Parsons replies to me

KP: I am a tad busy right now, so I don't think I will have time for a long point/counterpoint. However, I would like to point out that the argument you are attributing to me is not the one I was trying to make. I am not questioning the legitimacy of all a priori reasoning. I was pointing out that philosophers have often made armchair pronouncements about what must or must not be, which scientists have blithely disregarded and proceeded to do what philosophers said could not be done. Leibniz, for instance, claimed to disprove the possibility of physical atoms. Scientists went right ahead with atomic theory--and a good thing too. Kant held that three dimensional space was an a priori intuition. Physicists have found it useful to disregard that "intuition." Spinoza "proved" that all that is must be. Quantum physics does not give a fig for such determinism. Auguste Comte said that the constitution of the stars would never be known. A year or two later the spectrograph was invented. Kant held that asserting either that the universe had a beginning or did not leads to insoluble intellectual antinomies. Big Bang theorists never cared. Descartes "proved" that the mind must be incorporeal res cogitans. Neuroscience piles success on top of success assuming that we think with our brains.

VR: But of course, the argument here isn't just an armchair speculation, it is a principed argument. In these cases, it has to be clarified that the scientific theory and the philosophical argument really contradicted one another. I know in the case of Kant, it is an open question as to whether the claims are really in conflict. This is the discussion of it in the Stanford Encyclopedia. 
It doesn't seem to me that Kant's position, just described, conflicts with scientific theory. 

Atheists don't get God

Here. 

Ht: Bob Prokop

Contradiction, Omnipotence, and Divine Power

John at Secular Outpost wrote: 

"if I have all power, then the simple answer is that I used the power of omnipotence to get it done."

That will not do as an answer if the task is to draw a triangle with 4 sides. Some of us seriously doubt that it makes sense to speak of a person causing things to exist without a body or brain, outside of space and time. To say "God does it by his power of omnipotence" is not useful here. Even omnipotent beings cannot do things which are conceptually impossible.

VR: But doesn't this just question-beggingly delimit just what can cause what? If there is some logical contradiction in God causing something without a body or a brain, that would be one thing. Of course, omnipotence is typically defined as the power to do anything that doesn't involve a contradiction, so the triangle with four sides case would be ruled out by definition.

A priori arguments and materialism

This begins a series of responses to Keith Parsons on the Argument from Reason, found here. 

Parsons' first critical response to the argument is this: 

First, note that Goetz and Taliafero’s arguments, and practically all arguments against the MTB thesis, are a priori in nature, whereas the arguments for MTB are mostly empirical. Historically, a priori arguments have fared very poorly when opposed to empirical arguments. Philosophers will draw an a priori line in the sand and scientists will gleefully jump over it. The dismal track record of a priori claims against empirical ones provides some reason to doubt the cogency of arguments like those of Goetz and Taliafero.

Are all a priori arguments bad? Really? What about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, for crying out loud? Or the entire edifice of mathematics, on which the entire operation of science is based? That's ALL a priori. 

It might be helpful to see some examples of what Parsons is talking about. 

What C. S. Lewis never said

Here. 

How could they have thought that?

 Consider this  speech by Richard Henry Pratt. Explain how such attitudes could have been prevalent in a previous era of American history, yet completely socially unacceptable today. Are we much smarter than those people back them, or is there some other explanation for the disgust that most people would feel towards this kind of attitude?

Or are we so far removed from this perspective??

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ — lies where we have never suspected it.”-- C. S. Lewis. 

Bill Vallicella on his comments policy, and mine

Here. I don't know if it's a liberal v. conservative issue at all. I wonder who people who are nasty think they are persuading? I would have thought such people were are just showing everyone what idiots they are.

I still believe in having a free speech zone as far as I possibly can. I'm sensitive to the concern that I might be banning people in a biased manner. I suppose his policy is unbiased as well.

Reppert's Corollary

I'm Skeptical wrote: Neil deGrasse Tyson made an interesting comment about religious people in science. He said that he doesn't care if you have religious views while working in the science lab. But if you think you have the answers based on your religion, and that causes you to not have the curiosity to seek further knowledge on those questions, then he has no need for you in the lab.

Sounds great, so long as you include Reppert's Corollary: But if you think you have the answers based on your atheism, and that causes you to not have the curiosity to seek further knowledge on those questions, then he has no need for you in the lab.

But if you say "Oh, no, that would never be a concern. No one's atheism could cause they to lack the curiosity to  seek further knowledge," then you're a fundamentalist in the perjorative sense.

How to ruin science

Do you actually think there should be (anti) religious tests for scientists. That strikes me as a great way to ruin science, but be my guest.

C. S. Lewis on How to Avoid God

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

 "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Bill Vallicella has some other ways in which we can avoid God. 

Is Richard Dawkins a science denier?

I have covered this topic before, and used this link before, but it occurs to me that, given Dawkins' statements about the effects of religion on the one hand, and child sexual abuse on the other, compared to hard scientific data, that is the only conclusion anyone can come to.

The Amalekite Ban and the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility

Here is a discussion critical of my own difficulties with believing that God ordered a ban on the
Amalekites, by Turretinfan. 

