Loftus on Silver Bullets

John Loftus seems to me raising the distinction between "silver bullet" arguments that in fact persuade everyone, and arguments which, even though they don't persuade everyone, ought to persaude everyone. I made this exact distinction in my book, when I was talking about strong rationalism.   Now, clearly, no arguments about, say, belief in the existence of God are satisfying to everyone. There are atheists and theists on the highest levels of education. But the strong rationalist can maintain that while the case for belief (or unbelief) is not in fact convincing to everyone, it should be. The evidence is strong enough to convince everyone who is well informed and rational; if a well-informed person rejects the evidence, it is rejected because he suffers from some species of cognitive pathology—that is, from some kind of failure or inability to recognize the truth. Consider what many academics believe about astrology. Surely there are plenty of people who believe in astrology,  but I at least am inclined to suppose that a careful study of astrological beliefs will show that it is not reasonable to accept these claims.

C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, p. 31.

John adds:

Such an argument does not have to be convincing. With this in mind I think there are plenty of silver bullets. That you don't see them merely means you have resorted to faith to overcome it. Faith, by the way, is irrational.

Again, I think talking about faith in this way obfuscates the issue, especially if you are talking to someone who accepts C. S. Lewis's definition of faith.

"Faith is that art of hold on to things which your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. Unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and for, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather or the sate of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.”

A quote from me about arguments and belief: why there are no silver bullets

“The claim that one side or the other in some highly controversial issue as theism has a monopoly on rationality is thought by most philosophers to be an extremely difficult claim to defend….while it is important to be as rational as possible concerning religious beliefs, one should recognize that this is a difficult task and that one cannot reasonably be asked to empty oneself of emotional dispositions.”

—	Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea, p. 35-6

A case against socialized medicine

Here.

What do you guys think of these arguments?

Is evolution past its prime?

This is by Douglas Axe.

Famine Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer

This is a famous and controversial essay by Peter Singer from back in 1972. It seems to undermine completely the idea of private property. It also, on the basis of utilitarianism, undercuts the idea that we have duties to our family members, or countrymen, that we don't have toward those who are outside those relationships.

Why Republicans won't repeal Obamacare even if they are elected

Here.

Would a Romney Victory Advance the Conservative Cause?

Probably. But maybe not.

One problem you might run into is that if Obama goes to his left, Republicans will oppose him. But if Romney goes left, it has a better chance of sticking. If Hubert Humphrey had gone to China, he would have been called a communist appeaser and would have gotten zero bipartisan support. If Romney repeals Obamacare and replaces it with something equally socialistic, or supports an assault weapons ban, Republicans won't put up a pitched battle against him. If he goes "multiple choice" on abortion, he could do more harm to the right to life than Obama ever could.

I would maintain that an Romney election would probably advance the conservative cause more than an Obama re-election. But maybe not be nearly as much as most people think.

Meanwhile, the hard left can barely tolerate Obama.

Win Corduan responds

I need to make this its own post so that it won't get overlooked.

Hi everyone! Thank you for this wonderful discussion, and especially to cl for showing such patience. Please keep in mind that my recent post is a response to Carrier's criticism of my chapter in Miracles, ed. by Habermas and Geivett. I've provided links to Carrier's text, but unfortunately could not provide one to the chapter. Still, in the end, unless you've read the chapter as well as Carrier's critique, you can't possibly understand all of the nuances. If someone doesn't want to spend the $20 on the book, that's fine, and you're still entitled to your opinion, but your opinion may be utterly wrong-headed.


The technical distinction between magic and a miracle should not be as fuzzy as you make it sound. It it is new to you, you should learn it and apply it. In magic, the outcome ultimately depends on the performer. He or she must use the proper technique. Theoretically, if you do so properly, the outcome is guaranteed. Conversely, if you don't achieve the desired outcome, you did not follow proper procedure. A miracle, on the other hand, is a free act of God, which cannot be manipulated by our actions. He may respond with a miracle if he so wishes; he may not. If my prayers are not answered, it is likely not that I didn't follow the correct form of prayer, but that God has other plans for me.

Obviously this distinction makes sense only in a theistic world views. But look at it this way: If I want to learn about a distinction within a Buddhism, such as between Honen's and Shinran's view of the Pure Land, I need to posit the reality of the Pure Land heuristically. Similarly, the critic of miracles, which fall into the provenance of theism, must stipulate the theistic world view as a heuristic, or he is addressing a straw man. Win

Feser's Review of Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Here.

HT: Steve Hays.

J D Walters on Christianity and the Paranormal

Here

WLC: Eastwooding Richard Dawkins

Here.

Corduan replies to Carrier on miracles

Here.

Omphalos and scientific realism

A redated post.

This is an interesting discussion of Gosse's Omphalos. Can a Darwinist be a Christian? Heck, a Darwinist can be a six-day creationist. Just not a scientific creationist.

What an Omphalos creationists has to maintain is that while creationism is true, our best science is evolution. (So no challenging what they teach in public school classrooms. That has to be our best science, whether it is true or not.

In other words a Darwinian creationist (Darwinist about our best science,
Creationist about the truths) has to deny is the doctrine of scientific realism, which is defined in this discussion from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

It is easier to define scientific realism than it is to identify its role as a distinctly philosophical doctrine. Scientific realists hold that the characteristic product of successful scientific research is knowledge of largely theory-independent phenomena and that such knowledge is possible (indeed actual) even in those cases in which the relevant phenomena are not, in any non-question-begging sense, observable. According to scientific realists, for example, if you obtain a good contemporary chemistry textbook you will have good reason to believe (because the scientists whose work the book reports had good scientific evidence for) the (approximate) truth of the claims it contains about the existence and properties of atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles, energy levels, reaction mechanisms, etc. Moreover, you have good reason to think that such phenomena have the properties attributed to them in the textbook independently of our theoretical conceptions in chemistry. Scientific realism is thus the common sense (or common science) conception that, subject to a recognition that scientific methods are fallible and that most scientific knowledge is approximate, we are justified in accepting the most secure findings of scientists "at face value."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Gosse gets a bad rap from people like Bertrand Russell. But he was one of the outstanding biologists of his time. Would a contemporary biology department refuse to hire him because he was not a realist about his evolutionism?

McCormick argues that a God who perfoms miracles would be immoral

Here

If God can be moral while permitting suffering, I don't know that you could then argue that God can be immoral if he both performs miracles and permits suffering. So I am not sure that this changes the dynamic of the argument from evil, which is in play here.

Surprisingness and evidence for supernatural occurrences

From my paper "Miracles and the Case for Theism."

