dangerous idea

Atheist prefers reasonable believers to some fellow atheists

2012-05-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

HT: Steve Hays.

His heresy trial starts tomorrow, Judge Richard Dawkins presiding.

A Christian case for socialism

2012-05-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

I remember my New Testament professor in seminary thought that you couldn't make much of a case for socialism based on the practices of the Jerusalem Church, but he did think that 2 Cor 8:14 established material equality as a legitimate goal. (He was theologically conservative, but was a member of the British Labour party).

2 Corinthians 8:14 – “At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality” (NIV)

In any event, just don't see "this is socialism" as grounds for condemning something. I think keeping some things on the free market, and some things within the government sphere of influence, is reasonable.

Prager on the Left's Misplaced Concern

2012-05-23T20:01:00.001-07:00

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.
And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?

VR: My view is that anyone with too much power can be very effective in doing evil. But, more to the point, what happens when Big Business in the a position to buy Big Government through its control of campaign financing?
I must say I don't understand why many conservatives oppose campaign finance reform and rejoice at Citizens United. If the goal is to get government to stay out of our economic lives, this can never be accomplished so long as corporations can determine the results of elections through campaign donations. Sure, you might get less of one kind of socialism (social programs for the poor and middle class), but money-driven politics is invariably going to result in the government picking winners and losers in the marketplace, upholding position of those with existing money. Rather than allowing free competition to determine how things go in the marketplace, entrenched interests will continue to use the power of government to keep themselves on top, all the while claiming to be conservatives. If corporations can buy big government, then the can do all the evil of big government.

The end of Loftus

2012-05-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

He's quitting, at least for the most part.

I have the feeling that there is something problematic about devoting your life to attacking what you are against, as opposed to defending and developing what you are for. I've noticed in showing atheist-theist debates to audiences of students that the atheists in those debates come across as negative and angry. Part of it could be the nature of the position they are taking; they have the job of tearing something down, while the believer is trying to build something up.

But, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, we won't have John Loftus to kick around anymore.

The atheist fundification of believers.

2012-05-22T14:32:00.001-07:00

This is what I call the atheist fundification of believers. This is a quote from Ben Yaachov. He was talking about what an atheist had said in the course of discussion at Common Sense Atheism.

He added the problem with an Atheist insisting on a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture to a non-fundamentalist Christian is he the atheist in a sense has to put on the hat of a Fundamentalist Religious Apologist and try to convince his opponent to adopt a view of Scripture both already reject before turning around and offering an Atheist criticism of the Fundamentalist view.

I should add that when atheists fundify believers, they commit them to a lead-footed literalism that goes beyond what would be taught by an inerrantist theologian. They commit us to a position that probably couldn't be found much of anywhere else but Jimmy Swaggart Bible College, when it was in existence.

Bill Craig and Mormon epistemology

2012-05-21T13:20:00.001-07:00

A redated post.

William Lane Craig has been criticized for using the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit in a way that parallels what I have been criticizing as the "misuse" of the Mormon "burning in the bosom" appeal. I say misuse in deference to Mormons like Clark who say that there are legitimate limits on its use and that it cannot be used to simply dismiss any and all evidence that might amount to falsification of Mormon claims. In other words, what I am talking about is the use of it as what Steve Cannon calls a "Don't confuse me with facts" strategy. But this is what many Christians think happens to them when they give what they think are good arguments against Mormon claims. But is Craig caught up in the same strategy? Mark Smith, of the Contra Craig website, writes:

MS: In my twenty minute discussion with Craig, in the process of getting his signature, I asked him about his views on evidence (which to me seem very close to self-induced insanity). In short, I set up the following scenario:

Dr. Craig, for the sake of argument let's pretend that a time machine gets built. You and I hop in it, and travel back to the day before Easter, 33 AD. We park it outside the tomb of Jesus. We wait. Easter morning rolls around, and nothing happens. We continue to wait. After several weeks of waiting, still nothing happens. There is no resurrection- Jesus is quietly rotting away in the tomb.

I asked him, given this scenario, would he then give up his Christianity? Having seen with his own eyes that there was no resurrection of Jesus, having been an eyewitness to the fact that Christianity has been based upon a fraud and a lie, would he NOW renounce Christianity? His answer was shocking, and quite unexpected.

He told me, face to face, that he would STILL believe in Jesus, he would STILL believe in the resurrection, and he would STILL remain a Christian. When asked, in light of his being a personal eyewitness to the fact that there WAS no resurrection, he replied that due to the witness of the "holy spirit" within him, he would assume a trick of some sort had been played on him while watching Jesus' tomb. This self-induced blindness astounded me.

