents, or through a professional match-maker. And it was often made without the couple involved ever having seen each other. Marriage was held to be far too serious a step to be left to the dictates of the human heart.

(ii) There was the betrothal. The betrothal was what we might call the ratification of the engagement into which the couple had previously entered. At this point the engagement, entered into by the parents or the match-maker, could be broken if the girl was unwilling to go on with it. But once the betrothal was entered into, it was absolutely binding. It lasted for one year. During that year the couple were known as man and wife, although they had not the rights of man and wife. It could not be terminated in any other way than by divorce. In the Jewish law we frequently find what is to us a curious phrase. A girl whose fiance had died during the year of betrothal is called "a virgin who is a widow". It was at this stage that Joseph and Mary were. They were betrothed, and if Joseph wished to end the betrothal, he could do so in no other way than by divorce; and in that year of betrothal Mary was legally known as his wife.

(iii) The third stage was the marriage proper, which took place at the end of the year of betrothal.

This is how marriage was done back then. No dating, or even courtship. Throughout most of history this is how it has been done. That is why, in India, Valentine's day is such a controversial holiday. On Valentine's day we celebrate falling in love,  since that determines the course of our relationships. In India, it is a family decision, sometimes done with the primary participation of the actual couple, but in other cases not. 

The same-sex marriage issue can only arise in a Valentine's Day culture. Can you imagine Tzeitel (in Fiddler on the Roof) telling the matchmaker she's a lesbian, and wants to be matched with a woman? 

Christianity, Islam, and Hermeneutics

How you go from texts to application is a big issue, and it was recognized in the Islamic tradition as early as the 8th Century. The violent texts seem to presuppose a context of open battle where Islamic soldiers are fighting against pagan soldiers, as in the Battle of Mecca.To use those text to justify attacking a standing target like the World Trade Centers is to take those texts out of context. 

In the Christian tradition, people who get different messages from the same Scripture are operating with different hermeneutics. Let's take "Women should be silent in church." Most conservative Christians realize that the contingencies of the time and situation led Paul to make that statement, and that it would be a mistake to apply it literally to the church in the present day. But some are literal about it. Both of them can read, but they use different principles of application. 

To take another example, it can easily be argued that given the way homosexuality was practiced in the Greco-Roman world, Paul had ample reason to condemn what he saw going on around him. But Christian differ as to whether these condemnations should be applied to homosexuality in general in the present day, or whether they are bound to their time and place. 

There were four different schools of thought in the Sunni tradition as to how you apply the Qur'an to a different situation. One school, the Hanbalite school, was very strict and literal, but there were three others. Muslims lived in different places than Arabia, and some saw rules made for Arabia that they thought might not straightforwardly apply in, say Baghdad. But others thought this this freedom of application led to loose morals, and different Muslim came down in different places on this. But they weren't just uneducated about what their texts said.

Hitler's anti-Catholicism

“We are the joyous Hitler Youth. We need no stinkin’ Christian virtue. Our Führer is our savior and future. The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone. We wish to be pagans once again.” It’s a safe bet that few have heard this line from the Hitler Youth’s anthem; far more have heard that Pope Pius XII was callously indifferent to the victims of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the Third Reich’s persecution of the Catholic Church is one of the most overlooked threads in the otherwise widely documented history of Nazism. It is to be hoped that French journalist Guillaume Zeller’s The Priest Barracks, now available in English, will increase awareness of Hitler’s hatred of the Catholic faith.

Here. 

When the monotheistic tradition is rejected and overthrown, this is one way you can go. Why do people assume that as soon as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition is rejected, people will settle down to a nice, common humanistic moral core which preserves all the good that has come from those traditions but dumps all the irrational taboos?

Why?

What is secular privilege?

Here. 

Also from Chesterton in "The Future of Democracy"

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, 'Don't you sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' But it is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and decision, 'No, I don't,' and there is no more disputing about it further than about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moods is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.

Here. 

Chesterton on America

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth, and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism. and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. 

The essay is found here. 

The argument from reason and four categories of statements

The argument from reason, which I have defended, essentially maintains that if you maintain a consistently naturalistic view of human thought, you end up not describing our thought processes in a way that renders our belief in naturalism, or even the thought processes of natural scientists, justified. For any proposition, there are four possibilities.

                A) It is true, and we can have a justified belief that it is true. We believe, for example, that the world is round, and we have good reason to think so.

                B) It is true, but we cannot have a justified belief that it is true. Consider the proposition “No one believes anything for a reason.” If could be true, but if it were, you couldn’t possibly provide an argument that it is true, because if you did so, there would be no one could possibly be persuaded by your argument. If you did persuade someone, it would falsify your position. The self-refuting character of this position, is, therefore a good reason to believe that it is false.

                C) It is false, but we can have a justified belief that it is true. We had a justified belief that all swans were white, before they found a black one in Western Australia.

                D) It is false, and we cannot have a justified belief that it is true. The claim the universe is nothing but a turnip with whipped cream on top is not only observationally false, but if it were true, neither the turnip nor the whipped cream could infer that the universe contains nothing but a turnip and whipped cream.

Naturalists obviously want to claim that their belief that naturalism is true falls into category A. Naturalism is true, they say, because the natural sciences provide us with a great way of knowing things, (though theory formation, observation, experimentation, and mathematical calculation). But this involves inferring one thing from another. The reason is that the base level, which is typically called the physical, is mechanistic, meaning that it proceeds without reference to the mental. On a deterministic form of naturalism, at the basic level, given the condition of the basic particles at a time when no minds even existed, and given the laws governing those basic particles, every event that follows, including all the discoveries of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, as well as the arguments of J. L. Mackie and John Rawls, are all inevitable results of a process that is, at the fundamental level, nonrational or even, at least in the dictionary sense of the term irrational. The indeterminism of quantum mechanics doesn’t really add anything rational, by itself if merely adds a factor of random chance. Causation on the naturalistic view is a mechanistic process that takes place at the physical level. Thus we have an apparent incompatibility between the claim that, say, Charles Darwin inferred natural selection from observations about finches in the Galapagos islands, and that Charles Darwin’s went from one brain state to another brain state, not because of the evidence, but because of the laws of nature and previous facts concerning Darwin’s brain and his environment. In defending the argument from reason, I have been arguing that this conflict isn’t just apparent, it’s real. If there is justified belief, then naturalism has to be false. Naturalism might fall into category B, that is, it could be true but no one knows that it is.  But any proposition that is a bad candidate for category A is best rejected as false.