Reply to Parsons on Religion and Violence

• Parsons' comments are  here. 
• 
  
• I think you misunderstood my point. People can be tempted to kill for what they think is really important. If you are religious, this might be really important, though with Christianity you do have an argument against supporting religion with violence, originally made by Lactantius:

  "Religion being a matter of the will, it cannot be forced on anyone; in this matter it is better to employ words than blows [verbis melius quam verberibus res agenda est]. Of what use is cruelty? What has the rack to do with piety? Surely there is no connection between truth and violence, between justice and cruelty . . . . It is true that nothing is so important as religion, and one must defend it at any cost [summa vi] . . . It is true that it must be protected, but by dying for it, not by killing others; by long-suffering, not by violence; by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend religion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion. (Divine Institutes V:20)"

  Surely there has been plenty of religiously motivated violence, and Christians have, sadly, not always followed Lactantius' excellent advice. But you need something more than religion to justify violence. You need to accept the claim that force can and should be used to advance one's religion. It might lead you to violence if you think somehow you can promote religion by the use of political power. As I have argued, it's a lot harder for Muslims to reject this premise than for Christians, since Islam was founded through the use of political power.

  But what about atheism? Could people really convinced that our society, if it to advance, needs to embrace atheism, be tempted to use political power, and ultimately violence, to achieve that goal? If you buy in on all the "mind virus" and "delusion" rhetoric that the New Atheists are fond of using, if you are convinced that raising a child as a Christian or a Jew is to abuse that child, etc. etc. etc., wouldn't there be a temptation to "use the ring" and force people to abandon their faith? Why not? Dawkins has already supported using the fear of ridicule to peer-pressure people out of their beliefs. Ever hear of the League of the Militant Godless in the former Soviet Union? Ever hear of the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution.

  http://www.russkiivopros.com/?...

  http://www.sullivan-county.com...

  What I object to is the idea that somehow abandoning religious belief is going to eliminate violence, and that atheism somehow is going to leave us all with, as John Lennon put it, "nothing to kill or die for." As I see it, THAT view is delusional, and you have to smoke a lot of pot and drop a lot of acid believe that. My answer to Lennon comes for George Strait, as follows:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  If we consider something important, then we can be tempted to decide that the end justifies the means. And that includes the end of faith.

   

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Against property dualism

A redated post

What if you accept irreducibility arguments that defend the claim that mental states are ineliminable and irreducible to physical states. Many philosophers buy these arguments without denying an overall philosophical naturalism. What they accept, instead, is dualism of properties but a monism of substances. At least when I was in graduate school, it seemed to me as if the mainstream position amongst secular philosophers was a non-reductive materialism based on the supervenience of mental states on physical states. There were numerous opposing views about what kind of supervenience relationship had to obtain between mental and physical states.

William Hasker, in his response to me in Philosophia Christi, entitled “What about a Sensible Naturalism,” is talking about just this kind of naturalistic position. He describes a sensible naturalism as “a naturalism that makes a serious effort to accommodate, or at least makes sense of, our ordinary convictions about the mind and its operations—the things we think we all “know” about the mind, when we are not doing philosophy.”

The difficulty here is that the mental and the physical are defined in such a way as to exclude one another. So reductionist accounts of the mental have a tendency to be either fully or partly eliminativist. We have to back off from what we thought were out common-sense conceptions of what the mental is in order to accept a reduction to the physical. To accept reductionist accounts of the mental, for Hasker, is not to be a sensible naturalist.

There is, it seems to me, a paradoxical difficulty for naturalistic philosophies of mind. If you can reduce the mental to the physical, then the issue of mental causation, I think, becomes easier for the naturalist. If the naturalist is inclined in a reductionist/eliminativist direction, then the argument from propositional content becomes the main focus. However, many naturalist philosophers do not think reductionism is plausible. But if the naturalist buys a nonreductive materialism, which means that we accept a dualism of properties, then the argument from mental causation becomes the key argument.

Edward Feser presents the case against the non-reductivist view on mental causation as follows:

…Property dualism seems if anything to have a worse problem with epiphenomenalism than does Cartesian dualism. Recall that the Cartesian dualist who opts for epiphenomenalism seems to be committed to the absurd consequence that we cannot so much as talk about out mental states, because if epiphenomenalism is true, those mental states have no effect at all on our bodies, including our larynxes, tongues and lips. But as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the property dualist seems committed to something even more absurd: the conclusion that we cannot even think about our mental states, or at least about our qualia! For if your beliefs—including your belief that you have qualia—are physical states of your brain, and qualia can have no effects on anything physical, then whether you have qualia has nothing to do with whether you believe that you have them. The experience of pain you have in your back has absolutely no connection to your belief that you have an experience of pain in your back; for, being incapable of having any causal influence on the physical world, it cannot be what caused you to have beliefs about it.

Dion DiMucci's Catholic Testimony

Inspiring to, I think, all of us, Catholic or Protestant. Here.  

C. S. Lewis on the Socratic Club

“In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university, there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into ‘coteries’ where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.”