Here is the critical passage: 

There is absolutely no question that the Lord commanded the slaughter of the Amalekites.  Moreover, the explicitly stated reason for this slaughter is that they attacked Israel during the Exodus.  That does not mean that God did not have other reasons.

And he goes on to say: 

But Victor does not need to speculate.  God gives a reason.  The reason is retaliation for prior treachery.  Of course, the sucklings were not a part of that treachery, but the crime was performed by the nation and they are in a federal relationship with respect to the nation.  Absent God’s mercy, the judgment on the nation extends even to those who had no personal part in it.  Indeed, given the lapse of time between the Exodus and Saul, it seems unlikely that there were any alive in Amalek who had been in any personal way involved in the attack on Israel.  So, it is not only the sucklings who are receiving judgment from God for the sins of their fathers, but also the adults of Amalek as well.

One of Victor’s problems is that he is attempting to impose an external moral framework on the situation, instead of trying to extract a moral framework from the situation.  What God does is right.  That should be the premise.  Examples like the commanded destruction of the children of Amalek teach us about the heritability of guilt for sin. 

What people find shocking in the Amalekite case is that descendants are being given a kind of "national death penalty" for actions their remote ancestors did which the individuals involved had nothing to do with. We are inclined to suppose that children are innocent, and as such can't be blamed for actions their ancestors performed. We moderns are committed to the doctrine of individual responsibility, and from that standpoint the ban on the Amalekites does indeed seem unjust. If we can swallow the idea that someone can deserve the death penalty for the actions of an ancestor, then the Amalekite ban ceases to be a problem. 

However, the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility has an important biblical foundation, in Ezekiel 18 (NIV): 

The One Who Sins Will Die

1The word of the Lord came to me: 2“What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:

“ ‘The parents eat sour grapes,

and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?

3“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. 4For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.

5“Suppose there is a righteous man

who does what is just and right.

6He does not eat at the mountain shrines

or look to the idols of Israel.

He does not defile his neighbor’s wife

or have sexual relations with a woman during her period.

7He does not oppress anyone,

but returns what he took in pledge for a loan.

He does not commit robbery

but gives his food to the hungry

and provides clothing for the naked.

8He does not lend to them at interest

or take a profit from them.

He withholds his hand from doing wrong

and judges fairly between two parties.

9He follows my decrees

and faithfully keeps my laws.

That man is righteous;

he will surely live,

declares the Sovereign Lord.

10“Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things^a 11(though the father has done none of them):

“He eats at the mountain shrines.

He defiles his neighbor’s wife.

12He oppresses the poor and needy.

He commits robbery.

He does not return what he took in pledge.

He looks to the idols.

He does detestable things.

13He lends at interest and takes a profit.

Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.

14“But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:

15“He does not eat at the mountain shrines

or look to the idols of Israel.

He does not defile his neighbor’s wife.

16He does not oppress anyone

or require a pledge for a loan.

He does not commit robbery

but gives his food to the hungry

and provides clothing for the naked.

17He withholds his hand from mistreating the poor

and takes no interest or profit from them.

He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.

He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live. 18But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.

19“Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

21“But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live; they will not die. 22None of the offenses they have committed will be remembered against them. Because of the righteous things they have done, they will live.23Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?

24“But if a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked person does, will they live? None of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness they are guilty of and because of the sins they have committed, they will die.

25“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear, you Israelites: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust? 26If a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin, they will die for it; because of the sin they have committed they will die. 27But if a wicked person turns away from the wickedness they have committed and does what is just and right, they will save their life. 28Because they consider all the offenses they have committed and turn away from them, that person will surely live; they will not die. 29Yet the Israelites say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Are my ways unjust, people of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust?

30“Therefore, you Israelites, I will judge each of you according to your own ways, declares the SovereignLord. Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall. 31Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? 32For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!

So I am inclined to think that saying "Just follow the Bible and give up the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility" is a bit of an oversimplified answer. 

Dangit! This nutty mythicist is giving us respectable mythicists a bad name

From Richard Carrier. Here. 

HT: Steve Hays

Who created God?

As for who created God,  here  is an answer from a Catholic website. 

If something came into existence at a certain point in time—that is, if it had a beginning—then there needs to be a cause, an explanation, for why it came to be. But if something exists outside of time—like God—then it does not need an explanation for its beginning, because it does not have one.
The earth, indeed the universe, had a beginning point in time, and this is something that both the Big Bang Theory and the Book of Genesis agree on. 

Lead-footed literalism

If you are going for what I would call lead-footed literalism about the Bible, then there is going to be a clash between science and religion. But I'm not talking about Darwin or evolution, I am talking about simple astronomy. If, based on the Bible, you conclude that you have a comprehensive genealogy, then you can count back from a well established date, such as the time of King David, and count years back until you get to a beginning of the universe in approximately 4004 B. C. At least that is what one famous archbishop concluded. You see, it was the heavens and the earth that was created, Adam came into existence on Day 6, so if you count back from David to Adam, that's about what it is going to be. And since it was the heavens and the earth that were created at that point, then that would mean that the universe is 6017 years old. If that were true, then we should only be able to see stars 6017 light years away, since light from stars further away would have had to travel to far to be seen from earth. So, if you are trying to believe THAT, then Darwin's theory of evolution is the least of your worries. 