VR: I think it would depend on the context. If someone were to walk up to me and say they had invented a wayback machine, and I wasn't at all sure that it worked properly, and we got out and saw some hillside that looked like a Jewish graveyard from the 1st Century, and no one left the grave or rolled the stone away, then that woudn't be convincing. If there were reliable time travel technology, and we got some supporting evidence, the challenge might be more severe. Generally fundamental changes of belief occur because of a wide range of considerations, so it is hard to point to one thing that would alone do the trick. But I can imagine overwhelming contrary evidence against Christianity.

Is vitalism back? James Shapiro's response to the charge that his view is indistinguishable from vitalism

2012-05-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today at his Huffington Post blog, Shapiro responds to Barham's challenge to distinguish his view from vitalism of one kind or another.

Shapiro responds in part:

Unfortunately, scientific vitalism, as championed by serious people like Hans Driesch, acquired a bad name in the early 20th century. Reliable observations definitely indicated sensory and control processes at work in embryonic development, wound healing and regeneration following experimental disruption. But the vitalists had no objective way to describe the cellular "home" of these capabilities.

Molecular biology has pointed us toward solutions by uncovering complex arrays of sensory, signaling, and decision-making networks in all living cells. In many cases we can enumerate network components and interactions, although in no case can we be sure the list is complete.

How these immensely sophisticated analog molecular networks operate is still a mystery. We can look to electronic computation systems for models and ideas. But I am not aware of any truly original conceptual understanding of how cell circuits operate that goes beyond the limits of current digital computers, which have neither the flexibility nor robustness of cell networks (let alone the capacity to reproduce).

Evil and the Atheism of the Gaps

2012-05-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

A redated post.

Anonymous wrote:
First off, I think you're right when you say that you're at a disadvantage when you, as a theist, must first set out your proofs for god and how they square everyone's observations of the natural world. It's not an unfair disadvantage, though; it's perfectly fair and right that things are tougher for you than for the atheist, because you're making the positive claim ("God Exists"). If you want that claim to have any weight, you must present the positive arguement and then let others attack the logical edifice to see if it holds together. What you're doing right now is just avoiding your responsibility at a theistic philosopher, trying to get the athiests to do your work for you. I can understand why you want your opponents to play the besieged party (it's easier to be on the attack, sure), but just because you don't want to do the work of establishing your premise doesn't mean you can assume it's true and rest on your laurels.

There are some mistakes in this discussion that need to be addressed. First of all, I am not at all sure that "making the positive claim" places a burden of proof on the theist. Until somebody converts me to classical foundationalism my view of burdens of proof is that the burden of proof falls on someone trying to get someone else to change his or her mind. We have the right, as rational persons, to believe what we already do believe, unless we receive evidence against what we believe. Someone claiming that the external world exists is making a positive claim, so by the above logic he or she should have to prove to a skeptic that the external world exists in order to be rational in believing it.

Second, I have myself defended theism with arguments. So that isn't my problem.

My problem is this. The argument from evil is the attempt to shoulder a burden of proof on behalf of atheism. It is, after all an argument for atheism. It as attempt to argue that God does not exist. It is an argument against theism. For it to be successful, we need to see how it works, what moral principles are invoked, and what factual claims are being made, to see if the argument is a good one.

What I am objecting to is what I will call atheism-of-the-gaps. Theists are rightly criticized when they take a gap in the naturalistic understanding of the world as automatically proving that God must exist, so that the gap can be filled. A gap in our scientific understanding of the world might be as a result of the limitations of our present understanding rather than providing a foundation for world-view change. But when they come to the evil in the world, they point to some evil and say "Explain this, otherwise, you're being irrataional." This in spite of the fact that the omnipotence of God and the teaching of Scripture strongly predict that there will be gaps in our understanding of evil.

Now we need something more than the contention that we have a gap here.

What Liberal Said This?

2012-05-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

What flaming liberal said this?

“I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here even though some time back they may have entered illegally.”

a. Barack Obama
b. Hillary Clinton
c. Dennis Kucinich
d. Michael Moore
e. none of the above

Douglas Gresham on C. S. Lewis

2012-05-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

Why Francis Collins believes in God

2012-05-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

The head of the Human Genome Project.

Robin Collins on ID

2012-05-11T19:13:00.001-07:00

This is a paper by Robin Collins, who seems sympathetic to the overall goals of ID but does not consider it to be a scientific theory per se.

Benedict XVI on Genesis 1:1

2012-05-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

A redated post.

Who is apparently not a young earth creationist.

Tolkien's Hobbit in the Hands of a present-day book editor

2012-05-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

A redated post.

This is hilarious.

Lewis's Discussion of Faith

2012-05-03T17:35:00.000-07:00

Here. This includes his famous statement "I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in."

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Consciousness

2012-05-02T21:21:00.003-07:00

I find this section interesting.

