Glass Houses

You are not showing the greatest critical thinking skills here either. I granted that if I were dismissing the book because of that single review, that would be a mistake, and I granted that it was natural to think that I was doing that. I then pointed out what I didn't intend my comments to be read that way, that instead I was pointing out some problems with the book that a reviewer noted, and then said that IF the reviewer was reading the book accurately, that would be evidence of an uncritical skepticism. 

DO NOT IGNORE MY INTERPRETATION OF MY OWN COMMENTS. I think people are entitled to come back and say "That's not what I meant," even when their opponent's interpretation of those comments is reasonable and perfectly understandable.  

Let me get this straight. I make a hasty statement that sounded more dismissive of a book than I really meant to be, and that proves that my critical thinking skills are poor. But you can made accusations that someone is "deceived" without making clear what it was I said that occasioned that charge, and we shouldn't question YOUR critical thinking skills? YOU can commit the ad hominem fallacy any time you want to, and not be called on it? People who live in glass houses.....

Let me bring up the "uncredentialed hack" business with Tim McGrew. I don't fault you for not knowing that he was a credentialed scholar. What you should have recognized, however, was that his responses were reasonable and intelligent. If you work in the blogosphere, you have to be willing to engage serious thinking regardless of credentials. You then rebroadcast a critique of an essay by the McGrews that completely misinterpreted his statements and attributed to him statements that he never made. 

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2011/05/straw-men-burning-tim-mcgrew-on.htm

I am not going to make the kinds of harsh judgments about your overall critical thinking skills that you have made concerning mine. I think you are smarter than you are at your worst moments. But if I were to do so, you've given me a whole lot of material to work with. 

Blind as a Bat?

Here is my reply to what I consider to be Loftus' ad hominem attack on me, which he has just posted.

You are picking up on something that I realize was not properly clarified and you are running with it. I quite admit that I made it sound as if the comment from the book was a grounds for simply dismissing it, but let's put this in context.

I made three statements. One was that I thought that it wasn't clear that God is necessarily a supernatural being, and that I didn't see any reason a priori why God couldn't figure into a supernatural explanation, and that we could, at least in theory, predict God's actions through science.  I then asked if seeing a miracle would count as real evidence for God, and then I pointed out that I had seen evidence of the paranormal. In response to that I get the familiar charge of being delusional, and a book on how to think about weird things as proof of that. Now, I don't see exactly which claim of mine was supposed to prove delusion, or what in the book was supposed to do show what was wrong with what I said. At least in the eyes of one reviewer, the book makes several appeals to our sense that something seems ridiculous or silly in order to dismiss it. Since lots of stuff that seems ridiculous or silly has often turned out to be true on investigation, (think quantum mechanics, or even Darwin's theory of evolution) it would be certainly problematic, at least to my mind, for the book to do that. Now, maybe, the reviewer misread the book.
But surely you would agree, (or would you?), that this would be a problem if it were an accurate reading.

But there are lots of books on all sides of lots of questions. One would like to compare Schick's critique of NDEs with the best defenses of them.

In any event, it is arguments, not arguers, that are the appropriate objects of consideration. You're only as good as the argument you are presenting. To forget this is to commit one of the cardinal sins of critical thinking, the ad hominem fallacy (or the appeal to authority fallacy). 

A Debunking Christianity exchange on (you guessed it), the OTF

This discussion, on the whole, went rather better than most I have had over there, even though it begins with typical Loftus-style bluster. The following is, I think, my most interesting contribution, although there are other interesting discussion-tracks. 

I object to the idea that you should treat something you don't believe as having the same epistemic status as what you do believe, unless it can be shown that what you now believe is entirely and completely the product of non-truth-conducive causes. That's certainly not the case for me, though I sometimes present OTF-type arguments to students who think that it is a sufficient reason to believe something that they were raised to believe it. I think the OTF is a worthwhile thought experiment (what if I had started out with different beliefs, then what would I think?), but I really don't think it really gives us anything over and above ordinary admonitions to pay attention to evidence and consider opposing positions. Insofar as it places nonbelief as a sort of "default" position on religious beliefs, I think it is committed to some highly questionable epistemology. So I don't think it's the intellectual monument that it is typically hyped to be, nor do I think it provides an argument that demonstrates the irrationality of all Christians and underwrites the familiar delusion charges.  I encountered something like it when I read Russell's The Value of Free Thought. I found that essay very intellectually challenging when i was 18, though I certainly would take issue with a lot of what was in there.

Is the argument from prophecy a flat Tyre?

A redated post.

I changed the title of this one.

Does the fulfillment of biblical prophecy provide evidence that God exists? Farrell Till is a well-known skeptic who argues against this claim.

HT: Amanda Chandler.

Is there a case to be made from fulfilled biblical prophecy?

Despite well-known abuses of prophecy, Bloom in this essay claim that a case can be made.

Four features of conscious states

A redated post.

Someone asked me for a definition of consciousness. J. P. Moreland's essay "Hume and the argument from consciousness" in Sennett and Groothuis ed. In Defense of Natural Theology (IVP, 2005) delineates some features of conscious states that he thinks they have.

1. There is a raw qualitative feel or a "what it is like" to hve a mental state.
2. At least many states have intentionality--ofness or aboutness--directed toward an object.
3. They are inner, private, and immediate to the subject having them.
4. They require a subjective ontology--namely, mental states are necessarily owned by the first person sentient subjects who have them.

Now Moreland mentions a fifth feature, which I take it no physicalist is going to buy:

5. They fail to have crucial features (spatial extension, locatioin) that charcterize physical states and, in general, cannot be described using physical language.

Now I take it this last one is not one that a materialist could accept. But the first four seem to me to reflect what consciousness is. I would add that consciousness is importantly unified, that there is single entity that possesses all of the relevant conscious mental states; something that ties them together.

I take it that this is the common-sense conception of consciousness, and to reject it would be to accept a revisionist position.

Separating the supernatural from the natural in the story of Jesus--the point behind the trilemma

It is popular to disconnect the plausibility of naturalistically acceptable claims made by the New Testament writers from those involving a supernatural commitment. This kind of an issue has come up before, when people have argued that no amount of accuracy on the part of the New Testament writers in recording mundane matter (such as we find in the Book of Acts), provides any evidence that the supernatural claims are also true.

 It is interesting that some of you who are very eager to affirm the unity of the New Testament when you are arguing against the claim that the New Testament provides independent, or even partially independent strands of evidence for the claims of the New Testament, seem to want to argue that the New Testament is a diverse source when arguing that maybe we can accept the non-supernaturally involved claims while rejecting any element of the supernatural.

First, accurate reporting is a habit of mind. Even in mundane matters, you have people who take varying degrees of effort to get things right. If we conclude that a good deal of what our sources have to say is false, then that reflects poorly on everything they have to say, in much the way that evidence that a witness in a court case is untruthful about one thing can damage their credibility in other matters.