Lewis Scholar Christopher Mitchell on the Oxford Socratic Club

This seem to me to be the model for discussion that Christians and their opponents ought to strive for.

Correction

In this post, I made the mistake of saying that Lindsay was implying that believers are stupid or idiots. He never actually explained the existence of educated believers in terms of stupidity. But he claiming that theism is a stupid position, undeserving of serious discussion, and supported by  no evidence whatsoever. There is a tone of intellectual superiority in these sorts of statements, which  is why I used the word "idiot." But it's important to be accurate. Of course, IDiot is a common term used for ID advocates, but they don't strike me as stupid.

Well, besides stupid, there is ignorant, wicked, and insane. Some people argue that educated theists are simply unwilling to consider evidence that calls their beliefs into question. But I remember choosing philosophy as a major largely because I thought that if there were good arguments to be made against Christianity it wanted to know about them sooner as opposed to later. I have been a Christian minority in most of the philosophy departments I studied and taught at.

Then there is the line "faith makes intelligent people seem stupid." But I got my credentials in philosophy working mostly on issues relevant to my religious beliefs, and my dissertation had to pass a committee of people skeptical of my line of argument.

Lecture notes on the multicultural problem in ethics

•Ethics: The Multicultural Approach

•How moral issues arise in our culture

•“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

•Perhaps no statement captures the moral consciousness of our country. On the one hand, human equality is a powerful idea. On the other hand, the author of those words owned slaves, nor was he particularly known for treating women as equals.

•Moral debates in America

•A lot of moral issues arise in America in an attempt to apply the concept of equality. Consider the issue of slavery, which ripped the country in half in the 19th Century. Or consider the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and even the gay rights movement. The idea in all of these movements is that people shouldn’t be treated as inferiors because of differences that are not morally relevant, or for differences that are not under the person’s control.

•Equality and multiculturalism

•Our belief in equality is perhaps one of the most significant motivation for looking at things multiculturally. If people are equal, then we might want to avoid treating people or ideas as inferior if they came from some culture other than our own.

•Blum’s motives for multicultural educaton

•Lawrence Blum mentions three values motivating a multicultural approach: antiracism, a sense of interracial community, and treating persons as individuals.

•These values are more common in our own culture than they are in many others. In many other countries race (and gender) is a basis for treating others as inferior, there is no interracial community, and people are not treated as individuals.

•Arranged marriages and female genital mutilation

•Something that reflects the individualism of our own society is the fact that we select our own mates. We do not countenance the idea, for example, of being given in marriage by one’s parents. But in some cultures not only are marriages are arranged, but people are forced into them as children. Similarly, in some cultures women are forced into genital mutilation, which is the subject of Martha Nussbaum’s essay.

•The value of tolerance

We value tolerance in our culture quite a bit. I think historically we found ourselves having to live in a democratic society with many different religious standpoints, so we needed tolerance to get along with one another.

One idea that people think will encourage tolerance is the idea of relativism. If morals are relative, and there is no truth about what is really right or wrong, then we will be less inclined to be judgmental toward others.

•Or will it?

•One surprising result is that if relativism is true, then it is a virtue to be tolerant of other cultures just in case your culture approves of tolerating other cultures. If it doesn't, then you are supposed to be intolerant. So relativism doesn't lead to tolerance, it can just as easily lead to intolerance.

•http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/ethics_text/Chapter_3_Relativism/Relativism_Tolerance.htm

•Dealing with other cultures

•How should we respond to things going on in other cultures. One side of us wants to say that we shouldn’t be critical of what other cultures do. On the other hand, sometimes in other societies we find that some people are treated as inferiors, and what we would consider to be their rights are violated. So, how do we respond to that?

•The paradox of multiculturalism

•The paradox of multiculturalism is the fact that the values that drive us toward multiculturalism are exactly those values that are rejected in other cultures.

•For example, we have a conviction that people should be treated as equals, regardless of their origin or background. Otherwise we could look at other cultures and just say “those barbarians.” But other cultures often approve of treating certain peoples as inferiors.

•Examples:

•The Caste system in India

•Prohibiting women from driving in Saudi Arabia

•Arranged marriages, and even child marriages, in India and other countries.

•Anti-gay laws in Kenya and Uganda: Both male and female homosexual activity is illegal. Under the Penal Code, "carnal knowledge against the order of nature" between two males carries a potential penalty of life imprisonment and executions/torture are allowed with no legal liabilities for the executioners.”

•Criminal punishment for rape victims in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Somalia, and India. http://shariaunveiled.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/5-countries-that-respond-to-rape-victims-by-throwing-them-in-prison/

•Executing people for adultery in places like Afghanistan

•Female Genital Mutilation

•The Good Old USA

•Well, we had slavery until the Civil War, and women got the right to vote in the 1920s, which means that during most of our country’s history, women have NOT had this right. The civil rights movement culminated in the 1960s, in my lifetime.

•Two ways of responding

1)It’s their culture. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong

2)People’s rights are being unjustly violated. It’s wrong no matter whether the culture approves or not.

