Peter Smith of Cambridge attacks the LLL argument

By doing what John Beversluis also does, suggesting that if Jesus claimed to be God, and wasn't, the delusion could be, and likely was what I would call a local delusion, not necessarily affecting his overall moral character or his moral teaching.

HT: Eric Thomson.

Some Shorter Statements of the AFR

From Jim Slagle, who wrote his master's thesis on the AFR at the University of the Louvain in Belgium.

I'm getting fried on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board again

Same old stuff. It's an appeal to ignorance, Carrier refuted me back in 2004, apologists are are dishonest because, after all, they're apologists you know. It's late and I'm tired.

Answering back to God, or is it Fred?

God could want there to be wicked creatures for his own good purpose???

Which purpose? So that others might be saved. We can imagine the following scenario: Smith and Jones are members of the Crips, Jones dies is a drive-by shooting and Smith has a vision of Jones in hell. Smith repents of his sin, accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior, becomes an inner-city minister who brings thousands of kids otherwise headed for a life of gang violence to Jesus.

Except for one one thing. Smith, and every one of those gang kids could have been saved by God's sovereign decree if he had chosen to give it. Jones' eternal damnation could have been avoided without any further loss of souls.

It is easier to make these "hidden good" arguments where the hidden good might become evident once if we knew what free choices other people might have made, or where we don't know the final outcome of everything. Hurricane Katrina, for all its horror, could end up resulting in more people going to heaven than would otherwise have gone to heaven. But for every soul which suffers eternal punishment. we know that that sould could have been saved, and that that person's being saved would not have resulted in any other person's being lost. The final result is known, to suggest that some other final result would not have been better would be to violate every moral intuition I have.

But shouldn't I nevertheless accept it because it is taught in God's word? God, by definition, is a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. A being who predestines people for everlasting punishment doesn't meet the third requirement, and therefore isn't God. So if the Bible teaches predestination and reprobation, it is not God's word, but only the Word of an omnipotent Fred.

Who are you O man, to answer back to Fred? Not such a show-stopper, is it?

Schick on arguing from science to atheism

Here's a version of a popular line of argument from science to atheism.

HT: Sara Sciborski Munson.

An argument against compatibilism

Here's an argument against compatibilism.

1. If compatibilism is true, then God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
2. If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, then, if God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
3. But God did not create the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
4. Therefore, compatiblism is false.

Oh yeah, 1 is true only if theism true. But theism is true, therefore, the argument works!

A debate between John Schellenberg and Jeffrey Jordan

Jeff Jordan and I shared an office at during my year at Notre Dame in 1989-1990. This debate contains his re-deployment of Pascal's Wager.

Wau! A New Religion

I just became an abolitionist!

Now why would I need to do a thing like that? Because just as torture didn't end with the Spanish Inquisition, slavery didn't end with the Emancipation Proclamation, even in America, sad to say. I'm afraid that a lot of what you buy in the store was made by slaves. Where's Frederick Douglass now that we need him?

Tom Gilson was on this a long time ago

This was published by BreakPoint, critical of Dawkins' claims about child abuse.

From my exchange with Parsons on Secular Outpost

You have a duty as a parent to teach your children what you think is true, not what you think is false. Whatever goes wrong when a parent teaches Young Earth Creationism to a child goes wrong when someone comes to accept those beliefs, not in teaching the doctrine to one's children. Creationists don't think that what they are teaching is false, they think it's true, otherwise they wouldn't teach it.

As a Christian I think it's wrong to teach atheism to a child, since, on my view, it gets the wrong answer to the question of God. I also think it's wrong to teach YEC to children because I don't believe that, and I think it especially regrettable if the parent teaches the child that anyone who dissents from YEC is something less than a real Christian. It;s unfortunate that they hold those beliefs, but they still have a duty to be honest in teaching their children In most cases, however, a parent should not be shy about tell a child what they themselves believe.

It's wrong to teach dogmatic and narrow-minded Christianity to children, just as it's wrong to teach dogmatic and narrow-minded atheism to children. In view Dawkins-style atheism is just another brand of fundamentalism. Anybody who thinks that nonbelievers have a monopoly on open-mindedness has beeen drinking Kool-Aid.