Admittedly, there are differences amongst the scenarios which conclude that the miracle claims are false. On some views, the writers experienced what they said they experienced, but were wrong about the causes of what they experienced. Hallucination theories of the Resurrection fit into this category. If the disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus, then they were "appeared to Jesus-ly," but were mistaken in supposing that the real risen Jesus was the cause of their being so appeared to. Or,t they might have seen lepers walking away from Jesus apparently cleansed, when the cause of this recovery was psychosomatic rather than divinely caused.

But other views treat the claims to be pretty much made up out of the whole cloth. If the New Testament contains a lot of material that was just made up, then it seems to me it would then be hard to credit passages that say Jesus taught that you should turn the other cheek.

I think the Gospels record actions on the part of Jesus that are mostly connected to his supernatural claims in one way or the other. Telling someone their sins are forgiven isn't directly supernatural, but if we accept it, we give ourselves the problem of figuring out how someone could believe that he had the prerogative to do so. Even Jesus's manner of teaching is a little odd from a naturalistic standpoint, in that you have a Jew who speaks on his own authority and even puts his own words (But I say unto you...)
in the place of the Law of Moses.

Now, you can argue, of course, that there are some good moral ideas that you can take from the New Testament even if Jesus didn't do or say much of anything he is supposed to have said. That's a different issue. I think something stronger can be claimed here; I believe that there is an ethical mind behind the Gospels that possessed true moral greatness, and that that is something that would have to be explained by any naturalistic theory. But that is a subject for another time.

But what I do maintain is that an easy separation between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic is going to end up being a whole lot harder than it looks to carry off. It is indeed what the Trilemma argument is driving it.

Darek Barefoot replies to Richard Carrier

A redated post.

Darek Barefoot has posted a defense of my book against Carrier's criticisms on the Secular Web. I've spent a fair amount of time responding to Carrier, but I really think he doesn't give the best responses to my arguments that a naturalist can produce. However, when someone put as much into a response as Carrier did, it does deserve a good response.

WWJD

If you are trying to get from one side of the lake to the other side of the lake, is the question to ask "What would Jesus do?"

The humanistic Jesus

If you can't trust what the New Testament says when it says Jesus rose from the dead, can we nevertheless trust the New Testament when it teaches that Jesus told people to turn the other cheek? It's the same book.

Psychoanalyzing Strident Religious Unbelievers

A redated post.

This is the wikipedia entry on reaction formation.

If one really thought psychoanalyzing one's opponents had much validity, there would be a lot of ways to do it. I would like to invite crusading atheists to examine themselves, to see to what extent their strident atheism could be reaction formation.

Of course, believers can be caught up in reaction formation as well. I think it important, though, to be acting intellectually, and not just reacting.

I take it seriously when an atheist says "Examine your thinking and see if it isn't just wishful thinking," for example. If they say "You only believe because you want to,' knowing only that I am a Christian, that crosses the line. But I think I can say "examine yourself" without committing the ad hominem fallacy.

The Case of Eta Linneamann

Here is a review of one of Linneamann's books.

Religious Belief in Academia and Elsewhere

Does the fact that as you go up the educational scale, religious belief goes down, count as evidence against religious belief?

My overall theory is that there, percentagewise, the number of dedicated religious people is about the same in the highest levels of the academic community as there is in the community at large. The difference is that people who don’t have a serious faith still have a vague religious belief in the population at large, but as you move into academia, unless people are serious about their religion, they become unbelievers.

I know that are ex-believers out there who left the fold, but there are also migrations for unbelief to belief. But what you lose at the top level of academia are the people who say "Yes I believe there is a force out there; I just don't believe in organized religion."

May the force be with you.

A paper by Dallas Willard on intentionality

Amazing Grace in the House of the Rising Sun

I always knew you could do Amazing Grace to the tune of the House of the Rising Sun. Combining the message of the two songs, however, really makes secular humanism seem shallow and silly, in my humble opinion.

It's all because of that darned school prayer decision!

A redated post

According to Chuck Missler:

•Over the past 30 years, our population has increased 41%, but our Gross Domestic Product has tripled, and our social spending has had the benefit of a 500% increase. Impressive by any standard.
•And yet, we have had a 500% increase in violent crime, a 400% increase in illegitimate births, a 400% increase in the divorce rate, a 300% increase in single  parent homes, a 200% increase in teenage suicides, and a 75 point decrease in SAT scores.

•Each day in America there are 2,795 teen pregnancies and 4,219 teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease. Every 64 seconds a baby is born to a teenage mother; five minutes later, a baby will have been born to a teenager who already has a child. Ten hours later, 560 babies will have been born to teenagers.
•Over the past 30 years, we have conducted over 31 million abortions; every day there are 1,106 teen abortions alone! (When John the Baptist began his ministry, he was only 9 inches long and weighed about a pound and a half. In the womb, he was Spirit-filled, and leapt for joy).

•We are a nation in peril. We lead the industrialized world in murder, rape, and violent crime. In elementary and secondary education, we are near the bottom in achievement scores. There is a coarseness, callousness, cynicism, banality, and vulgarity signalling the decivilization of our nation.

•An analysis of these, and virtually every social and cultural indicator, clearly shows a marked deterioration since the early 1960s. What event transpired then to cause this rapid and catastrophic destruction of our American culture? We outlawed God from our schools!10
10 1962, Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court declared school prayer "unconstitutional." 1963, School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Bible reading in schools was an "establishment of religion." 1980, Stone v. Graham, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments cannot be posted on the wall of a schoolroom.



Amazing. The decision that keeps Protestant children from having a teacher lead them in the Hail Mary caused this much trouble? This looks like a world-class example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Christians don't help themselves by indulging in this kind of rhetoric.

Van Fraassen on materialism

This is an excellent essay on materialism by philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen.

Some Background on the School Prayer decision

From the Wikipedia entry:

The case was brought by the families of public school students in New Hyde Park, New York who complained that the voluntary prayer to "Almighty God" contradicted their religious beliefs. They were supported by groups opposed to the school prayer including rabbinical organizations, Ethical Culture, and Judaic organizations. The prayer in question was:

Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.

The plaintiffs argued that opening the school day with such a prayer violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (as applied to the states through the Fourteenth), which says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The governments of twenty-two states signed on to an amicus curiae brief urging affirmation of the New York Court of Appeals decision that upheld the constitutionality of the prayer.^[1] The American Ethical Union, the American Jewish Committee, and the Synagogue Council of America each submitted briefs urging the Court to instead reverse and rule that the prayer was unconstitutional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel_v._Vitale

See what I mean about the generic prayer?

An essay by Avery Cardinal Dulles on Lewis as an apologist

Lewis’ second favorite proof, the argument from reason, appears in his book Miracles. A certain kind of naturalism, he observes, characterizes rational thinking as a mere product of nervous reflexes, instincts, and habits. Lewis replies that physical or psychological conditioning cannot explain our power to make judgments about truth and error. We are conscious that our judgments are determined not by subrational forces but by reality as it impinges on our minds. The power to reach understanding through rational explanations is evidence of an affinity between the mind and reality. It is explicable only if there is an aboriginal mind that accounts for both intelligence and intelligibility.