It comes down to the whole issue of moral objectivity.

•

Eastern Religious Traditions and the Supernatural

Eastern religions don't seem to draw the nature-supernature distinction. On the other hand, they hold positions like reincarnation, which seem impossible if the natural world, as presently understood by science, is all there is. 

An important difference between Islam and Christianity

I find a great deal to admire in Islam. However, it seems to be essential to Islam that it aspire to be implemented from the top down through government, and that makes it very difficult for Muslims to buy in on the idea that they ought voluntarily to refrain from using government to pursue their goals, if it is indeed possible.

Remember how Islam was founded. Muhammad had been exiled from Mecca, then conquered by force of arms. The Qu'ran is written as a law-book. The idea of separating religion from state does violence to essence of Islam.

How was Christianity founded? Well, if was founded by people who didn't have political power, so the New Testament provides almost nothing about government except "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." Now after Constantine, Christians did assume political power, and they did use political power to advance the cause of their religion. So, yes, Christians had the Crusades, the attacks on the Albigensians,  the Spanish Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, and the Salem Witch trials. But after the Wars of Religion and the damage that these things did, Christian leaders started to back away from wanting to implementing their religion through government, and there is nothing in this that contradicts the essence of Christianity. Most of the people responsible for getting church and state separated were Christians, not secularists.

Yes, you can be violent on behalf of Christianity. You can also suppress religion violently. But there is nothing in Christianity that requires you to use violence to uphold Christianity, anymore than there is anything in atheism that requires atheists to use the state to suppress theism.

The "religion leads to violence" idea is based on a profound confusion. ANYTHING can lead to violence. But the idea that non-religious people have "nothing to kill or die for" while religious people do have something to kill or die for, is absurd. Some atheists believe that the progress of civilization depends on whether we "outgrow" religion or not. Why would people who believe that eschew the use of force to accomplish so important a goal, if the opportunity presented itself. OK, it doesn't involve anyone's eternal destiny, but the progress or regression of civilization? Important enough, for at least some, to use ridicule and peer pressure on its behalf.

The doctrine of causal closure

Let us take a pair of electrons, Eric and Ed. Eric the electron is an electron in the body of Richard Dawkins. Ed is an electron inside the body of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Knowing this, we might know that Ed is far more likely to be inside of an Anglican Church this Sunday morning than is Eric. But if the physical is causally closed, then where Eric and Ed will be on Sunday morning is either fully determined by the present state of the world at the physical level plus the laws of physics (assuming determinism), or else where Eric and Ed are also affect by quantum-mechanical indeterminism. But this indeterminism, given causal closure, is brute chance and nothing more. It is not a “window” for intentional states to affect the physical. Imagine a being omniscient with respect to the state of the physical world. That physically omniscient being could learn nothing useful about where Eric and Ed will be if it learns that Eric is in the body of an atheist, while Ed is in the body of a Christian. The electrons will go where the laws say they must go, or where chance places them. To say otherwise would be to deny the causal closure of the physical world. 

Supervenience theory and the reflexivity problem

If something supervenes on the physical, we need to know why it supervenes. To say that it is just a brute fact that mental state X supervenes on physical state Y will not do. The reason is not hard to seek. If supervenience theory is true, then everything supervenes on the physical, and that would have to include the supervenience relation itself.  If everything supervenes on the physical plus a supervenience relation, then it is not quite true that everything supervenes on the physical. So we need an account as to why the supervenience relationship obtains, in order to avoid a reflexivity problem. 

Feser replies to Nagel critics

Here. 

They don't call it the cult of gnu for nothing

It's the atheist equivalent of television evangelists. Tuck in your love gift, as they used to say on TBN.

Thick and Clear Religions

A redated post.

From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.

“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”

A critique of scientism

Here. 

Feser's Three Varieties of Atheism

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all.  It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.

2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations.  But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it.  Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism.  An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.


It seems to me that there is another division of atheists. There are those atheists, even if they think theism is irrational, they don't think we have a good reason to make a concerted effort to "win souls for atheism." I remember in the debates against Craig, both Douglas Jesseph and Keith Parsons said that they were, of course, not trying to convert anyone to atheism.

Now we have sites like this, which looks a heck of a lot like a Chick tract. And then there's this Loftus post. 

Bertrand Russell on searching for causes

From the debate with Frederick Copleston: 

I think — there seems to me a certain unwarrantable extension here; a physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn’t he’s had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes. 

The ending of my Infidels paper on miracles

If my foregoing discussion is correct, opponents of, say, the resurrection of Jesus cannot appeal to a general theory of probability to prove that anyone who accepts the resurrection is being irrational. It is also a consequence that different people can reasonably expected to have different credence functions with respect to Christian (and other) miracle claims. If you want to convince some people that Christ was resurrected, you have a much heavier burden of proof than you have in convincing others. It must be noted that there is no way, on the model I have presented, to show that everyone who denies the Resurrection is irrational, or engaged in bad faith. Of course, one can still believe that unbelievers disbelieve because of "sin" or "suppressing the truth," or what have you. But given the legitimate differences that can exist concerning the antecedent probability of the miraculous, I don't see how such charges can be defended. So the lesson here, I think, is that both apologetics and anti-apologetics should be engaged in persuasion, not coercion, and that the attempt to ground irrationality charges against one's opponents is a misguided enterprise.[22]

Here. 