It is true that in order for miraculous occurrences to play a role
in a case for theism, it must be the case that such events contradict
naturalistic expectations. But it does not follow that, from the point
of view of naturalism, these events have to be maximally improbable.
Other events that contradict naturalistic expectations to a greater degree
can be passed off as mere anomalies because no plausible theistic
explanation is available to tempt the naturalist to alter his beliefs about
the way the world works. Paul Horwich gives an account of what it is
for an event to be surprising that may shed some light on this matter.
He claims that it is necessary to distinguish between unlikely events
and surprising events, since many unlikely events do not surprise us.
If I were to flip a coin 100 times and get heads every time it would
surprise me, even though any other sequence of heads and tails would
be equally unlikely. What distinguishes surprising events from other
unlikely events is the presence of an alternative account of the circumstances
under which the event occurred, an account not previously
accepted, that would diminish the improbability of the event in
question. Thus in the coin-tossing case the possibility that the coin
might not be fair causes me to wonder if the world is in fact the way
I, who am accustomed to coins being fair, previously thought it to be.
This explains why it would not be surprising if Jones were to win a
lottery amongst a billion people, but it would be surprising if Smith
were to win three lotteries amongst a thousand people, even though it
is more probable that Smith should win his three thousand-person
lotteries than that Jones should win a billion-person lottery. This is
because the Smith case gives me reason to change my background
assumption about the fairness of the lotteries in a way that the Jones
case does not. Thus surprisingness, for Horwich, does not vary with
improbability, it varies with the degree to which events force us to
change our hypotheses about how things happen in the world. 21 In
cases where there is evidence that a miracle has occurred, it is the
combination of natural improbability and the availability of supernatural
explanation that makes the evidence surprising from the point
of view of naturalism, not the improbability alone. So perhaps we can
attribute Mackie's insistence that miracles are maximally improbable
for atheists to the fact that good evidence for miracles would be maximally
surprising for atheists; for persons with a naturalistic bent the
acceptance of miracles requires a thorough revision of their view of
the world. (Miracles would also surprise theists, if they were not expecting
God to act in the way he did and would find it necessary to
change their view about what God is like). However, as Horwich has
shown, surprisingness is not strictly a function of improbability; therefore
Mackie is mistaken in assuming that since miracles are maximally
surprising they must also be maximally improbable.  

Several definitions of evolution

Jay Richards delineates six definitions of evolution. Can a Christian accept all six? Should a Christian do so

Ruse on Humanism as a Religion

Here.

HT: Bob Prokop

Maybe a discussion of socialism could go on this post

For the benefit of all of you non-Baltimore Sun readers.

Here.

Atheism and lobbying

Atheists are lobbying in Congress. See here.

Was Kant anti-science?

Kant thought that the reality we perceive is not reality as it is in itself, but reality as it appears to us. If this is true, then what science describes is not reality as it is in itself. Is this an anti-science philosophy?

Would a Limited God be Worthy of Worship?

An interesting question, posed in Kraemer's essay entitled Darwin's Doubts and the Problem of Animal Pain.

Although I am not a limited God defender, I would be inclined to say "Why not?"

Lewis Scholar Meilaender review Nagel's The Last Word

Here. Nagel defends an AFR, but stops short of theism.

Why Science Can't Disprove God

A reply by Father Robert Barron. HT: Bob Prokop

Debunking the Defeasibility Test

I have added new material to this post.

In this exchange, David Marshall asks for a debate concerning the Outsider Test for Faith, and Peter Boghossian refuses to begin such dialogue in because Marshall does not give an adequate answer to the question "What would it take for you to lose your faith?"

What Boghossian is applying was defined by Matt McCormick as The Defeasibility Test. The claim here is that unless the believer is willing to indicate what kinds of considerations would cause him to lose his faith, discussion is useless and the believer should be regarded as terminally irrational. This has also been endorsed by Loftus.

Now this, to some, has a reasonable ring to it, harking back to Flew's Falsification Challenge. But I am going to argue that the way it is being employed by McCormick and Boghossian is misguided. 

First, I am convinced that there are three factors involved when people make religious decisions. The first is their evaluation of publicly available evidence, evidence that we can all examine. This would be the usual set of reasons we all talk about in the philosophy of religion: the theistic arguments, the problem of evil, the problem of hiddenness, etc. The second factor is one's personal experience. This will differ from person to person and is not available for public inspection. The third is the pragmatics of belief. Some people might be very adversely affected by becoming an atheist, or a theist, and those factors are also relevant for people to consider when they are trying to decide what to believe. 

First of all, suppose someone has indicated that they think that there are good theistic arguments, but they also think they would remain a fideistic believer if those arguments were shown to be faulty. If they are in fact bad arguments, wouldn't showing that this is so be worthwhile? Is the only goal of dialogue conversion to atheism? 

Second, if I am right, not all of the considerations that go into a reasonable person's choice as to whether or not to be a believer are open for public debate. If I, for example, had a direct experience of God, I can't cause you to have one, too. All I can do is testify to my own experience, and you may or may not believe me. 

Plantinga's Purloined Letter example is relevant here. All the public evidence may support the claim that I stole a damaging letter, but I may nevertheless know perfectly well that I didn't steal it.  

Third, not all considerations with respect to one's own beliefs with respect to God are even introspectively obvious.  If we had asked a subsequent de-convert what it would take for them to give up their faith, I am not sure they could have predicted the scenario that led them to change their mind. 

Fourth, some atheists are committed to indefeasibility. Are they terminally irrational?

http://old.richarddawkins.net/discussions/642394-there-can-be-no-evidence-for-god-revisited

It is an important conviction of mine that discussion and defense of what I believe is not primarily aimed at the conversion of my discussion partner. I know perfectly well that reasons on both sides of the issue of something like God are far more complex that what we can encompass in a single discussion. Many of my most gratifying discussions with people with opposing views have largely been taken up with the descriptive task, that is, getting and giving a clearer understanding of the relevant issues and our respective positions than we had going in. 

I remember once giving my first philosophy paper at the Pacific division of the APA. When I returned to the Pacific APA an undergraduate student came up to me and gave me a paper he had written for an undergraduate philosophy journal, which had what I would now recognize as an "internet infidel" flavor to it. I sent him several paragraphs critiquing what I took to be the naive philosophy of science that his paper embodied. I heard nothing from him for  few years, and then received an e-mail indicating that he had become a Christian, and thanking me for my courteous response. Humbling, surely, but I had no idea that this would happen, nor was I especially concerned about trying to convert him. 

I am inclined to agree with Lewis that apologetic discussion is about following the argument where it leads. It is not about judging our opponents, or persuading them. Those sorts of transformations involve  far more than intellectual assent, though assent is involved and reasons are relevant. But I am not going to be trapped in a version of "What arguments do I have to win with you to make you agree with me." Since it hasn't happened, I don't know what I would do if I saw the evidence differently. And neither do you.





 

A statement from my first published paper

Here is the link to it.

The theistic hypothesis has test implications for a wide variety of phenomena, and for this reason there are many other types of evidence to consider when trying to decide whether or not to be a theist. Making miracles in general, or some particularmiracle (such as the Resurrection of Christ) into an experimentum
crucis seems clearly to be unwarranted.

Could it be Satan?

A redated post.