Lewis’ sketchy presentation of this argument leaves further work to be done. Having an ancestry that goes all the way back through Plato to Anaxagoras, it resembles the argument for the existence of God proposed in highly technical terms by Bernard Lonergan and popularized in several apologetical works of Hugo Meynell. For all these authors the wonderful correspondence between reason and reality implies that reality is imbued with an order that stems from a creative Mind. Lewis’ focus is not so much on the intelligibility of the world as on the mind’s capacity for truth, which in his opinion cannot be explained by natural selection but only by an intelligent Creator.

Lonergan's AFR is found in chapter 19 of his book Insight. Hugo Meynell's book The Intelligible Universe is based on Lonergan's argument.

Is school prayer permitted?

Yes. What is prohibited is state-sponsored school prayer. But would you want the state to sponsor a teacher in leading her class, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, in the Hail Mary?

Of course, there could be a rule that would make sure that school sponsored prayers be generic prayers. I don't pray generic prayers. Do you?

Plantinga on the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

HT: Kristofer Rasmussen.

Do the Wealthy Create Jobs?

According to this, no.

In London, it's harder to come out as Christian than as gay

Don't they know it's the end of the world?

The link is to Skeeter Davis' signature song on the subject, however, the occasion is Harold Camping's prediction that it will be all over this Sunday.

When I was young, the big guy in end-of-the-world stuff was Hal Lindsey, a former Campus Crusade staffer who has written extensively on the End Times. In his most famous book, The Late Great Planet Earth, he said that the famous "This generation shall not pass away until all is fulfilled" (Mt: 24:34)  referred not to the time of Christ at all, but rather to the time when the Jews return to Israel. Hence the clock started ticking in 1948. One generation is forty years, he said, therefore it should all be over by about 1988. Since seven of those years are the Tribulation period, the Rapture should have happened in about 1981. However, Lindsey took the passage about no one knowing the day or the hour (Mt: 24:36) seriously enough to not make the kind of exact predictions that Camping has made. (Camping had one in 1994, but since we're still here, he's at least 0 for 1). Lindsey held, instead, that no man knows the day or the hour, but a study of Bible prophecy should permit us to hit the bullseye on the generation.

My good friend Joe Sheffer, when I was an undergraduate, pointed to a copy of the Late Great Planet Earth and said "That guy's going to look like such a fool." Then he commenced to tear Lindsey's contentions to shreds. But Lindsey is a fool that still has a loyal following, and a Bible prophecy TV show.

Asking for a parody

Apparently there is something about the sappy, left-wing idealism if John Lennon's Imagine that invites parody. Do you have any idea how many people have posted versions of "Imagine there's no liberals" and posted it on the internet?

The History that Didn't Repeat This Time.

HT: Ken Samples

Classic NBA History

Boston Celtics History:

65 NBA Seasons

21 Finals Appearances

17 NBA Titles

Minneapolis-Los Angeles Lakers History:

65 NBA Seasons

31 Finals Appearances

16 NBA Titles

Head-To-Head in the Finals 12 Times:

Celtics 9

Lakers 3

As for me, Anybody But the Heat. 

What the **** happened to my post

On hoping for universalism.

Hoping for universalism

Some who don't embrace universalism nevertheless at least hope it's true. If we can, and should, hope for the soul of each person individually, then should we not also hope for the soul of all persons collectively?

This links to a discussion by Keith DeRose on Prosblogion.

The Sins of Sodom----and Gomorrah

A friend of mine pointed out, years ago, that in Dante's Inferno, the homosexuals and the usurers (people who lend money at interest), are in adjoining parts of hell. The sin of Sodom is homosexuality, the sin of Gomorrah is usury. Homosexuality is unproductive sex, usury is unproductive money.

What this would mean is that the foaming-at-the-mouth preachers who say that "The Sins of Sodom and Gomorrah put America in Danger of Destruction" are, well, half right.

More seriously, the people who want to weaken the wall of separation between church and state also think that somehow this will result in capitalists being left alone. But in the Middle Ages, the Church had state-like powers, and prohibited Christians from lending money at interest. The idea that God is about to zap us because of our gay bars, but has no problem with the likes of Goldman Sachs, it an perspective that strikes me as incomprehensible.

I love that story in the Bible where Jesus drove the homosexuals out of the temple. 

On the use of probability theory in the philosophy of religion

I have a take on the role of probabilistic arguments that might be of help here. Look, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, a person's decision to accept or not accept the Resurrection is likely to be a combination of the evidence specific to the Resurrection, and a prior assessment of how likely the background beliefs that are behind belief in the resurrection are to be true. We know that people who are thinking about the Resurrection are bound to differ about whether the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is antecedently plausible. There's going to be people who find the fact that something would have to be explained as a divine miracle grounds for giving it as close to a probability of zero as you can get. There are some people who are already committed to some form of supernaturalism, and who are not going to be deterred by the fact that the explanation involves the miraculous. So, how can we carry on the discussion? One way of doing it is to ask merely whether the evidence in more like what we should expect if the Resurrection happened, or whether it's more like what we should expect if it didn't.  In other words, is there anything in the reports coming out of the first-century church that is more like what you should expect if Jesus was raised than if Jesus was not raised. If the answer to that question is yes, then the evidence confirms the resurrection, but it might still be rejected by reasonable people on the grounds that a Resurrection would commit you to the existence of God, or other features of Christianity that you consider to be improbable. Fine, but you can at least say, in response to the evidence, that the evidence directly bearing on the resurrection of Jesus is easier to explain if the Resurrection occurred than if it didn't. In other words, we can isolate one particular piece of evidence from the total evidence we have that bears on the issue and ask whether this piece of evidence supports the Christian claim that Jesus was resurrected or not.

Similarly, we can ask, concerning the fact of pain and suffering, how it impacts the credibility of theism. It could turn out that yes, pain and suffering adversely affects the credibility of theism, but it does not show that anyone who believes in the existence of God is just being delusional.

I understand that some people do Bayesian probability theory to get a correct final conclusion based upon agreed-upon methods for ascertaining probabilities. That's legitimate, but we also might like to isolate the impact of a piece of evidence on the overall plausibility of theism and Christianity. I find Bayes' theorem to be a helpful tool in doing that, even though I do not expect an agreed-upon conclusion concerning the Resurrection after we are done. To me, it's not a misuse of Bayes' theorem, just a different use.

Straw Men Burning: Tim McGrew on Misinterpretations of the McGrews' article on the Resurrection

It's easy to dismiss and discredit an opponent when you don't make any effort to understand what that opponent has written. There is the idea about that the McGrews actually calculated the odds of the Resurrection, or that they maintain the strict and complete independence of the New Testament sources, when in fact they say no such thing. That's life in the blogosphere; in peer-reviewed journals editors and referees are there to at least try to keep this sort of things from happening. Of course, as Lewis pointed out, it is sometimes difficult to understand a position to which you are antipathetic, even if you try to understand it. Anyway, Tim responds here. 


TM: One of the hazards of writing technical philosophy is the risk that someone who lacks the appropriate expertise will attempt to critique it. In the case of the article on the resurrection that Lydia and I wrote for The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, this has already happened. It is hard enough to correct misimpressions of this sort on a relatively neutral topic; when the subject rouses passions of the sort that, as Hume reminds us, religious disputes are apt to generate, then the difficulties are redoubled. 