Unfortunately for Christianity-bashers, this kind of literalism was never the norm within the Christian Church. It's not as if everybody was a lead-footed literalist until science came along and pointed all of these problems out. Quite the contrary, Christians going all the way back to Augustine have avoided this kind of literalism. See here. 

The latest chapter in the "Jesus Myth" saga

Here.  

Does anyone find this stuff boring besides me?

Homosexuality and choice

I was born heterosexual, but there is nothing about my heterosexuality that requires that I perform heterosexual sex acts at any time during my lifetime. I can either engage in heterosexual behavior or not. And the same applies to homosexuals.

So, even if a person has no choice about whether or not to be gay (I must say that is certainly true in my case, and I am inclined to think that it is true in the case of at least some homosexuals), it is possible to freely choose or not choose to engage in homosexual behavior.

While sexual orientation is many cases not a choice, it has to be a choice sometimes, otherwise there would be no bisexuals.

Against Christian anti-intellectualism

Here.

Justice Scalia says Satan is real.

Here.  The Louvin Brothers would have agreed.

Stanford Encyclopedia on Pascal's Wager

Here. 

Parsons responds to the AFR

Here. 

A secular argument against same sex marriage

Here.

The End of Science

Here is a case made for putting an end to science, based on atomic fears. This is the song.

You don't normally hear an actual attack on science itself.

C. S. Lewis on Faith from Mere Christianity

A redated post.

Roughly speaking, the word faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply belief--accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people--at least it used to puzzle me--is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on Earth it can be a virtue--what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then--and a good many people do not see still--was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith; on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.....
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair; some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue; unless you teach your moods "where they get off" you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.

C.S Lewis

Now, does it take faith to be an atheist? Of course!

For Catholics Fideism is a heresy

Odd position to take for a bunch of faith-heads, don't you think.

Here. 

No evidence?? Really??

A redated post.

On Debunking Christianity Loftus was questioning my claim that there is a boatload of evidence for theism

Exapologist is right of course. I fired off those comments on my blog and then pasted them to the other blog, out of sheer irritation with the "no evidence claim."

In my view, evidence for hypothesis H exists if there is something that is more likely to exist given H than not-h. That is the long and the short of it. There are numerous features of human experience that seem more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Even if they have possible atheistic explanations, these facts seem to me to make theism more plausible than otherewise. To say that there is NO evidence for theism just means that EVERYTHING in the world is at least as likely given atheism as given theism.

I would not be inclined to say "There is no evidence for theism." and I would not want to say "there is no evidence for atheism." If I were on a website where everyone was implying that atheists were a bunch of idiots and that there is no evidence whatsoever that God does not exist, I could just as truthfully reply that there is a boatload of evidence for atheism. All told, I think the scale points toward theism myself, but not so strongly that I would want to be defending irrationaltiy charges against atheists. (As you may know, I've gotten into some exchanges with people who think that here are really no atheists).

I threw a bunch of stuff out because I thought the discussion up to that point was one-sided and even somewhat ad hominem. I an convinced that a new brand of atheist apologetics is brewing which is doing considerable harm to the quality of debate between our two sides. `

Radical Naturalistic Presuppositionalism

I have never been able to figure out exactly how there arguments for methodological naturalism are supposed to go. It seems that a lot of the time this sort of thing just gets asserted without an real explanation of why it has to be like that.

Let's take the subtitle of Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, which is "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design." Now, if this is taken seriously, it has to imply that evidence of evolution could have revealed a universe with design, but it just didn't. Otherwise, what leads us to the conclusion that the universe is without design wouldn't be the evidence of evolution, it would be the constraints of rational inquiry. The evidence of evolution would be superfluous

Russell presumably said if he met God and were asked to explain is failure to believe in him, he would say "Well, God, you didn't give me enough evidence!" But, that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense unless God could have given enough evidence, but just didn't. But, if it is a fundamental principle of reason that we can't possibly have evidence for God, then that's kind of empty don't you think?

I once asked a longtime friend who is now a well-known atheist philosopher, Keith Parsons "If I were God, and I wanted to rationally persuade you of my existence, what would I have to do?" He told me that if I, as God were to make the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster to spell out the words "Turn Or Burn, Parsons This Means You," he's turn. I guess for many naturalists, there are limits on methodological naturalism. But if Parsons were to turn, I am sure at least some of his atheist colleagues would accuse him of succumbing to a God of the Gaps explanation.

If MN is stated strongly enough, it requires you to reject a theistic explanation (which is surely logically possible) even if it were a true explanation. That's a position that I would describe as radical naturalistic presuppositionalism. Are there any naturalistic presuppositionalists out there? Are there Cornelius Van Tils in the naturalist camp?

I'm on this video of the Magician's Twin

Here. 

Abortion and Moral Objectivity

Some people think that the fact that people cannot agree about the issue of abortion is good evidence that moral values are relative or subjective. It is quite true that there are profound differences about moral values that are extraordinarily difficult to resolve when it comes to this issue. It is also true that a lot of the dispute on this issue takes place at what I call the bumper sticker level: "Abortion is murder" "A woman has the right to do as she pleases with her own body," etc.

