Motives and dialogue between believers and unbelievers

Redating a post on religion and motivation.

When I was in Cambridge, Gary Habermans told me that about the first question he asked Antony Flew as Flew got off the plane from England to engage in the famous (or infamous) "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead" debate with Habermas, was whether Flew thought that everyone wants for theism to be true, and that while theists engage in wishful thinking, nonbelievers are honestly facing the truth. Flew replied that he disagreed with people like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche in this; that he thought that both believers and unbelievers had non-rational motives for believing what they believed. Well, we know what eventually happened to Flew, but I think this is a profound recognition that people on all sides of these issues need to come to terms with. If you read Bertrand Russell's anti-religious writings, you find the following picture: believers believe for emotional reasons, such as the fear of death, the fear of hell, and the fear that the universe should be meaningless. Nonbelievers, on the other hand, have faced the fact that it is 70 years and out, they wouldn't believe unless the evidence pushed them their, since their position is so contrary to what we humans would like to be true.

Consider what how Russell defines free thought:

'The expression "Free Thought" is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable. "Free Thought" means thinking freely - as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being.

The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the Free Thinker free from? To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things; the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man’s emancipation he deserves to be called a Free Thinker.

A man is not to be denied this title because he happens, on some point, to agree with the theologians of his country. An Arab who, starting from the first principles of human reason, is able to deduce that the Koran was not created, but existed eternally in heaven, may be counted as a Free Thinker, provided he is willing to listen to counter arguments and subject his ratiocination to critical scrutiny.

What makes a Free Thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.' - Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought"

Notice that while Russell thinks that the class of Christian freethinkers could have members, in fact he thinks the class of actual Christian freethinkers to be empty.

I was myself at one time officially concerned in the appointment of a philosophy
professor in an important American university; all the others agreed that of course he must be a good Christian. Practically all philosophers of any intellectual eminence are openly or secretly freethinkers; the insistence on orthodoxy therefore necessitated the appointment of a nonentity or a humbug.

Couldn't they have gotten one of those Christian freethinkers? Apparently, in actuality he thought there were none. All the irrational motives are on the side of belief, all the rational motives are on the side of nonbelief.

If you defending theism and talking to someone who believes this sort of thing, I can guarantee you that it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to get anywhere. Whatever reason you give them, they are automatically going to assume that whatever "reasons" you give for the hope that is in you are not the real reasons; the real reasons are that you are afraid of death, afraid of hell, afraid that the universe should be meaningless, or maybe afraid of sex (Russell forgot that one, I have no idea why). Now there are theists would talk the same way; they think people are afraid to submit to God and are looking for any possible excuse to avoid believing.

I think that if you are in dialogue about belief and unbelief this is what you ought to get cleared up before the discussion goes any further.

Consider the following passage from C. S. Lewis: “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed” – perhaps the most reluctant convert in all of England ." Are you inclined to read this and say, naah, it couldn't be true. Lewis had to have really
wanted to believe, or he would never have been able to.

But what about unbeliever Thomas Nagel? Is he telling the truth when he says:

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper - namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (1997)

I think it's almost impossible to get anywhere in a discussion with someone who really thinks that all the irrational motivations are on the other side. But are they all on the side of the theists. Well, let's put it this way. We know that Bertrand Russell was committing adultery at the age of 80. Wouldn't coming to accept Christianity at any point in his adult life require some, well, massive lifestyle changes? Besides, is it very pleasant to believe that there is someone who in existence who has an absolute, non-negotiable right, power, and authority to issue commandments? Did Russell really think that there was only reason underlying his unbelief, and not some very powerful non-rational motives.

Now I'm perfectly happy to see the motive arguments cancel each other out. Then we can start talking about the pros and cons of these matters with a level playing field. But if you are arguing with someone who thinks that all the irrational motives are on the other side, then you are going to face a burden of proof that will be almost impossible to overcome, unless you address the motivational issue first.

New Atheism's Moral Meltdown

From Saints and Skeptics. Here. 

If there is no God....

If there's no God, everything is permitted, including hanging onto theism in spite of the evidence. Why not?

What would you do if I could get you to reassess the evidence?

I'm very reticent to say what I would do if I reassessed the evidence in a certain way. Atheists are fond of asking "Well, if I could convince you of this or that, would you deconvert? What would it take?" It's kind of like asking "Would you divorce your wife if she had an affair?," when she isn't having one and I have no reason to believe that she will have one.

C. S. Lewis's Rejection of Soteriological Exclusivism

But Lewis was no soteriological exclusivist. This is from Man or Rabbit.

The question before each of us is not “Can someone lead a good life without Christianity?” The question is, “Can I?” We all know there have been good men who were not Christians; men like Socrates and Confucius who had never heard of it, or men like J. S. Mill who quite honestly couldn’t believe it. Supposing Christianity to be true, these men were in a state of honest ignorance or honest error. If there intentions were as good as I suppose them to have been (for of course I can’t read their secret hearts) I hope and believe that the skill and mercy of God will remedy the evils which their ignorance, left to itself, would naturally produce both for them and for those whom they influenced.

I would have to admit that had I felt that I had to be an exclusivist, it would have been a lot more difficult for me to remain a Christian. Lewis and others convinced me that I could reject exclusivism and still remain a Christian.

Is the argument for an unmoved mover circular?

I'm Skeptical wrote: 

I realize that classical theists have logical arguments to prove the existence of God. But you don't realize that they all presuppose the existence of God. So yes, they do take God as a brute fact, no matter how much they deny it.


Now, here is presentation of Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. I take it you are implying that this must be a circular argument. How so?

Atheism is unfalsifiable, and it's the theists' fault

According to this post, from the Axis of Jared.

On cosmological arguments

A redated post. 

In making sense of questions concerning cosmological arguments, I think perhaps an important place to begin is to think through what kind of necessity can be attributed to the physical universe. The physical universe, at least if it is beginningless, can be considered to be factually necessary, and perhaps that concept needs to be clarified. I’d like to see a detailed definition of factual necessity.

Once we get this, we then have to ask if we have good reason to think that a universe that possesses factual necessity is unexplained in some important way that could be overcome by accepting theism. Is there a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason that is rational to accept that gives us reason to think that a theistic explanation is nevertheless needed?

And then we have to ask what reason we have to suppose that the universe had a beginning. If the universe had a temporal beginning, how does that change the situation?