Feser on some varieties of atheism

What makes someone a gnu? I think this explains it best. My way of describing the difference is the difference between someone who thinks that religious belief is something to debate, and someone who believers that religion must be dealt with via a culture war.

Update

I'm in a rehab care facility, giving my repaired hip time to heal so I can put weight on my right leg again.

For purposes of the First Amendment, atheism is a religion

Here.  The "not collecting stamps" argument doesn't work here.

Against Ann Coulter

There is only one rebuttal to the claim that political conservatism is un-Christian, and that is to say that while Christian conservatives are as concerned about the less fortunate as liberals, this concern should be rightly expressed through private, as opposed to governmental, agency. Such governmental efforts invariably, the conservative says, do more harm than good and undermine freedom.

The above is an interesting, and debatable position.

Ann Coulter, however, criticizes private efforts to respond to the Ebola virus in Africa. This strikes me as hopelessly unbiblical.

A critique of The Last Superstition

Here. 

Dan Gillson on Recalcitrant Skepticism

A recalcitrant skeptic demands evidence to stack the deck in favor of whatever it is that he is denying. There is never enough evidence to sway him. He knows this, so he asks for it to say that it either doesn't count or that it's not enough.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on what constitutes evidence

Here. 

Atheist Quentin Smith on the Philosophy of Religion

This is relevant to the "end of the philosophy of religion" debate, although I suppose someone probably brought this up already.

If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that “no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith,” although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.^[3]

I got this from this source. 

A response to the Skeptic Zone on the old "What would it take to make you give it up" issue

Here. 

A couple of things. The Catholic Church has repeatedly condemned fideism as heresy. Lewis says that he isn't asking anyone to believe if the weight of the evidence is against it, and says that is not the point where faith comes in. Is Lewis a heretic? I there are some who will quote Bible verses here, but I know the verses and I don't interpret them as requiring suppression of doubt, 

A lot of confusion arises when these questions are asked because it looks like a request for a one-sentence answer. But if you read stories of people who move from theism to atheism, or vice versa, it's a lot of things put together. 

When I was younger I had a lot of doubts and questions, and drove everyone nuts by asking questions. I did hear the "We're not to question" response from some people, but most of the time people tried to provide something intellectually responsive. The Christian community, as I experienced it, did not, as a whole, try to get me to simply quash doubt. If it had, I might very well not be a Christian today. 

And then you have P. Z. Myers, who says that belief in God is something so defined that there couldn't be any evidence for it. 

The New Anti-Intellectualism and the Passion for Certainty

I think that at the back of this is the desire for absolute certainty. If you are in the intellectual community, living as a Christian means living with doubts and uncertainties. I don't mean worrisome doubts necessarily, but you can't make the people who say you are mistaken go away. "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" is something intellectuals are going to have trouble saying. But Dawkins says he offers near-certainty (which is what someone in science has to say), and that is the closest anyone in the intellectual community is going to get. All the "evidence" is on our side, all the "motives" are on the other side, so that's as close to settling it as anything can be. 

Gnus can't imagine in their wildest dreams that they're anti-intellectual. But that is exactly what they are.

I'm right, you're an idiot, so it's time to shut the discussion down

This is from James Lindsay, quoted on Loftus' blog. What do you say when someone wants to shut down the dialogue? 

It is very difficult to see the matter of theism as something to treat seriously as a philosophical object. We shouldn't. It is a theological object, and theology is only "pseudo-philosophical," as Carrier puts it, and pseudo-academic, as I outlined above. No one is required to take such a thing seriously or engage its "best" arguments, as if it has any, as if the real contenders haven't already been dealt with thoroughly and repeatedly, and as if any argument stands up to the simple and straightforward question that's been waiting for them all along: "Where's the evidence?"

But because the idea that we should engage any position's best case is generally true in philosophy proper, and all academic debate, it is an easy value to turn into a false virtue. The principle simply doesn't apply here because theology is pseudo-academic, though. Misapplying it as a false virtue, a moral value defining a particular kind of thinker, I think, is exactly what apologists for the philosophy of religion are doing, and I think it constitutes a confusing and unproductive avenue in the conversation that should not continue. LINK.

A reply to Wielenberg on naturalistic moral realism: C. S. Lewis's Second Moral Argument

I had a look at the Wielenberg Faith and Philosophy paper, and one problem jumps out at me. For moral properties to do the work we expect them to do, they have to  be causal properties. Something being right has to at least potentially play a role in my doing what is right. But even if there are these moral properties, they aren't physical, and if all causation is physical, then these properties can't affect my behavior without violating the causal closure of the physical. In theism is true, then these moral properties can be at least possibly causally relevant. So we have, I think, still a reason for choosing a theistic account over a non-theistic one. To paraphrase Lewis, "Even if moral truths exist, what exactly have they got to do with the occurrence of a right decision as a psychological event?"