My daughter is writing a paper on the problem of evil, and asked me what I thought of the attempt to explain natural evil as a species of moral evil. In the literature on the problem of evil, moral evil is thought to be the result of the actions of creatures do wrong. Examples of this would be Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews, the party purges of Stalin, the murders of Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper, but also would include less dramatic evils such as the sins I have committed today. Natural evil is evil that does not result from the actions of creatures, such as earthquakes, floods, being struck by lightning, illness, old age, etc.
In the case of moral evil, a solution looks to be available. God, it seems, has an interest in free obedience, and by free I mean that obedience that is not determined or controlled by God himself. (See my discussion of Star Trek in a previous entry). But in order for God to open the way obedience that is free in this sense, God must refuse to control the outcome of our choices, but if he does that, then he risks the possibility that disobedience. I realize this involves rejecting the claim that free will and determinism are compatible. If freedom and determinism are compatible, then God could have created the World of Mr. Rogers, the world in which everyone freely does what is right.
Plantinga’s Demon Scenario
For the sake of this discussion, I will assume that the problem of moral evil is answerable in terms of human free will. This still leaves the serious problem of explaining natural evil. In Alvin Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity, he mentions the idea that all evils are broadly moral evil, because while some evils are the result of human free choices, other evils are the result of the free choices of non-human creatures. He writes:
But another and more traditional line of thought is pursued by St. Augustine, who attributes much of the evil we find to Satan, or to Satan and his cohorts. Satan, so the traditional doctrine goes, is a mighty non-human spirit who, along with many other angels, was created long before God created man. Unlike most of his colleagues, Satan rebelled against God and since has been wreaking whatever havoc he can. The result is natural evil. So the natural evil we find is due to free actions of non-human spirits.1

Now, Plantinga points out that for Augustine, this appeal to Satanic agency is an attempt to provide a theodicy, that is, to provide a true explanation for why God permits suffering. A defense, on the other hand, is an attempt to refute some version of the argument from evil. That may involve providing the actual explanation for the existence of evils, but it may not. The argument from evil Plantinga is discussing here is often called the logical problem of evil; it involves the claim that theists, in believing both that there is a God and in also being a realist about the evils in the world, the theist is implicitly contradicting himself. All we need to refute this argument is to provide a possible scenario according to which God and the evils in this world co-exist. Plantinga therefore claims that the demon scenario meets this requirement, and therefore, he claims the logical problem of evil stands refuted.

Over the years, and largely due to the work of Plantinga, attention has shifted from the logical problem of evil to the probabilistic or evidential problem of evil. The idea is that while it is possible that God existence is compatible with the suffering and evil we find in the world, nevertheless, it can be argued that evil in the world makes God’s existence improbable, or that that evil and suffering is strong evidence against the existence of God. In response to this argument, Plantinga says:
(The demon scenario), for example, involves the idea that the evil that is not due to free agency, is due to the agency of other rational and significantly free creatures. Do we have evidence against this idea? Many people find it preposterous; but that is scarcely evidence against it. Theologians sometimes tell us that this idea is repugnant to “man come of age” or to “modern habits of thought.” I am not convinced that this is so; in any case it does not come to much as evidence. The mere fact that a belief in unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting, no doubt, from a sociological point of view; it is evidentially irrelevant. Perhaps, we do have evidence against this belief, but if we do, I do not know what it is.2

I recall a conversation in my office with Plantinga when I was a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame in which Plantinga told me that even though he presented the scenario as a possible scenario, he considered demonic influence to be the real explanation of many of the evils in the world. Certainly this explanation has biblical support, as is evident from reading Job or the Gospels. It also has the support of an obscure popular British theologian from the middle of the past century, a guy by the name of..uh..uh..Lewis. (See the Animal Pain chapter of The Problem of Pain).

Atheist philosopher Keith M. Parsons, in his book God and the Burden of Proof, however, offers two criticisms of the demon scenario as a defense against the problem of evil. He writes:

But how is this even possible? What would it be like to bring about natural evils? Natural evils are caused, so far as we can tell, by the same fundamental laws of nature that explain all other natural phenomena. Earthquakes are caused by the same tectonic processes that produce majestic mountain ranges; pathogens and parasites evolved according to the same kittens and butterflies, weather systems that bring balmy breezes to one region bring tornadoes to another. The causes of natural evil are thus so intimately involved with (and often identical to) the causes of all other natural phenomena that to cause natural evil, it would seem necessary to cause nature.
But in that case, what becomes of the doctrine of God as creator? At best we would seem to have a kind of dualism reminiscent of Manichaeism—a heretical movements in the late Roman Empire that viewed the cosmos as the creation of eternally opposed good and evil principles. If the demon scenario is thus inconsistent with the doctrine of God as creator, it cannot be of any use to Plantinga, not even as a bare possibility.3

He goes on to say:

A further difficulty with Plantinga’s argument is his assumption that free will could have the sort of absolute value he thinks it might have. As we saw earlier, ordinary moral judgments do not grant such a value to the possession or employment of free will. For instance, if I knew that a terrorist, of his own free will, planed to plant a bomb on an airliner, I would feel obliged to do everything in my power to inhibit him from exercising his free will in that way. How then is it possible that God could be justified in allowing Satan to run amok? How is it consistent with the goodness of God not to have placed greater restrictions on Satan’s freedom?4

So I’m going to put the question to my commentators, having presented both sides of the argument. Are at least some natural evils due to the influence of Satan and his minions? Or not?

1 Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 192. He references “The Problem of Free Choice”’ in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 22 (New York: Paulist/ Newman Press), pp. 71ff.; and Confessions and Enchiridion tr. and ed., by Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminister Press), pp. 341-6.
2 Plantinga, p. 195.
3 Keith Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989) pp. 123-124.
4. Parsons, p. 124.

Will Science Rule Out the Possibility of God?

Sean Carroll thinks so. I'm sure Bill Craig will disagree.

Coyne's Silence on Junk DNA

Apparently, our DNA isn't so junky after all.

Brain Wars

Here is the Amazon entry for Beauregard's new book.

The brain can be weighed, measured, scanned, dissected, and studied. The mind that we conceive to be generated by the brain, however, remains a mystery. It has no mass, no volume, and no shape, and it cannot be measured in space and time. Yet it is as real as neurons, neurotransmitters, and synaptic junctions. It is also very powerful.


—from Brain Wars



Is the brain "a computer made of meat," and human consciousness a simple product of electrical impulses? The idea that matter is all that exists has dominated science since the late nineteenth century and led to the long-standing scientific and popular understanding of the brain as simply a collection of neurons and neural activity. But for acclaimed neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., along with a rising number of colleagues and others, this materialist-based view clashes with what we feel and experience every day.



In Brain Wars, Dr. Beauregard delivers a paradigm-shifting examination of the role of the brain and mind. Filled with engaging, surprising, and cutting-edge scientific accounts, this eye-opening book makes the increasingly indisputable case that our immaterial minds influence what happens in our brains, our bodies, and even beyond our bodies. Examining the hard science behind "unexplained" phenomena such as the placebo effect, self-healing, brain control, meditation, hypnosis, and near-death and mystical experiences, Dr. Beauregard reveals the mind's capabilities and explores new answers to age-old mind-body questions.



Radically shifting our comprehension of the role of consciousness in the universe, Brain Wars forces us to consider the immense untapped power of the mind and explore the profound social, moral, and spiritual implications that this new understanding holds for our future.

