An atheist convention seeks the end of religion

Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were at this one.

Abortion and health insurance

I must say I don't understand the abortion controversy. Or rather, I don't understand how it is playing out in the political arena. There seem to be three groups on this issue.

1) Pro-lifers. Abortion sucks. It is wrong, and in fact is every bit as wrong as choking a 3-year-old to death. We ought to prevent abortions in any way possible, including the use of the long arm of the criminal law.

2) Abortion sucks. But it may not be as wrong as choking a 3-year-old to death. The loss of a fetus is a tragic loss, but not on the scale of the loss of a born baby. However, we should keep the long arm of the criminal law out of it, since this would involve an inappropriate interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

3) Abortion doesn't suck at all. It's like removing a blob of tissue.

Now in my life I have gone back and forth between 1 and 2. But it seems odd. Surely the 1s and the 2s outnumber the 3s. Shouldn't these two sides work together to find public policies that will discourage abortion? Do pro-lifer political leaders prefer passing ideological litmus tests to preventing real abortions.

Now consider two possible futures.

1) Roe v. Wade is overturned, but we never achieve universal health insurance coverage for all children.

2) Roe is never overturned, but universal health insurance is assured for every child.

In which world, do you think, there will be fewer abortions? Remember that overturning Roe will not make any abortions illegal. It may prevent two abortions in Mississippi, but that is about all. Since abortions are far less expensive than taking care of children, isn't it likely that universal health care for children will result in fewer abortions than overturning Roe?

The Christian Progressive Movement

This is the website for the Christian Progressive Movement. HT: Jarrod Cochran.

Diamondbacks 5, Cubs 1

It's all over. Now, probably the Rockies and a tougher challenge.

Diamondbacks 8, Cubs 4

Diamondbacks 3, Cubs 1

Game 1 of the division series. We can't let the Cubs stop selling those 1908 World Champion t-shirts. I mean if the Cubs keep winning I'll have to stop using the irrational beliefs of die-hard Cub fans at the beginning of every season that this will be the year they win the Series as an example of an unjustified belief that might turn out to be true. We can't have that. But if tonight's game is any indication, there's nothing to worry about.

The canon within the canon, ethical relativism, and ther problem of evil

Yes, for me the sacrificial love of Christ is the canon within the canon. If that's cherry picking, so be it!
Ron: It appears to me that debate about moral realism (or objectivism) vs. moral relativism to be fruitless. I think everyone at heart knows that moral values really exist and aren't just subjective constructions. Otherwise, atheists wouldn't point out all the bad events in Christian history. Why would Dawkins point out the moral evils of Christians if he didn't believe that morality was something absolute and not just a cultural or biological product?
VR: Precisely. And if relativism is where naturalism leads, it lets the air out of the argument from evil. I've often wondered why the argument from evil is often thought to be somehow stronger than your average argument. It points to an explanatory gap in the theist's understanding of the world, but there are plenty of arguments that point out explanatory gaps for naturalism.
What I come up with is that, on the face of things, it allows the atheist to hang on to his or her moral purity. It presumably lets you call evil evil, and not have to fit it into some broader pattern in which it is good in some sense. But if this comes from a naturalist, and if Lewis is right that naturalism is going to lead logically to some kind of moral subjectivism, then it seems to me that that advantage disappears. You can't say of the Amalekite massacre that it is really, truly, honest to goodness evil.

What??? No more memes???

Plantinga's critique of Dawkins

Reply to Ron on the problem of evil

Ron wrote: The AFE is a 'defeater' argument designed to show that there are internal contradictions in the theistic position. So while Lewis is correct technically, he misses the point that the AFE is concerned only with the rationality of the theistic position. The position of the atheist (or anyone else who uses the AFE) is not relevant. I think this is a mistake I've seen Christian apologists make.

VR: It is quite true that you can advance the argument from evil as a reductio against one's Christian opponent. What that entails is showing that as a Christian one must accept the moral premise of the argument (typically, a perfectly good being will prevent unnecessary suffering if possible, unless that suffering is necessary for a greater good), even though the atheist objector considers it subjective. But can you count on the Christian theist to accept that premise? Even if the theist accepts that premise in human contexts (and even that's not clear) it doesn't follow that the theist is inconsistent in not applying it to God.

In his debate with Keith Parsons William Lane Craig says that God is justified in ordering the Amalekites to be slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child, because God is the author and giver of life and therefore can take life as he chooses. Of course, Parsons found this shocking, and I personally find it counterintuitive. But I don;'t find Craig's position inconsistent. I don't see how an atheist can object to Craig's position without appealing to an objective standard that both the atheist and the theist share.

I've covered and discussed this point on here quite a bit, as the link should show.

The Diamonbacks are in the playoffs

For the first time since 2002, with three mid-season minor league callups in the starting lineup at the end of the year.

A well-known C. S. Lewis passage on the argument from evil

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless–I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

From Mere Christianity, p. 38.

Don't like gay people? Move to Iran!

They don't have any there, according to their president. Actually, the Qu'ran says that you must execute people who perform homosexual acts if it is observed by two witnesses. Or, it's confessed. So unless the President has inspected all the closets in his country, I don't know how he knows.

Arguments that don't mix part II

Here's a pair of arguments dear to the heart of atheists which I think cannot be consistently used together. One of them is the god-of-the-gaps objection to various theistic arguments like the argument from design. According to the GGO, finding an explanatory gap for the naturalist is not the same as refuting naturalism. Further evidence may come in which shows that the gap in question is not a real gap at all.