The Gay Case against Gay Marriage

Here.

Witch Hunts, Religious and Secular

I don't know if Christians have any greater record of inquisitions and witch hunts than anyone else does. Christians invariably think that Christianity matters, and that what it has to say is important and worth spreading. But you need something more than that to get witch hunts etc. You need the idea that this end justifies the means used to accomplish it, and that it is appropriate to use the weapons of power to get people to believe the right thing. Most Christians today, I think would say that a forced belief in Christianity isn't real one, and that such actions on behalf of Christianity are inappropriate and self-defeating. The people who brought the idea of a free and democratic society to the Western were mostly Christians. Any democratic society needs religious freedom to survive. For political reasons, autocratic governments pursue religious (or non-religious) uniformity. Democratic ones ordinarily tolerate opposing religious views. Islam is somewhat of a different case, because Islam, is rooted in the idea that the government should be implementing it. That's why it's so hard to get a democracy going in an Islamic country. 

Now Christian autocrats have pursued Christian uniformity, and often pursued Catholic or Protestant uniformity. Atheist autocrats have also pursued atheist uniformity, as in the case of the League of the Militant Godless in Russia. The way this is prevented is not by supporting or opposing religion, it is by saying the governments should stay out of the business of enforcing uniformity in matters of religion. 

People will sometimes say atheism is a non-belief, not a belief, but in the minds of many this non-belief matters. Some, like Dawkins, think that society will either progress or regress depending on whether or not we are successful in ridding ourselves of religion, which they consider to be irrational superstition. So, if you have the power to use force to help eliminate religion, or to force it on others, would you use it? If you were given Tolkien's One Ring, and could use it to make everyone religious or everyone nonreligious would you use it? If religion or lack of it matters, and most of us on both sides think it does,  then it is always possible for anyone to "use the ring" to compel assent, if the power to do so is present. 

What would science look like in a creationist world?

Let me ask this question. Assume that creationism were true. What would science look like in that possible world? Would it be true that if even if there were no evolution, it would have been necessary to invent it?

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Here. 

Hasker on Chalmers

Here. 

A redated April Fool's Day meditation

April Fool's day is today, but what I have to say is not specific to that day. On AFD, people try to show up the gullibility of their fellows by trying to get them to believe things that aren't true. I think, though, that in many ways Christians have failed to value the virtue of wisdom, and the result has been a kind of gullibility that makes us look as if the charges of credulity that are leveled by unbelievers at believers have some merit to them.

Consider the following passage from C. S. Lewis, where he talks about the virtue of prudence:

He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. (Mere Christianity pp. 77-78).

In an essay I will be publishing in the upcoming volume on philosophy and the Chronicles of Narnia, I add:

Like many passages in Lewis, this one has tremendous contemporary relevance. Many people in the Christian community (and outside of it) have been slack in their intellectual responsibilities, and the results have been disastrous. The mass suicides in Guyana and the suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California are grim reminders of what happens when religious people give up on thinking critically and simply follow what a leader says. Or to take less dramatic examples, but ones closer to home, think about how millions of Christians get caught up in spiritual fads like the recent “prayer of Jabez” phenomenon or the sensational eschatology of the Left Behind series. How many people have given money they can hardly afford to television evangelists, only to find out that the money went for air-conditioned dog houses and visits to sleazy motel rooms? The Christian community suffers greatly whenever it is intellectually lazy and careless.

But are matters of faith and exception to the policy of prudence? Should we be prudent in the rest of our lives and exercise faith (believe without regard to evidence) in matters of religion? Lewis's answer is emphatically no.

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in...Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. . . . 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.

Hence Faith and Prudence are not polar opposites, but are rather two sides of the same coin. The job of Christian apologetics, in my view, is to show that the life of prudence and the life of faith are in harmony with one another, in short to show that Christianity is rational. Much of the world thinks it is not rational, and a lot of things Christians say and do supports them in this, making the task of Christian apologetics more difficult than it would otherwise be.

Daniel Wallace reviews Blomberg's Can We Believe the Bible

Here. 

Judas and Prophecy

A theologian struggles with this tough issue. Here. 

What is marriage: A case against gay marriage

Here. 

Greg Koukl on why he doesn't like the word "faith"

Here. 

A nice AFR discussion from Shameless Popery

Here.

The central idea is that if materialism is true, then subjective experience is explanatorily irrelevant. But, if anyone reasons, then the subjective experience is explanatorily relevant. Therefore, materialism is false. 

Should scientists who believe in ID be excluded from science positions?

Jerry Coyne thinks so.

In a funny sort of way, these sorts of statements support one of the claims made by ID supporters. For example, the lack of peer reviewed science articles is supposed to be a reason for rejecting ID. But if all the peer reviewers are going to lose their jobs if they approve articles supportive of ID, then the lack of peer reviewed articles has an easy explanation that doesn't undermine the credibility of ID at all: namely, even if there were good evidence for ID, no peer reviewer would allow such articles for fear of losing their jobs.

Let me play back to you what Loftus just said about keeping an open marketplace of ideas.

In fact, it's this kind of democratic freedom which is the undoing of your faith. For without state sponsored censorship or social pressures against minority viewpoints the believing majority cannot stay uniformed about the evidence against their faith. We know atheism will win in the marketplace of ideas, and if not, we know that only with these freedoms can we ever know the truth. So it stands to reason we would want to grant everyone these rights in a democracy.


OK, then let's show a little trust in the marketplace of ideas, and stop behaving like such a control freak when ideas like ID are put forward in that marketplace. If ID really is the bollocks that Coyne thinks that it is, then why is he so afraid of it? 

Archeological Confirmation of Acts

Here.  Oh yeah, the guy's a Christian, so his arguments must be no good.

A valid argument for a flat earth

1. If Charles Johnson (former head of the Flat Earth Society) says the earth is flat, then the earth is flat.

2. Charles Johnson says that the earth is flat.

3. Therefore, the earth is flat.

Validity, by itself, doesn't do a whole lot.

Is the Christian doctrine of heaven a bribe, and does the doctrine of hell commit the scare tactics fallacy?

1. Some people maintain that, in religions that teach a belief in heaven and hell, that heaven is a bribe and the doctrine of hell commits the scare tactics fallacy. Is this a reasonable statement, or not? 

Here is a discussion of the scare tactics fallacy. 