The Brain Fallacy

A redated post.

I've been revising a paper of mine that I did in England in response to Carrier, and I have added this section, on what I call the brain fallacy:

But more than that, here again we find Carrier explaining one kind of mental activity in terms of another mental activity and then explaining it “naturalistically” by saying “the brain” does it. My argument is, first and foremost, that something exists whose activities are to be fundamentally explained in intentional and teleological terms. In order for talk about the brain to play its proper role in a physicalistic (non-intentional and non-teleological in the final analysis) analysis of mental events, we have to be sure that we are describing a brain that is mechanistic and part of a causally closed physical world. What I wrote in response to Keith Parsons, who had said that we could take what in Philosophia Christi applies here as well: (Parsons had argued that we could simply take all the characteristics that I wanted to attribute to the non-physical mind and attribute them to the brain).

But we should be careful of exactly what is meant by the term “brain.” The “brain” is supposed to be “physical,” and we also have to be careful about what we mean by “physical.” If by physical we mean that it occupies space, then there is nothing in my argument that suggests that I need to deny this possibility. I would just prefer to cal the part of the brain that does not function mechanistically the soul, since, as I understand it, there is more packed into the notion of the physical than just the occupation of space. If on the other hand, for something to be physical (hence part of the brain) it has to function mechanistically, that is, intentional an teleological considerations cannot be basic explanations for the activity of the brain, then Parsons’ suggestion (and Carrier’s as well-VR) is incoherent.

I think that a many people fail to see the difficulties posed by the arguments from reason because they think they can just engage in some brain-talk (well, the brain does this, the brain does that, etc.) and call that good. I call that the brain fallacy. The question should always be, “If we view the brain as a mechanistic system in the full sense, does it make sense to attribute this characteristic to the brain?” Using brain-talk doesn’t mean that the work of physicalistic analysis has really been done.

The Magician's Twin

I have a contribution in this Discovery Institute volume, which is another presentation of the AFR.

Al Moritz's AFR

Here.

Coyne attacks Nagel

Here is a discussion of Jerry Coyne's reply to Nagel. He considers it outrageous that an atheist would admit any legitimacy whatsover to Intelligent Design.

Nagel's review of Plantinga's newest book

Here.

The path to total skepticism

The path to total skepticism might go like this. We should believe only what we can prove to be true. However, proofs have premises, and we can demand proof for those premises. The premises of the proof of the proof will need proof, as well as the premises of the proof of the proof of the proof, not to mention the premises of the proof of the proof of the proof of the proof. This can go on forever, and therefore we can never reach a point where we can rest in our knowledge. 

C. S. Lewis's Vision of Heaven: Positively Desirable?

A redated post. There is a comment on here from Leah Libresco, back when she was an atheist.

One weakness that Christians have in the modern times, I believe, is providing a vision of heaven that really motivates people. I have often heard it said that the vision of heaven is boring. It must be admitted that Christians have often associated heaven with what seem to many of us to be boring images: harps, clouds, and effeminate figures with wings. At least Islam offers the Celestial Playboy Mansion.

As Kenny Chesney puts it:

Everybody wanna go to heaven
It beats the other place there ain’t no doubt
Everybody wanna go to heaven
But nobody wanna go now

Heaven for many of us is negatively desirable; it is an alternative to eternal punishment and extinction, which seem to be the options. I think Lewis is the one thinker that has done the best job of giving us a picture of heaven that is positively desirable. This is an essay by Charlie Starr, published in the New York C. S. Lewis Society bulletin, which discusses Lewis's views of heaven.

On Kant's Moral Argument

A redated post.

Kant doesn't say that in order to be moral, you have to be religious. He is someone who thinks that other sorts of rational arguments about God don't decide the question either way (first cause arguments, arguments from evil, etc.) So, on his view, we are left with a choice of believing the world to contain a God, of believing in free will or not , and in believing that humans survive death.
On earth as we know it, virtue and happiness are not proportional. Virtuous people are sometimes miserable, nasty people are sometimes happy. (Think of all the murder cases which are never solved.)
Religious world-views presume the existence of a universe in which there is a future life in which happiness is apportioned according to virtue. Whether it is through a last judgment, or through a law of karma that puts you back on this earth either in good shape or in bad shape depending on your deeds, good prevails and evil fails, eventually.
Or you can accept a naturalistic world-view in which there is no mechanism for balancing the cosmic scales of justice. If wrong triumphs in the course of a lifetime, which is certainly seems to, then the story ends, people die, and feed the worms with no recompense for injustice. Hitler and Mother Teresa are in the same condition. They are dead.
The Kantian argument here strikes me as a distant cousin to Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's wager, you are looking at your own prospects, and "betting" on the world-view that pays off better. (Pascal, like Kant, was addressing the undecided. If your belief system is like that of Richard Dawkins, making yourself believe for either Pascalian or Kantian reasons is not an issue). The difference between the Kantian wager and the Pascalian is that you are "betting" on the world-view that will give you the most moral encouragement. You are not just betting on your own self-interest,, as you are in Pascal's Wager. Kant doesn't assume that you can't be moral without God. Pure practical reason tells you what is right and wrong, according to Kant. However, Kant maintains that you since can't settle the question of God any other way, you ought to choose based on the moral encouragement provided by each world-view.

Sometimes being moral is hard. In fact, all actions with moral worth are, according to Kant, done from duty as opposed to being done in accordance with duty, which means that when you do those actions, your inclinations or emotions are pulling you the other way. In other words, perfoming actions of moral worth, like breaking up, is hard to do. Is it more conducive to making the hard moral decisions we have to make to believe that there is no cosmic justice, or to believe that there is cosmic justice. Kant thinks the choice is a no-brainer, practical reason enjoins us to view the world as cosmically just, and therefore to accept the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality.

Kant's moral argument for God

Here is Kant's version of the moral argument.

This is a nice critique of Loftus

Loftus says that Satan would be stupid to rebel against God if he were to exist. But, on another post, he says he would not worship an omnipotent being if he were to exist.

From Randal Rauser.

Nonreligious bases for morality: Is this all there is?

In an important sense, there are two moral motivations that seem to me to be independent of religion. One is our desire to function socially. We want others to treat us well, so we do the same to others. The other is our sympathy and empathy for others. Atheists, like everyone else, have social interests, and natural sympathy for others. But the question then arises, is that all there is to morality?

Darwin, power, and discrimination

 Suppose you lived in a society where certain people were treated as inferiors. The justification this treatment is "It's a dog eat dog world, and as Darwin said, it's survival of the fittest. We have the upper hand, and we have to power to make these other people do what we want. Who's to say that there's anything wrong with that?"

The Declaration of Independence says that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. If you replace the word "creator" with "evolution" in that statement from the declaration, you end up with nonsense. We clearly didn't evolve equally. So, how would you argue against discrimination from a Darwinian perspective? 

Relativism and Divine Commands

It's going to be difficult to be a relativist if you think there is a God who gives binding commandments. If relativism is true, then different individuals or groups think of something as right or wrong, and if so, there is no place for saying that they are really wrong. It is just your opinion or your group's opinion against someone else's opinion. But what if someone in your moral community has the status of God? Could an adulterer say to God "Yes, you say adultery is wrong, but I don't see anything wrong with it myself. Who's to say which of us is right about adultery?" (It's too bad you are not here to hear me give this last statement with my Bill Clinton voice). 

