Mind-virus thinking

I think we are in trouble if we think that we can infer from the fact that someone holds a view based on a religious conviction, it must therefore be an uncritical and irrational belief, and therefore we have the right to deputize the government to punish you if you try to act on it. This kind of "mind-virus" thinking concerning one's opponents is precisely what is going to turn the atheist movement in a totalitarian direction. I'm not going to argue that atheism always leads to totalitarianism, but well-intentioned anti-religious philosophies have produced the worst forms of totalitarianism the world has ever seen. How does this happen? It happens because people think there is a right answer to the world's problems, and to get us to the end, any means is justified. 

The simple fact is that there are people at the top of every major academic field, from theoretical physics, to evolutionary biology, to philosophy, who are serious, orthodox Christians. These are people who think very hard about these issues, and come out where they come out. They are not going away, and they are not going to go away in response to anti-Christian bullying. Simplistic ways of explaining them away won't wash. If they are mistaken, the explanation for their error is more complex than the simplistic answers I am used to (and tired of hearing) from atheists.

Religious freedom is foundational to our country. People are going to disagree about religion, and we have to find a way to deal with it. Gay marriage? Maybe. But, oh, that's not enough. We have to protect gay people from anyone expressing openly the idea that they might not be doing the right thing before God, and therefore they are unable to produce speech congratulating them for doing what they are doing. 

You can tell me that the deity I worship is "the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” and that's not hate speech. You can say that biology instructors who teach intelligent design should be fired from their jobs. But we have to punish people who won't do wedding photographers for a gay wedding when the couple can go right across the street and find a photographer who will? Ohhh, that's discrimination, you're just like George Wallace and Lester Maddox. 

You're kidding. No?

Speech and service: why the racist comparison doesn't work

Typically, a couple doesn't just say "Just bake the damned cake, I want it white with chocolate frosting." They want something that helps to celebrate their relationship and upcoming marriage. If I were going to marry a man at long last because of Obergfell, I would probably want something like a rainbow arrangement and two grooms on top of the cake. Wedding photographers pose pictures to accentuate the romance between the couple. Ours certainly did. If they didn't, they wouldn't be good photographers. That is why at least some wedding services are engaged in what seems to me to be more like speech than just cooking a meal. And if they are traditional Christians and they are being asked to do this for a same-sex wedding, they are being asked to produce, and do a good job of producing, speech that celebrates something that their religion says should not be celebrated. 

There is a principled basis within the religion for taking this position. It's not just a cover for hating certain people. I am not saying it can't be challenged within Christianity. I have a lot of sympathy for people of Christian conviction who find that they are unavoidably gay and become convinced that the best way they can serve God is to have the kind of commitment in a gay relationship that is required of Christians in their marriages. Other Christians are convinced that such people have reached the wrong answer. In my view, neither side in this is stupid, ignorant, insane or wicked, nor is it right to call them bigoted. 

On the other hand, I don't see a principled Christian reason for opposing interracial marriage. So far as I can tell, race isn't even a biblical concept, except for Jew and Gentile, and Paul explicitly bridged that barrier. If someone convinced me that they had a principled religious reason for not providing wedding services to a racially mixed wedding, I actually think I would argue that they have the right to refuse service. Some people are going to get mad at me for this, but there can be cases where freedom of religion trumps equal rights. Convincing me that the religious objection to mixed-race marriage was motivated by religious principle and not racial prejudice would be the trick. 

Freedom of religion is central to any free society. For example, democracy is going to have a lot of trouble working in a country like Iraq where the two types of Muslims are unwilling to grant religious freedom to the other branch. 

The comparisons between defenders of traditional marriage and the KKK don't wash. Traditional marriage defenders may, at the end of the day, be mistaken. If people can't see the real differences between them, then I strongly suspect that they are not primarily concerned about equal rights for gay people, they are primarily concerned about bashing traditional religion and bringing it down a peg, and gays are just a tool for doing that.

Suggestion for traditionalist wedding providers

If you are having a gay wedding, it seems to me that LAST thing you would want would be a photographer or a baker who really doesn't believe in gay marriage. That is, if I were a wedding service provider opposed to gay marriage but asked to do a gay wedding instead of just saying no, I might just point out to them that, based on my convictions, I have trouble seeing their wedding as something to celebrate, and that I would unrecommend myself as a wedding service provider. Now, a gay couple with any sense is going to head for the door. If they don't head for the door, then I am have to suspect that they are not looking for a wedding service provider, they are looking for someone to sue or shame as a bigot. 

Is science coming to an end?

See a discussion of this here. This is a follow-up.

A typical argument is goes this way.

1. Human beings are inherently biased. They will believe what they were taught to believe, or what they want to believe, unless this is somehow corrected.

2. Science, as a way of knowing the world, has a system of inherent safeguards against bias. By adopting a scientific perspective, one will not simply be exchanging one bias for another, one will be able to free oneself from bias.

3. Therefore, regardless of what seems to oneself to be true, we stand the best chance of overcoming bias by adopting a scientific perspective.

4. A scientific perspective has within it no room for faith, and no room for any belief in a supernatural being such as God.