But one thing that we did not anticipate is that people who are completely clueless would undertake to explain the article to the rest of the world, in the process completely garbling the central claim and shedding absolutely no light on any of the surrounding issues. Since this particular exhibition of aggressive incompetence is now being uncritically rebroadcast by people who are unable or unwilling actually to read the article, it is worth making a few salient points: 

1. Nowhere in the article do we give, estimate, or suggest "odds on the resurrection." Near the outset we explicitly disclaim any attempt to do so, writing:

Even as we focus on the resurrection of Jesus, our aim is limited. To show that the probability of R given all evidence relevant to it is high would require us to examine other evidence bearing on the existence of God, since such other evidence – both positive and negative – is indirectly relevant to the occurrence of the resurrection. Examining every piece of data relevant to R more directly – including, for example, the many issues in textual scholarship and archeology which we shall discuss only briefly – would require many volumes. Our intent, rather, is to examine a small set of salient public facts that strongly support R. The historical facts in question are, we believe, those most pertinent to the argument. Our aim is to show that this evidence, taken cumulatively, provides a strong argument of the sort Richard Swinburne calls “C-inductive” – that is, whether or not P(R) is greater than some specified value such as .5 or .9 given allevidence, this evidence itself heavily favors R over ~R.

The ratio of 10^44 to 1 is a likelihood ratio, not odds. People who do not understand the difference between these two ratios should not attempt to discuss the mathematical parts of the article.

2. We are very explicit about our assumptions. In the online version of the article, on p. 39, we make it plain that our calculation

is predicated on the assumption that in matters other than the explicit claims of miracles, the gospels and the book of Acts are generally reliable – that they may be trusted as much as any ordinary document of secular history with respect to the secularly describable facts they affirm. And where they do recount miraculous events, such as Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, we assume that they are authentic – that is, that they tell us what the disciples claimed. This calculation tells us little about the evidence for the resurrection if those assumptions are false. We have provided reasons to accept them, but of course there is much more to be said on the issue.

3. We are quite aware that the assumption of independence is critical, and we discuss this matter extensively on pp. 40-46. It is wearying to see commentators who have not bothered actually to read the article confidently proclaiming that we have overlooked the possibility of dependence.

Readers are of course free to disagree with our actual conclusions. It would be cheering, however, if they would first take the trouble to understand what those conclusions are.

Against the fine-tuning argument: Theodore Drange

Opposing Viewpoints on the role of waterboarding in the killing of bin Laden

The argument about waterboarding has two sides to it. One side has to do with whether such techniques are justified deontologically. In other words, are we doing something that is wrong in itself, to such an extent that even if you could maximize the total balance of pleasure over pain by waterboarding someone, you ought not to do it, because the end doesn't justify the means and waterboarding violates natural law. If you could save the entire population of New York City by waterboarding someone who has a bunch of bombs set to go off all over the city sufficient to kill everyone within a 100-mile radius, would waterboarding be justified? Does the end of saving all these people justify the means of torturing someone to get the necessary information to stop it. This is a classic consequentialist-anti-consequentialist debate that you can have about a number of things, such as assassinating a dictator. 

The question of consequences is, of course, very broad, and includes such things as damage to our international reputation. In WWII, German soldiers preferred to surrender to the Americans than to the Russians, because they thought the Americans were far less likely to torture them. So it is possible that waterboarding might work in the narrow sense of being the most likely way to get the information we want, but it still might not be justified from a utilitarian perspective, because of the damage it will do to the reputation of our country and its operatives. 

But, perhaps most important, is the question of whether techniques like waterboarding work. One common response to this issue is to say that it may well work to get information out of an otherwise silent captive, but someone in that position is likely to produce, not actionable intelligence, but rather whatever BS the captive thinks the captors want to hear. Unless we have good reason to believe that a harsh technique like waterboarding will not only work, but will get better results than other available techniques of getting information, the issue can't even be set up as a consequentialist-anti-consequentialist problem. If it turns out that harsh techniques like waterboarding are likely to give us the results we want, then the issue of can be cast in terms of consequentialism. If, on the other hand, other techniques are more effective and can get better results, then it would just be an example of the "toughness fallacy" the fallacy of thinking that certain methods of dealing with wrongdoers are more likely to be effective because they are tougher. As an example, we may think that the death penalty is a better deterrent than life imprisonment because it is tougher, but the question has to be settled empirically as to whether the death penalty is a superior deterrent than life imprisonment. 

Anyway, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey argues that a large part of the information we used to get bin Laden came from intelligence received through waterboarding, but Chris Smith argues that waterboarding actually prolonged bin Laden's life. 

Edward Feser explains the argument based on a per se causal series

In response to Paul Edwards' much-anthologized critique of the Thomistic cosmological argument.

Some Notes on Ronald Nash's Discussion of Free Will in Life's Ultimate Questions

This is in response to an inquiry from a student. 

This is where I have a lot of problems with Nash's presentation. I actually think that Nash's use of the term uninfluenced will makes some assumptions that I would be inclined to deny. Nash is a Calvinist, and I'm not a Calvinist, so we don't see eye to eye on free will.

Let's go back to that Adam and Eve story for a minute, to help illustrate the issue. Whether we take this story literally or not does not affect its value to illustrate a point. Suppose God were to place Adam and Eve in the Garden, but he didn't allow the serpent to get anywhere near the place. In fact, he created Adam in such a way that he always wanted to obey God. Given the state of Adam's desires, it really wouldn't matter whether that nasty serpent showed up or not. Adam and Eve wouldn't want to do anything that was disobedient toward God, and would simply tell that snake to go to hell if he suggested that to them that they disobey and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The way Adam and Eve are put together, on this scenario, they cannot so much as desire to violate the law that God has laid down. Hence, they decline the invitation to sin, and get to remain in the garden forever. All the ills of human history, the wars, the plagues, the massacres, and all the sins, from the Holocaust down to me losing my temper yesterday, don't take place. Nobody goes to hell.  God makes sure that Adam and Eve always want to do what is right, and he makes sure that he always has the opportunity to do what is right. In fact, God could not only have done this for Adam and Eve, he could have done this for Lucifer as well, in which case Lucifer would never have fallen.

If you talk to atheists, particularly those who have studied the free will problem, they will often tell you that that is precisely what God should have done. God could have created the world in such a way that everyone does what is right, and if God were a loving God, he would have done exactly that. Not only would we have avoided sinning, it turns out that one of the major philosophical definitions of what it is to have a free will is satisfied. "The liberty of spontaneity (the kind of free will a compatibilist thinks we have)...explains human freedom as the ability to do what the person wants to do." (Nash, p.328). Many people are taught to think that the reason why God permitted Adam and Eve to fall is because he had to give them free will in order to make it possible for them to be truly obedient, but in order to open that possibility, he also had to open the possibility that Adam and Eve disobey. But if God were to give Adam and Eve compatibilist free will, he could have allowed them to be free while at the same time guaranteeing that they would never sin. He didn't have to risk the fall of Adam and Eve, or the fall of Lucifer. So, if all we have is compatibilist free will, then we are going to need some other explanation for why God permitted Adam to sin. And theological Calvinists think that there is some other explanation. There are two explanations that I have heard. One is that God receives more glory if he predestines some people to disobey him, so that he can exercise his righteous wrath against unrepentant sin, as well as providing the saved a sense of what they were saved from. What is more, we can't be expected to understand why God does what he does, so even if those explanations don't wash (and they certainly don't for me), there is perhaps some unknown reason why God permitted (in fact, caused), the Fall of Man.