4. The descriptive question: What are the features of consciousness?

Craig on Materialism

2012-05-01T18:53:00.002-07:00

Here.

Did Napoleon Exist? A satirical reply to Hume on miracles

2012-04-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

A redated post.

By 19th Century philosopher Richard Whately. Say, does Richard Dawkins exist? I've never met him.

Tim McGrew Presents Doubts Relative to Richard Carrier

2012-04-29T13:31:00.004-07:00

Here.

Ad hominem fallacy

2012-04-27T22:38:00.001-07:00

The idea of ad hominem is this. A person says they believe something, and then give you a reason for believing it. Now, if they expect you to believe it because they said so, then who they are is important. But if they give you a reason, then you have to assess not them, but the reason they give for believing something. So, if someone offers a reason for rejecting the death penalty, it doesn't matter if, say, they are an inmate on death row. If they argue The focus shifts from them to the argument they offer. To focus back on the person when they have offered a reason for what they believe is to commit the "ad hominem" (to the man), fallacy.

William Lane Craig argues as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Craig offers arguments in defense of each of the premises.

What that means, is that it is ad hominem to reject the argument by pointing out that he would believe in God, because of what he takes to be the testimony of the Holy Spirit, even if other arguments were bad. It is ad hominem to argue that he had an emotional conversion to Christianity. It is ad hominem to say that he wants to believe in God, so he will produce whatever arguments he needs in order to believe. Since he has given an argument, critiquing any thing other than the argument is irrelevant.

An atheist criticizes the Jesus Myth

2012-04-25T15:59:00.004-07:00

And the New Atheism's fascination with it. Here.

A series on arguments for atheism: The Argument from Intellectual Progress

2012-04-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

A redated post from about two years ago.

I found a page I had written on some arguments for atheism which I am not sure I have ever written spelled out as such, but seem to be implicit in a lot of people's thinking. Here's one, the Argument from Intellectual Progress:

1) Human thought has progressed from the earliest days of humanity until now.
2) In the infancy of the human race, humans believe that everything was divine: rocks, trees, etc.
3) Then humans believed in many gods but rejected the divinity of rocks and trees.
4) Then humans went from polytheism to monotheism with the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, reducing the number of deities to one (or three-in-one, as the case might be.
5) At first these religions were accepted with a full-blown supernaturalism. More recently, even adherents of these religions have seen fit to modify their commitment to the supernatural. They acknowledge that the supernatural exists but are more reticent than their ancestors in attibuting things to the supernatural.
6) In the Eighteenth Century belief in God was reduced by the deists to a being who would up the universe like a watch. In the nineteenth century, after Darwin, atheism became a serious possiblity for many intelligent poeple. No in many educated groups, atheism is virtually taken for granted.
7) If we trace the logical conclusion of human thought, we will find that it is leading in the direction of the rejection of gods entirely. Perhaps in the 24th Century most people will be atheists, with a few theists hanging on in the outlying counties.

Of course I don't buy this argument, as I think it falls victim to Lewis's critique of chronological snobbery. But I would like to get some discussion on this.

Atheism and Falsification

2012-04-18T12:57:00.001-07:00

Here's an article endorsed by P. Z. Myers. Where's Tony Flew now that we need him?

More on the AFR

2012-04-18T12:38:00.003-07:00

II. C. S. Lewis’s argument, and mine

In reading John Beversluis’s new edition of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, it occurred to me that while I have developed Lewis’s argument a great deal, I have not been as explicit as I might have been in delineating exactly how my argument differs from, and develops his. Of course, Lewis didn’t invent the argument, and it has an important predecessor in Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister-philosopher of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Lewis’s role was to introduce the argument to a popular audience, and to revise the argument in response to the criticisms of Elizabeth Anscombe. There have been other important contributors to the argument, in particular William Hasker and Alvin Plantinga.

At several points along the way I have introduced some structure to the argument that was not originally present in Lewis. I am certainly following Lewis’s fundamental idea in this, but a number of the nuances in the argument are my own. Explicating exactly what I have done on this might be helpful in understanding my argument.

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Lewis begins his discussion by distinguishing between naturalism and supernaturalism. A naturalist is someone who thinks that the privilege of “being on its own,” belongs to “the whole show,” in much the way that sovereignty, in a democracy, belongs to the people not to some particular person or group of persons. A supernaturalist thinks that there are certain real things (or One Thing) that have the privilege of existing on their own, and that other objects depend on that for its existence. Further, he distinguished a “strict materialism,” which he thinks can be refuted by the one-line Haldane quote (If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, then I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true, and hence I have no reason for supposing that my brain is made up of atoms.), from naturalism that is not purely materialistic, and must be refuted with a more complex argument. Lewis says that if naturalism is true, there can be no free will, because determinism would be true. He mentions quantum mechanics, but he describes quantum-mechanical indeterminacy as a “threat” to naturalism, in which the “subnatural” can invade nature “from below,” as it were. However, he expresses doubt that this kind of indeterminism will continue to be affirmed by science.