5. Therefore, religious faith should be rejected, including the belief in God.

On the contrary, I think the value of science is context-dependent and contingent. It is a  human institution, and it can be corrupted by human weaknesses. It operates most effectively through the use of high levels of specialization, but success in a highly specialized enterprise does not always translate to effective cognition across the board. There are numerous failed attempts to extrapolate results from some area of scientific success beyond their proper limits.

Here is a interesting set of warnings about what to watch for in science journalism.

Sociological research on same-sex parenting: The Regnerus Dilemma

It seems to me that you have to wonder about bias on the part of researchers on this issue----on both sides.

Here. 

On Galileo

Here. 

Groothuis on propositions and materialism

Here. 

C. S. Lewis's Review of the Hobbit from 1937

Here. 

Pope Francis on evolution

Here. 

What creationists don't say

Religious believers, if they are creationists, typically challenge the science behind evolution. They don't just say "Sure science says that, but science is wrong." 

But I suppose they could, if they wanted to. 

The truth value of unprovable statements

Many statements which are not provable, at least not by us, are either true or false, and we agree that they are either true or false even if we have no way of determining whether they are true or false. A good example would be

1)______ committed the Jack the Ripper murders. For any name you put in, they either did or did not commit those crimes. Yet we have no doubt that there is someone (or more than one person) for which that statement is true, just as it is false of everyone else. 

2) There is life of comparable intelligence to our own on other planets. 

Is there a population bomb?

Apparently, fears have been exaggerated.

Here. 

God and Obamacare: Fact or opinion?

The fact-opinion distinction is less than clear. By fact do we mean something which can be true or false, or is it something that can be proven true of false. Is an opinion something that is neither true nor false, or is it something that cannot be proven true or false. 

There are a lot of things that can be true or false, about which evidence is certainly relevant, which nevertheless there is no proof that ought to convince all reasonable persons. The existence of God is one of them. Whether Obamacare is doing more good than harm, or harm than good, is another. 

Notes on the Philosophy and Politics paper.

I think you have to sign into academia.edu before you can download. But the idea is that academics have to analyze the issues and come to terms with them fairly and honestly, and not pay attention to what the political implications of their statements are. 

An example of this would be criticisms of Thomas Nagel. Nagel is a non-theist who develops a lot of the arguments against naturalistic materialism that I do. But he thinks you can accept the arguments supporting the idea that reason and "the mental" is fundamental to the universe without becoming a theist. In the process he is critical of the overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything. Now, I can understand why many secularists think that he's mistaken, that materialistic naturalism doesn't have quite the severe problems Nagel thinks they do. But, on top of this comes strong message that he's giving aid and comfort to religious believers and even (gasp!) intelligent design advocates, and they virtually imply that if that is what he really thinks he ought to shut up about it because of the bad political implications of making his case. After all, you don't want someone giving ammo to those "armies of the night." When people criticize them for heresy hunting, they just reply by saying "We're just criticize arguments we don't accept. Shouldn't all ideas be open to criticism?" But no, you aren't just doing that, you're saying his ideas lead to "mischief" and one philosopher, perhaps jokingly, said that his books should be put on a modern secular version of the Index of Forbidden Books. 

To them, I want to say, cut the political correctness and follow the argument where it leads. 

The paper argues that the political involvement of philosophers may lead them to not give fair consideration to positions that could be used to support their political opponents. I am inclined to agree.

Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics

Here. 

The LGBT divide

I think there's actually a split in the pro-LGBT community on the issue of marriage. There is a conservative wing of it that basically says that traditional marriage is just fine, it just needs to be extended to same-sex couples. This is typical of Christian supporters of SSM such as Matthew Vines. They believe in such things as lifetime commitment, two and only two partners, marital fidelity, etc., they just think that for people who are gay in their orientation, they should exercise that with a partner of the same sex. Such people would be embarrassed, I think by Richard Carrier's adaptation of LGBT rhetoric to support polyamory.

People like Gessen are on the radical wing of the pro-LGBT movement, they are happy to see the opposite sex requirement eliminated for marriage, but they reject the rest of traditional marriage as well.

The difference between these two wings has been de-emphasized during the battle for SSM. After Obergfell, I strongly suspect that this disagreement develop more and more into a debate within the pro-LGBT community.

Is polygamy next?

Maybe. 

Debunking the wrong answer

I noticed John Loftus objecting to my comments by, typically, bringing up Scandanavian countries. However, PL's point is relevant here, that strong secularization tends to move a country toward underpopulation, which makes it difficult for them to avoid a Muslim majority. And, I would also have to make the note that the secularization of those countries took place with very little of the religion-bashing typical of new atheism. If religion dies within a culture, I think it is more likely to die of neglect than anything else.

There is a sense in which writing books like the God Delusion and running websites like Debunking Christianity is a self-defeating enterprise. What you are saying by doing that is that God and Christianity are so important that someone needs to take lots of time and effort attacking it. I know they don't intend to leave this message, but that is still the effect. These people spend a lot of time and energy on what they don't believe, in debunking the wrong answer. If it's really worth the time and energy to criticize something, then there are rules, such as the principle of charity, that have to be followed. If not, then you are better off pursuing the right answer than attacking the wrong answer.