David Marshall has edited a new book.

Here.

Robin Collins on ID

A redated post. 

This is a paper by Robin Collins, who seems sympathetic to the overall goals of ID but does not consider it to be a scientific theory per se.

The Difference between Christianity and Islam

Governments in the West, even when the leaders are devout believers, accept some for of the separation of church and state. This has not always been the case, of course. But Christianity never tells you how to run the government. The New Testament was written when Christians had no political power whatsoever. With Islam, however, it's different. That is a religion that is written for people in power.

Does the End (of Faith) Justify the Means? It could for some people

People do turn atheism in to a cause for which they could potentially be willing to kill or die for. People can have the same kind of devotion to atheism that they have to any religion. They can believe that "the end of faith" is a goal worth pursuing. They can conclude that this end (of faith) justifies the means. People sometimes assume that heaven and hell make fanaticism possible, and since they are missing on atheism, it isn't possible to be a fanatical atheist. In Communism there was an equivalent to heaven, it was the socialist paradise promised by Marx, and people did kill and die for that. Hell for some atheists seems to be the obstruction of scientific progress, or religious taboos against certain types of sex behavior.

It is also possible for atheists to disregard solid evidence because of their anti-religious convictions. I see little difference between Todd Akin's refusal to accept the existence of pregnancies produced by rape and Richard Dawkins' claim that a religious upbringing does more harm that child sexual abuse. In both cases, the evidence against these claims is overwhelming, but ideology trumps inconvenient facts in both cases.

I do think that the Columbine case underscores another point, that the abandonment of traditional religious belief will not necessarily produce cheerful humanists. I remember when I was growing up there was a 18-year-old boy who killed 5 women with a knife at a beauty parlor, and what people could remember of him from high school was that he was an atheist. Now, there's nothing inevitable about this, but there is a route from atheism to nihilism to murder, and there is also the possibility of crimes of fanaticism to serve the end of faith and the advancement and glorification of science. Of course, there is also the religious justification for the 9/11 attacks, and for the crusades and wars of religion, but these are also not inevitable.

A critique of Lewis's "Why I am not a Pacifist"

Although Lewis was not a pacifist, Stanley Hauerwas thinks he should have been.

HT: Bob Prokop

Why couldn't there be mass killings in the name of atheism?

When atheists were in control of governments, in the Communist world, there was plenty of mass killing. You can certainly be a racist with or without religion. (Hitler didn't exterminate Jews for religious reasons, for examples). Human nature, not religion, seems to be the reason why we do evil things to one another. Ideologies, religious or otherwise, can serve as a pretext. But at least with Christianity, killing without justification is against one of the Ten Commandments.

If you  thought that the worst thing in the world was religion, you thought the end justified the means, and you had the power to do something to get rid of it, you could decide to commit atrocities to free the world of religion. Why couldn't this happen? What is there about the rejection of religion that would prevent this? Doesn't all the evidence point the other way? Why think atheism would give us all nothing to kill or die for? 

No one has ever come close to explaining to me how the abandonment of religion would do anything to eliminate man's humanity to man. 

Were the Robber Barons a myth

A lot of people look at the late 19th Century as a time when out of control capitalism led to the exploitation of the common people. This essay suggests that this is am myth.

Does religion require commitment to the supernatural?

Apparently not. 

These are the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:   

The Four Noble Truths

1. Life means suffering.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering.

http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/fourtruths.html

Is there anything in there about supernatural beings who are to be worshipped?

Hasker on Dennett's Dangerous Dogmatic Presupposition

A redated post. 

William Hasker, in the preface to The Emergent Self,(Cornell, 1999) x, wrote:

But there is one kind of approach to these issues that is unlikely to be affected by the views and arguments contained in this book. As an example of this approach, (though by no means not the only one) we may take Daniel Dennett, as he presents himself in his essay in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1995). He tells us that, having come to distrust the methods employed by other philosophers, he decided that "before I could trust my intuitions about the mind, I had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind's work." This means accepting, right from the outset that the brain is a "syntactic engine" that mimics the competence of "semantic engines. (How we mere syntactic engines could ever know what a semantic engine might be is not addressed). All this is dictated by an "initial allegiance....to the physical sciences and the third-person point of view," an allegiance which in turn is justified by appeal to an evolutionary perspective. The foundational commitment to mechanistic materialism is unmistakable. This commitment is subsequently refined and elaborated, but it is never subjected to a fundamental re-evaluation; rather, data that conflict with it are dismissed as illusory. ("This conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign 'user illusion.'") In view of this, it seems appropriate to characterize Dennett's physicalism as a dogmatic presupposition--and such dogmatism is hardly rendered benign by the fact that it is fairly widespread in the philosophy-of-mind community.

Can atheists and believers both be right?

 Let's take a simple case where most people would want to avoid being relativists. Let's take the claim that the world is round. If someone thought the earth was flat, and then went around the world on a ship, it looks as if the sensible conclusion would be that they were in error about that, that the thought the earth was flat, but it turns out to be round.

Now, let's try something else. We may be unsure as to who committed the Jack the Ripper murders, since the case was never solved. But we do know that someone did. That seems to suggest to me that even in cases where we don't have sufficient evidence that something is true, sufficient to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt, we still believe that someone is right about it. Thus, many people believe that O. J. Simpson killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, even though the jury didn't think there was enough evidence for a conviction.

Of course, being right doesn't mean being justified in one's belief. Thus, I can get the right answer to a math problem by guessing. It's still the right answer, even if the teacher doesn't give me credit for it because I didn't show my work.

Now let's consider a scenario in the matter of religious belief. Suppose a person were to be an atheist throughout their lives, and a person who does not believe in life after death (as almost all atheists do). Suppose this atheist were to die, but continue to exist, and were then to experience the presence of a very powerful being on a white throne (let's say), and that being on the throne were to ask the atheist why he did not believe in his existence during his lifetime. (We can imagine this atheist being sent to overheated living quarters thereafter). Wouldn't the sensible think for this atheist to say be that those darned Christians were right after all?

The problem of prior time

Here is Graham Oppys response to some Craig's claims about the Kalam argument.

Grünbaum (1990) (1991) worries about the propriety of the claim, that the universe began to exist, in the context of classical Big Bang models of the origins of the universe. In particular, he considers two cases: (i) models which are closed at the Big Bang instant t=0, in which t=0 is the location of a singular, temporally first event in the history of the universe; and (ii) models which are open at the Big Bang instant t=0, in which there is no singular, temporally first event in the history of the universe.
In connection with the first type of model, Grünbaum observes that it is misleading to say that in these models the universe began because this suggests that there were moments of time before t=0. Craig (1992:237f.) objects that "x begins to exist" should not be analysed as "x exists at time t and there are times immediately prior to t at which x does not exist", but rather as "x exists at t and there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists." Of course, this analysis would commit Craig to the unwanted claim that God began to exist--since, on the theistic version of this model, there is no time immediately prior to t=0 at which God exists--so Craig further suggests that, within a theistic context, the analysis should be amended to "x exists at t; there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists; and the actual world contains no state of affairs involving x's timeless existence." But this amended suggestion invokes the extremely puzzling notion of "(God's) timeless existence." Moreover, even the unamended analysis naturally provokes the question whether anything which begins to exist in this sense must have a cause.