However, disputants do agree that humans in general have a right to life. No one, (or almost no one) disputes that. There is a very strong consensus about the right to life outside the womb, even amongst pro-choicers, which is challenged in some cases by Australian philosophers taking pro-choice arguments so far as to justify infanticide, but by and large social consensus against infanticide is pretty strong. No one thinks we have the right to knock off a four-year-old just because the four-year-old is annoying us. People also believe in the right of persons, including women to control their own body. Pro-lifers are not inclined to oppose that right except in the case of a pregnancy, where they believe another person's rights to be involved. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers also agree that the quality of life matters a great deal. It is just that pro-lifers think that quality of life concerns have to be set aside in order to protect the right to life of the fetus, the exact argument that a pro-choice person would make on behalf of four-year-olds.

Hence the contemporary debate concerning abortion is a kind of in-house quarrel between people who agree on a range of fundamental principles. Looked at in this way, the dispute about abortion provides an problem for moral subjectivity, not an argument for it.

The Abolition of Man is online

Here. 

An ethical claim from Hector Avalos

From this discussion.

I would go much further and argue that all theistic ethics are inherently unethical because,
at least from a secular viewpoint, a functional ethical system is one in which all members
of a community have at least the same potential ability to verify the information on which
their actions are based.

Why assume this? In science, different people have different levels of access. Why must egalitarianism of this kind rule in ethics?

Hush Hush

I believe in at least this part of "teach the controversy," and that is that supporters of evolution shouldn't suppress aspects of evolutionary biology that are problematic, for fear of (God forbid, oops that should be Darwin forbid), providing cannot fodder for creationists. 

As the article says: 

Ball suggests that popular accounts of evolution may be sanitized because of anxiety that the uncertainty might be exploited by people who want to undermine evolutionary theory. But, he writes, "We are grown-up enough to be told about the doubts, debates and discussions that are leaving the putative 'age of the genome' with more questions than answers."

But, if we can't talk about the problems with any theory, then the whole self-correcting mechanism of science is threatened. 

Just for fun, I am including a link to the Pistol Annies' song "Hush Hush." 

Hush hush don't you dare say a word
Hush hush don't you know the truth hurts
Hush hush when push comes to shove
It's best to keep it hush hush
Best to keep it hush hush

Are there pages missing?

Actually, some recent manuscripts have been discovered which show that God first created Adam and Steve. But that didn't work out so well with regard to populating the earth, so God then created Eve to correct the situation. 

How to save a refuted theory

I understand that, for any scientific theory, the "refuted" theory can always be saved by adjusting it to fit the contrary evidence. There is no logical point at which scientists must give up their theory, but theories are often nevertheless abandoned by their adherents (possible when all the old scientists who believed the theory die off). 


The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, 'refuted" by the telescope. The scarred surface of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter can, if one wants, be fitted into a geocentric scheme... How far, by endless tinkerings, it could have kept up with them till even now, I do not know. But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can 'save the appearances." The new astronomy triumphed, not because the case for the old became desperate, but because the new was a better tool, and once this was grasped, our ingrained conviction that Nature herself is thrifty did the rest.

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 219-220. 

Reasons, causes and ontological commitments.

A redated post. 

Explanations, causal or non-causal, involve ontological commitments. That which plays an explanatory role is supposed to exist. Therefore, if we explain the existence of the presents under the Christmas tree in terms of Santa Claus I take it that means that Santa Claus exists in more than just a non-realist “Yes, Virginia,” sense. What this means is that even if reasons-explanations do not exclude physical explanations, even if reasons-explanations are somehow not causal explanations, the naturalist is not out of the woods. The naturalist maintains that the universe, at its base, is governed by blind matter rather than reasons. So if reasons-explanations are true, we still need to know why they are true and why reasons exist in a world that is fundamentally non-rational.

Faith, Reason, Love, and Marriage

I am inclined to see the question of religious belief as a judgment call. If we are looking for proof of the sort we have for the claim that the earth goes around the sun, then this isn't going to work. But there are facts and evidence that seem to be relevant here. There are reasons that can be given on both sides. Because a lot in our lives depend on how we decide, we have to "call it" one way or the other. (Do we go to church or not? Do we follow a religion? Do we use any religious texts as a guide for life? etc.) 

Consider the question of whether someone loves you enough to get married to them. Can you prove that that person will be a good husband or wife? If you wait for proof in some strict sense, then no one will get married. But you can see evidence of someone's love, or more seriously, evidence that someone's love is deficient. Or you could ignore it. People get married to abusers. They should have seen that something was wrong, but they closed their eyes. That may have seemed like true faith to them, but it seems like a recipe for unhappiness now. 

What does it mean?

A redated post.

What does it mean to say "ID is only disguised creationism?" Creationism, I take it would be

C) The species in existence today were specially created by God, and were not produced by any evolutionary process.

Whereas Intelligent Design is committed to

ID) The species in existence today, including man, were, in part, produced by a process distinct from the processes described in neo-Darwinian theory (random variation, natural selection, genetic drift, etc.) in that these processes included the work of an intelligent designer.

But C and ID are really equivalent, because

P) In the proposed high school textbook, Of Pandas and People, numerous references to a creator were changed to refer to an intelligent designer, once the Supreme Court upheld the anti-creationism decisions.