The other is the argument from evil. What the argument from evil points to is the fact that some evils are unexplained from the point of view of theism. There is, as it were, an explanatory gap for the theist, something the theist can't explain. Now how is it possible for atheists to use the argument from evil against theism, but then use the god of the gaps objection to theistic arguments. If a gap is fatal in the one case, it should be fatal in the other. If the gap is nonfatal in one case, it should be nonfatal in the other. What gives?

Can Kooks make valid points?

Because Jonathan Wells' name came up again on my blog, I am redating an old post I did on Wells.

· At 7:53 AM, Ahab said…
Wells wrote:
As a theology graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I learned that the anti-religious implications of Darwinism have profoundly influenced modern theologians. Even with only an undergraduate background in science, however, I knew that the evidence for Darwinism was not as solid as the theologians seemed to think. If Darwinism were solid science, its anti-religious implications would (in my opinion) be inescapable. The more I learned, however, the more it seemed to me that Darwinism was just old-fashioned materialistic philosophy masquerading as modern empirical science. Because of its profound and harmful consequences for religion, science and culture, I decided to devote my life to criticizing this philosophy and destroying its domination of our educational system.


Victor, this guy comes across as a real quack. How can you take him seriously?
Dawinism dominates our education system? Damn, a large percentage of people in our county don't even understand the basics of evolutionay theory because so little time is spent in school explaining it.
And the idea that theologians have been relying on Darwin is even kookier.

Again, how can you, or anyone, take him seriously?



These comments are certainly ones that I would not make, simply because using the term "Darwinism" without clarification is a recipe for confusion. It's a mistake to treat "Darwinism" as a package deal. At least Alvin Plantinga, in his well-known essay "When Faith and Reason Clash" , suggests five different claims made by “Darwinists,” which in my book I distinguish as the five points of evolution. These points are:

1. The Ancient Earth Thesis. The earth has been in existence for a very long time.
2. The Gradual Emergence of Species Thesis. Different species emerged gradually over this time-period.
3. The Common Ancestry thesis: All life is related to a single common ancestor that was the first life form.
4. Darwinism or the Grand Evolutionary Story: The claim that speciation occurred exclusively through naturalistic processes like random variation and natural selection.
5. The Naturalistic Origin of Life thesis, the claim that life itself emerged naturalistically, with no supernatural intervention.

One of my editorial readers at IVP suggested that I include a sixth point, that the initial conditions of the universe were not selected by design. This would make Darwinism explicitly atheistic. Without the sixth point, Darwinism is perfectly compatible with theism.

However, I am not sure that I understand the claim that people don’t understand Darwinism. There’s a “one-minute version” of evolutionism which I sometimes present in class, which says that if you have enough time, if you have a way for species to vary, if species reproduce, then it is theoretically possible to produce the effects of intelligent design without a designer in virtue of the facts that these non-designed products would not survive to pass their characteristics on to descendents if they didn’t have design-ish characteristics.

Evolution has certainly been a very influential idea in our culture, and it can be an influential idea without most people knowing much of the details of how evolutionary theory works or deals with the problems it faces. There are people in theology who have been greatly influenced by evolution; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would be a good example. Lewis liked to distinguish popular evolutionism from the actual scientific theory, which he considered to be theologically benign.

Wells’ motivations and understanding of the role of evolution in Western culture are, however, independent of his claims concerning the strength or weakness of the evidence supporting it. The question I wanted to pose while getting into the discussion of the icons was: do the standard evolution textbooks make overblown claims about the “icons” of evolution. It seems to me that a person can have a good handle on the evidence surrounding Darwinian theory and at the same time have pretty flaky ideas about the social and philosophical implications of that same theory. I think Richard Dawkins is an atrocious philosopher; that doesn’t mean he can’t be a good scientist.

Further notes on inerrancy

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction.7 (RTS) 105.

Twp things to notice. First, as Don points out, the inerrancy Lewis attributes to the "fundamentalist" is a naive, not a theologically nuanced version of the doctrine. Second, it looks as if Calvin (one of the premier champions of biblical authority in the history of the Church) didn't hold this naive doctrine. However, naive versions of the doctrine can easily be found in pews and pulpits all across the evangelical community. Don seems to think Lewis was "caricaturing" the position, but I think there are plenty of people who fit the caricature to a T. It's just that he's not responding to a theologically underdeveloped version of the doctrine.

My own view is that the question "Do you believe in inerrancy" is a little like asking someone "do you believe in evolution?" Depending on how you explain the doctrine, I might answer either question yes or no. I personally dislike the word inerrancy, and prefer to ask "what hermeneutical constraints follow from believing that Scripture is special revelation from God?"

Evangelical groups committed to inerrancy sometimes do purge members whose interpretations of Scripture do not square with inerrancy as they understand it. Such was the case in the purging of Robert Gundry from the Evangelical Theological Society a number of years ago, based on what they took to be "errantist" interpretation of Matthew.

Is Christianity the religion of peace

This book got is up to #188 on the Amazon.com ranking list. I'd like to see what kind of case he makes.

Some reflections of a Christian philosophy of mind

God and the Reach of Reason

This book, by Erik Wielenberg is going to set the gold standard for extensive treatments of C. S. Lewis from a philosophical perspective from people who don't accept the conclusions of Lewis's apologetics. It's a must for all students of Lewis's apologetics, both supporters and opponents.

Secular Outpost features a new Chick tract

Some people are their own caricature. Jack Chick is one of them.