Here's a key issue that comes up in Kalam debates. Does the idea that everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence hold up if there is, as standard BBT postulates, that there is no time prior to the first event.

Why a Catholic secretly roots for atheists in theist/atheist debates

Here. 

Why? Because he keeps hoping to see some real arguments.

What I was wholly unprepared for, however, was the way in which the Atheist team consistently abandons the effort to present logical arguments at all and simply reverts to name calling. As I said, when faced with worthy opponents, such as Dr. Craig or Dinesh D’Souza, many of the atheist debaters give up any effort to mount rational arguments and just start making snide remarks.

Never happens here at DI. :)

Now, I have heard theist-atheist debates in which atheists have produced real arguments.

HT: Bob Prokop

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Modal Logic

Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Modal Logic. There is no mention that I can see that it is even used in theology or philosophy of religion.

Sceptical non-theism

Apparently, it's hard to know what worlds are possible even without theism. See here, by Alexander Pruss.

HT: Crude

Human benevolence and the problem of evil

A redated post.

As for how it is possible to believe that humans ought to alleviate suffering but God may be justified in permitting it, it is to be remembered that humans have a far narrower purview of considerations than God does. We do the best we can with no knowledge, for example, of how our actions will affect the free choices of people living 50 years from now, but God knows how those choices will be affected and may choose to do something that seems bad now in order to improve the situation with respect to the situation 50 years from now and 100 years from now.

If we eliminate certain diseases, we cannot be absolutely sure that they will not make the world a worse place in the long run. But to the best of our knowledge, they will cause an improvement of human life. Would you cure smallpox if you knew that if you didn't cure it, Hitler's mother would die of smallpox and the world would be spared the Holocaust? You don't have those things to think about, because you are a human with limited knowledge. God's knowledge is not limited (unless you're an open theist, in which case God's knowledge is still a whole lot less limited than yours is!)

Is there an argument from beauty to God

A redated post.

Mark Wynn, following up on F. R. Tennant, thinks that this is so. It is a type of design argument.

Lewis, Secular Marriage and Christian Marriage

C. S. Lewis wrote:

“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question-how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”

This passage suggests that we should operate with two distinct conceptions of marriage, and that we should not be looking to the government to uphold the Christian conception. While this does not provide a case for same sex marriage, it does undercut certain ways of arguing against it. Some people argue that there is a univocal conception of marriage ordained by God when he created Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve), and that that conception must be upheld by government. A person can start an affair, divorce his wife, and then marry the person he is having an affair with, and if he does so, the government asks only if the divorce was executed legally. Despite being the "guilty party" in the collapse of his prior marriage, he is free to marry again.  If we go with Lewis on this, government is free to decide who is married and who is not as it sees fit for its own purposes, and this may or may not fit with what Christian church might believe. So, opponents of gay marriage need to find another line of argument. 

I've always considered government to be a poor guardian of the sacred institution of marriage. I would expect that people who think government should be limited would recognize the limitations of government in this. 

Here is a blog post to the same effect. 

Socrates in the Service of Christ

By Angus Menuge.

Argument has a life of its own: what believer-unbeliever dialogue should look like

Here is Lewis's essay on the founding of the Oxford Socratic Club. I am redating this post.

"We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours... The arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated." 

C. S. Lewis, "The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club."

Engagement in real dialogue about matters of religious faith is an act of faith. One must be so sincerely convinced of what one believes that one is prepared to trust one's ideas to the forum of open intellectual dialogue, playing as fair as it is possible to play. We have to trust that dialogue will be rational even if the people who engage in it are not. Honest philosophy and theology has to come first, the conversions have to be a by-product. Though I like seeing people embrace the positions I embrace as much as the next person.

Attention Gnus (you too Loftus): The appeal to ridicule is a fallacy

See here.

Hambourger's design argument

Hambourger argues that even if there is no evidence of interference by a designer in the course of evolution, we have to consider the fact that living creatures are made up of genetic material that reproduces after its kind, but not exactly. We could have reproduction that only produces exact duplicates, in which case evolution would be impossible, since there would be no variation. We could also have genetic material that changes very rapidly, in which case speciation would be chaotic, and evolution would also be impossible. That fact that genetic material changes gradually is the only scenario that makes evolution possible. But why did we happen to have genetic material that mutates at just the right pace? Doesn't that imply a background designer?

For some critical comment, see here. 

C. S. Lewis was never a real atheist

A redated post.

According to this essay from an online secular humanist site, which indulges extensively in the "horse laugh" fallacy.

This reminds me of something. Oh I know. Those Christians who say that if you deconvert, you never were a Christian to begin with.

An old AFR interview

Here's an interview I did on the AFR way back in 2006. My segment starts aroung minute 48.

A sound argument for the unmoved mover?

Here. Someone was asking if the First Way was still alive. But no one paid attention to this post I did a few weeks back.

More on reductios and the AFe

I'm Skeptical wrote: 


If I understand Victor's position, a skeptic can't defend the argument from evil unless he concedes that there are objective moral values. This is a parlor trick. It's equivalent to saying that if I want to make the statement "If A then B" I must first concede that A is true.

If you accept Victor's position, why not take the same logic one step further and demand that the skeptic concede that God exists before he can defend AE?


VR: No, you don't understand my position. I admitted that reductio versions of the argument from evil are possible, even for those who don't believe in moral objectivity.  The problem is going to arise when the atheist/subjectivist tries to defend the moral premise of the argument. The subjectivist can't appeal to his own value theory to argue about what it is for God to be good. 


Let's take this statement from Rowe:


An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.


Now, does  theist necessarily have to believe this? And if they do believe it, do they have to agree with the atheist about what would be a greater good or the prevention of some evil equally bad or worse? If there are any value-theoretic conflicts, someone committed to objective moral values can argue that the theist's value system is faulty. They can argue that the theist has some misplaced values, and in particular, perhaps, undervalues the prevention of intense suffering and makes inflates the legitimacy of other values which, he argues, are not sufficient justifiers for intense suffering. A subjectivist can't do that. The logic of his argument forces him to concede the value-theoretic position of his theist opponent at every turn, since he cannot


The most serious objection to this line of argument comes in the Mark Nelson  post, from Thrasymachus. I will need a separate post to respond to that. 

Reductios and the argument from evil

This links to a bunch of posts I did on the topic of the argument from evil as a reductio. What happens when someone who doesn't believe in moral objectivity defends the argument from evil?