I'll stand by my basic claim: Dawkins' comparison of religious upbringing to child sexual abuse is horrendously irresponsible. Even where teaching the doctrine of hell is concerned, you have to consider how it is done; what understanding of hell is presented and how the presentation is done. It can be harmful, but it need not be. No such distinctions need to be drawn in the case of child sexual abuse. We have solid documentation of the claim that however it is done, child sexual exploitation does grievous harm. Speculating about needed to protect children from religious "indoctrination" raises the automatic question as to who will do the protecting.

We all want our children to get the "right" answers to the big question in life. We have to look closely at the concept of indoctrination. Parents will give the child a world-view which does give that child a set of control beliefs--I don't see how that's avoidable. But of course they're bound to question those when they grow up.

Reply to Bill Snedden on teaching hell

VR: "And if someone believes in hell, it then gets problematic to argue that they ought not to teach the doctrine at all (keep it secret?). At most one is left with the constraints about age-appropriate teaching, which I was trying to cover in my post."
Bill S.: I don't find it problematic at all to argue that people who believe in morally repugnant notions ought not to teach them. If a concept is morally evil, then it shouldn't be taught as good, period. Whether a person believes that concept to be good is wholly beside the point.
Parents who are KKK members and believe that miscegenation is morally evil should not teach such rubbish to their children. That they disagree is beside the point.
Your point about different views of the doctrine of hell is well taken, I think. However, if we were to agree that a doctrine of eternal torment was morally repugnant, would we not also agree that it should not be taught to anyone (as true), much less children?
VR: I think some of the discussion has gotten a little off track here, and I think I ought to get it on track.
First, we might distinguish between ways in which we might assess different versions of the doctrine of hell.
1) Doctrines of hell which are morally coherent and at least plausible from within a Christian perspective.
2) Doctrines of hell that, in the final analysis, are morally incoherent, but which can be held in good conscience by at least some Christians.
3) Doctrines of hell which are morally incoherent, and where the moral incoherence should be evident to anyone who reflects on it.
I realize that there are arguments for the claim that no doctrine of everlasting punishment falls into category 1, and that this case is made not only by atheists but by universalist Christians like Tom Talbott. Another position might be that while the DEP may not be incoherent, many popular versions of the doctrine are morally incoherent. If the missionary's truck broke down on the way to the village before the dying man preached the gospel to him, and he ends up in an eternal torture chamber rather than in eternal bliss because of it, then I've got to be concerned about the concept of eternal punishment in use here.
Another example of a doctrine that I find morally incoherent is Calvinism. In spite of the biblical and moral arguments which I have heard over the years, this view just seems to be just completely incoherent morally. It's a view that leaves me just shaking my head at how anyone can actually believe that God can do that and be good. And yet, I know that there are Christians of good will and good conscience who believe it.
I'm not saying this to launch a debate on that topic. I'm saying I would oppose the claim that people who believe this should refrain from teaching it to their children. That's what they honestly think is true. If they don't teach it to their children, they would be liars. It now becomes a matter, and a matter only, of how they teach that doctrine.
Suppose, however, the doctrine could not be held by a reasonable person. That is what Bill is suggesting when he talks about the KKK and people who oppose miscegenation. The problem here seems to be that the doctrine shouldn't be believed by any reasonable person. But if, my some intellectual failure, it is believed by someone, I think I would still have to say that you can't argue that it is wrong to teach the honest truth to one's children. The error, the intellectual dishonesty if that is what is involved, occurred when the belief was formed. I don't see how you could give someone a reason not to teach some particular version of the doctrine of everlasting punishment to children (even a version of it that you or I might both find detestable) without at the same time giving the holder of the belief a reason to abandon the doctrine itself.
If I fire a gun at someone I think to be and armed robber, and I shoot an innocent 15-year-old boy instead and kill him; if we assume that I am within my rights morally to shoot an armed robber under these circumstances, then depending on how I formed my belief that the moving object over there really was an armed robber, I could be morally in the clear for firing the shot, even though an innocent 15-year-old died as a result.
You have to act on the beliefs you have, not the beliefs that someone else might wish that you had.

On teaching the doctrine of hell to children

More from my response to Parsons' thread on the Secular Outpost.