Lewis's moral argument in Miracles chapter 5 emphasizes the causal role of morality, though it is not as apparent Mere Christianity.

Wielenberg's paper is here, Lowder's recommendation of Wielenberg is here. 

A little exercise

Provide a convincing argument against slavery that would be convincing to anyone  who thinks slavery isn't wrong, without any explicit or implicit theological appeals.

I actually think that, at least for long periods of history, the institution of slavery is defensible from the standpoint of utilitarianism, for example. It is now a socially unpopular idea. But so is infanticide and bestiality, but Peter Singer is prepared to defend both.

I don't think it can be done. It's a dog eat dog world, only the fittest survive, if we have the power to enslave others, what's wrong with it? It will certainly help me pass on my genes. Owning slaves gives people a selective advantage.

Believe, me I despise slavery. But I don't see a universally convincing secular argument.

Would a secular case against slavery have been persuasive? I doubt it!

Another critical question is whether we could have ever come upon the idea that slavery is wrong if Paul's point had not been made. People became slaves historically because of military defeat. Slaves were the spoils of battle. On a polytheistic view, if you lose a war, your god was defeated by the other country's god, and so they had the right to treat you as human refuse. Paul says that the slave has to be treated in certain ways because you and the slave are both creatures of the same God, and God plays no favorites. 

But what if we had gone from a polytheistic view to the view that we weren't created at all, but were spat up by evolution. Wouldn't it be natural to think that a country who had just won a war was the country that was "selected for," as if were, and could do what it wanted to do with the people of the country that lost? It's a dog eat dog world, and natural selection supports those who can enslave others and get them to do hard labor. Did the free people of Egypt build the Pyramids? How did ships cross the Mediterranean sea. Could you have gotten a galley full of rowers with volunteer labor? Could a convincing case against exploitation have been made without the kind of theological appeal that Paul makes? 

Of course, nowadays we all hate slavery (though believe me, it's still around!) But it came naturally for a lot of people to treat it as perfectly acceptable. We all imagine that if we had been in, say, the antebellum South, we would have seen through the detestable practice. But the moral force of the abolitionist arguments came from their Christianity. It did not come from secular humanism.

Ephesians' indirect critique of slavery

Discussed  here. 

Here is the indirect attack:

9 And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

Now if you really internalize the message that the slave and the master have the same Lord, and that the Lord shows no favoritism, how can you own slaves? Nevertheless, we might wish Scripture had spelled that out for us. 

Theism, atheism faith, and placing our bets

Atheism is possibly false, yet the atheist must act as if it is true. Christians place their bets as well. Faith in the sense Lewis talks about in Mere Christianity must be exercised by anyone who has a developed world-view. Faith in the sense of belief in the teeth of evidence is something I don't expect from anyone.

On the philosophy of religion

What we call the philosophy of religion has to do with what we as a culture do with our deepest and most serious disagreements. It's a difficult project, because we have a much easier time talking to people who agree with us for the most part.But if we don't discuss these differences, what do we do? Do we reinstitute the Inquisition for the ideologically unacceptable?

Slagle on Omphalos

Here

I always thought Omphalos was a clever idea.. But these are decisive arguments against it.

lucky to be alive

I was in a car accident, and broke my hip. I got the worst of it, my wife and daughter are OK. A speeder got us. They're out of the hospital, I have a couple more days.

Some questions about the Kitzmiller decision

I don't think that court case was rightly decided, or at least not for the reasons that was given in the decision. If "the court said it, I believe it, that settles it" was a good argument form, then we could establish that black slaves are really the property of their owners because Dred Scott v. Sandford said that they were.

But now we get to something I really don't get. Edwards v. Aguillard said that you couldn't teach creationism in public school, since this made reference to the doctrines of a specific religion.

The Supreme Court held that the Act is facially invalid as violative of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because it lacks a clear secular purpose (first test of the above Lemon test), since (a)the Act does not further its stated secular purpose of "protecting academic freedom." and (b) the Act impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.
They also said:

We do not imply that a legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught. . . . Teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.
Now, suppose someone took what was originally a creationist textbook, used all the same arguments, but deleted the implication that a supernatural being was responsible. This is some dastardly subterfuge?

Suppose in fact the people who were developing this were actually creationists, and even young earth creationists. Suppose, further, they hoped that by making the case for a designer, they hoped that they could support religious belief. Couldn't they still say that they were doing what the court says was allowable.

If the court says "You can't do A, but you can do B," you are still doing B and not A even if you wanted to do A, or even if people concluding A was what you hope they would do if you do B, the fact is you ARE doing B and not A.

So they changed the words of the book to satisfy the ruling. Isn't that what you're supposed to do???

Besides it is just plain false to say that advocates of ID are advocates of creationism, if creationism is meant to be something like YEC and flood geology. Behe, for example, affirms common ancestry, something that is an absolute no-no amongst creationists, who will label you an evolutionist if you accept it.