The problem arises when the argument requires are fairly finely tuned moral claim. Someone might say "If God is good, then he can't allow gratuitous suffering. The theist answers "Why? What's wrong with permitting gratuitous suffering?" The atheist can't say that it's objectively wrong for God to do that, so he has to argue that the theist believes that it is wrong for God to do that? The atheist then has to work from inside the moral belief system of the person with whom he is arguing. But moral belief-systems amongst theists, and even Christians differ from one another.

Calvinists think that God is justified in creating people for the sake of reprobating them in hell forever, for the sake of God's own glory. I happen to disagree with them, but I believe in objective moral values. How can a subjectivist argue with them?

Two Problems for Would-Be Communists

Under communism, the slogan is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." There are two problems if you are going to go that way. The first is, how are you going to get people to work without the profit motive. You are going to get what you need regardless of whether you work hard, or goldbrick. The second problem has to do with how you decide who needs what. In communist countries, the Communist Party (the vanguard of the Proletariat), decided what people needed, and, unsurprisingly, they decided the Communist Party needed more than non-Party members.

Loftus Challenges P. Z. Myers

Here.  Actually, I think Loftus occupies a position somewhere between someone like Lowder and people like Myers.

A secular case against gay marriage

From Wintery Knight.

Was there an Obama Spending Binge?

Not according to Rex Nutting. It never happened.

Part of it has to do with putting the two wars into the budget, which Bush didn't do, but Obama did.

Matt McCormick on the meaning of faith

The meaning of the word "faith" is complex. Do you think McCormick understands it correctly? Just click on the powerpoint.
Every time you use the word "faith" in a discussion with an atheist, they are going to declare victory. They will presume that you are believing for no reason, and that you are are admitting that the evidence is against you.

But Lewis saw it quite differently?

The Best Congress Money can Buy

I remember seeing a poll that said that Congress had a 19% approval rating. I asked "How can that be? We have the best Congress money can buy!

Does Apologetics Only Reassure the Faithful?

A redated post from over 6 1/2 years ago.

I hear that over and over (and just saw it once again in a post by BeingItself). But apparently not. I got this letter a few weeks back from a recent convert to Christianity:


Dr. Reppert,

I recently got a copy of your C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. I'm in the
middle of it, and I have found it to be quite good. I was very
impressed with a number of your responses to objections against the
Argument from Reason.

To get to the point, I recently converted to Christianity. I have been
a theist for about six months, after being an atheist for about five
years or so.

I suppose a bit of background would help. I gave up my Christianity
during high school and became an atheist. When I entered the
university, I was a biology major and spent most of my free time
reading books about evolutionary biology and cosmology--especially
Guth's inflationary cosmology.

It wasn't until about a year or so into my college education that I
discovered philosophy. I took my first class and fell in love. I've
always enjoyed philosophical topics, argumentation and the examination
of unquestioned assumptions.

That was about two years ago. I switched my major to philosophy and as
a result have delayed my graduation (I have about two years left). The
point is, that when I discovered philosophy, I concurrently discovered
Platinga, C. Stephen Evans, William Dembski, William Lane Craig, Gary
Habermas, Richard Swinburne, Robin Collins, Soren Kierkegaard, et al.

They were quite good at challenging my scientism(istic) and atheistic
faith. I began to question materialism, which I took to be better
confirmed than theism or humanism. Of course Swinburne's attack on
materialism in his book 'Is There a God?' was hard to swallow.

Of the course of about a year and a half, I began to lose faith in
science, materialism and atheism. And about six months I decided that
there were a number of very good reasons affirm theism as a much
better hypothesis than materialism.

It took a couple of trips of the Cathedral to realize all that
Christianity had to offer. That there were good reasons to believe in
the Gospels historical reliability and that Christianity seemed to
capture the essence of man (if he indeed possesses on) better than any
other.

As a result of this change, and resently getting a copy of your book
(which has helped change my mind as well), how would I go about
defending Christianity and theism? I have a number of very skeptical
friends, most of which are atheists. The work done in defense of
theism is especially good! But what about Christianity? It seems
persuasive to me, but as a theist, the probability of Jesus'
resurrection goes up (i.e. Stephen Davis). But it doesn't follow from
the proposition that theism raises the probability of Jesus'
resurrection that his resurrection isn't sufficiently high to the
naturalist! At least not without further argumentation. That is a
simple point of logic.

I suppose I am a bit overwhelmed. I do not know quite how to proceed.
I got a copy of a book by F. F. Bruce arguing for the gospel's
reliability. But that doesn't seem to be enough.

I know that philosophers have pretty much given up the idea of a
"knock-down" Cartesian-style system to PROVE beyond a shadow of a
doubt that Christian theism is true. But I don't know quite how to
defend Christian theism and show that it is a very reasonable and
powerful alternative to materialism/naturalism AND that it is superior
at least to some degree or other.

Please help! You're advice would be much appreciated.

Jimmy Licon
http://philosopher999.tripod.com/

Contra Celsum: The Myth of the "Dark Ages"

Making the case that the "Dark Ages" was a myth.

Contra Celsum: The Myth of the "Dark Ages"

A short version of Plantinga's EAAN

From his new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies.

First, the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.  (To put it a bit inaccurately but suggestively, if naturalism and evolution were both true, our cognitive faculties would very likely not be reliable.)  But then according to the second premise of my argument, if I believe both naturalism and evolution, I have a defeater for my intuitive assumption that my cognitive faculties are reliable.  If I have a defeater for that belief, however, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be produced by my cognitive faculties.  That means that I have a defeater for my belief that naturalism and evolution are true.  So my belief that naturalism and evolution are true gives me a defeater for that very belief; that belief shoots itself in the foot and is self-referentially incoherent; therefore I cannot rationally accept it.

p. 314.

Consciousness-raising assumes that there is an up, and a down

If someone believes that, for example, women should be basically enslaved and treated as inferiors, are they mistaken about that? Feminists talk about consciousness-raising. But, of course, consciousness-raising is only possible if there is an up, and a down.

I'm interviewed on Apologetics 315

Here.

Dawkins, Falwell, and Ideology

OK, let's take stock. About the worst thing people have come up with about Falwell is that he said that AIDS was God's punishment on gay people, and that opposing it was wrong. Now, that's pretty insane. He has no basis for knowing this. Even on the assumption that homosexuality is a sin, and that homosexuality is one of a long list of offenses against God that Sodom was guilty of, (that's the most conservative reading that can plausibly be given for the Sodom and Gomorrah passage), the idea that AIDS is punishment for homosexuality is still irrational. It's certainly cringe-worthy. Of course, not all AIDS victims, even back when Falwell said what he did, were gay. What makes it worse is that it seems to be grounds for opposing anti-AIDS efforts. If this ever became public policy, it would cause terrible harm. 

But what about Dawkins, or Harris. Dawkins says that bringing a child up as part of a religious community is abusive, comparing it unfavorably with sexual abuse. Yes, he does say that, and he doesn't limit it to people who preach hell-fire to their kids as a means of controlling their conduct. His claims fly in the face of considerable scientific evidence about the effects of religion on children. Since we all agree that the state has an interest in stopping child abuse, and has the right to remove children from abusive parents, this means that he is committed, at least implicitly, to the idea of preventing parents from raising children within their own faith. As I see it, if implemented at the level of public policy, that would bring down the curtain on religious freedom, and on the separation of church and state. In the Soviet Union, they attempted to eliminate religion not by stopping adults from practicing it, but by stopping parents from transmitting it to their children. If this were implemented at the level of public policy it would be disastrous, and sensible atheists should, well, cringe when they hear such a thing. 