Commercial services and expression

CM: First, who wants to give a business, carrying out a commercial transaction, authority of approval? Should fat people not be allowed to buy iPhones because they make the technology look unattractive? Should book stores refuse to sell to people who wear crosses around their necks because the bookseller doesn't approve of religious garb? 

VR: The answer to this involves a distinction between commercial services that provide expression, or speech, on behalf of gay weddings, and those that don't. For the former, I there is a problem with a business putting a sign up in their hardware store that says "no gays." (So if a gay person needs a screw, they have to get it somewhere else). However, businesses that provide celebratory expression should be able, if this is a stated policy, to provide that expression only if that is what they support. If you are a professional speechwriter, should you be accused of discrimination if you will only provide your services for Republican candidates and not Democratic candidates?

Apologies for the bad pun. 

Make Christianity the state religion? Actually there's quite a lot of support for it!

Here. 

I am surprised.

The moral impact of Christianity, and atheism

A great deal of fundamental ideas which we all accept as a matter of social justice came from Christians that was not accepted by, say, the leaders of Roman society at the time. Now, the history isn't perfect, and there is plenty you can use against it in the Bible and in Christian history. But what does evolution give you? Evolution says that certain critters have certain advantages over certain other critters, and that using those advantages allows the critters with those advantages to pass on their genes. If materialistic atheism is true, there is nothing in reality that supports treating people with prima facie disadvantages as equal, as opposed to simply using your advantage over them for you and those you feel close to. 

It is not as if everything in morality is religious, it's not. There are two forces in human nature that very often push us in a moral direction: social utility and sympathy. But we get social utility from those like ourselves (the social disutility of being a n-lover at a Klan meeting should be obvious), and we tend to lack sympathy for others when the others are one of "them" and not one of us. The antidote to this is found in the parable of the Good Samaritan but it cuts against human nature to a very large extent. 

I find it distressing that movements within atheism are starting to see the conflict between belief and unbelief as a war, not a debate, and are starting to adopt an us vs. them mentality. I remember the well-intentioned ideas that launched the French Revolution and the Russian revolution, and remember also where these movements ended: with guillotines and gulags. As a result I am concerned about what is going to happen if the secularist movement today gets a lot of political power. These people started off with combining secularism with a passion for social justice, and look what happened to them. The death tolls of the Soviet Union far outstrip all the "holy horrors" of Christianity, such as the Inquisition. It's not even close. One commentator over on Debunking Christianity once started talking about putting Christians in camps and preventing them from reproducing. Of course most people of that mindset don't actually come out and say this stuff, but that doesn't mean they would resist the temptation if they thought they could actually cure the great "mind virus" that way.

What is deism? Not what you think!

Bob: 

Keep in mind, Victor, that those words were penned by a deist - a man who believed there were no consequences to his actions (or inactions). His "God" was a distant, uninvolved, non-actor, Who cared not what happened in the creation He (quite unaccountably) set in motion aeons ago. 

Lord, give me an honest atheist any day over a damned deist!

I don't think you have Jefferson's desim quite right Bob. It's quite different from what most people think it is.

If you believe in the idea of a transcendent, as opposed to a simply immanent God (such as many Hindus accept), there are choices here as well. For example, some believers in God are called deists, in that they don’t accept special revelation. By special revelation, I mean deliberate activity on the part of God to make people aware of who God is and what he expects from people. Typically people think of deists as holding that God created the universe and then ceased to be active within it.

However, historically deists were committed to the following five points.
1) God exists
2) God is to be worshipped
3) The practice of virtue is the true worship of God
4) People must repent of wrongdoing
5) There are future rewards and punishments.

This is somewhat different from what people today think of as deism.

Avery Dulles on Jefferson's Deism.

Religious motives for doing good

What are the religious motivations for good behavior? Is it all reward and punishment, or is it motivating for people to believe that their good actions are actions that fulfill the intended purpose of their existence? 

Left-wing tolerance

Herbert Marcuse wrote: 
“Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested…   Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

Marcusian tolerance seems to be taking over.  See here. 

Marriage and limiting government

Marriage licenses, at the very least, require explanation. It would be interesting to know what other countries do on this issue. 

One argument on this issue might be this. People who enter marriages naturally bring children into the mix. But having children means adding mouths to feed, and children to educate, etc. So the government compensates people who risk this with various financial advantages. However gay relationships don't incur this risk, so they should not receive this kind of compensation.

One firm conviction I have on this issue is that my government is not competent to adjudicate the moral question of homosexuality one way or the other. I am against sodomy laws and forcing bakers to bake rainbow shaped cakes with two grooms on top for exactly the same reason.

A review of Mind and Cosmos

Here. 

A conservative admits the G W Bush administration was a disaster

Here. 

Protecting the marketplace of ideas

It's been decades since I've voted for a Republican for President. I think it unlikely that I will break that streak this year. But, recently, I have been concerned about the left-wing's willingness to compromise the openness of the marketplace of ideas. I would have considered it the openness of the marketplace of ideas to be a very liberal idea.