But C and ID are not equivalent, and P does nothing to show that C and ID are equivalent. The changes, clearly, changed the meanings of the statements. Plato clearly believed in ID but not C, and a case could be made the Hume did so as well.

So when people say that ID is just disguised C, what do they mean?

The significance of the Dover decision

Can someone kindly explain to me who died and made some federal judge in Pennsylvania the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not science?

Do people realize that if there hadn't been a personnel change on the Dover school board, the case would have gone up the court system, and there is some evidence that if it had made to the Supreme Court, some justices were likely to overturn the case?

Even if it were not overturned, while we need judges to make decisions like this sometimes, the way this decision is talked about by some people it almost seems to have metaphysical significance. Why?

The Lewis quote Bob was looking for

It's from The Abolition of Man.

“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
― C.S. Lewis

One-sided academic freedom?

It sure looks like it here, at Ball State.

Some Clarifications for Steven Carr

Steven Carr: No, the whole point is that 'the power of omnipotence' is a meaningless phrase indicating the total lack of thought that has gone into working out your views.

Apparently, any being other than a god can only win a chess game by playing better moves than his opponent, while in contrast, a god wins chess games by a different method - namely the power of omnipotence.

VR: Actually, it depends on what you want explained. Winning a chess game involves making better moves than one's opponent, granted. But now if we ask "OK, I have the scoresheet, and I know what God did to win the game. But how in the world did he figure out what the best moves were?" we would be ignoring God's omniscience.

Similarly, we might get a good deal more detail about what happened when God raised Jesus from the dead. A Laplacean demon might know in detail what all the physical, chemical, and biological changes were that brought Jesus back to life. That would identify in more detail what the miracle was. But, if we then ask "OK, I see all that, but isn't that impossible given the laws of physics, so how did God do that?" then it seems the interlocutor is simply forgetting that God, ex hypothesi, is omnipotent, and has the power to create the laws of physics or to produce effects that are not possible given the laws of physics, and we would be gratuitously presupposing naturalism, which is precisely what is at issue between the defender of miracles and the opponent of miracles.

How did God do that?

Lowder writes:

The more substantial point is this. Simply claiming that a Creator/Designer is the “best explanation” hardly amounts to showing that a Creator/Designer really is the “best explanation.” In my experience, many (but not all) people who invoke a Creator or Designer as the “best explanation” fail to show that it is the best explanation. Indeed, some (and this includes WK, at least in the linked post) don’t even try! Instead, they just assume that a Creator or Designer is an explanation.  If, however, the design hypothesis isn’t an explanation at all, then it cannot be the best explanation.

This is always an interesting issue. But does it really make sense to ask of an omnipotent being how they did something. For example, I once beat a Grandmaster in a chess tournament. Now, you might ask how I did that, since as someone whose rating has never gone above expert, you might wonder how I did that. (And the answer isn't all the flattering, was able to win because my opponent had had entirely too much to drink.) But if I have all power, then the simple answer is that I used the power of omnipotence to get it done.

Lowder's Is "Freethinker" Synonymous with Nontheist?

A redated post.

Athanasius' On the Incarnation

A redated post.

Athanasius had theological reasons for insisting on the doctrine of the Trinity. It wasn't just a matter of "who won the election." He was concerned about what Arianism would do to monotheism (in spite of a unity of purpose between the Father and the Son) and he was also concerned about the fact that if Arianism is true, then someone other than God is saving us. This edition, of course, includes Lewis's fanous preface, otherwise known as "On the Reading of Old Books."

Evangelical Outpost on Zombies

Is your neighbor a zombie? Is Britney Spears a zombie? (scratch that). Joe Carter thinks that if materialism is true, we would have to worry about this possibility.

You can't argue with a zombie

A redated post.
A paper by Jaron Lanier.

The Stanford entry on Functionalism

Here. 

The final paragraph is as follows:

In general, the sophistication of functionalist theories has increased since their introduction, but so has the sophistication of the objections to functionalism, especially to functionalist accounts of mental causation (section 5.2), introspective knowledge (Section 5.3), and the qualitative character of experiential states (Section 5.5). For those unconvinced of the plausibility of dualism, however, and unwilling to restrict mental states to creatures physically like ourselves, the initial attractions of functionalism remain. The primary challenge for future functionalists, therefore, will be to meet these objections to the doctrine, either by articulating a functionalist theory in increasingly convincing detail, or by showing how the intuitions that fuel these objections can be explained away.

A question for naturalists

This is from an i'm-skeptical response

This is evidence of your own misunderstanding of what it means to be (at least relatively) free of superstition and woo. It's not the cold, dark bleakness of "mindless electrical impulses" that you make it out to be. I have thoughts and emotions, just like everyone else. Your failure to understand it, your deluded perception, does not change the reality. (I might add here that we all have deluded perceptions - reality is not what it appears.) You've convinced yourself (as have most theists) that "mindless electrical impulses" can't possibly result in cognition. As I said, there is "matter in motion" behind it, but it's anything but mindless. It is just how mental function works. Sorry to disappoint you, the materialist isn't angry and jealous because he doesn't share your happy delusions about mind. But he may well wish that you'd wake up, take a look at the evidence, and stop being so smug about your beliefs. 