Any world view, except the sunniest forms of theistic universalism, I take it, commits you to unpleasant realities that you probably are not going to be too eager to teach to your children, and if you do teach them to your children, you would have to do so in a gingerly way, exercising a certain amount of caution in making sure that the teaching was done in an age-appropriate way. A Christian who taught the doctrine of hell to a five-year-old, or a Christian who used made a special effort to present the doctrine of hell in an especially terrifying way, with the intent of scaring the child into proper behavior, would be teaching the doctrine abusively. But an atheist who constantly emphasized to their children that their Christian schoolmates who hope for an eternal life in heaven are deluded, and that when you die you rot, rot, rot, would be teaching the atheist view of death in a way that seems to me abusive as well. If you had someone who, through no epistemic fault of their own but due to some unfortunate intellectual circumstances, came to hold that the Jews controlled the banking industry and that black people were inferior (Darwin seems to have held that latter belief), then one would have to teach those beliefs to one's children in some sort of appropriate way. You can't teach your children what you think isn't true, you have to teach them what you think is true. That's what makes this nonsense about "teaching falsehoods to children" nonsense. I have trouble believing that an educated person today could hold those kinds of beliefs without some sort of culpability, just as I am sure Dawkins doesn't think that anybody could believe in the doctrine of everlasting punishment without some culpability.

On the Tolkien Estate

HT: Colin Duriez. With some information about previously unavailable Tolkien work.

The New Atheists and the Religious Right: Two Peas in a Pod?

The Secular Outpost: SUPERLATIVELY SILLY SUPER-SENSITIVE SECULARISTS:

VR: "I would object myself to compulsory religious education in the public schools, which you could have surmised if you, well, read my comment. Of course Dawkins can complain about that; I would complain about it myself and I think, so would C. S. Lewis. My complaint is that some of the people in the New Atheist group start sounding like they want the government to actively support atheism. You can't advocate that and at the same time object to such lovely institutions as prayer in public schools. If you subscribe to the thesis that whoever is in power gets to promote their own favorite beliefs in the area of religion (the thesis that got 1/3 of the population of Europe killed in the 17th Century), then you're on the same page with Oliver Cromwell, Cotton Mather, and Charles V.

In the Soviet Union they didn't send believers to re-education camps, they just made sure that kids were taught Soviet atheism in the public school and prevented parents from teaching Christianity to children. The New Atheists at least sound as if they are suggesting the same idea. If they are saying that, they are making themselves hypocrites when the oppose the sort of joining of Church and State advocated by the Religious Right in America. If they're not saying that, then they need to be a lot more careful about what they say."

Reply to Parsons on the New Atheism

Keith: We've discussed this quite a bit over at my place. It is one thing to criticize critics of religion for excessive rhetoric and inadequate justification for the assertions they make. I think that case can be made against Dawkins and company. It is another thing to criticize them for being unduly harsh. Here it gets tricky. One should be entitled, it seems to me to attack real intellectual fraud in as harsh of terms as is necessary. However, if one is really making an intellectual fraud charge, or if one is accusing an opponent of being culpably wrong, one assumes a much higher burden of proof. I, for example, in one post, took my friend Dick Purtill to task because he challenged Dr. Beversluis's intellectual integrity while at the same time misidentifiying the central claim of his chapter on A Grief Observed. The safest road is always civility, just because if you aren't civil you've really got to prove it. If people like Dawkins were to take the sort of tone they take but provide careful analyses of the doctrines they criticize, taking the time and effort to get things right, I would think better of him than I do now. A third problem is if these New atheists" have actually advocated doing thing that undermine the principles underlying the separation of church and state. Did Harris say, or did not say, that the death of God should be taught in the public schools. I'm sorry, but can you imagine what would hit the fan if a Christian were to say that he wanted the Resurrection of Jesus preached in the public schools? Did Dawkins describe the education of children in a particular religion in a religious faith as child abuse, or did he just think that an upbringing that made undue use of the fear of hell is child abuse. From the quotes I have seen it looks like he thinks all religious upbringing, including the education of my own daughters as Christians, is abusive. Am I being unduly sensitive if I am not too happy with Dawkins for implying that my wife and I are child abusers? Did Dennett say that we shouldn't let religious people teach falsehoods to children, such as teaching them to reject evolution? It's one thing to teach evolution in the public schools, it's another thing to tell parents that they can't tell their kids that it's all false. How would you enforce that sort of thing, without undercutting the foundations of the separation of church and state? In the "new atheist" literature they have gone beyond the sensible thing that one might say on these matters and have said things that to me undermine the underlying prinicple behind the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Maybe they didn't mean it, but then I have to say that people need to pay attention to what they are saying, and what these claims imply. Of course vigorous critique and debate is never a bad thing. If the main problem with Dawkins et al is that they aren't nice, that would be a minor problem. But I think they are open to more serious criticism than that on several fronts, including, I think, a rejection of the prinicples underlying the separation of church and state. If they don't mean these things, they should be speak more carefully in the future.