But consider this piece on Robert George. According to this piece, he's a bigot, his views are not politically adequate, so he should be stripped of an endowed chair at Princeton. Do they give endowed chairs to be people because we like what they say?

I think academic independence from politics and ideology is a great value. For example, I don't have a problem with people disagreeing with Thomas Nagel. What makes me mad is when his philosophical arguments are attacked not because he is mistaken, but because they give aid and comfort to political miscreants like ID advocates. Consider this from the Nagel-Weisberg review of Mind and Cosmos.

The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief.”

So we can't say certain things because it might become bulletin-board material for the bad guys. Really. 

You gotta have a license?

In the case of gay marriage, one place to look to start with is the whole issue of what the government is doing giving out marriage licenses in the first place. With fishing licenses and driver's licenses, the government will stop you from fishing or driving if you don't have one. In the case of a marriage license, there is nothing you can do as a couple where the government will say "If you want to do that, you gotta have a license."

Tom Gilson gives a further defense of the AFR

YMBA

Japanese Buddhists on the Hawaiian Islands formed the Young Man's Buddhist Association, or the YMBA.

Can you imagine the Buddhist monks doing this song in their orange robes?

Why aiming to marginalize is a self-defeating enterprise

One question that interests me is the question is whether debate of any kind can do anything to marginalize an opposing viewpoint, or whether there is a way of conducting discussion with the intent to marginalize, or whether all you can do in arguing against a position is to show that it is mistaken.

I am inclined to think the latter. If you are going to discuss something, you are required to be as fair and as respectful as you can be, as is required by the Principle of Charity.

I am familiar with Wolfgang Pauli's expression "not even wrong," but I think all that debate can do is establish wrongness. Now you might do so well in criticizing something that no one will ever again want to defend the opposing view, but there is nothing you can do to aim for that result. You just have to argue that you are right, and argue well.

That is what critiquing an opposing view involves. You have to work hard to understand your opponents. You will perhaps preach well to the choir, but your opponents will have every right to accuse you of the straw man fallacy. People who are informed about what they believe will look for misrepresentations in the work of people who are trying to ridicule them. And in my experience, they will typically find it.

For people who want to abolish philosophy of religion, for example, I am inclined to use a version of the pro-choice slogan: "If you don't believe in abortion, don't get one." If you can't find in yourself enough intellectual sympathy with an opposing viewpoint to deal with it fairly, you are probably better off leaving criticism of that viewpoint to others. Nothing requires you, as a theist or an atheist, to write argue for what you believe.

The predominance of religious believers in philosophy of religion, to me, has a pedestrian explanation, believers are articulating what they do believe, so they are more likely to do philosophy of religion. They think that religion holds the right answer to the basic questions of life. Atheists think that religious answers are the wrong answer, which means the right answer lies elsewhere. People may be concerned about answers they think wrong, but most people don't find it very exciting to devote themselves to wrong answers. They want to spell out the right answers.

It's not niceness, so if people ask "Why do we have to be so nice" they are missing the point. The issue is just doing the job of criticizing effectively. If you don't think you have to try to be fair, you probably won't do a good job.

Shadow to Light on conversion and deconversion: We have met the enemy and it is us, or is it them?

Here. 

When someone becomes a Christian, what sets the stage is the following intuitive insight: There is something very wrong with me; I need to change.

When someone becomes an atheist, what sets the stage i(s) the following intuitive insight: There is something very wrong with them; they need to be stopped.

The Great Commission, atheist style

Therefore, go and make atheists of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Richard Dawkins,  and of Sam Harris,  and of Christopher Hitchens. 

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the atheism that you have.

Seriously, why all the witnessing for atheism? 

Here's a site where you can get atheist tracts to pass out. 

Aiming to marginalize

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn’t argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we’re doing is, we’re presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.-A. C. Grayling

Really? Tim Chaffey replies: 

Finally, Grayling’s quote is ridiculous. When were atheists burned at the stake by Christians? Christianity was the dominant faith in the U.S. for over 200 years. When has an atheist ever been burned at the stake in the U.S.? When were atheists burned at the stake in Europe? Did the Catholics do that? I know that many Christians were burned at the stake (Hus, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, Sattler, et al.). So where is the evidence that Christians in power burned atheists at the stake?

Most importantly, are atheists just arguing? No, some of them seek to marginalize religious belief. This is their stated purpose. Here is actor Chris O'Dowd: 

“There’s going to be a turning point where it’s going to be like racism. You know, ‘You’re not allowed to say that weird shit! It’s mad! And you’re making everybody crazy!“

How to criticize religion without being a bigot

Here. 

Finish this sentence

 If someone uses the n-word a lot and makes a lot of crude jokes at the expense of African-Americans they have got to be a......

What the laws of nature tell us

“But, don’t you see,” said I, “that science never could show anything of the sort?”

“Why on earth not?”

“Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists—anything ‘outside.’ How could you find that out by studying simply Nature?”

--C. S. Lewis

Natural laws only tell you what will happen as long as there is no interference in the system from the outside. Furthermore, those laws can’t tell you if such interference is going to occur.

Here. 

Tim McGrew's Argument from Undesigned Coincidences

If it's all made up, how did this happen. Here. 

Why did we go into Iraq?

