Howard Robinson's Stanford Entry on Dualism

Carrier's Atheistic Cosmological Argument

From the Carrier-Wanchick debate, which I am linking to .

Carrier's Atheistic Cosmological Argument from his Debate with Wanchick.

Atheistic Cosmological Argument (ACA)
The universe is almost entirely lethal to life. By far, most of existence is a radiation-filled vacuum, and there are easily a trillion times more dead worlds than life-bearing planets. Life is clearly an extremely rare and unusual product of the universe. We also know it took the universe billions of years to finally produce any life anywhere, and then only an extremely simple single-celled life form. Then it took billions more years of a long, meandering and often catastrophically failing process of evolutionary trial-and-error to finally produce human beings. CN explains this state of affairs better than BT, since this state of affairs is highly probable on CN but not particularly probable on BT.
Even if a God might have some reason to build a universe this way, he had many other ways he could have chosen (like the way the Bible literally depicts and early Christians believed), and some make more sense on BT (a God has no need of a universe so old or big, for example). But we know of only one way CN could produce human beings: pretty much the way they were, with vast ages of unguided trial-and-error spanning across vast stretches of life-killing space. For example, if CN, then (a) life could only be an accidental byproduct of the organization of the universe, but (b) the only way life could then exist is if the universe were so incredibly old and big that something as improbable as the origin of life would be possible, yet (c) that is exactly the universe we find ourselves in. We have no comparably good explanation for why the universe would be so old and big on BT, or for many other peculiar features of our universe. Therefore, CN is a good explanation for why we observe what we do, while BT is not.

Formally:
P21: If CN is true, the nature and scale of the universe, and the history of life that we actually observe, is the only possible way we could exist that we know of, and is therefore what we would expect to observe.
P22: If BT is true, the nature and scale of the universe, and the history of life that we actually observe, is one of countless possible ways we could exist that we know of, including some that make more sense, and is therefore not what we would expect.
C10: Therefore, per logicum, CN explains what we observe better than BT.

Parody argument:
1. I crossed the street today.
2. If naturalism is true, then the only way I can do that is by walking.
3. If God exists, then there are many ways I can get across the street besides walking, because, for example, God could cause me to apparate across the street Harry Potter style.
4. Therefore, we have evidence that God does not exist, based on the fact that I walked across the street today.

Reply to Clayton on Russell

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

Clayton says: I don't see that Russell failed to take account of this point: If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.You say, "Cosmological arguments always tell you what needs a cause. Contingent things. Things that begin to exist". He doesn't think that cosmological arguments show both that all contingent things need causes _and_ the world is such a contingent thing. He doesn't think that cosmological arguments show that everything that has a beginning needs a cause _and_ the world had a beginning. Now, you might disagree with _this_ point, but I don't think Russell is guilty of quite the strawman you've suggested.

But it seems to me that there are attempts on the table (Russell could have been forgiven for not knowing about the Kalam argument, but the Thomistic argument is another matter) that try to point to a characteristic that the physical world possesses, namely contingency, which God does not possess, such that the world needs a cause and God does not. These attempts may fail, but Russell surely knew that they existed, and nevertheless he presents a one-parapraph refutation of all cosmological arguments that simply presumes that all attempts like this fail. In the process he makes theists look really retarded, because it looks as if advocates of these arguments simply had to be reminded of the simple point that James Mill made to his son John Stuart Mill, and the cosmological argument is a cooked goose. In fact a good deal of the impact of the paragraph has to do with not only that the argument can be refuted, but that this is something that can be done on one's lunch break.

I suppose you can say that here Russell is giving us the "short version" of an argument that can be defended at greater length. And of course lots of people do that sort of thing. You might think that in fact the universe has no cause-requiring properties that God would not equally possess. But in any event he makes it look easy, when it really isn't.

Islam and Calvinism

According to the linked site.

Beyond gaining a better understanding of Islam it is astounding to me how many of the verses from the Qur’an and how many of arguments Muslim theologians and commentaries use sound identical to those used by Calvinists to rationalize the doctrine of predestination. My guess is that if you removed the flowery language and substituted certain words such as Allah in many of the quotes from the Qur’an or Muslim commentaries with the word God that the statements would be indistinguishable from statements on doctrine from not just the Reformers of John Calvin’s day but also indistinguishable from those in modern Reformed Theology like John Piper, R.C. Sproul and others.



I am not sure of the value of this line of argumentation in a critique of Calvinism, however. First, a similarity to something is Islam is not an automatic problem. Muslims do get some things right. Secondly, the Calvinist responses here seem to involve theological voluntarism, which is certainly a natural inference from some things Reformed theologian say, but I don't think is essential to Calvinism. I did say at some points in my exchanges with Calvinists a few months back that I thought that the theodicy moves they were making could as easily be made on behalf of Islam as well as on behalf of Christianity.