But, some people would ask whether this is real free will. If an outside agent, in the last analysis, is pulling the strings, can we be really said to have a free will? Some people have argued that we can't have real free will unless, given the past, we could have done otherwise from what we did. This is the incompatibilist, or libertarian, conception of free will. Nash refers to this as the uninfluenced will, but it is actually the libertarian conception of free will. It does not seem uninfluenced to me, on the contrary; it seems perfectly possible to be influenced by something that does not ultimately determine the will. Thus, I can be influenced by someone who wants me to marry Joan, but I might marry Susan instead, ultimately making a choice that could have gone the other way. I don't think it fair to describe an undetermined will as an uninfluenced will.  Nash makes the argument that we always act on our strongest desire, but as the philosopher William Hasker has pointed out, "strongest" turns out to just mean "the desire we acted upon," in which case "we always act on our strongest desire" just turns out to mean "We always act on the desire we act on," which is hardly news to anyone. Many people in science, based on quantum mechanics, believe that some events occur even though sufficient causes for them have not taken place (though, or course, there have to be necessary conditions), yet they nevertheless occur.

This is a massive debate in philosophy, and I am just scratching the surface of it here.

Did Waterboarding Help Us Get Bin Laden?

Peter King, of New York, claims that bin Laden's capture was partially due to waterboarding. But where is the hard evidence for this?

John McCain is skeptical.

Ding! Dong! Bin Laden is dead

Osama bin Laden is dead. Is it ever moral to celebrate someone's death? I don't know, but if you're going to sing Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead, I'm partial to the Fifth Estate's version from 1967.

From Wainwright's Philosophy of Religion on the Cosmological Argument

This is another post in a series attempting to make sense of Aquinas's Third Way.

This is from William Wainwright's Philosophy of Religion. (Wadsworth, 2nd. ed, 1999).

Aquinas concedes that infinite temporal regresses are possible. Each change or causal activity could be preceded by an earlier one. Each change or causal activity could be preceded by an earlier one. He thinks, howe ver, that series of simultaneously occurring changes or causes must have first members--the activity that is the source of change but isn't itself susceptible to change or a causal activity that is not, and could not be, derived from another. The ultimate ground of change ("the first mover") or causal activity ("the first cause") is God.

These cosmological arguments are historically important. Their plausibility, however, depends on assumptions that are no longer widely held. Ancient and medieval science, for example, thoght in terms of hierarchies of simultaneously occurring causes of different ontological kinds. Effects at lower levels of being we explained by causal activities at higher levels of being. Ancient and medieval metaphysics also assumed that the less perfect can be explained only by the more perfect.

Modern versions of the cosmological argumemt dispense with these assumptions. Most of them focus on contingent existence.

I'm wondering if this isn't perhaps too hasty of a dismissal. The underlying consideration seems to be the idea regardless of what past causes there might be for any contingent thing, there still has to be a contemporaneously existing thing or things which cause the existence of something now. That leads to a commitment to an infinite number of contingent things (perhaps an absurdity given the finite size of the universe) or a necessary being on which all things depend.

The Argument from Truth in Augustine

This is from Katherin Rogers' website. She is at the University of Delaware.


Proof from Truth: Summary
1. You know you exist.  (Si fallor, sum)
2. You know you also live and think. (To know 1 you'd have to.)
3. Your reason is superior to mere existence or existence and life.
A. It contains the other two.  (Existence is good, the more being a thing has, the more there is to it, the better it is.  Corollaries: The Great Chain of Being, The Principle of Plenitude.)
B. Reason judges other aspects of cognitive apparatus.
4. Therefore reason is the "highest" thing in our world.
5. Something would be God if it were...
A. really existent
B. not part of physical world
C. eternal and immutable
D. superior to reason
6. There is something like that, Truth i.e. Numbers and Wisdom
A. We all "see" it.
B. Clearly not part of physical world (We know it will be the case tomorrow, Idea of unity, mathematical rules that hold for infinite number system....)
C. Recognize don't change over time
D. Reason must conform to it, not vice versa.
7. And this Truth is the SOURCE of our world.
A. To exist must have form
B. Form depends on number.
C. A thing cannot form itself.

Therefore: God

Angus Menuge develops Puddleglum's argument a different way

A redated post.

In Bassham and Walls ed. The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (Open Court, 2005), Angus Menuge finds an implicit argument against materialism that is not pragmatic in nature. In "Why Eustace Almost Deserved His Name: Lewis's Critique of Modern Secularism" he writes:

The argument is left rather implicit, but Lewis is clearly attacking the intelligibility of the debunkers' claim that our ideas of "higher" things can derive from "lower" sources. How can the idea of something great derive from something lacking that greatness? Could the idea of eternity arise from the materialist's temporal world? Could the ideas of infinity and perfection derive from the finite, imperfect world of the secularist? Could the idea of a necessary being like God derive from the secularist's contingent universe? There is a good case to be made that material causes do not account for the content of those ideas. pp. 202-203.

This is reminiscent of an argument found in Descartes' Meditations.

See also this discussion.

An Interview with Tim McGrew

On undesigned coincidences.

What Lewis means by "supernatural"

A redated post.

To call the act of knowing--the act, not of remembering that something was so in the past, but of 'seeing' that it must be so always and in any possible world--to call this act 'supernatural', is some violence to our ordinary linguistic usage. But of course we do not mean by this that it is spooky, or sensational, or even (in any religious sense) 'spiritual'. We mean only that it 'won't fit in'; that such an act, to be what it claims to be--and if it is not, all our thinking is discredited--cannot be merely the exhibition at a particular place and time of that total, and largely mindless, system of events called 'Nature'. It must break sufficiently free from that universal chain in order to be determined by what it knows.

From Miracles, Chapter 3.

Hylemorphic Dualism

An essay by David Oderberg.

Universalism amongst the early church fathers

If this is correct, universalism was, if anything, more prevalent than the doctrine of everlasting torment in the Patristic era.

Tom Talbott on the Outsider Test for Faith

Thomas Talbott has written a detailed critique of the Outsider Test for faith. I've been long convinced that the discussion of the OTF needs to move out of the blogosphere and into the realm of peer-reviewed journals. If Tom can be prevailed upon to submit this paper to such a journal, hopefully this can begin. It is the first essay on his list of "other writings."

Would Lewis have supported ID?

Michael Peterson argues that he would not.

No Argument for God

Tom Gilson reviews a book by a Christian youth pastor proudly proclaiming that there is no argument for God. Don't tell Loftus this book is out there.