 Is it possible that what we sought to create over there was a democratic "beachhead" that was supposed to lead other Arabic nations to accept democracy? That has the advantage of being a more noble motive than oil, but it has the disadvantage of being doomed from the start.

Lydia McGrew on Testability, Likelihoods, and Design

Here.

Three Universalist proof texts

John 12:32: “And I, when I am lifted upfrom the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

Romans 5:18: “Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.”

Col 1:19-20  “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

What does it mean to say that God is not physical?

It seems to me that the statement "God is not physical" can mean

1) God's acts are not determined by the laws of physics.
2) God has no location in space and time. 
3) God's acts have no physical effects. 

The first true are true, orthodox, and biblical. The third is, of course unorthodox. 

Bayesianism in mathematics and philosophy

Bayesianism is a mathematical concept, but it is used in epistemological contexts. Basically, it is a model of what confirmation is. 

From the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy;

Though a mathematical triviality, the Theorem's central insight — that a hypothesis is supported by any body of data it renders probable — lies at the heart of all subjectivist approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/

My overall picture of epistemological justification goes something like this. We all start from different places, and have different initial dispositions with respect to the world as we experience it. Then, we acquire further information. Historically people have tried to pull their model of the world apart and start only from certain basics, and believe only what can be built up from there, but I don't think that's necessary, especially when the people who say we have to do it disagree about what has to be in the base. I think it makes more sense to adjust the beliefs we have as we go along and move incrementally toward consensus as evidence comes in. And with some things, the hope of consensus is pretty slight in the foreseeable future, so we are going to keep disagreeing. I think, for example, that atheists and theists are here to stay for a long time, and the fact that we aren't closing in on agreement does not necessarily mean that one side or the other is just being stubborn or delusional. I would say it's because the issue is too complex and there are too many parameters to it to be sure that we have considered everything, and fairly. It's easy to come up with motives for our opponents, but that in itself proves nothing whatsoever. 

I believe in God, but there is plenty of disconfirming evidence. It is just that the confirming evidence, all told, outweighs it, as I see it. 

An incomplete slogan

When people say "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," I have to ask "But who interpreted it?

Ideological violence

We might identify a class of violence we call ideological violence. We can start be identifying overall worldviews. These might be religious, in the case of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or Hinduism, etc. or these might be materialist, or what have you. Then we might ask how much we care whether other people believe what we do. As humans we like to see people believe what we believe. And here there is a huge amount of variation in how much we would like to see others agree with us. Some Christians are really motivated to see everyone else become a Christian, others care a whole lot less. Some Christians think salvation is at stake, since the only way to be saved is to believe as they do. Others think God's grace can save nonbelievers (see the documents of Vatican II as an example). Atheists are the same way. Some atheists think belief in God is a "mind virus" we've got to cure for the sake of civilization, others have no interest in whether others believe as we do. Usually theism or atheism isn't the whole of what we would like people to believe. I don't know of any believer in God who thinks belief that God exists is necessary and sufficient for salvation. Now, caring a lot over whether other people believe as we do doesn't necessarily mean we will use force to make sure they do. we might decide that it will do more harm than good for our cause. To use violence, we have to think it will work, and that it's appropriate.  Theism and atheism are not answers to the question of the meaning of life, but they are necessary conditions for ideologies that some people think are the answer. Communists for example, thought that religion had to be destroyed so that we could achieve the classless and stateless society. 

There is a road to ideological violence whether or not you believe in a god or not. 

Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge

My own response to the "no evidence" charge is, I think pretty well known, and it goes like this: 

We first have to define what evidence is. 

I understand evidence in Bayesian terms. For me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. By this definition, something can have evidence for it and be false. 

There is a whole boatload of stuff that look to me to be a LOT more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Some of it's in the Bible, most of it isn't. 

Here's a short list: 

1) The fact that we can reason about the world. The fact that it is even possible to go from evidence to a conclusion. If this isn't possible, then science isn't even possible. But that implies that our acts of reasoning are governed by the laws of logic, as opposed to the laws of physics. But naturalism says the laws of physics govern everything, and the laws of logic are superfluous as an explanation for any event in the universe. 
2) That there are stable laws of nature, so that the distant past resembles the recent past. It's easy to imagine an atheistic world with no stability at all, where the laws keep changing for no reason. Why is that not the actual world? 
3) The we have just the right cosmic constants for life to emerge. 
4) That DNA allows for gradual change, as opposed to being completely static or so radically changeable that it is completely unpredictable. 
5) That monotheism arose against all odds in a polytheistic world in a country that hardly qualifies as a world superpower, and that it persisted in spite of the efforts of the superpowers like Assyria, Babylon, the Seleucids, and the Romans, to get it to assimilate into a polytheistic culture. 
6) That the disciples of Jesus got in the faces of those responsible for Jesus's crucifixion and told them that the Jesus they crucified was Lord and God, and lived to tell the tale and found Christianity. (If they killed Jesus, they can kill you too). 
7) That archaeology has discovered that if Luke was writing a story about the founding of Christianity, it wrote it in such a way that the "research" for his "fictional" story was corroborated centuries later by archaeology, "research" that would have required him to know all sorts of detail from Jerusalem to Malta at just the right time in the first century. 
8) That Christianity became the dominant religion of an empire in spite of getting no help, and intermittent persecution, from the political leaders of that empire, for nearly three centuries.