Intelligent Design: Is it a matter of evidence, or presuppositions?

Here. 

Myth, History, and the New Testament

An interesting fact about many "mythical" accounts from the ancient world is that they don't normally provide any details, and they certainly don't provide dates and times that have been confirmed by archaeology. Let's take, for example, the Book of Acts, which contains numerous miracle claims. It not only contains miracle claims, it also has all sorts of information about local governments that brought Paul up on trial. And guess what. Archaeology has supported the Book of Acts every time. So whoever wrote that book knew exactly what the local governments in these cities consisted in. 

Now, I live in Glendale, and I know they have a mayor and a city council of three. But what about Peoria, Avondale, Surprise, El Mirage, and Goodyear? I have no idea how many people are in their council. I can Google it and find out, but whoever wrote Acts had no Google. So how did he know all of this? That's something people would normally know only if they actually appeared before all these councils. 

Now it is possible to do a bunch of research so that you can, for example, put all sorts of accurate detail into a fictional account. But ancient people didn't  do that sort of thing. They didn't mix fact and fiction the way they do in a present-day historical novel. If they were writing legends they didn't make it look to fact-checkers as if it fit with reality. So I think there are some real difficulties in the secular story that are not easy to explain. But if any non-miraculous account has to be better than a miraculous one, then I suppose there couldn't be enough evidence.

Here is a comparison between the story of Jesus and the story of Apollonius of Tyana. 

Is that a fact?

The can be evidence for something without it reaching the status of fact. For example, you can agree that the Zapruder film is evidence that there was a shooter on the grassy knoll, but still also think the preponderance of the evidence supports the "Oswald alone" theory. So it might not be a fact, but it could be supported by evidence. In fact I am inclined to think that something can have the status of a proven fact only if there is evidence sufficient to allow no other conclusion but one. So, there may be evidence supporting various candidates for "Jack the Ripper," but none is sufficient to make any of them a fact. 

Though, there is an ambiguity in the use of the word "fact." It can be either something that is true, or something that is proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. That is why when people use words like "fact" and "opinion" I always ask for a further definition. "Faith" is another word in that category. 

The gold standard

Reagan seems to be the gold standard amongst conservative candidates for President. No one can win the Republican nomination these days without promising to be the next Ronald Reagan. Yet, in his time, he was considered to represent the far right wing of the Republican party, with a moderate wing still substantially represented. 

Here is his first inaugural address.

Punishment and Behavior Modification

In response to the previous discussion on punishment, I think that maybe some problems are being overlooked here. If what we are concerned about is behavior mod, then it is being assumed that the loss of retributive punishment is simply going to eliminate only the vengeance. But this is far from clear. The end up retribution may result in less harsh punishments in some cases, but also perhaps harsher ones in other cases. I am inclined to think of retribution is an upper limit on punishment. We must give criminal at most as much punishment as they deserve, but we can't possibly give them all the punishment they deserve every time, and it would make us far worse people if we did. If we thought that we ought to a serial torture killer (BTK, for example) suffering equivalent to that which he inflicted on his victims, then we would be punishing people in ways that no civilized society could punish them. 

However, once punishment is reduced to behavior modification, then we could punish people a la Minority Report who might become offenders, we could end up punishing innocent people if we think their punishment will result in better results for society. 

I hate to say it, but it's all in Lewis, it's all in Lewis. 

Crime and Punishment in a naturalistic world

--In a deterministic universe, we understand that a criminal's career is not a matter of an unconditioned personal choice, but fully a function of a complex set of conditions, genetic and enviromental, that interact to produce the offender and his proclivities. Had we been in his shows in all respects, we too would have followed the same path, since there is no freely willing self that could have done otherwise as causality unfolds. There is no kernel of independent moral agency -- we are not, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "moral levitators" that rise above circunstances in our choices,including choices to rob, rape, or kill. Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, in his article "Maximizing Liberty". Emphasis in blue added.

HT: Subversive Thinking. 

Correction for Jeff Lowder, and John Loftus

Jeff is quite right that I made it sound as if Loftus was suggesting that in some cases we should put religious believers in insane asylums. He was against doing this. His "exceptions" refer to believers doing what they want to do. But what I was doing here was not even an attempt to criticize Loftus. I think he makes an important point when he says that if an atheist embraces democratic political institutions, this kind of out and out persecution is unacceptable, because democratic political institutions and religious freedom go hand in hand.

That said, I don't think John's disclaimer is as reassuring as he hopes it will be, for reasons I will explain in another post, although they are implied by some other comments I have made.

On religion and persecution

I guess that's the whole thing, the concept of accepting a liberal democratic system. Autocratic political systems usually seek religious, or anti-religious uniformity. Democratic ones don't, because you can't run a democracy in a religiously pluralistic culture without allowing religious freedom. Christianity doesn't mandate the development of a Christian state, although Christian autocrats have tried to have one. But all the Bible says about governing is "Render unto Caesar." Islam's a different story, it's a recipe for running a government, which is why America was foolish to try to force a Democratic Iraq. Communists were autocrats, and so they did some persecuting.

You do get fantasizing from Dennett about putting Baptists in cultural zoos, and you Jerry Coyne said this:

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.

Rhetoric that treats religion as a delusion that is dangerous to society opens the possibility that someone using political power might try to wipe it out using that power. But such an attempt would be difficult within the framework of a democratic governmental system. But it might occur in subtle ways.

While this line of reasoning, to a large extent, lets atheists of the hook from the charge of wanting to force their lack of religion on others, it also goes a long way toward showing that blaming Christianity for religious persecutions is a misplaced charge. The cure for religious or anti-religious violence is not giving government the job of generating religious uniformity. That's why you have to go back a few centuries for cases of Christian based violence. The trick is to stop using the government to enforce religious belief, something that Christians have pretty much accepted for the last few centuries.

Would atheists put Christians in mental institutions?

According to Debunking Christianity, no. With a few exceptions.

Did Monotheism socially evolve?

According to this piece, nope. 

Getting things right, or at least trying to

The new Cosmos series is off to a bad start. Here. 