Are you a determinist? Here's how you can tell

Would you say, with respect to any decision that you have made, that given the actual past, you could have done otherwise than what you did? Determinists may agree with the statement "I could have done otherwise," but what they mean is that if the past had been different, the act would have been different.  Libertarians say that even given the actual past, they could have done otherwise from what they did.

Nagel on the idea that ID is science

The denier that ID [intelligent design] is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.”
― Thomas Nagel

Is Scientific Thought Truncated?

Because Doctor Logic says that the scientific method is the only way to transcend bias in thinking, I want to give some arguments from C. S. Lewis that scientific thought is truncated, and that therefore scientism introduces a bias of its own into our thinking. I am redating this post from 2006.

From Chapter 6, Answers to Misgivings, in C. S. Lewis's Miracles: A Preliminary Study, pp. 41-42.
All these instances show that the fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, maybe precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is some remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten. The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s thinking cannot be a merely natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. But this absent-mindedness is in no way surprising. You do not need—indeed you do not wish—to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading. In the same way the proper procedure for all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your own thinking, and concentrate on the object. It is only when you stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete philosophy that you must take it into account. For a complete philosophy must get in all the facts. In it you turn away from specialised or truncated thought to total thought: and one of the fact total thought must think about is Thinking itself. There is a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious fact of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of men have been increasingly turned outward to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialized inquiries in which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the “scientific” habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. But no other source was at hand, for during the same period men of science were becoming metaphysically and theologically uneducated.

Religion and Incarceration

A critique of a popular atheist claim. Here. 

What is it like to be one of Boghossian's students? "I wrote what I had to to 'agree'.

Here is what a student wrote on a paper in Boghossian's class.

"I wrote what I had to ‘agree’ with what was said in class, but in truth I believe ABSOLUTELY that there is an amazing, savior GOD, who created the universe, lives among us, and loves us more than anything. That is my ABSOLUTE, and no amount of ‘philosophy’ will change that."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/07/192/boghossian#ixzz37ffInOeL
Inside Higher Ed

Now think about this. A student feels she has to write certain things to pass a course which are contrary to what she believes. As teachers we have the power of the grade. I would certainly feel I had done something wrong if a student felt she had to take certain positions she did not believe in because she was afraid of flunking if she disagreed with me.

What kind of a person do you want to be?

A post by Unkle E, a frequent commenter here.

Should the Establishment Clause Apply to Atheists as well?

Here. 

The majority view seems to me that it should be. If this conclusion is drawn, then what happens to Peter Boghossian, who uses his position as a professor at Portland State University, to promote atheism?

Is there a double standard in the way that academic freedom is typically understood? If I made it my stated purpose to convert my students to Christianity, and said so, (something I would never do) would I be more likely to get in trouble with administration than someone like Boghossian, who does what he does?

Thomas Nagel's account of reason

A redated post.

Reason, if there is such a thing, can serve as a court of appeal not only against the received opinions and habits of our community but also against the peculiarities of our personal perspective. It is something each individual can find with himself, but at the same time it has universal authority. Reason provides, mysteriously, a way of distancing oneself from common opinion and received practices that is not a mere elevation of individuality... not a determination to express one's idiosyncratic self rather than go along with everyone else. Whoever appeals to reason purports to discover a source of authority within himself that is not merely personal or societal, but universal... and that should also persuade others who are willing to listen to it. The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3-4.

One way we might approach some of this is to ask whether reason in this sense exists, as I claim, it must if philosophical and scientific inquiry is to be truly possible, and second, what are the metaphysical implication of the existence of reason in this sense.

A new book: Trace of God by J. L. Hinman

I've been reading J. L. Hinman's book Trace of God, which is a discussion and defense of the argument from religious experience. In one passage he quotes a passage from someone named Gracely on Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence in which Gracely admits that if ordinary evidence were only required, some paranormal claims would prove to be defensible. It really does look like moving the goalposts to me. This passage is blogged here. 

There is no science, only sciences

Is this an accurate statement?

John Schellenberg's argument from hiddenness

1. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such relationships--i.e., able to do so just by trying to.

2. No one can be in a position to participate in such relationships without believing that God exists.

3. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists (from 1 and 2).

4. It is not the case that all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists: there is nonresistant nonbelief; God is hidden.

5. It is not the case that there is a perfectly loving God (from 3 and 4).

6. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.

7. It is not the case that God exists (from 5 and 6).

What, if anything, do you think is wrong with this argument. It seems to underly a lot of atheist argumentation these days. 

Saints and Skeptics on the Argument from Reason

Here. 

An index to the Feser-Parsons exchange

Here. Some hope for those who were wondering if real dialogue between Christians and atheists can still take place in the Blogosphere.

Carrier and I agree on something!

A redated post.

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

ID and open-mindedness

Bob Prokop called attention to this essay, and asks why the exclusion of intelligent design from serious dialogue doesn't have the same bad effect. Here. 