Because of this, Beversluis responds that his argument against naturalism works, if at all, against deterministic forms of naturalism, and unless the naturalism in question is of the determinist variety, Lewis’s argument is not an argument against that. But does determinism really make a difference? In deterministic forms of naturalism, events are guaranteed by the action of non-rational causes. In non-deterministic forms of naturalism, there is brute chance instead of determinism, but do events ever happen because of reasons? It doesn’t seem as if determinism makes a relevant difference.

I think Lewis’s exposition of the naturalist-supernaturalist distinction needs some further development for philosophical argumentation today. I ask the question of whether the basic causes of the universe are mentalistic or non-mentalistic. If the basic causes of the universe are non-mentalistic, then if we have a mentalistic explanation, such as “Smith believes in evolution, in part, because the fossil record supports it,” then there has to be some explanation underlying that one which in non-mentalistic cause-and-effect operation of mindless atoms moving in accordance with the laws of nature is what is happening in the final analysis. On the other hand, if we look at those same atoms from the standpoint of theism, we find that those particles have the powers and liabilities they do because God created them that way. Scratch far enough, and you get a mentalistic explanation, not a non-mentalistic one. It is interesting that when you look at what makes something “material” or “natural,” you end up defining “material” in terms of the absence of mental characteristics. If a naturalistic worldview is true, then reason comes late to the party, when a brain of sufficient sophistication develops. Lewis describes his argument as an argument for supernaturalism, which is fine so long as we understand that by supernatural, what we mean is that it has, at bottom, and not a non-mentalistic explanation. Richard Carrier, perhaps the Argument from Reason’s most prolific critic, puts it this way.

Hence, I propose a general rule that covers all and thus distinguishes naturalism from supernaturalism: If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not.

But what are the characteristic of the mental? I have identified four characteristics of the mental. The first mark of the mental is purpose. For anyone who denies the ultimacy of the mind, an explanation in terms of purposes requires a further nonpurposive explanation to account for the purpose explanation. The second mark is intentionality or aboutness. Genuinely non-mental states are not about anything at all. The third mark is normativity. A normative explanation must be explained in terms of the non-normative, in the mental is not on the ground level of reality. The fourth mark is subjectivity. There is no inner perspective at the physical level.

Hence, a naturalistic view has, on my view, three basic elements. One of them is a mechanistic, that is non-mentalistic, basic level of reality. The second is the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical. This does not require determinism, but what it does require that nothing outside of the physical be in causal connection. The third doctrine, is the doctrine of supervenience. Whatever is not itself physical must in fact, supervene on the physical. Therefore, this conception of reality is one which prohibits skyhooks, that is, anything from a higher level that is not accounted for on the lower level.

Having laid out these elements, we can proceed to consider what I maintain a naturalistic view has difficulty accounting for. We could begin by looking at what human rationality is, or how it is supposed to manifest itself. Atheists very often perceive themselves has having the more rational view. The claim that, instead of believing things on faith, they look at the evidence and believe only what the evidence supports. But let’s take a look at how this works. If someone, let’s say, believes in evolution because they believe the fossil record supports it, that seems to imply that one set of mental events, those involved in examining and evaluating the fossil evidence, helps to bring about that fact that the person believes in evolution. But, it looks as if, at the basic level of analysis, mental states do not play any role qua mental states. What we have to be calling an instance of mental causation has to in fact be an example of physical causation in which the real causes are in the non-mental supervenience base, not amongst the mental states themselves.

In fact, Lewis said that all knowledge, apart from the knowledge of our sensations, is inferred from those sensations. This led Beversluis to presume that his argument is essentially committed to the idea that, for example, our knowledge that there is a tree in the quad which I see, is really inferential knowledge. He points out that Lewis doesn’t really defend this view of sensory knowledge as inferential, and it would be odd for him to construct an argument based on this kind of view. But Lewis did not have to take such a strong view of inferential knowledge in order for his argument to work. What he needs, instead, is simply to argue that inferential knowledge is essential to science, since no modern atheist is going to argue that science does not acquire knowledge at all. If you consider the process of doing a mathematical equation, or basing a belief in evolution on the evidence, you will see that if your worldview says that this never happens, then this is certainly a very serious problem. These seem to be clear cases in which one mental event cause another mental event.

Who's really doing the science?

2012-04-16T14:53:00.001-07:00

Is if Francis Collins, or the Gnu leaders? Find out here.

HT: Bilbo.