I would like to ask I-S whether, in saying that mental explanations are true, he is saying that they are basic-level explanations. Richard Carrier, in his lengthy critique of my book, agrees with me that purposive and intentional basic explanations are unacceptable for naturalists.

Reppert attempts to generalize his arguments to all forms of naturalism only in a very vague and haphazard way when he comes to his defense of "explanatory dualism" as his alternative. For example, he deploys what I earlier described as the Causation Fallacy again when he argues that naturalism's reliance on only two categories of fundamental explanation—necessity and accident—eliminates reason (87), which is teleological (a third category). But this is a non sequitur. Just because our basic explanations are limited to accident and necessity it does not follow that this exhausts all explanations available to us—for not all explanations are basic. Reppert knows very well that naturalism allows teleological causation as a category of explanation (human behavior, for example), and that we explain the emergence of this type of cause as an effect of a complex system of more fundamental nonteleological causes.

Do you think that Carrier has accurately characterized the commitments of naturalism. 

Theological Voluntarism and the debate over Calvinism

Roger Olson, an Arminian, thinks that the heart of the Calvinist-Arminian debate concerns theological voluntarism. I think that it really does boil down to this, although I have run into arguments to the effect that Calvinists are not necessarily committed to voluntarism.

When I debated the issue a few years back with the people over at Triablogue (mostly) I thought they were getting away from straightforward voluntarism, but that their position ended up in something like it in the final analysis. I think Calvinists like to cast the debate as reliance on intuitions vs. reliance on Scripture, but can we have knowledge of moral truths in the Platonistic sense which permit us to form judgments about what is can be plausibly attributed to God, which in turn affects our understanding of what we take from Scripture?

Philosophical terms as understood by nonphilosophers

This is great

A Musical Debate

The Louvin Brothers affirm belief in God with There's a Higher Power.  Robbie Fulks responds with God isn't Real.  How would the Louvins have responded to Fulks' argument from evil? Probably with Satan is Real. 

Another version of the AFR

1. If there is no God, then all causation in the universe is blind, physical causation. 
2. If that is true, then what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation. 
3. But science exists. And if science exists, then scientists also exist. And those scientists do form beliefs because of the evidence for those beliefs. Otherwise, we would not take scientists any more seriously than tea leaf readers. 
4. But if science exists, then it is not the case that what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation. 
5. But if it is not true that what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation, then it is not the case that all causation in the universe is blind physical causation. 
6. If it is not true that all causation in the universe is blind physical causation, then God does exist. 

Heard from a Quad Preacher back when I was at the University of Illinois

A redated post.

Do they still have the fire-and-brimstone quad preachers that always get a big crowd around?

Back in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, God had all the homosexuals in one place. So he smote them with fire and brimstone. Now, they're spread all over the world. So he sent AIDS.

McAtheism

This is a brilliant term, which we can always use when we get tired of "gnu." Here.

Would you like fries with that?

A William Lane Craig Interview

On Reasons to Believe. Here.

Six Atheist Arguments. But are they new?

Apparently this atheist thinks its more of the same darned thing.

A Common Sense Atheism post on whether Christians really believe what they say they do

Here. In particular he is talking about the belief in soteriological exclusivism, which says that only Christians go to heaven and everyone else is going to roast in hell.

If we really believe this, would we spend every waking moment trying to evangelize the lost, and worrying ourselves sick that some of the people we really care about won't make it?

Back when I was an undergrad, a couple of guys by the names of Bob Prokop and Joe Sheffer convinced me that soteriological exclusivism was false, and interestingly enough, they brought up some of the same points that this atheist does.

Laying out the problem of evil: If there is a God, why does my back hurt so much?

Here is a version of the argument from evil. 

(1) Gratuitous evils probably exist
(2) Gratuitous evils are incompatible with the God of theism (omnipotent, omniscient, all-good
(3) Therefore, the God of theism probably does not exist. 

Gratuitous evils are unnecessary and pointless evils. On the face of things, there seems to be a number of those. My back hurting a lot of the time seems on the face of things to be unnecessary. In fact evolutionary biologists explain it as what happens when creatures transitioned from four legs to two legs, and started standing up straight. That put's pressure on a back that was evolved from creatures with four legs who didn't put so much pressure on their backs. 

What is the best way to respond to an AFE that is spelled out in this way? 

A note from someone on a discussion group I frequent

BTW I was talking to a Christian astronomer on Thursday. Curiously, even those scientists who believe that Nature is "the whole show" are in a quandary at the moment on the subject of "Dark matter" and "dark energy". Many scientists firmly believe these exist. They hypothesize the "dark" stuff from its "effects", but have no idea what it is and hence how to detect it (huh? methinks, how can they be sure that they are observing dark matter/energy's "effects" then?) 

Lewis's voice recording has moved

To here.

The Atheist's Guide to Reality

James Anderson claims that Alex Rosenberg has unwittingly produced an excellent case for theism. Thanks, Alex.

Peter Bide

Peter Bide is the Anglican priest who prayed for Joy Davidman Lewis, after which her cancer went into remission. He passed away in 2003.