The comparisons are interesting in their own right, however.

Christianity: Unique, or Uniquely wrong

Christianity makes a claim on behalf of its founder that is unprecedented and unique in the whole world. No one else says that the God of the Universe walked on earth to save us. Christianity is unique, and uniquely wrong if it's wrong.

William Lane Craig will debate Richard Carrier

This should be really interesting.

The Secular Outpost: Stupid Philosopher Tricks

Keith Parsons thinks philosophers have said a lot of ridiculous things. I think in a lot of cases there is method in their madness even if, at the end of the day, we conclude that there was madness in their method.

The Secular Outpost: Stupid Philosopher Tricks

Is Morality Hard or Easy?

This is, or course, an echo of the chapter in Lewis's Mere Christianity where he asks, "Is Christianity Hard Or Easy?" I put this question on the discussion board for my ethics class, and got three responses, all agreeing that morality is easy, at least for them.

I find this a little stunning.

At least he's not gay

Congressman Pete Stark is a out-of-the-closet atheist in congress. My title is based on one of the comments.

Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism

Explaining these three positions.

A Wikipedia entry on....me??

Meaning of life apologetics and the Keith Parsons rebuttal

Here is an account of a new debate by Bill Craig in Canada. One thing to notice about this debate, however, is that Craig is defending a proposition here about which he and Richard Dawkins profoundly agree. Both of them, emphatically, think the question of God is enormously important!! While the idea that the question of God doesn't matter is popular in the general public, there is something a bit strange in an atheist arguing the negative side of that issue.

Craig says: But I noticed that in the debate I was watching, he actually said exactly what I was going to argue that evening, namely, that if there is no God, then “the universe is devoid of any absolute meaning or moral sense.” I decided to camp on that point and added his quotation to the end of my opening speech.

A couple of points. First, while I think the question of God is profoundly important, and I do think that the type of meaning we might find in life is going to differ whether we are theists or atheists, I question whether these sorts of considerations are as devastating to atheism as Craig makes them sound. Keith Parsons, in his debate with Craig and in his essay on misconceptions of atheism, suggests a line of defense against this "meaning of life apologetics" that I have yet to see answered effectively.

The first point is that many atheists lead what they consider to be meaningful lives. They have friendships and other close personal relationship, they pursue the truth, they watch football games and eat pizza, etc. The meaning of life apologist then answers that this isn't "absolute" or "ultimate" meaning. The second point in the Keith Parsons rebuttal is to point out that this need for "absolute" or "ultimate" meaning is one that is imposed by a theistic or especially Christian world-view, and need not be accepted by an atheist. We can, to use C. S. Lewis's phrase "rub along quite well" without it. The typical next step in meaning of life apologetics is to bring out various nonbelievers who bewail the lack of meaning in life without God. Russell's "firm foundation of unyielding despair" is a typical one that Craig actually quoted in his debate with Parsons; a few quotes from existentialists like Sartre and Camus (the most important philosophical problem is the question of suicide) will do the trick also. But here Parsons can (and did) point out that the Russell quote is taken out of context if viewed from the perspective of the philosopher's total life, and the emotional reactions of people like Camus are surely not logically necessary for atheists, in fact, as Eric Koski suggested to me in correspondence, these reactions may be temper tantrums on the part of people who long for a lost faith, but hardly normative for atheists in general.

OK, so where does the Meaning of Life Apologetic go from here, in response to the Keith Parsons rebuttal? Maybe something like the Lewis-style argument from desire might be tried at this point. But I am claiming that, so far as I can tell, the Meaning of Life Apologetic as developed by Craig doesn't seem to me to have a good answer to the Keith Parsons rebuttal. Unless there is something I missed in Craig.

Hasker on Scientific Naturalism

But science as a total worldview—the idea that science can tell us everything there is to know about what reality consists of, enjoys no such overwhelming support. This worldview, (often termed scientific naturalism) is just one theory amongst others and is no more capable of being “proved to all reasonable people” than are religious belief systems. To claim that the strong support enjoyed by, say, the periodic table of the elements transfers to scientific naturalism as a worldview is highly confused if not deliberately misleading.



From Peterson, Basinger, Reichenbach and Hasker, Reason and Religious Belief 4th ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 57.



I happen to know that Hasker wrote this.

The Case Against Grad School

This author thinks that, for most people, graduate work in the humanities is a bad idea, and certainly a bad career move.