More on the Courtier's Reply

PL is correct. I have actually studied both arguments for and against God. This isn't revealed theology or theological dialogue that presupposes belief in God. If that were the case, then I you could argue that I don't have to know all sorts of detailed about theology in order to argue for atheism. On the other hand, if someone dismisses theistic arguments without knowing the first thing about them, or if one shows a lack of familiarity with critical issues relevant to the rationality of belief in the existence of God, such as the well-known Plantingian claim that the existence of God can be properly basic, but one at the same time argues that the belief in God is delusional, then I m justified in arguing that his critique is an ignorant one. If you attack cosmological arguments but you haven't paid enough attention to know that all of these arguments use causal principles that require the universe to have a cause while God need not have a cause (ex. Replywhatever BEGINS TO EXIST must have a cause of its existence), then the critique is severely faulty.

For example, if I am going to argue against Mormonism, then I need to know the teaching of Mormonism. I need to know why someone, for example, might believe that the Angel Moroni gave gold plates to Joseph Smith. I would also have to understand the role of the Mormon "testimony" or the "burning in the bosom" which is often used to justify Mormon belief. Otherwise, I am batting the air. If I want to be critical of Mormonism from a biblical perspective, then I have to understand the Mormon position on the authority of both the Old and New Testaments, and articles of modern revelation such as the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the status of the Mormon President as Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.

A critic of Catholicism might think it's a telling point against the Catholic Church to point out all the illegitimate children Popes have had, but it's ignorant to do so if I fail to recognize that whatever infallibility is claimed on behalf of the Papacy, it has nothing to do with the moral rectitude of the Vicars of Christ.

Now, someone could be justified in not being a Catholic of a Mormon without knowing these things, but if I want to have an effective critique of these religious views, then ignorance of them is inexcusable.

If I am talking to a Catholic, and I assume that he must think that his belief in God is a leap of faith not supported by evidence or reasoning, then I deserve to have a Catholic call me on it and point out that Vatican II condemned fideism as heretical.

If I am talking to Jew, and I bring up a Old Testament verses that I believe point to Jesus as the Messiah, then I need to realize that Jews interpret their Scriptures with reference to a long history of Rabbinical interpretation.

If I want to argue that Paley was an idiot, then I had better realize that he never compared the universe to a watch, and I had better, maybe actually READ Natural Theology, as opposed to just assuming that what I heard years ago in Philosophy 101 in an accurate rendition of his argument.

In short, if I want to argue against someone's position, I need to take my head out of my rear end and actually get some information as to why someone might take the positions that I am attacking.

To see my point, get yourself a copy of Anthony Kenny's The Five Ways, and compare it to what Russell said and to what Dawkins said about those same arguments. MInd you, Kenny doesn't buy them, and argues against them. But he makes a serious attempt to understand Aquinas, and Russell and Dawkins do not. It's not a matter of intelligence, of course Russell, at least, was a brilliant man. (Bertrand Russell was a friend of mine, and Richard Dawkins, you're no Bertrand Russell). I read Russell long before anything by the New Atheists was even written, and I have to say that although the guy was a real genius, he had such a lack of intellectual sympathy with things like Christianity which made it impossible to avoid egregious blunders in dealing with them, blunders that I could see through when I was 18. I never got the impression that he thought Christianity was something that he needed to put brilliant mind to work in order to critique in an intelligent manner. It seems to me that you could say of his approach what he said of a claim in the philosophy of mathematics, that it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. A great misfortune, and an even greater one that a group of leading atheists has taken all of the worst features of Russell, and turned atheism into a popular movement.

Against the Courtier's Reply response

The objection to the Courtier's Reply response is not to the claim that you can reject a belief without examining all its defenses thoroughly. All of us have limitations on their time and can't spend hours and hours considering every position in detail. What is makes the response problematic is the fact that these people who use it write books trying to get others to agree with them. Look, if I want to reject Mormonism, I don't have to know much about it. If I write a book called The Mormon Delusion, I had bloody well better know a whole lot about Mormonism.

Lewis's Inaugural Essay for Cambridge

In which he refers to himself as a dinosaur.

A redated post.

A model for defining evidence

How about the following as a conception of evidence, based on Bayesianism? X is evidence for Y if X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. 

Now if we accept this, it looks like there are lots of things that qualify on behalf of theism and on behalf of atheis. Beginning of the universe? Maybe it can be reconciled with atheism, but it's not what an atheist would expect. Ditto for the fine tuning of the universe? 

Evil and suffering? Sure it's possible given theism, but is it more likely given atheism? 

With this model, we might say of our opponents that there isn't enough evidence, or that the evidence is outweighed by the other side, but can we really make the "no evidence" charge? 

Is there something wrong with this definition of evidence? 

Matter, truth, and C. S. Lewis

We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer’s brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.{18}

C. S. Lewis "De Futilitate" 

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book revolutionized how we look at science. Here is an account of it.

Dawkins fails the defeasability test

Here.  Matt McCormick's Defeasibility test is here.

Motivated reasoning isn't science, so long as we don't like your motives?

I'm Skeptical wrote:

"So is the denial of design (or perhaps the failure to mention design) a necessary condition for doing science?"

No. What's necessary for doing science is to follow scientific method. Victor, you don't seem to understand why ID is shunned by the scientific community. It isn't because it is based on religious beliefs. It is because of the fact that it isn't science. 

In science, you have to be driven by the evidence. The folks from DI are driven by their beliefs. They search for evidence to support what they already believe. That's not scientific method, because it leads them to ignore evidence that doesn't fit their objective. If you ignore evidence, you can't hope to move scientific understanding forward.

OK, let me see. I think most of us would say that Richard Lewontin is a scientist, right? Here's what he wrote. Now you may agree with it or not, that's not the point. The point is, that if you are driven by your beliefs, you'll ignore evidence that doesn't fit your objective, right? You've seen the quote, surely. 

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that Miracles may happen.

Now,  based on this, how can anyone use the reasons you provided for denying that ID is science, and also say that Lewontin is also doing science. Or is it that you can't reason from pre-established beliefs so long as they are materialist pre-established beliefs? 

Interview with Mario Beauregard

Here. 

Death Panels in Oregon: Some issues for assisted suicide

Here. 

Arguments that Don't Mix One More Time

So is the denial of design (or perhaps the failure to mention design) a necessary condition for doing science? Fine, we can go that way. But if you do, it then becomes trivially true that scientists haven't discovered any design. The minute they claim to have discovered it, you can then say they've stopped doing science. Heads, I win, tails you lose. If science answers the question of whether or not there is design, then there has to be a mechanism within science to identify it it is (or had been) there. Otherwise, it's like saying "I took a metal detector all of the beach and didn't find that $100 bill that I lost. I guess someone must have taken it."