HT: Steve Hays

The Kalam Cosmological Argument from Philoponus to Prokop

A redated post

To preface this, Bob Prokop, a sometime commentator here, is an friend of mine from undergraduate days at ASU, whom I met in a History of the Middle Ages class in 1973. I remember Bob explaining a theistic argument to me in a classroom at ASU in 1975, some four years before William Lane Craig published his first work on the Kalam Cosmological argument. I later discovered that the argument had been used by the Scholastics during the Medieval period. Little did I know that Bob's argument would become the most discussed theistic argument of the last 25 years. I got back in touch with Bob after a long time out of touch, and he wanted to see what I thought of this argument he invented when he was an undergrad.

The reason I wanted to e-mail you is that I would like you to try and find a flaw in what I believe is an iron-clad proof that the universe must have been created, and cannot possibly have always existed.


As prelude to my argument, I have to confess that for myself, my very existence has always been evidence enough for a Creator (read: God). My mind simply can not and will not accept the idea that the universe "just is". So for me, the existence of God is Case Closed, and I generally find debates on the subject to be rather pointless. BUT, I am fully aware that existence itself is not considered to be sufficient proof of a Creator by the hard-core atheist, who generally respond with two objections which they think are fatal flaws in the "Argument for Existence".


First Objection: "Then where did God come from?" This one is simple. The question is semantically null - without meaning. The Creator is by definition the Creator, and not a creation. To ask who created the creator is to string words together to no purpose.


Second Objection: Now this one is worth refuting. The argument runs thus. Existence does not require a Creator, because the universe has always been here from eternity, and therefore "just is".


I respond to that proposition with a simple thought experiment. Call this a sub-set of the "Argument from Existence" - maybe a good name for it would be the "Argument from there being a Now". Thus:


1. Imagine a time a billion years in the future. You know that in a billion years from now, that time will be the present. The same works for any finite number you can name, no matter how large. At some point, we'll get there, and some future person will be able to experience that point in time as "Now".


2. Now, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the future. In this case, no matter how long you wait, we'll NEVER arrive at that point. It will never be the present, but always and forever an infinite time in the future, and no one will ever experience that time as "Now".


3. Now let's go in the other direction. Imagine 14 billion years ago (the current rough estimate of the age of the universe, give or take a billion years or so). Starting from that point, we eventually get to where (when?) we are today - the present time.


4. Finally, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the past. Just as in step 2, we would never, ever get to today. Our present existence becomes an impossibility. It would always be an infinite time in the future, and never arrived at.


THEREFORE: The universe (Creation) requires a beginning, before which there was nothing. It cannot have always been here, or we would not be here "Now". Creation Ex Nihilo


So my challenge to you - where is the flaw in this argument? I cannot find one. Also, as an aside, has anyone else ever used this argument. I don't recall ever seeing it anywhere. (Here's where you get your chance to show how uneducated I am, and point out that it dates back to Augustine, or something like that!)


Bob

I gave a couple of replies to Bob: I remember you came up with an argument for theism which had not been discussed much by the early 70s, but a Christian philosopher named William Lane Craig developed it, and his book, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, was his first major publication, tracing it back to Islamic thinkers of the early Middle Ages.



Here is some Craig stuff on the argument:

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/existence.html

And this is the response of who I think is his best critic, Wes Morriston.

There is also the move that says that the beginning of the universe just doesn't need a cause, that a cause is required only if there is a time prior to the beginning.

Whenever you see the phrase, "Kalam Cosmological Argument," that's the argument this is talking about.

Thomas Aquinas didn't use this argument.  I think Joe Sheffer (another friend of ours from undergrad days, and a big-time Aquinas aficianado who, tragically, passed away in 1989) criticized the argument also, but my photographic memory fails me as to just how that discussion went. Here is a discussion on Aquinas's understanding of the infinite, which provides the reason why he rejected the argument, and made the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning (and therefore a temporal first cause), an article of faith known through revelation, rather than something established by natural reason alone.

When Bob asked me my own view of the argument, I replied (well, mostly):

Well, you have to realize that, thanks to William Lane Craig, this argument has gone from being an obscure argument dating back to golden age of Islam, and used by some scholastics (but NOT Aquinas), to being the most discussed argument for the existence of God in the past 30 years. A large body of papers have been written about it, I've only read a fraction of them. The very latest is a paper by William Lane Craig and James Sinclair in Craig and Moreland, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

The argument basically says that, when it comes to counting anything, infinity can't be real. More precisely, a completed infinite set of past moments is impossible. Yet there is an infinite set of integers. All these numbers do exist, yet there is an infinite number of them. There is a set, but I suppose there is the question of whether it can be traversed. Hence there had to be a beginning, because if there wasn't, there would be no now. Mathematicians make a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite, and say that an actual infinite is impossible.

One question might be to ask you how many moments are there in our heavenly future? If there can be an infinite number of future moments in which we praise God, (we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun), then can't there have always been an infinite number of past moments prior to this one?

I haven't worked through what are considered to be the strongest objections to the argument against an infinite number of past moments, and I haven't worked my way through the question of why Aquinas rejected the argument, concluding that the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning was an article of faith, rather than provably false, which is what your argument shows if it works. (If it had made it into the Five Ways, it would have been extensively discussed by philosophers).