Why I don't buy "trajectory of science" arguments

I should say that I am unpersuaded of "trajectory of science" arguments which suggest that as we investigate further we will find greater and greater support for reductionism. Two aspects of the materialistic vision of the world as it has been historically understood are the following: 

1) The universe had no beginning, and has always existed. 

2) The universe is deterministic, and as we do science we will come closer and closer to finding determining causes for everything. 

Now, thanks to the development of the Big Bang theory in the first instance, and quantum mechanics in the second instance, confidence in both of these theses has eroded in comparison to what might have been thought in the early days of the 20th Century. 

Now, of course, naturalists have revised their conception of what is naturalistically acceptable to accommodate a universe with a temporal beginning, and a universe with quantum level indeterminism. But the point is that science frustrated the expectations of what at the time were the expected results of the naturalistic thrust of science. 

With respect to the analysis of mind, I see a lot of bravado about reductive analyses but no real hard evidence that reductions are going to be successful. In fact, given the fact that "the material" or "the natural" has to be defined in terms of the absence of the mental, it looks to me as if reduction of the mental to the physical is logically impossible, and that the more we study things scientifically the more evident this will become.

Bottom line: future science is FUTURE science. Who knows where it will go. 

Can we talk? Some concerns and fears

Thinking of how things have gone on this blog in the last couple of years, I have struggled with my real purpose. 

Thinking about the New Atheism, I think it really doesn't attempt to argue against religious belief. The point isn't debate, it's marginalization. It's keeping religious believers off the "adult table," as Boghossian likes to say. Treating it as argumentation, I think is a mistake. I have complained about the underlying attitude. I think it is socially dangerous. But I think my complaints are pointless, in a way. 

Polite respectful dialogues isn't just to be nice. People naturally tend to represent positions they don't like poorly. When we have the enterprise of defending our own positions, yes we like our positions and we like seeing people embracing them. But we also have to commit ourselves to the health of the community of dialogue. If I were to have a public debate with someone on belief in God, I would feel as if we are opponents in one sense, but we also have a cooperative goal of enhancing understanding of the issues at stake. Without a sense of this common goal, discussion inevitably degenerates. 

The latest crop of anti-theists aren't saying Christianity or theism is wrong, they are trying to get across the idea that it is not even wrong. I don't know how I would construe the rules of dialogue for dealing with something you consider to be not even wrong. Normal dialogue is aimed at showing that something is wrong, and gives a certain respect to the opposing view in order to refute it. 

I still hate banning people, but I think that if you think you have nothing to learn about questions surrounding religious belief and other philosophical matters, I will just say that Dangerous Idea is not for you. 

I am not concerned about an impending "End of Faith." I am concerned about the possibility that we are evolving toward a situation where believers and unbelievers can't even talk to one another without the discussion degenerating. We've had good discussions here,  but I have been seeing less and less of it as time has gone on. A kind of intellectual apartheid is where I am afraid we are headed as a society. 

If you find someone on the other side isn't giving you real dialogue, then know what to ignore. Don't waste time telling someone they're an idiot. There is no constructive purpose in doing that. 

Here is the Scientific Method

This is an overview of the scientific method. But can you do experiments like this in evolutionary biology? 

Loftus sometimes says that there is no Christianity, only Christianities. I wonder if someone could say that there is no science, only sciences. Some things seem appropriate for physics but not for biology, others for psychology and sociology. Then there are people who follow Rutherford say that science divides between physics and stamp collecting.  

 

Key Info

• The scientific method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments.
• The steps of the scientific method are to:
  • Ask a Question
  • Do Background Research
  • Construct a Hypothesis
  • Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
  • Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
  • Communicate Your Results
• It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A "fair test" occurs when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the same.
• While scientists study how nature works, engineers create new things, such as products, websites, environments, and experiences.
  • If your project involves creating or inventing something new, your project might better fit the steps of The Engineering Design Process.
  • If you are not sure if your project is a scientific or engineering project, you should read Comparing the Engineering Design Process and the Scientific Method.

Nagel on ID and public education

This is a really stellar paper, neatly balanced.

Here.

The AFR, the Fallacy of Composition, and Underdetermination

A lot of anti-AFR arguments make the charge that it commits the fallacy of composition. My claim is that sometimes the status of the upper-level state follows necessarily from the base-level states, and sometimes it leaves the hopelessly underdetermined. The state of a planet seems to be fully determined by the states of the particles that make up the planet (plus relations to the star it revolves around, etc.) Mental states are, as I see it, hopelessly underdetermined by the physical. The physical states are compatible with numerous mental states, or even a complete lack of mental states entirely. 

Del Ratzsch on ID in 2004

This is a Panda's Thumb response, and I am somewhat surprised by the PT commentators' level-headed responses.

Ratzsch's attitude is pretty close to mine. I recently did some re-reading in Dembski's book The Design Revolution, and I think it contains two significant overreaches. First, he rejects Bayesian inference, probably because he doesn't want prior probabilities to undermine his case. Lydia McGrew argues that this is a mistake, and I agree. Second, he was touting "Of Pandas and People" as a way of recruiting people to ID, and supporting the attempt to get this into the K-12 classroom. I think that's an overreach, too. 