A critique of my defense of critical rationalism

From a critical analysis of my book by Kyler Kuehn:

After dispensing with faulty understandings of Lewis’s apologetic stance, Reppert broadens the scope of his inquiry to deal with more general epistemic issues, in order to show where Lewis’s apologetic position fits within the spectrum of ideas. The first view described is fideism, which is comparable to the Presuppositional view of epistemology (and apologetics) held by Van Til, Bahnsen, Frame, and others. As an example of this view, Reppert quotes the well-known televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who opines (p. 29), “Man can’t use his mind to know the truth; if he uses his mind he just comes up with something stupid like the theory of evolution”. This captures the essence of fideism, which requires that one’s ultimate religious questions are not open to critical analysis by one’s mental faculties. The problems with mutually conflicting fideistic claims are obvious, and Reppert does not spill any additional ink reviewing them. Instead, moving on to strong rationalism, he describes the other extreme: the belief that our rational faculties are the sole arbiter of truth claims, so that claims that cannot be verified logically or empirically do not warrant our belief. Bertrand Russell is given as a paragon of strong rationalist beliefs, in that he explains away beliefs in the supernatural (and especially God) as the product of irrational fears. Interestingly, Reppert points out that claims to holding a “monopoly on rationality” are expressed on the theistic side as well, as shown by Josh McDowell’s statement in Evidence that Demands a Verdict that “a rejection of Christianity is usually not so much of the ‘mind’ as of the will, not so much ‘I can’t’ but ‘I won’t’”.

Now there are two main problems with such a view. The first is that at the very least a de facto, operational answer is given to the problem of the criterion by every single thinking, observing being. Either one begins with experiential forms of knowledge and one builds a worldview (including a definition of knowledge) from that starting point, or one posits logically necessary criteria for what constitutes knowledge, and then one seeks experiences and observations that fulfill such criteria. Unfortunately for Reppert, his view proves too much; if both options that are able to solve the dilemma of the criterion are disallowed, then it is not the case that definitions of knowledge are up for grabs, with radically different worldviews resulting in internally “rational” beliefs. Rather, no view of knowledge whatsoever is valid! Only radical skepticism denies in principle the attainability of knowledge; however, his entire purpose for writing is that he believes that true and rationally justified beliefs (i.e. knowledge) are attainable. And it is important for our later considerations to point out that there is a sense in which even those who doubt the validity of knowledge in general make practical use of (even tentatively held) beliefs—though they would not call such a thing “knowledge”, of course.

The second problem with Reppert’s analysis of critical rationalism is that he vastly overestimates the necessity of “neutral” ground from which to analyze competing truth claims. While it is true that no finite being can attain an unbiased “view from nowhere”, Reppert errs when he thinks such a view is necessary for clearly discerning the truth in any given situation. Yes, psychological effects can influence one’s beliefs, but they do not utterly overturn and negate one’s innate rational capabilities (once again, Reppert ironically appears to be attacking one of the foundational pillars of his argument from reason—namely, that truth actually exists and is knowable by humans). What is necessary, then, is not “neutral” ground, but instead common ground between disputants in any argument. In an adversarial situation, such as within a court of law, both the prosecution and the defense have a bias in that they want their own position to be true, but they have a mutually agreed upon framework within which to present their respective arguments. Indeed, the common presumption is that our legal system works precisely because both sides are biased towards their own view, and will thus work with all possible skill to prove their position true and their intellectual opponent’s position false. A disinterested defense attorney leads not to justice, but to a mistrial!

Since Reppert merely requires that his position be defensible given his assumptions, we will see that his argument, while valid, will not ultimately prove convincing to skeptics unless the further step is made to justify the premises of his arguments. This also colors his view of Lewis’s arguments, such that he seeks to explain away Lewis’s more confrontational statements as not being truly representative of his actual views. But if Reppert’s definition of critical rationalism lacks the clarity to distinguish between rationally acceptable arguments (valid solely within one’s framework) and rationally compelling arguments (that hold across all reasonable frameworks), then he will of course be at a loss to fit Lewis’s bold claims of exclusive rationality into a more tentative “critical rationalist” stance. But this is only a definitional problem for Reppert, not a consistency problem for Lewis.

This is a really nice powerpoint on Hume on Miracles

By Wes Morriston. Doesn't prove anything one way of the other (doesn't try to, really) but lays out the issues really nicely.

Wikipedia on Christian Faith

Chernikov replies to Koski, not Parsons

People believe the damnedest things.

Was it a fumble?

I promised I would not blame the game's result on the officiating. But it was pretty obviously an incomplete pass. Of course, all that would have resulted in was a chance for a Hail Mary in the end zone. Warner would just have to throw it into coverage and hope that Larry or Anquan came down with it. Two costly plays: the pick-6 at the goal line by Harrison just before half, and Aaron Francisco falling down and allowing the 46-yard Santonio Holmes catch.

On the other hand, the game with the Eagles could have gone the other way as well. The Panthers were not a championship caiber team, but the Eagles, the Cardinals and the Steelers were all championship caliber teams. The scoring history in the Eagles game and the Steelers game was remarkably similar, with the Cardinals in reversed roles.

Pittsburgh Steelers 27, Arizona Cardinals 23

The good news is that this is one of history's great Super Bowls. The bad news is, the Cardinals lost.