I can understand concluding, at the end of the day, that this evidence is outweighed by the evidence for atheism. What is beyond my comprehension is the idea that this somehow isn't evidence AT ALL. Repeating "God of the Gaps" fifty times is not a response. 

Kant vs. Dawkins on evidence of absence

Kant maintained that what we know about the world around us can only be about the way the world appears to us, not the world as it is in itself. Therefore, we are left with just putting our appearances together, and given this we can't expect there to be evidence either way. So, Kant said, we have to decide whether to believe in God or not depending on whether we think it would make us a better person if we believed. And, he thinks that belief in God would be better for our character, and therefore we should believe. 

Contrast him with someone like Richard Dawkins, of God Delusion fame. Dawkins thinks that if there were a God, there would be evidence for his existence. But, there isn't any evidence that isn't better explained by evolution. He thinks we can know reality, and it makes more sense without belief in God. In fact, he actually thinks God couldn't possibly explain anything at all, and it would be the ultimate wrong answer whether or not there was a good evolutionary explanation for everything. For him, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To believe in God is to embrace a belief that is almost certainly false, and therefore cannot be moral. 

Del Ratzsch on design arguments and the ID debate

Here. 

We will not pursue that dispute here except to note that even if the case is made that ID could not count as proper science, which is controversial,[24] that would not in itself demonstrate a defect in design arguments as such. Science need not be seen as exhausting the space of legitimate conclusions from empirical data. In any case, the floods of vitriol in the current ID discussion suggest that much more than the propriety of selected inferences from particular empirical evidences is at issue.

Eric Hyde on the no-evidence charge

Here. 

1. There is no evidence for God’s existence.

There is at least one major problem with this line as it is typically presented.

One often hears, “there is no evidence for God, therefore Christians believe in fairytales,” (or something to that effect) when what is actually meant is more like, “there is no physical proof of God’s being in the physical world, therefore Christians believe in fairytales (since all ‘real’ things are physical).”

The fact that Christians have never claimed to believe in a physical God – as merely one more physical being among all other physical beings in the universe – does not stop these sorts of atheists from thinking they have laid waste to 40 centuries of religious thought, experience, and refinement with the mere mention of this evidentiary boogieman. It rarely occurs to them that such physical proof would actually run 100% counter to Judeo-Christian theistic claims. Their argument against a physical God is actually applauded and defended by Christians.

This fact is not, of course, proof that the Christian claim is true, but merely proof that with such attacks the atheist has not even begun to swing in the direction of Christianity.

However, if what they mean is something more like, “There is no logical evidence of God’s existence…” then the straw man suddenly becomes a brick wall. The logical arguments for God are vast and time tested against some of the greatest minds of all time working tirelessly against them. They are well-known arguments and can be easily found online or in print, but let me give one quick example. I recently read someone who claimed that I conceded the atheist’s argument that God is not real since the faith teaches He is not physical. Let me help those who might struggle with this idea using a quote from David Bentley Hart: “Why can’t there be a physical explanation of existence? Because anything physical is, by definition, something that exists. So there cannot be a physical cause of existence.” The faith claims this non-physical, yet real, entity is God. His absolute “existence” is more real than physical existence by order of priority.

But besides logical arguments an additional reason why atheists often fail with this approach is because they run up against Christians with living experiences with God. There is no amount of speculative babbling from the uninitiated that can oppose the one whose faith is built on a living subjectivity to the presence of God. On these matters Kierkegaard had it right – in objectivity there is no truth for the single individual; the truth is subjectivity.

Is faith avoidable?

The definition of faith is as complicated one. Lots of people study the issue of religion, but no one can examine every parameter of the issue. So, we have to live on the basis of some view of ultimate reality or another, fully acting on the view we accept, even though it is always possible that there is some feature of reality that we haven't considered that might give us a reason to believe and act in the opposite way. Defined this way, faith is impossible to avoid. 

Why the brain presupposes a mind

Why are mental states not states of the brain? Well, what is a brain, after all? A brain has to be described as a set of particles. No individual particle of the brain is the brain, it is as set. But what makes a set a real object? If you don't accept essences of some kind or another. 

What is a naturalistic perspective on what a "whole" is? Here is David Hume. 

“The WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular cause of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

What is a whole? It is a product of AN ARBITRARY ACT OF THE MIND," and not something in the nature of things. If the brain is a whole, then it can't exist without there being a mind. It s a mind-dependent object. 

About that theon

The point about the theon is simply this. You are trying to define naturalism. I maintain that I really have nothing at stake in calling what I believe in natural or supernatural. I know Lewis likes to uses the term "supernaturalism" for his position, and I have no problem with that, but what I do have a problem with is the failure on the part of some to provide some criteria for what is natural. With no principled criteria, I can simply baptize my ontology as naturalistic. If you are trying so say, "You can't being that into science, you IDiot, you can't believe in that, it's supernatural, it's a bunch of woo, etc., then we need some criteria for doing that kind of exclusion. I don't need the criteria, you do. 