Obama and the Democrats: Too Far to the Right?

While right-wingers think of Obama as a Leftist, Taner Edis of the Secular Outpost think he, and the Democrats, are way too far right.

Sometimes, you can't please anybody.

C. S.Lewis on the AFR and the Scientific Juggernaut

The link is to an article by Jim Slagle in Quodlibeta. 


The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher corresponds to nothing in my own experience. That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory -- in other words, unless Reason is an absolute -- all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.

The Arizona Birth Certificate Bill is Not about Obama

From a news report. 

On Thursday night Arizona’s birther bill passed through the House with a handy 40-16 margin. It was the final hurdle for the bill, which will require any presidential or vice presidential candidate to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship before they can be put on the state ballot.

Among the acceptable documents are a “long-form birth certificate,” an early baptismal or circumcision certificate, hospital birth record, early census record or a postpartum hospital record given to the mother, Politico reported.

“This bill is not about Obama. It’s not about that,” Arizona Rep. Carl Seel insisted to CNN. “It’s about future elections and maintaining the integrity of the Constitution.”


Yeah, right. If you'll buy that, I've got some oceanfront property in Arizona. Anyway, Gov. Brewer had the good sense to veto it. 

Parsons on Mental Causation

The Secular Outpost: The Problem with Metaphysical Naturalism (According to Victor Reppert)

First, I do share Parsons' concern about getting definitions right. When I deal with a naturalistic view, I offer an account of what that is supposed to have in it, which includes the mechanistic character of the base level, the causal closure of the base level, and the superveniece of everything else on the base level. By mechanism I mean that we are excluding from that base level four properties: intentionality, purpose, first-person subjectivity, and normativity. Now someone might come along and say that they have a view that doesn't fit these characteristics but is still naturalistic in some sense, in which case we'd have to look at their theory to see in what sense they're calling it naturalistic and whether I think a version of the AFR can be advanced against it. Here, I am going to assume that Parsons agrees with this account, and move forward. 

Looking at this post, it seems to me that there are a couple of issues that we have to be careful about conflating. One of them is the claim that some version of nonreductive materialism can meet the argument from reason. In the combox, you get some discussion of that, and some responses to some exchanges with Clayton Littlejohn. However, the impression that I have had in discussion with Clayton is that he believes that mental events qua mental events do cause other mental states and physical states. Troubles with mental causation have been the focus of some of Jaegwon Kim's criticisms of nonreductive materialism, in particular the nonreductivism of Donald Davidson. Kim writes:

Davidson's anomalous monism fails to do full justice to psychophysical causation in which the mental qua mental has any real causal role to play. Consider Davidson's account: whether or not a given event has a mental description (optional reading: whether or not it has a mental characteristic) seems entirely irrelevant to what causal relations it enters into. Its causal powers are wholly determined by the physical description or characteristic that holds for it; for it is under its physical description that it may be subsumed under a causal law.

Jaegwon Kim, "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation" ch. 6 of Supervenience and Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 106.

Now, of course, there can be a debate as to whether a case cam be made for mental causation in a non-reductive materialist framework. I think it can't. It's not that I don't think higher-level properties can be causally relevant. They can be if the are configurational combinations of physical states. If a bowling ball knocks all the pins down, this is perfectly possible even though basic physics makes no reference to bowling balls and pins. However, I take it if you add up the physical states and know what words mean, you can't avoid the conclusion that the bowling ball knocked down the pins. What I don't see is how you can add up non-normative states and get normative states, how you can add up non-intentional states and get intentional states, how you can add up non-first-person states and get first-person states, or how you can add up non-purposive states and get purposive states.

Science always prefers the most tractable accounts it can get. Scientists are happy when they can analyze the movement of a bullet through space, and determine what kind of impact it would have to make given the speed at which it was traveling. But there is another type of explanation that we might be interested in with respect to the bullet. It was fired by someone who had some intention with respect to what he wanted the bullet to do. Perhaps, he fired the bullet to kill his mother-in-law, whom he believes to be the worst person he knows. That is an agent-explanation, and as such is less tractable to science than a ballistic explanation. However, it isn't a total mystery; we can understand the person's motivations, and perhaps not find the action totally unexpected. After all, we are talking about the motivations of a fellow human. Now, as action might be the action of a superior being of some kind, and there it is even less tractable. Still, I would not want to call it a pseudo-explanation, because we can have some understanding of a superior mind, even the mind of God.

But it is a natural impulse in science to want to analyze the world in as tractable terms as possible, and hence we can understand why materialism is appealing from the point of view of science. However, at the same time, science described the activity of scientists in mentalistic terms. Scientists gather evidence, they form hypotheses, they perform logical and mathematical inferences, etc. It would indeed undermine the scientific enterprise if these mentalistic explanations of the behavior of scientists were simply untrue. Few people would be materialists if it weren't appealing from a scientific standpoint, but if mentalistic explanations are all false, then there are no scientists, and therefore no science. So, some kind of explanatory compatibility thesis must be defended by materialists. Scientists are, in the last analysis physical beings whose actions can be fully explained at the physical level as part of a closed mechanistic system, and their rationality, such as it is, must be some supervening property that emerges through evolution in a materialist world.

Parsons' strategy for establishing explanatory compatibility is essentially the same as the one Elizabeth Anscombe, (not a naturalist herself, but surely the most famous critic of C. S. Lewis's AFR). The mentalistic explanations we need in order for science to be science are compatible with materialism because those explanations aren't causal explanations, while those offered by physics are causal explanations.

Now Parsons, like Anscombe, points out that there are compatible explanations. Of course there are. For example, if we ask why the soda-can is sitting on the bookshelf, I might say "Because I put it there yesterday, since I am planning on recycling it," or "because it has a cylindrical shape, and is sitting on its base." But there are, certainly, incompatible explanations. Otherwise, there would be no hope that scientific explanations could ever supplant religious explanations.

Parsons tries to establish the explanatory compatibility as follows, using as an example Sam's acceptance of Krugman's arguments that the Ryan budget is a recipe for disaster. 

When we say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments it seems to me perverse to attribute some very (I think in-principally) mysterious kind of causal power to the sense or propositional content of Krugman’s arguments. Attributing causal powers to Fregean Sinn (meaning), if this is what Victor wants to assert, just seems to me a straightforward category mistake. It is like saying that the set of all integers broke the deadlock between NFL players and owners. No, to say that Sam was convinced by Krugman’s arguments means that Sam considered Krugman’s claims, examined the supporting reasons, weighed them in the light of prior knowledge and norms of good reasoning, and judged that these were persuasive. However, considering Krugman’s claims, examining the supporting arguments, evaluating them, and judging them to be persuasive are things that Sam does with his brain, and happenings in Sam’s brain, being physical events, can cause things. 