Which is worse? Does it matter? They're both pretty awful. 

My point is that whether you are a theist or an atheist, ideology can get control of your thinking and wipe out your common sense, if you let it. The fact that you are saying it in the name of "reason" or "science" doesn't immunize you from this possibility. If you care about a cause enough, you can die for it, and you can also kill for it. The idea that "religion" is somehow liable to this, while anti-religion is somehow immune, strikes me as preposterous.

Probabilities, miracles, and design

I do believe that a case can be made for the claim that the Christian story about what happened in the life of Jesus makes more sense of the evidence than any possible naturalistic story, so long as you are willing to allow for a God who might do such a thing. 

But here Hume keeps coming back. If you base probabilities on what is most frequently found in nature, and you don't introduce the possibility of a non-human designer, then it looks as if the frequency of dead people who stay dead defeats anything but "extraordinary" (read virtually impossible) evidence for, say, a resurrection. 

But, the believer responds, causing the miracles in the life of Jesus seems like something a God might do. It makes sense from a theistic perspective, as opposed to, say, claiming that God caused a bunch of people to hallucinate, or caused a bunch of people to propagate a hoax that would ultimately result in them ending up on the kind of cross that Jesus was crucified on. 

But, the reply goes, likelihoods about what a divine agent might or might not do can't be brought in. They aren't based on experience, the way, say, the frequency of dead people who stay dead does. If you bring God in, you play a wild card. Anything goes. 

But, the theist replies, we can draw inferences about possible divine designers from analogy to human designers. 

That's why I think Lydia McGrew's paper on design and probabilities is relevant to this whole debate, which I linked to a few days ago.

What do historians think of the reliability of the Gospels?

Here is a discussion of this.

HT: Bob Prokop

Embarrassment and the New Atheism

I'd like to see an atheist come out and say that they are as embarrassed by some of Dawkins' antics as I am when I hear people like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson appearing as spokesmen for Christianity.
Of course, Gnus have a name for an atheist who does this: Accommodationist.

Paul Ree's Classic Statement of Hard Determinism

Entitled "Determinism and the Illusion of Moral Responsibility."

A redated post.

Should immigration country quotas be increased?

Would this help with the problem of illegal immigration? There are, as  usual, pros and cons.

I am surprised that there is so much talk about illegal immigration, but little mentioned about possibly preventing it by increasing country quotas.

Atheist Watch

This is a blog devoted to, well:

Watching hate group atheism, sounding the alarm against their bullying.

The argument from consciousness

A piece by J. P. Moreland.

A redated post.

On the Flat Earth Myth

A redated post.

Did Columbus have trouble getting his voyage funded because everyone believed in flat earth? I was taught that in school. But it is a piece of anti-medieval slander, perpetrated by people like Andrew Dickson White.

Are there myths today that advocates of religion-science warfare like to propagate?

Archaeological Confirmation of Acts 18:2

From Christian Cadre.

Angus Menuge on the AFR

Here.

Does the Constitution Support a Right to Privacy?

Interestingly enough, the legal case for overturning Roe v. Wade (as opposed to the moral case against abortion) doesn't turn on affirming a fetus's constitutional right to life, but instead on denying a woman's absolute right to privacy, which according to Roe's critics, is an invented right which is the product of judicial activism. Here is some information on the debate concerning the right to privacy.

It seems to me there are four possible positions here. You could accept the court's defense of the right to privacy, but still consider abortion to be murder, you could reject the court's defense of the right to privacy and consider abortion to be murder, you could accept the court's defense of the right to privacy and deny that abortion is murder, or you could reject the court's defense of the right to privacy, but deny that abortion is is murder.

The first and fourth positions seem to be, at least consistent, though they put you in a bit of spot reconciling your moral and legal philosophies. In the first place you are stuck saying that abortion is murder, but it has to be legal to protect a woman's privacy. In the second case, you think abortion isn't murder, but there is no legal basis for stopping the government from legislating against it.

Here is a discussion of the legal issue of privacy.

Ethics without God, or ethics without metaphysics

I am redating this old post.

One interesting point about many ethical philosophies is that while they make no reference to a theistic God, they do seem to be grounded in metaphysics, and the kind of metaphysics at work is one that a modern naturalist would have trouble accepting. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are prime examples. Plato's moral philosophy is based on the Form of the Good, which shares certain characteristics with the theistic God, and which can be known through a process of recollection where we recollect what we were aware of in a pre-existence. Aristotle is based on the idea of an inherent purpose for human life, and Stoic ethics is a response to Stoic metaphysics. No one seems to be suggesting that ethics will be all just the same regardless of metaphysics. Even if a personal God isn't required for ethics, doesn't it seem plausible that at the very least some sort of metaphysics is required that most naturalists today would have a hard time accepting. Is it reasonable to reject what Kant called a metaphysics of morals?

A Defense of Objective Moral Values

By Neil Shenvi.

Can Islam Separate Church and State?

In the early seventeenth century, leaders of Christian countries, Protestant and Catholic, thought that their opposite numbers were turning people into candidates for hell. As a result, they slaughtered one third of the population of Europe. As a result, these European countries, still predominantly Christian, accepted the separation of church and state, in other words, they put the coercive power of government on the one hand, and religious fervor on the other, in different hands.




Whether Muslims can do this or not remains to be seen. The Bible doesn't tell you how to govern, and it was written for people with zero political power. The Qur'an, on the other hand, was written with governance in mind, and it was applied in the first instance by people who ran a state. Whether Islam can exist with a separation of religion and government is the question.

The Inclusivism of Vatican II

Since Vatican II, the stand of the Catholic Church has been inclusivism. I wonder how many people think that Catholics hold that all non-Catholics are going to hell.

Dembski responds to Dennett

On Turing and the computational view of the mind.

Lydia McGrew on identifying intelligent agents

This looks like an intriguing paper.

Abstract: It is often assumed by friends and foes alike of intelligent design that a likelihood approach to design inferences will require evidence regarding the specific motives and abilities of any hypothetical designer. Elliott Sober, like Venn before him, indicates that this information is unavailable when the designer is not human (or at least finite) and concludes that there is no good argument for design in biology. I argue that a knowledge of motives and abilities is not always necessary for obtaining a likelihood on design. In many cases, including the case of irreducibly complex objects, frequencies from known agents can supply the likelihood. I argue against the claim that data gathered from humans is inapplicable to non-human agents. Finally, I point out that a broadly Bayesian approach to design inferences, such as that advocated by Sober, is actually advantagous to design advocates in that it frees them from the Popperian requirement that they construct an overarching science which makes high-likelihood predictions.

Three Arguments for Dualism

A discussion by Jeremy Pierce.

Freddoso's papers

Here. I thought I should link to his page for all his available papers.

Freddoso reviews Plantinga on the nature of God