What are you excluding?

My AFR argument is perfectly clear on the kind of naturalism that it is attacking. It makes a distinction between mentalistic and non-mentalistic world-views, and it maintains that any world-view that is meaningfully naturalistic has to exclude certain things from the basic level of analysis: normativity, intentionality, subjectivity, and purpose. So whether we use the term physicalism or naturalism or materialism doesn't matter. What matters is what has to be excluded from the "natural" level. If you can't come up with anything that makes something meaningfully naturalistic, then I will advance my Christian theism as a liberal form of naturalism. God then becomes an unusual physical particle, which I will call the theon.

Defining the natural

Well, how do you define the physical, or the natural? I would have no problems whatsoever if, for example, the Apostle's Creed were true, but everything was "natural" in some sense. The word "supernatural" does not appear in the Creed at all. So, maybe it's all natural, but nature has more in it than what we used to think it did.

Is dualism and empirical question?

I am not sure that dualism is an empirical question. The implications of materialism might be such that, if materialism were true, no one would believe anything on the basis of evidence. After all, inference based on evidence logically entails mental causation, but if materialism is true, then all causation is physical, and therefore nonmental causation. Thus the success of science doesn't support materialism, it refutes it. The more evidence we have that science works, the more proof there is that there is real mental causation, which is logically incompatible with materialism. 

Is the claim "No one believes anything for a reason" an empirical question? If we look at the world and conclude that that proposition is true, then that would work only if it is possible to reach conclusions on the basis of reasons, which in turn is impossible unless there is mental causation and materialism is false. Science could never reach the conclusion that it is true unless it is prepared to blow itself up and condemn itself and every other human epistemic endeavor as hopelessly irrational.

We should be tolerant of everyone, except, of course, for bigots

Here.  On the intolerance of tolerance. HT: Bob Prokop

10 Questions for Materialist Atheists

Here. 

1.      Consider this assertion: Nothing exists but those things with which science can experiment. Do you believe this because of scientific reasons, or it is a dogma for you?

2.      Many materialists believe, with Steven Weinberg [1], that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. Do you really believe that everything is pointless? In that case, why do you get up in the night when your child is ill?

3.      Science seems to have discovered many things about the universe and the world around us. But some materialist thinkers, like Stephen Hawking [2], say that objective reality in unknowable. Do you believe that scientific discoveries are real, or are they just mental constructs of man? In the second case, why does technology work?

4.      Science has discovered that nature is subject to surprisingly simple laws, if they are expressed in mathematical form. Materialist philosophers believe that there is no need to find an explanation for the existence of the laws. They are just there, with no reason.Do you agree with this assertion? Do you have scientific reasons to believe it, or do you believe it without reason? In other words, is it a dogma for you?

5.      The evolution of living beings takes place through a combination of chance and necessity. Materialists say that this proves that there cannot be design in evolution. In our experiments on artificial life (a branch of computer science that simulates the behavior of living beings with a program) we use a combination of chance and necessity, parallel to that in biological evolution. It is evident that our experiments are designed. Knowing this, do you still affirm that biological evolution is not designed? Do you believe it for scientific reasons, or is it a dogma for you?

6.      Materialism affirms that we are not free, that we are programmed machines, thatwhenever we act or think, we have no option but to act or think as we actually act or think. Are you a materialist because you have meditated and found reasons for this position, or because you have been programmed to accept it?

7.      Materialists assert that in nature there are only efficient causes, that there are no final causes or purposes. You are a part of nature. How then can you have purposes, how can you set goals and work to achieve them? Or is that just an illusion? In that case,why should we work to achieve anything, if everything is decided beforehand?

8.      Is man just an animal, as materialists say? If we analyze the matter carefully, we can see that the differences between man and the animals are overwhelming [3]. Are you sure that man is just an animal? Why do you believe that? Is it a dogma for you, or do you have reasons to believe it, apart from having read about it?

9.      To come to the conclusion that God does not exist, have you studied carefully the Christian idea of God? Or perhaps, following Richard Dawkins [4], do you think that, as God does not exist, you don’t have to lose your time studying what other people say about Him? In other words: Is the inexistence of God a start point for you, a dogma?

Antony Flew

10.  One of the most important atheist philosophers of the twentieth century (Antony Flew, 1923-2010) changed his mind in 2004 and published a book [5] explaining the reasons for his decision. Have you read Flew’s book, or  will you take care not to read it, so that your atheistic convictions won’t be in danger?

[1] Steven Weinberg, The first three minutes, 1977, Basic Books.

[2] Stephen Hawking, L. Mlodinow, The grand design, 2010, Transworld Digital. Seehttp://populscience.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-grand-design.html

[3] Manuel Alfonseca, Is man just an animal?http://populscience.blogspot.com/2015/06/is-man-just-animal.html

[4] Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, 2008, Mariner Books. Seehttp://populscience.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-dawkins-delusion.html

[5] Antony Flew, There is a God: how the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind, 2008, HarperOne.

What is religion for legal purposes?