Well, if Sam's considering and accepting Krugman's arguments is a brain process, it looks like we are going to end up attributing properties to Sam's brain that are going to violate the causal closure of the physical. If Sam finds Krugman's arguments persuasive, one of the things he has to be persuaded by is the logical connection between the Krugman's premises and his conclusions. To be aware of something is to be causally influenced by it. So, yes, my awareness of a stop sign causes me to stop, not the stop sign itself. If I don't see the sign, I'll barrel right through. But, the stop sign has to cause my awareness of the stop sign. And if the physical is causally closed, then everything that I am aware of has to be also physical, and by physical I take it we mean that it has a particular location in space and time. A logical relationship has no particular location in space and time, and so if I am aware of a logical relationship, and that logical relationship affects my brain, then the causal closure of the physical has been violated, because something that has no particular location in space and time is bringing it about that I think certain things.

If I am aware that the cat is on the mat, then there is a causal connection between the cat and my brain, which occurs within space and time. If I am aware of the fact that, if a=b, and b=c and a=c, then in order for this awareness to be fitted within the framework of a causally closed physical order, that truth has to have a particular location in space and time. But it has not particular location in space and time, so, if the physical is closed, I can't be aware of it.

Explanations have ontological commitments. If I explain the existence of presents under the Christmas tree by saying that Santa put them there, then I commit myself to the existence of Santa. If I say I believe something because I perceive a logical relationship, that means that there are logical relationships. But where is this logical relationship for me to be aware of?

I don't see that you really resolve the problem naturalism has with rational inference by denying the causal character of these explanations.

Today is Tax Day, but not for these companies

Is this justifiable?

Gilbert Meilaender reviews Nagel's The Last Word

A redated post.

I believe that Thomas Nagel's The Last Word is really a defense of the Argument from Reason that stops short of offering theism as the conclusion. Nevertheless it does attack naturalism as we know it. The is Lewis scholar Meilaender's review of Nagel's book.

From a Faith and Philosophy review of Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons ed. Kevin Corcoran

Jaegwon Kim’s essay “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism” comes from a philosopher who operates out of the physicalist tradition. Unlike some in that tradition, however, he has been very serious about pressing difficulties for otherwise popular forms of physicalism in the area of mental causation. In this paper he presents some problems for dualism in the area of mental causation. He reconsiders the familiar objection to Descartes’ dualism that dualism is untenable because we cannot see how something nonphysical can interact with something physical. As Kim points out, this is often presented with no or almost no supporting argumentation. However, Kim does supply some argumentation to put some meat on the bones of the familiar objection, by generating what he calls the pairing problem.
Kim maintains that a spatial framework is necessary for the existence of a causal relationship amongst objects. If two rifles are fired and two people are killed, what criteria would lead us to correctly pair the causes and effects? The answer, says Kim, is the spatial relationships between deadly bullets and the victims. Kim also points out that lack of a spatial relation between a suspect and the victim is often sufficient to ground an alibi in a murder case. But since souls are not spatial, spatial pairing relationships between souls and matter cannot exist. Kim considers the possibility that souls have spatial locations, but he finds some difficulties with that idea as well, but he thinks this is problematic as well. We need to locate souls at a particular point in space, and claims that it would beg the question to locate the souls in the brain. Second, he argues that to locate souls in space would require that not more than one soul could occupy a location in space, that is, something like the impenetrability of matter would have to obtain. But he asks, if this is so, “why aren’t such souls just material objects, albeit of a very special, and strange kind?” And he thinks the soul found in a geometrical point could not have a structure capable of accounting for the rich mental life that humans have. Finally, he is suspicious of any solutions to the problem dictated by “dualist commitments.” He says “We shouldn’t do philosophy by first deciding what conclusions we want to prove, and then posit convenient entities and premises to get us where we want to go.”
First of all, it needs to be made clear just what it is for something to be a material thing. The book makes it evident that the concept of “materiality” and “matter” need to be made clearer than they are. This is especially imperative for Christians who want to go as far as possible in accommodating their faith to “materialism.” Orthodox materialism is a corollary of philosophical naturalism, and is typically committed to at least this: that the physical order is causally closed, and that whatever other states exist supervene on the physical; that is, there cannot be a difference without a physical difference. But what is more, physicalism is committed to the idea that the physical order is mechanistic, that is, purposive explanations cannot be basic-level explanations at the physical level. If the material is defined in this way, then it seems to me that something could have a spatial location, and it could also possess impenetrability, and still not be material in the orthodox sense. It could still be the case that the mental is sui generis and fundamental, and one of Foster’s dualist theses would still be true.

What does PETA think of Michael Vick

What do you think they'd think?

Is there a Republican War on Science?

I'm not a Republican, but can they be accused of being anti-science? This article, referencing David Klinghoffer, suggests otherwise.

An interesting article on assisted suicide

Plantinga on Dennett

This is an entertaining read.

Dennett's rejoinder to the argument is that possibly, "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out; [ 7 ] as it happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the development of intelligent life (where else?). 

Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot." Dennett's reply shows at most ('at most', because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a probabilistic argument, not one that is deductive valid. Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, you can't refute it just by pointing out that it isn't deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn't entail that it ever took place, but only makes that fact likely. You might as well reject the evidence for the earth's being round by pointing out that there are possible worlds in which we have all the evidence we do have for the earth's being round, but in fact the earth is flat. Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it.

Aquinas's Critique of the Argument from the Actual Infinite

This post, from Siris, argues that St. Thomas Aquinas provided the basis for rejecting versions of the Kalam Cosmological Argument that appeal to an actual infinite, beating Wes Morriston to the punch by eight and a half centuries.

Modern Healing Miracles

This is a discussion of a doctor's investigation into modern healing miracles. This was a well-known and popular book from the 1970s.

Groothuis on Multiverses and Intelligent Design

Why is the multiverse theory science, and ID not science? Can we appeal to the unobserved and unobservable, so long as it's not personal? Can one, with a straight face, reject theism because of Ockham's razor, and then believe in the multiverse?

Calvindude's argument that logic proves the existence of God

Lawrence Krauss responds to William Lane Craig

This, I think, illustrates the weakness of the debate format.

Keith Augustine's argument that Near Death Experiences are Hallucinatory

C. S. Lewis's Classic Reply to the Wish Fulfillment argument

A redated post. 

This is from Lewis's essay "On Obstinacy of Belief," to which I have linked. This is Lewis's classic response to the argument from wish fulfillment. It isn't a matter of riding Lewis's coattails here, it is simply pointing out that if you want to use a wish fulfillment argument against Christianity, this is the response you've got to answer. If you want to defend the argument from design, you've got to answer Hume. If you want to defend the evidentialist objection, you've got to answer Plantinga. If you want to defend psychological egoism, you've got to answer Butler. If you want to defend the wish fulfillment argument, you've got to answer Lewis.

Lewis's claim is that wish fulfillment arguments can be made on all sides, so they are pretty much useless to any side in particular.

There are of course people in our own day to whom the whole situation seems altered by the doctrine of the concealed wish. They will admit that men, otherwise apparently rational, have been deceived by the arguments for religion. But they will say that they have been deceived first by their own desires and produced the arguments afterwards as a rationalization: that these arguments have never been intrinsically even plausible, but have seemed so because they were secretly weighted by our wishes.