A peer reviewed paper that supports ID

Here.  Oh, but there are no such papers.

A Reply of mine on Debunking Christianity

The discussion is here. 

You say we need evidence of design. On your view, is such evidence of design by non-humans even conceivable, or do you accept in-principle arguments that rule it out? A lot of times people say "Show me the evidence, and then, come to find out, they buy in on in-principle arguments that rule out those kinds of design inferences across the board. For example, if the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster were to spell out the words "Turn or burn, SmilidonsRetreat This Means You", there are arguments that lead to the conclusion that even if such a case, attributing that to God would be to commit the God of the Gaps fallacy. So, when you say "Show me the evidence," I would like to know if there is some possible evidence you might accept. See Lydia McGrew's discussion here.

http://www.christendomreview.c...

Finally, you say, To consider design as an option, we need to know who did the designing? How? When? On what things?

No, I am afraid I don't buy that principle. Consider McGrew again.

It would be a very different matter if, far in the future, we managed to take pictures of the region around Alpha Centauri (where no humans had ever gone) and found incontrovertible evidence that a Volkswagen Beetle was orbiting a planet there. We might indeed wonder why anyone, particularly any non-human, would want to make that object just there. Nonetheless, the fact that the object would be virtually type identical to objects known to be made by agents, and the vanishingly small probability of its arising in any non-intentional fashion, would make it only reasonable to conclude that the car was designed by someone or other. The design claim in biology is best construed as saying something much like this: We have found complex biological machines. These machines, being in some cases part of the human body, or predating human life on earth, could not have been made by humans. But even if we do not know who designed such machines or why, it does not follow that we are incapable of telling that they were designed.

http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Phi...

Utilitarianism and racial justice

Suppose a utilitarian were visiting an area in which there was racial strife, and that, during his visit, a Negro rapes a white woman, and that race riots occur as a result of the crime, white mobs, with the connivance of the police, bashing and killing Negroes, etc. Suppose too that our utilitarian is in the area of the crime when it is committed such that his testimony would bring about the conviction of a particular Negro. If he knows that a quick arrest will stop the riots and lynchings, surely, as a utilitarian, he must conclude that he has a duty to bear false witness in order to bring about the punishment of an innocent person (127).

H. J. McCloskey

Dostoyevsky was right!

If there is no God, then everything is permitted. According to this atheist. HT: Triablogue.

A redated post.

"I don't want to discuss evidence"--Richard Dawkins

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.


Here. 

Feser on the Courtier's Reply

Here.  It reminds me of the comments of Representative Earl Landgrebe, who, confronted with the evidence for Nixon's guilt during Watergate, said “Don't confuse me with the facts. I've got a closed mind.” 

Lowder on the Pastafarian analogy

Nothing gnu here from Lowder, and believe me that's a compliment.

Lydia McGrew on In-Principle Arguments against Miracles

I think this would be a good occasion to bring up a suspicion of mine, and a source of frustration for me. On the one hand, the atheist seems to be complaining about lack of evidence, or claiming that the evidence supports his own atheistic view. That seems to suggest that the world happens to be one that lacks evidence for a deity, and even empirical evidence for a deity.

However, there also seem to be in-principle arguments designed to show that saying Godidit is wrong on principle. It seems to me that if a skeptic says we don't have any evidence, or any empirical evidence for God, the soul, or whatever, we need to first ask them what they think of attempts to show that that sort of evidence is impossible in principle. If the skeptic claims to reject such arguments, then we have to insist that the skeptic be consistent in rejecting them, and that they not bring them in through the back door as the discussion proceeds.

As Lydia McGrew writes:

Among in-principle objections, a set frequently encountered involves the claim that it is always illicit to use the action of God (characterized dismissively by the atheist as the claim “God did it!”) as an hypothesized cause for any event in the real world. When we consider that atheists also think Christians irrational for believing on the basis of insufficient evidence, the “heads I win; tails you lose” nature of this objection should be self-evident. How is it at all reasonable to tell Christians that they do not have enough evidence for their belief and then to tell them, in the next breath, that any evidence they do bring to the bar must be ruled out of court? Yet the claim that Divine action can never be rationally hypothesized can be surprisingly slippery and hence can seem surprisingly difficult to answer.

McGrew's paper is here. 

Oderberg on the first two ways

Here.  You can go in through Oderberg's index here.  It's number 37.

Let's try this.

Feser reviews A Universe From Nothing

Here.  HT: Mark Shea.

Can faith be rational?

A decision theorist thinks that the answer is yes.

An interview with Alvin Plantinga

Here. 

God, Authority, and Electrons

Atheists often make the claim that the burden of proof lies with the believer, not the unbeliever. They would ask whether you can prove that the nonexistence of anything. Rather, it should be up to the person who makes the positive claim to provide proof, not the people trying to prove a negative. 

However, there are many things that are invisible that I might have trouble proving. Let's take electrons,  for example. I've never seen one myself. Many people believe in them simply on the authority of scientists. People also believe in God, even though they can't see God, because they take his existence on the basis of authorities. What's the difference? 

Archaeological Evidence for the Bible

Here. 

Different kinds of proof

It could well be that different kinds of things require different kinds of proof. For example, should we ask for a mathematical type of proof for something to decide whether your significant other loves you? On the other hand, you could simply refuse to consider evidence that a spouse was unfaithful, and that would be a problem. As would hiring a private investigator without probable cause. 

20 Arguments for God

Here. 

Ht: Planks Length

Brick Walls, Moral Facts, and Mental States: How to avoid the fallacy of composition

In the case of the brick wall, the state of the bricks entails the state of the wall, therefore it is the fallacy of composition to say that since the wall can't be six feet tall because none of the bricks are six feet tall. With the question of whether a homicide was morally justified, the physical facts don't entail the moral fact, so you would not be committing the fallacy of composition by claiming that no moral fact is entailed by the physical facts. I was claiming that the problem of mental facts is like the moral case, as opposed to being like the brick wall case. When all the facts at the physical level are given, the mental fact is still an open question. But since the state of the physical is supposed to close the question (what else is supposed to close it?) of the state of the mental, saying that there might be no mental given the state of the physical does not commit the fallacy of composition.

Thomas Aquinas on Faith

Here.  Does this make him a faith-head?