An interesting sidelight to this whole argument has to do with Big Bang cosmology. Is cosmology trending in the direction of accepting a beginning of the universe, as attempts to get rid of an absolute beginning at the Big Bang keep going down the tubes. Is science showing that there was a beginning?

The argument seems right to me, but I have some questions about it.

Bob replied:

I followed your link to Aquinas's take on the subject, and was somewhat startled to find myself disagreeing with him. The issue of future moments is not relevant. We will never arrive at a point an infinite number of years in the future. there is no requirement to traverse that interval, as there is, were there an infinite amount of time in the past (i.e., it has to have happened in actuality, not conceptually).

I had been mistaken, however, in attributing the argument to Islamic sources. Craig and Sinclair wrote:

The kalam cosmological argument traces its roots to the efforts of early Christian theologians who, out of their commitment to the biblical teaching of creatio ex nihilo, sought to rebut the Aristotltelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe. Iin his works Against Aristotle and On the Eternity of the World Against Proclus, The Alexandrian Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus (d. 580?), the last great champion of creatio ex nihilo prior to the advent of Islam, initiated a tradition of argumentation in support of the doctrine of creation based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regression of events (Philoponus, 1987, Philoponus and Simplicius 1991). Following the Muslim conquest of North Africa, this tradition was taken up and subsequently enriched by medieval Muslim and Jewish theologians before being transmitted back again to Christian scholastic theology.

The argument from asymmetry

A redated piost

From the debate with Craig: Jesseph's atheistic argument from Asymmetry
This has been a tough one for me to make sense of. I think he has in mind something like this:
1) All believers in supernatural religions accept some supernatural claims and reject others. They, for example, explain the growth of Christianity in terms of the working of the Holy Spirit, but the belief that Joseph Smith translated the tablets with divine help as the result of some kind of delusion or dishonesty.
2) However, once you accept the supernatural, there is no principled way to prefer on supernatural explanation to another.
3) Therefore, theistic religionists of all stripes reject some claims and accept others for no principled reason.
4) But one should have principled reasons for accepting some beliefs and rejecting others.
5) Therefore, you should reject theism in favor of atheism.
Questions about Premise 2
The key premise is 2. It does seem that some supernatural claims seem antecedently more plausible than others. Actions attributed to God that serve a redemptive purpose seem more probable than those that don’t serve any. There is also better or worse testimonial evidence in favor of some claims as opposed to others. So I don’t see how premise 2 can be defended.

The role of religious scientists

A discussion of this is here.

Moderately conservative sexual ethics

One question I might pose is whether long-term happiness in relationships depends in any way on our willingness and ability to make fidelity promises and to keep them, taking into consideration the kind of stable atmosphere for childrearing that provides. If the answer to this question is yes, then what I would call a moderately conservative sexual morality results. I say moderately conservative because it doesn't rule on questions like what people of clearly homosexual orientation ought to do about it, or whether committed couples should have sex before the actual wedding ceremony. A lot of traditional religious people want to go further than the moderately conservative position to a full-blown conservatism that limits sex strictly to marriage and forbids gay relationships, but I am inclined to think that the discussion of sexual ethics should proceed in a two-stage fashion: we first ask if moderate conservatism about sex behavior is true, then proceed to discuss whether or not the moderate conservative position should be extended to full-blown conservatism. Intuitively, I think moderate conservatism can be defended without religious premises, but the conservative position needs them. 

Can altruism pass an outsider test?

Some people might ask whether or not we have come to think a meaningful life has to do with doing things for other people because we have been brainwashed in our society to think that way. If we look at this from a perspective of an outsider, would we prefer a life concerned with others over a self-centered life? 

Where did we get that idea?

Well, we came up with the idea of a three-headed dog by having the idea of three, the idea of heads, and the idea of a dog, and putting them all together. How did we come up with the idea of God? 

Relativism and the Westboro Baptist Church

Moral relativism is often motivated by a desire to be tolerant. Yet, it can end up providing a justification for the most extreme forms of intolerance. 

If morality is in the eye of the beholder, then people who, say, condemn homosexuals and carry "God hates fags" signs to military funerals can't be criticized morally, since they are doing exactly what their culture (Westboro Baptist Church) says that they ought to do. 

The Haldane-Krauss Argument

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

This is an argument that people who practice or accept science ought to be atheists, and it has been endorsed recently by Lawrence Krauss.  But what is the argument exactly? Here numbered premises might be nice. 

Maybe this: 

1. In setting up experiments in science, scientists set aside the possibility of divine interference changing the result of the experiment. 

2. To be consistent, therefore, someone who practices science ought also to discount the possibility of divine interference in all areas of life. 

3. To discount the possibility of divine activity in the world in all areas of life is to be, at least in practice if not in theory, an atheist. 

4. Therefore consistent thinking on the part of scientists leads to atheism. 

But I fail to see why I should believe 2. If I ask a scientist about  whether or not a hundred  dollar bill will remain in my drawer if I leave it there, the scientists might answer "yes." By this I take it he would mean that the bill did not have properties that will cause it to disintegrate there, or spontaneously combust. . But he doesn't know whether a burglar might get into the drawer. In other words, the scientist is going to tell me what will happen to the bill left to itself. It is mapping the world apart from interference, telling you what will happen all things being equal. But it is a further question as to whether all things are equal.