Chad McIntosh defends the Conceptualist Argument

Further dialogue with anonymous on telology at the basic level

Anon: I disagree. With theism, you have teleology that God doesn't cause right there in God's nature. If we allow brute, bedrock order/teleology/functionality in *this* case, then why not for the universe?

VR: Yes, you could have an immanent teleology built into the universe. That would make you, um, an idealist, or maybe a pantheist. I'm not arguing against those positions.

Anon: It's not as though the claim that all order/teleology comes always and necessarily from minds is a synthetic a priori proposition. But if not, then we need a poseriori evidence for it. Unfortunately, this isn't what we see. Order/teleology is observed to come from minds, but it also comes from instinct (e.g., the functionality and order of spider's webs), and it is observed to come from prior internal principles of order (e.g., seeds give rise to rosebushes). So we have multiple observed causes of order/teleology.

VR: But are those cases of teleology part of the real world, or something nonteleological that mimics teleology. I would say that if you take that hard-core Darwinian position with no background teleology the purpose of your eyes is not to see, but the eye is placed in the head through trial and error in such a way that it does what it would do if it were designed, even though it isn't. If this is so, whose purpose is it pray tell me?

Anon: So what are the most fundamental causes of such *derivative* order? Well, the best we can do is reason from from the observed causes of order to unobserved, ultimate causes of order via arguments from analogy. But if so, then since there are multiple *observed* causes of *derivative* order, and some of these are non-intelligent in nature, then we have no principled way of ruling out that the *fundamental* causes of order are analogous to the *non-intelligent* causes we observe.

VR: But there are a lot of things left out here. Non-mental facts underdetermine intentionality, they underdetermine purposiveness, they certainly don't provide for the existence of a perspective that is different from another person's perspective (try getting indexical facts out of non-mental information), and they provide no norms in and of themselves. We look at something and decide that it does pretty well at fulfilling a purpose, but the poor dumb objects have no idea what is going on.

Answers to some questions from Anonymous

Q: I'm curious: why is naturalism (i.e., the denial of the supernatural) committed to the causal closure of the physical? Or is it?

VR: I wouldn't simply treat naturalism as the denial of the supernatural, because there are world-views according to which are mentalistic in nature but maintain that reality is, in the last analysis mental and not physical. If that is the case, the natural/supernatural distinction breaks down. I prefer to ask a different fundamental question, are the basic causes operating in the universe mental or non-mental. If we analyze down to the bottom, as it were, and reasons are still in the explanation, then we have a mentalistic world-view, even if it is not traditional theism. If we analyze down to the bottom and the mental is analyzed out, then we have a non-mentalistic world view.

Q: Second, are *theists* committed to the causal closure of the most basic level of reality?

VR: Certainly not the causal closure of the non-mental.

Q: Finally, if abstract objects exist, then they are arguably a part of "the basic level of reality". If so, then wouldn't that mean that there's no violation of causal closure even if abstract objects and the physical interact? If you don't like causal-talk here (perhaps it's rejected that abstracta and concreta can't causally interact, although they must be related in *some* way), then replace such talk with "influence".

VR: No, the non-mental world goes on without reference to the abstract objects. For objects in the space-time manifold to pay heed to abstract objects would mean that they do something other than what the laws and prior facts would indicate that the will. Hence, something that "doesn't fit in" to the physical is breaking in to the physical. Lewis says that that is "supernatural", but it isn't spooky or weird or ghostly. It's just irreducibly mentalistic.

Hasker's "How Not to Be a Reductivist"

Can't recommend this one enough.