From the physical to the mental? You can't get there from here

Let’s consider a couple of types of arguments to see what our situation is with respect to our mental states. Consider the case of the size of a brick wall, based on the positions of the bricks. In the case of the wall, given the state of the bricks, the question is closed as to whether or not the wall is there, or how tall it is. Even though none of the bricks is six feet tall, they can be added up in such a way that the height of the wall is a determinate fact based on the sizes of the bricks, and the sizes of the bricks are determinate facts based on the sizes of the elementary particles that make them up.

            Contrast this with the case of whether a homicide was justified or unjustified. Here we can look at the homicide at every scientific level; the physical, the chemical, the biological, the psychological, and the sociological, and no entailment can be drawn as to whether or not the homicide was justified or unjustified. Something over and above the physical data must be brought in to make this kind of a judgment. Either there is some nonnatural fact that makes the statement concerning the rightness or wrongness of the homicide justified or unjustified, or the matter is a subjective matter, determined by the preferences of an individual or a society.

We might express this difficulty in the following way. Suppose we are given a complete list of physical facts, facts about where all the particles are. The information, thus given is insufficient to determine a unique mental state that a person is in. There is no entailment relation of any kind to the relevant mental state.

            In virtue of what is some physical state about some other physical state? This is the familiar worry about intentionality, a worry made more difficult by my claim that the kind of intentional states involved in rational inference are states in which the content is understood by the agent and put into a propositional format. Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which are physical in the sense in which we are understanding it here, and which jointly entail the conclusion that agent A is in the state of believing, or doubting, or desiring, or fearing, the proposition P is true? If the fact about what a person’s mental state is about does not follow from the state of the physical, then there is nothing else from which it can possibly follow. In the case of mental states, I do not see how the physical states can possibly “add up” to any determinate mental state. There is a qualitative difference between the physical base and mental content, that no amount of investigation can possibly overcome.  

            We might express this difficulty in the following way. Suppose we are given a complete list of physical facts, facts about where all the particles are. The information, thus given is insufficient to determine a unique mental state that a person is in. There is no entailment relation of any kind to the relevant mental state.

In virtue of what is some physical state about some other physical state? This is the familiar worry about intentionality, a worry made more difficult by my claim that the kind of intentional states involved in rational inference are states in which the content is understood by the agent and put into a propositional format. Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which are physical in the sense in which we are understanding it here, and which jointly entail the conclusion that agent A is in the state of believing, or doubting, or desiring, or fearing, the proposition P is true? If the fact about what a person’s mental state is about does not follow from the state of the physical, then there is nothing else from which it can possibly follow.

            You would think that this line of argument would be opposed by philosophers in the naturalistic camp, but this seems to be the upshot of, for example Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation, and Davidson’s argument against psychophysical laws, and is defended by Daniel Dennett. As Dennett writes:

And why not? Here, I think, we find as powerful and direct an expression as could be of the intuition that lies behind the belief in original intentionality. This is the doctrine Ruth Millikan calls meaning rationalism, and it is one of the central burdens of her important book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, to topple it from its traditional pedestal (Millikan, 1984. See also Millikan forthcoming).  Something has to give. Either you must abandon meaning rationalism--the idea that you are unlike the fledgling cuckoo not only having access, but in having privileged access to your meanings--or you must abandon the naturalism that insists that you are, after all, just a product of natural selection, whose intentionality is thus derivative and potentially indeterminate.

So perhaps we can live without determinate mental content. Or can we?

Given naturalism’s commitment to the natural sciences, the naturalist must presuppose the existence of mathematicians as well as scientists. Therefore, some serious consequences follow from the indeterminacy of mental states. It would mean that what Dawkins means by atheism is indeterminate. It means that it is not literally true that Einstein developed his theories of relativity from Maxwell’s equations.

When we consider material entities that exhibit intentionality, we see that they do not have their intentional content inherently, but have it relative to human interests. The marks on paper that you are reading now are just marks, unless they are related to a set of users who interpret it as such. In other words, it possesses a “derived intentionality” as opposed to “original intentionality.” As Feser points out

More to the point, brain processes, composed as they are of meaningless chemical components, seem as inherently devoid of intentionality as soundwaves or ink marks. Any intentionality they would also have to be derived from something else. But if anything physical would be devoid of intrinsic intentionality, whatever does have intrinsic intentionality would thereby have to be non-physical. Sine the mind is the source of the intentionality of physical entities like sentences and pictures, and doesn’t get its intentionality from anything else (there’s no one “using” our minds to convey meaning) it seems to follow that the mind has intrinsic intentionality, and thus is non-physical.⁵¹

Is the granting of a marriage license morally neutral?

The role of government in marriage licensing is a critical part of the discussion of same-sex and other kinds of marriages which is often overlooked. Is government's granting of marriage licenses to gay couples, or to polygamous partnerships, entail a moral approval of those relationships. Robert George argues yes, here. 

Yet, clearly our government does give marriage licenses to people whose relationships do not pass any kind of moral test. For example, the government has no qualms in giving licenses to couples who began their relationships in adulterous affairs. 

Miracles and Presidential Pardons

You can't have miracles unless you have an order of nature for them to stand out from. A Presidential pardon is only possible because there is a stable system of laws that require punishments for certain crimes, yet our system of laws allows the President to alter the penalty and release someone from those penalties. There is no inconsistency in a system of laws that permits Presidential discretionary pardons.

Who has done the most for the present world?

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis 

Should God have made his existence perfectly evident? Should he have?

Many of the things that it is supposed that God could have done to make his existence perfectly evident could be passed off as the work of powerful (but evolved) aliens. And no matter how much evidence God provides, there is some additional piece of evidence that an atheist could say God didn't provide, and if God really cared for us, he would have provided. The amount of evidence God could have provided has no intrinsic maximum.

The Firing Squad Argument and fine-tuning

Defended against Elliott Sober, here.

The Central Christian belief, according to C. S. Lewis

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. I will tell you what I think it is like…. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it. 
    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 54-56. 

Loftus' account of a world in which he would believe: Gosh, I wish the gaps were bigger!

Here. 

Suppose we transport Loftus to this possible world, and he believes on the basis he provides here. Could he be charged with God of the Gaps reasoning? 

Let's look at this passage. 