I don't think ID, or even the Discovery Institute, deserves the kind of demonization that we often see. I think evolution advocates are guilty of some pretty egregious overreaches themselves. 

Indoctrination?

Suppose a parent were to tell a child the following: 

Now, son (or daughter) I am not telling you what to believe. As the great Richard Dawkins says, if I were to label you as a child according to my beliefs, I would be guilty of child abuse. But, when you decide what to believe, just remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and no religion is worthy of belief unless it passes that Outsider Test for Faith, as defined by John Loftus. 

Indoctrination? Yes, no, maybe so?

Rate yourself morally

I wonder if anyone things of themselves as an immoral person. I wonder what the results would be if people were to rate themselves on a percentile scale as a moral person.

Did J. B. Phillips see C. S. Lewis after his death?

Randal Rauser poses this question here.

Leaving the fold, atheist style

Apparently, children of atheists don't always keep the, uh, un-faith.

Here. 

A real socialist on Obama's "socialism"

Here. 

The Jones Decision: Evolution's Trojan Horse?

The decision by Judge Jones excluding intelligent design from public education has been lauded by defenders of evolution, including atheistic evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who use evolutionary biology as a launching point for a defense of atheism. However, it seems to me that if we look carefully at the foundations of the Jones decision, the decision really makes sense only on the basis of arguments that decisively undermine the attempt to base a case for naturalism on evolution.

The Evolutionary Argument For Naturalism (EAFN) goes like this:

1.       If naturalism is false, and theism is true, then we should be able to find evidence of design through biological investigation.

2.       But we do not find that evidence of design through biological investigation. Instead, (to use the phrasing found in the subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker), the evidence of evolution reveals a world without design.

3.       Therefore evolutionary evidence supports naturalism, and provides evidence against theism.

Now let’s look at the basis on which Jones rejects ID. He maintains that ID fails to be scientific on the grounds that “it violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation.” In other words,  the problem with ID is methodological.

This methodological argument gets ID out of the way all right. But it’s a poison pill for the EAFN. If you are maintaining that the evidence of evolution reveals a world without design, then you are perforce presupposing that the evidence of evolution could have revealed something else had the evidence been different. But it does so at a heavy price for the EAFN. It effectively supports a very different argument, an argument I shall call the Methodological Argument for the Metaphysical Neutrality of Science, or MAMNS.

A good statement of MAMNS is found in the philosophy of religion textbook Reason and Religious Belief by Peterson, Hasker, Reichenbach, and Basinger. They write:

“As we try to assess ID, it is difficult (to) feel the force of its criticism of methodological naturalism per se. Methodological naturalism is simply the process of looking for natural causes for natural phenomena, a disciplined focus that has been the secret of science’s success. Methodological naturalism is neutral about whether any nonnatural phenomenon or supernatural reality exists. The fact the some atheistic scientists---such as Dawkins and others---believe that methodological naturalism favors philosophical naturalism reflects their own misunderstanding of the neutrality of science.  Ironically, this misunderstanding is shared by ID thinkers! So the theme of conflict between religion and established science is very strong in both groups.”

MAMNS could be formalized as follows:

1.       Evolutionary biology is the result of the application of methodological naturalism to biological phenomena.

2.       If evolutionary biology is methodologically naturalistic, then it is not equipped to adjudicate between naturalism and theism, without begging the question.

3.       Thus while the evidence of evolution is not free to mention design as an explanation for biological phenomena, neither can it actually establish the lack of design. All it can do is to provide the best account of biological phenomena that we can come up with without appealing to design.

It is important to remember the context of this decision. The plaintiffs in the case were trying to impugn ID as violation of the Establishment Clause. Now if you accept the EAFN, then just as you have to worry about ID violating the Establishment Clause if you teach it in school, you would then have to also worry about the claim that the teaching of evolution in school violates the establishment clause, since the evidence of evolution would then be used to support a religious position, namely atheism. Such a difficulty could be avoided if Jones were to embrace MAMNS, however. Under MAMNS, evolution is just science doing its job, but ID is an overstepping of the boundaries of science. The Jones decision (made by a churchgoing Republican judge) makes sense only if MAMNS is a good argument.

If the argumentation here is correct, then you can accept the Jones decision, or you can accept the EAFN. But you cannot do both. 

It all depends on your priors

I think an argument can be good even when it isn't strong enough such that it ought to convince any unbiased person. An argument might provide some evidence for its conclusion, which might be sufficient or insufficient given someone's personal prior probabilities.

The problem of motivated reasoning

The problem I am posing here is whether one side or the other of the religious debate can be accused of being more influenced by non-truth-conducive considerations than the other. Is there anything to be gained on either side by saying "you only believe that because you want to." It is my contention, going back to C. S. Lewis, is that these wish considerations pretty much cancel each other out. and nothing is to be gained by motivational speculations. We are not in a position to judge our opponents' thinking as "motivated" while our own position is free from motives.