Now I do not doubt that this sort of thing happens in thinking about religion as in thinking about other things; but as a general explanation of religious assent it seems to me quite useless. On that issue our wishes may favour either side or both. The assumption that every man would be pleased, and nothing but pleased, if only he could conclude that Christianity is true, appears to me to be simply preposterous.


If Freud is right about the Oedipus complex, the universal pressure of the wish that God should not exist must be enormous, and atheism must be an admirable gratification to one of our strongest suppressed impulses. This argument, in fact, could be used on the theistic side. But I have no intention of so using it. It will not really help either party. It is fatally ambivalent. Men wish on both sides: and again, there is fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment, and hypochondriac temperaments will always tend to think true what they most wish to be false.


Thus instead of the one predicament on which our opponents sometimes concentrate there are in fact four. A man may be a Christian because he wants Christianity to be true. He may be an atheist because he wants atheism to be true. He may be an atheist be-cause he wants Christianity to be true. He may be a Christian because he Wants atheism to be true. Surely these possibilities cancel one another out? They may be of some use in analysing a particular instance of belief or disbelief, where we know the case history, but as a general explanation of either they will not help us. I do not think they overthrow the view that there is evidence both for and against the Christian propositions which fully rational minds, working honestly, can assess differently.

Burgess-Jackson on explaining religion away

For every scurrilous explanation of theistic belief, there is a scurrilous explanation of atheistic belief. If theism is suspect because of its origins, then atheism is suspect because of its origins. Why don't we cease playing this stupid explanatory game and get on with the real game, which involves justifying one's beliefs?

HT: Steve Hays

Lydia McGrew on the Naturalistic induction

Lydia formulates the "naturalistic induction" as follows. 

Most problems which were unexplained by science in purely naturalistic terms have now been explained by science in purely naturalistic terms. So, by direct induction, any alleged evidence against naturalism has a scientific explanation in purely naturalistic terms.

Science has made and continues to make such great progress throughout history, gradually whittling away at the set of things that were previously not scientifically understood, that whatever it is that you are presently bringing forth as evidence against naturalism, I am sure that science will eventually get to that in time and explain it, as well, as entirely the product of natural causes.

 And then she argues that this induction is not going to work. And this refers to the Balfour quote she references.

What did you say, Newt?

"I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."-Newt Gingrich

HT: Taner Edis.

David Bentley Hart reviews Dennett's "Breaking the Spell"

Some exchange with Keith Parsons

KP: Honestly, I do not know what to make of your suggestion that souls and gods might turn out to be natural entities. “Natural” and “supernatural” are flexible terms, but I fear that if we stretch language that far it will break. Are you suggesting that gods and souls might turn out to be constituted of energy or matter and are thus denizens of the space/time universe and, ipso facto, subject to the laws of nature? I earnestly desire not to make a straw man of you (or Lewis for that matter), so I just have to say that I do not follow you here.

VR: Mostly, here I am trying to get clear on exactly what you are taking the constraints of naturalism to be. I \use a working definition of what a naturalistic world-view is supposed to contain, and my argument against naturalism is an argument against that. But then I am told that I am really attacking a straw man, that my argument works against materialism but not against naturalism, or that it works against reductive materialism but not non-reductive materialism, etc. If we say what is natural has to be constituted of energy or matter, or if you say that what is natural has to be a denizen of the space-time universe, in other words, it must have a particular location in space and time, and it must be subject to laws of nature, well, we have a start. I suppose that makes God non-natural, since God is not supposedly located in a particular place. But with the soul, it's a little tricky, since I don't see why a soul should have to lack a particular location in space.

KP: As for whether we ultimately explain in “mentalistic” terms or not, it is not at all clear to me that we have an either/or here. If mental happenings are fully realized by physical happenings, i.e., if we think, feel, imagine, desire, etc. with our brains (as I think we do), then we have a choice, depending on our interests at the time, of how we explain those mental happenings. I can say “I concluded that the defendant was indeed guilty on the basis of the cumulative evidence against him, his clear motive, and the shakiness of his alibi” when I am discussing things in a legal or philosophical context. If I am doing neuroscience I could talk about the causal relations between evolving brain states, in particular those states that realize my reasoning about the defendant’s guilt. Why should one type of explanation preclude or take precedence over the other? Isn’t all explanation wholly context-dependent? 

VR: The problem has to do with how what our concept of the physical is. It seems to me that a physical explanation, if we are sticking with standard definitions and are not expanding the notion of the physical to include things it doesn't traditionally include, our concept of what it is for something to be a physical explanation, at least at the base level of analysis, is for it to lack four "mentalistic" characteristics. First, the explanation at the base level cannot include an purpose. Second it cannot include any intentionality. What a physical state is about cannot enter into the base-level explanation. Third, it cannot include any reference to normativity. No piece of matter, in the last analysis, goes where it goes because it ought to go there. Fourth, a naturalistic explanation of a material state cannot contain any reference to a first-person perspective. I take it the idea that naturalists typically have is that the laws the govern matter don't change because the matter is realizing a mental operation. And, according to the standard understanding of naturalism, the base level is causally closed. This doesn't mean that it's deterministic, it means that nothing outside the physical system can affect where a particular atom goes, whether it's an atom in a rock or an atom in a brain. If there is quantum-level indeterminism, it's brute chance and nothing more. Quantum mechanics doesn't provide a door for non-physical causes to enter. There are some pretty strict limits on what kinds of explanations can be offered at the base level, if we are going to be good naturalists. If you want to loosen the definition of the physical, be my guest, but then I'm going to have to ask what the parameters are, and what is being excluded. Otherwise, how can we exclude what use to be called souls, or what used to be called gods? I mean we can even call God the theon, to make His name a more scientific sound.

KP: Finally, might not the behaviorists or the eliminative materialists turn out to have been the consistent naturalists? No. Consciousness is as much a natural phenomenon as a hurricane. Like a hurricane, consciousness is complexly realized and difficult to model, but there is no reason whatsoever to see it as not amenable to human understanding or as inexplicable in physical terms. Behaviorism and eliminativism were, as Bertrand Russell said about positivism, ideas so bizarrely stupid that only a very educated person could ever have been made to believe them. They are monuments to the astonishing capacity of highly intelligent and educated ideologues to ignore the elephant in the room.  


Yes, but you have to realize that these were attempts to be consistently naturalistic. When you introduce consciousness, you introduce all four of the types of explanations which I had excluded. By using brain-talk, naturalists often mask the fact that they are in fact using personalistic explanations to describe what the brain is doing. In which case I reply  "Interesting fellow, Mr. Brain. Remarkable what he can do."

In the case of hurricanes, it seems to me that if you add up all the physicalistic in formation about where the water molecules are and what you are doing, it closes the question as to whether there is a hurricane. In the case of mental states, it seems to me that if you add up all the nonmental states, you don't get determinate mental states. The physical underdetermines the mental. There is a conceptual barrier similar to the kind of barrier that is said to exist between an ought and an is. Given the fact we define the physical in terms of a lack of the mental, you can't go from the physical to the mental and get a definite conclusion as to what mental state is present. You can't siphon off the mental to the realm of the mental, because that's precisely what we are trying to explain.