 God could’ve made this universe and the creatures on earth absolutely unexplainable by science, especially since science is the major obstacle for many to believe. He could’ve created us in a universe that couldn’t be even remotely figured out by science. That is to say, there would be no evidence leading scientists to accept a big bang, nor would there be any evidence for the way galaxies, solar systems, or planets themselves form naturalistically. If God is truly omnipotent he could’ve created the universe instantaneously by fiat, and placed planets haphazardly around the sun, some revolving counter-clockwise and in haphazard orbits. The galaxies themselves, if he created any in the first place, would have no consistent pattern of formation at all. Then when it came to creatures on earth God could’ve created them without any connection whatsoever to each other. Each species would be so distinct from each other that no one could ever conclude natural selection was the process by which they have arisen. There would be no hierarchy of the species in gradual increments. There would be no rock formations that showed this evolutionary process because it wouldn’t exist in the first place. Human beings would be seen as absolutely special and distinct from the rest of the creatures on earth such that no scientist could ever conclude they evolved from the lower primates. There would be no evidence of unintelligent design, since the many signs of unintelligent design cancel out the design argument for the existence of God. God didn’t even have to create us with brains, if he created us with minds. The existence of this kind of universe and the creatures in it could never be explained by science apart from the existence of God.

Isn't he just saying here "Gosh, I wish the gaps were bigger?" 

The Unity of Consciousness (again)

V. The Argument from the Unity of Consciousness
Consider once again the inference “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.” Now if there is one entity, namely me, that has all these thoughts, then it might be supposed that we have a rational inference here. If Bill has the thought “All men are mortal,” and Dennis has the thought “Socrates is a man,” and I have the thought “Socrates is mortal,” then we have a problem. No one person has actually performed the inference, and so the inference has not been performed at all.
Hasker, who has been both one of the chief proponents of the Argument from the Unity of Consciousness and the Argument from Reason, nevertheless thinks that there are separate arguments, and that the argument from the unity of consciousness should not be counted among the arguments from reason. Carrier thinks the argument is really an argument from consciousness rather than an argument from reason, and he thinks that in the last analysis what is plausible in the arguments from reason is simply the argument from consciousness. As Hasker put it, “The issue of unity of consciousness, after all, applies to conscious states that are in no way concerned with reasoning, including the states of sentient beings incapable of reason.”
True enough. But some people, confronted with the problem of the unity of consciousness, attempt to show that this unity is an illusion of some kind. I have in mind Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model from Consciousness Explained, and other theories like it. According to Susan Blackmore,
Each illusory self is a construct of the memetic world in which it successfully competes. Each selfplex gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is something inside who is in charge.
Or Steven Pinker, who writes,
There’s considerable evidence that the unified self is a fiction—that the mind is a congeries of parts acting a synchronously, and that it is only an illusion that there’s a president in the Oval Office of the brain who oversees the activity of everything.
Now if this is really true, if there is really no one individual who thinks the thoughts we think, then it follows straightforwardly that no one performs any rational inferences, including the rational inferences that have been used to reach the conclusion that the unified self is a fiction.
Now a philosophical naturalist can be a fictionalist about all sorts of things, but he cannot be a fictionalist about the sorts of inferences scientists make. So the Argument from Reason comes to the aid of the Argument from the Unity of Consciousness, and block the "eliminativist" response with respect to the unity of consciousness.
Kant argued, in the Second Paralogism
Every composite substance is an aggregate of several substances, and the action of a composite, or whatever inheres in it as thus composite, is an aggregate of several actions or accidents, distributed among the plurality of substances. Now an effect which arises from the concurrence of many acting substances is indeed possible, namely, when this effect is external only (as, for instance, the motion of a body is the combined motion of all it parts). But with thoughts, as internal accidents belonging to a thinking being, it is different. For suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be part of the thought, and only all of them taken together would be the whole thought. But this cannot be consistently maintained. For representations (for instance, the single words of a verse) distributed among different beings, never make up a whole thought (a verse) and it is therefore impossible that a thought should inhere in what is essentially composite. It is therefore possible only in a single substance, which, not being an aggregate of many, is absolutely simple.
A formalization of the argument, which is developed in William Hasker’s The Emergent Self, goes as follows:
1. I am aware of my present visual field as a unity; in other words, the various components of the field are experienced by a single subject simultaneously.
2. Only something that functions as a whole rather than as a system of parts could experience a visual field as a unity.
3. Therefore, the subject functions as a whole rather than as a system of parts.
4. The brain and nervous system, and the entire body, is nothing more than a collection of physical parts organized in a certain way. (In other words, holism is false).
5. Therefore, the brain and nervous system cannot function as a whole; it must function as a system of parts.
6. Therefore, the subject is not the brain and nervous system (or the body, etc).
7. If the subject is not the brain and nervous system then it is (or contains as a proper part) a non-physical mind or “soul”, that is, a mind that is not ontologically reducible to the sorts of entities studied in the physical sciences. Such a mind, even if it is extended in space, could function as a whole rather than as a system of parts and so could be aware of my present visual field as a unity.
8. Therefore the subject is a soul, or contains a soul as part of itself.
Hasker’s example is the synchronic unity of being aware of my visual field, but in rational inference we find a diachronic unity; the inferring subject, who holds the premises of the argument in mind and draws the conclusion from them.
Now it will not do to simply point out that the brain is a highly complex system that is interconnected functionally and has billions of neurons. A genuine physical system is a system whose properties must be “summative” properties of its proper parts. If that is what a brain is, then no matter how complex it is, it is a set of parts.
A braking system of a car, a nutcracker, and even a chess-playing computer are all systems whose operations are the sums of the operations of their proper parts. Sometimes human beings are able to provide a framework of meaning for these objects that, if taken literally, would attribute to the system characteristics that they lack individually. But in human consciousness we find a subjective unity.
Carrier responds to this argument by sayingBut the point is the same: just as a collection of cells can organize and cooperate into a body that can walk—even though no one of those cells can walk at all or even has legs, much less the other needed organs, like hearts and lungs—so also can a collection of brain systems organize and cooperate into a mind that can think. And it does this by producing the virtual appearance of a singularity of consciousness, just as it produces the mere appearance that unified patches of color exist—when in fact only streams of various distinct particles exist.
But I am not talking about a unity of function that can exist in a braking system, I am talking about a unity of perspective experienced by the thinking agent itself. When a person infers “Socrates is mortal” from “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man,” that person infers the conclusion from his own perspective. There are truths that we know from a first-person perspective that cannot be known from any other perspective. For example, the truth that “I am Victor Reppert” is significant from my own perspective that cannot be discovered from a physical perspective. By taking an outside, third-person point of view, something is invariably lost.
It seems to me that Carrier, like Blackmore and Pinker, has fallen back on the fictionalist view of the unity of consciousness. But this position, I maintain, undermines rational inference.