If it is unconstitutional to establish a religion, then it might sometimes be important to determine whether something is a "religion" for Establishment Clause purposes.  For example, Malnak v Yogi (1979, 3rd Cir.) considered whether SCI/TM (scientific creative intelligence/transcendental meditation), offered as an elective course in New Jersey public schools, was a religion.  If so, offering such a course--even on an elective basis--might be unconstitutional.  Those challenging the course produced evidence that instructors told students that "creative intelligence is the basis of all growth" and that getting in touch with this intelligence through mantras is the way to "oneness with the underlying reality of the universe."  They also pointed out that students received personal mantras in puja ceremonies that include chanting and ritual.  On the other hand, supporters of the course showed that SCI/TM put forward no absolute moral code, had no organized clergy or observed holidays, and had no ceremonies for passages such as marriage and funerals.  Is SCI/TM a religion?  Judge Adams of the Third Circuit applied these three criteria before  answering the question in the affirmative:

1. A religion deals with issues of ultimate concern; with what makes life worth living; with basic attitudes toward fundamental problems of human existence.
2. A religion presents a comprehensive set of ideas--usually as "truth," not just theory.
3.  A religion generally has surface signs (such as clergy, observed holidays, and ritual) that can be analogized to well-recognized religions.

Here. 

God is not Tinkerbell

Some people seem to have the strange idea that God really exists for the people who believe in God, but does not exist for atheists. No side is in error, reality is just what you believe.

This makes no sense to me.

A debate book on Lewis's apologetics

Here.  My opponent is David Kyle Johnson.

Niceness and productivity

As many of you know, Bob Prokop and I go back a long ways, to our days as ASU undergraduates in the mid-seventies. We were members of a science fiction club called OSFFA, the Organized Science Fiction Fans of Arizona. Bob and our late friend Joe Sheffer were the resident Catholics, I was the token Methodist, and the President, as I recall, was an atheist and Heinlein fan named Bill Patterson. There were a lot of very passionate discussions. I don't think we ever were paragons of disputational civility. In fact, at one of the discussions was cartooned by an artistic member, showing Bill with a T-shirt that said "Heinlein is Power," Bob with one that said "I agree with nothing!" and Joe with one that said "I am wise." (I wasn't there that night).

Alas, Joe passed away in 1989, and Bill passed away a couple of years ago. He was known as the official biographer for Heinlein. And, to my knowledge, he remained an atheist throughout his life. But he ended up being heavily influence by St. Thomas Aquinas, and described himself at one point as a Thomistic atheist. He also was an opponent of abortion.

It isn't just niceness that makes productive discussion possible. But there is a state of mind that really tunes out people on the other side.

On multicultural ethics

Isn't ethics just the business of determining which moral beliefs are right or wrong? Foreign cultures practice

1. Female Genital Mutilation

2. The Caste system in India

3. The forced marriage of prepubescent girls in India

4. The execution of adulterers and active homosexuals, and the flogging of women who engage in suspicious behavior in places like Afghanistan

5. The bribing of rape victims' families in South Korea. 

6. The strict authoritarianism and glass ceilings of Japanese corporations. 

All of these practices have a common element, they treat people unequally based on who they are. So, egalitarianism makes us on the one hand makes us want to treat other cultures as equals, and yet at the same time the very practices of those cultures that we are considering are anything but egalitarian. 

Jeff Lowder

I want to say, for the record, I think people like Jeff do an enormous service to the whole community of dialogue. It was at his invitation that the first Argument from Reason paper appeared on Internet Infidels.

The question that I am concerned with is whether there is a place for an open forum of debate and dialogue between believers and unbelievers. Some people engage discussion in ways that has a tendency to shut down discussion and polarize believers and nonbelievers. In the spirit of I Pet 3:15, and in the spirit of Lewis's founding of the Oxford Socratic Club, I think it wrong for believers or unbelievers to shut down discussion.

He takes as lot of abuse from more militant types taking the position he takes, and has dealt with it with far more grace than I would have.

How do you get good people to do bad things?

You start with a greater good and a higher purpose, and then you buy in on the idea that the end justifies the means, and if they believe in God, that the means are acceptable to God. With Christianity at least, you have a belief in place that people are supposed to have a choice if their obedience is to be meaningful, and that the future course of the great events of history are ultimately under the control of God, not ourselves. Christianity does not encourage people to think that the end justifies the means. 

Just to give you an example, you hear a lot of anti-gay preaching from Christians in America, but even when you hear of queerbashings, religious condemnations of homosexuality, in almost all cases, aren't even used as a pretext, much less a motivation. Why? 

Why were there these mass killings in countries like China, Nazi Germany, and revolutionary France, and Soviet Russia. The French and Russian revolutions started off with what appear to be good motives about overthrowing tyrannical monarchs and fair treatment for workers. The French started with liberty, equality and fraternity and ended up with Madame la Guillotine. The Russian revolution overthrew the Tsar, and put in the Party. 

Some atheists today think that they have a great purpose of saving the world from religion. I am starting to hear "the end justifies the means" reasoning from some of them. Let's be honest, these people have no qualms about stirring up anti-religious hatred. What other than their lack of power to do so will prevent them from doing the kind of harm these previous revolutionaries did, all in the name of reason and science.