The pros and cons on same sex marriage

Here. 

Augustine predicts our discussions

HT: Bob Prokop

From The City of God, Book II:
Even after the plain truth has been thoroughly demonstrated, so far as a person is capable of doing, the confirmed skeptic will insist on maintaining belief in his own irrational notions. This is due to either a great blindness, which renders him incapable of seeing what is plainly set before him, or on account of an opinionative obstinacy, which prevents him from acknowledging the truth of what he does see. Thence arises the woeful necessity of going to ridiculous lengths to expound yet more fully on what we have already made perfectly clear, in hopes that we might get through to those who close their minds to reason.

And yet how shall we ever profit from our discussions, or what bounds can be set to our discourse, if we forever fall to the temptation of replying to those who reply to us? We must acknowledge that those who are so hardened by the habit of contradiction will never yield, but would rather reply out of stubbornness, even when they recognize their own error.

Did Hume Refute Paley before he even wrote Natural Theology?

V. J. Torley says no, Julian Biaggini says yes.

The dualists are coming the dualists are coming

According to this piece in the New Scientist. Moreland and Menuge reply here. 

Pinker argues that science makes belief in God obsolete

Here.  Here we run up once again against the claim that science shows that materialism is true. But, does that mean that science could have shown something else to be true, that, had the evidence been difference, science would have told us that we have souls? If you argue that science shows that we don't have souls, then it seems to follow from that that it could have shown that we do have them. Yet, arguments in support of souls are often thrown out on methodological grounds.

Consider, for example, the subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution shows a world without design. Does that imply that if science had found something else, it would have concluded that we have a universe that WAS designed? Otherwise, the evidence isn't doing anything, since by definition it couldn't have discovered evidence for design even if it had been there. Right?

What is humanism

Stephen Law defines it.

The argument from mathematics

Here. 

John D Barrow on God and Astronomy

A redated post. Barrow's essay is here. 

Cambridge mathematician finds God in astronomy. I think there are overtones of the argument from reason in this discussion, such as the following:

There are some who say that because we use our minds to appreciate the order and complexity of the Universe around us, there is nothing more to that order than what is imposed by the human mind. That is a serious misjudgment.

Were it true, then we would expect to find our greatest and most reliable understanding of the world in the everyday events for which millions of years of natural selection have sharpened our wits and prepared our senses. And when we look towards the outer space of galaxies and black holes, or into the inner space of quarks and electrons, we should expect to find few resonances between our minds and the ways of these worlds. Natural selection requires no understanding of quarks and black holes for our survival and multiplication.

And yet, we find these expectations turned upon their heads. The most precise and reliable knowledge we have about anything in the Universe is of events in a binary star system more than 3,000 light years from our planet and in the sub-atomic world of electrons and light rays, where we are accurate to better than nine decimal places.

And curiously, our greatest uncertainties all relate to the local problems of understanding ourselves - human societies, human behaviour, and human minds - all the things that really matter for human survival.

Turning Weinberg on His Head

I wouldn't say morality has no basis without God, because we are still social beings. But there do seem to be cases and situations in which having a God to which one must account provides a basis for much moral conduct. In fact, I am inclined to turn Weinberg on his head: Good people will always do good things, but getting bad people to do good things, that takes religion.

Killing in the name of anything

I posted this on the comment line, but I think I should make it a post as well.

As I understand it, some atheists have been using the admittedly bloody history of Christianity as grounds for atheism, claiming that atheism is pure in that regard. I find this patently absurd. You get the blood when the power of the state is attached to any ideology, whether it be a Christian ideology, a Jewish ideology, a Hindu ideology or an Islamic ideology, or an atheist ideology. Can people be fanatical enough about atheism to kill for it? I realize that they don't believe in hell, but some of them are exclusivists in the sense that they think everyone who is on the atheist side is right and everyone who is committed to "religion" is doing damage. When someone can't recogize the fact that Gandhi received profound inspiration from his Hindu beliefs while challenging the worst in Hinduism, if you call Martin Luther King insane because he was caught up in the "God delusion" and can't see how important his faith was in undergirding the social transformation he spearheaded, then you are an ideologue, and I'm going to start getting worried if you ever have a gun in your hand.

State-sponsored Christianity, state-sponsored Islam, state-sponsored atheism. Is the problem with the beliefs, or with the misguided attempt to support these ideologies with coercive power. The bad news for atheists is that the bloody history of Christianity does nothing to support a case against Christianity. The good news for atheists is that these things do support something that I think most atheists believe in: the separation of Church and State. That is the correct use of the"holy horrors" argument, and atheists who want to use it in that way can be my guest.

From Theism to Moral Objectivity

•Many people hold that God exists, and that he has given certain commandments (such as the Ten Commandments)

•But if moral values are subjective, then these commandments would reflect God’s subjective opinion, and would be no more legitimate than the opinion of, say, Bill Clinton.

•But that is absurd. If there is a God, then his “opinion” has to occupy the position of fact.

•Therefore, moral values are objective and not subjective.

Linville's The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism

Here. 

Why are Buddhists considered religious?

•One idea is that  Buddhists see the basic human problem as internal rather than external. They also not philosophical naturalists, in that they don’t maintain that everything can be analyzed completely in scientific terms. They do believe in a cycle of birth and rebirth, which a contemporary naturalistic atheist such as Dawkins would deny. 

What makes life meaningful?

This is a discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the meaning of life.

Some, like Craig, argue that life is absurd and meaningless without God. I guess I am more interested in a different type of issue. If atheists find their lives to be meaningful, what does it mean to tell them that, no, your life REALLY isn't meaningful. A more interesting question might be whether the possibility of finding a meaningful life is possible for everyone, or whether some people, in virtue of their circumstances, can't find one. It seems to me that the circumstances of a particular life might result in someone thinking their life has no meaning, and Christian theist might offer Christianity as a solution to this difficulty to everyone, where as the viability of atheistic solutions is contingent on circumstances.