Sir Isaac Newton was only masquerading as a scientist

Richard Dawkins wrote:

I am starting to think that the onus is on those who espouse 'serious theologians' to nominate at least ONE who is serious enough to be worth bothering to engage. It cannot be John Haught (see here). Nor can it be William Craig, whose idea of a moral theological argument is that infanticide is just fine because you are doing the children a favour by sending them straight to heaven. Nor can it be John Lennox, who masquerades as a scientist while believing Jesus turned water into wine. And now we see that it cannot even be the Archbishop of York. Where are we to turn for a theologian worth arguing with? Who, indeed, are these 'serious theologians' about which we hear so much. And what is this 'serious theology', ignorance of which is held to be so reprehensible?

If believing that Jesus turned water into wine is sufficient to be not taken seriously by Dawkins, then he is requiring that people water Christianity down in order to be taken seriously. 

But C. S. Lewis wrote: 

Do not attempt to water Christianity down. There must be no pretence that you can have it with the Supernatural left out. So far as I can see Christianity is precisely the one religion from which the miraculous cannot be separated. You must frankly argue for supernaturalism from the very outset. . . .

The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left.

C.S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics" (1945) included in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) 99..

The obvious question, though, is why someone can't be a scientist who believes that Jesus turned water into wine. Science attempts, or so we are told to map the activities of nature, (though I wouldn't dismiss at least the possibility that science might not discover laws of supernature as well, if it pushed on far enough), while a miracle involves the activity of someone who is outside of nature. So, we all know water doesn't turn into wine naturally. An omnipotent being surely would have the power to turn water into wine, and that is the agency through which Jesus presumably did this. I take it that Sir Isaac Newton believed that Jesus turned water into wine. Is Dawkins going to claim that Newton was only masquerading as a scientist since he holds that this is sufficient grounds to say that Lennox is only masquerading as a scientist? 

On being judgmental

Are Christians judgmental? To answer that question we have to ask what it is to be judgmental. If someone were to say "homosexual activity is a sin, because the Bible condemns it," is that person therefore being judgmental? Now, I am not here raising the question of whether a Christian must say this sort of thing, and certainly there is a considerable theological debate on the matter. But is it wrong to say something like this because it's judgmental? Does our disapproval of conduct on moral grounds constitute being judgmental? Is it judgmental to say that people who raise their child to believe a religion are abusing them also judgmental?

This blog post discusses that question.

Relativism, God, and Bill Clinton

If there is a God, and God has informed us that something is wrong, then we can be relativists only if we think that God's opinion is no better than anyone else's. Can you imagine Bill Clinton saying to God "You say adultery is wrong, but that's just your opinion. I think it's OK. Who's to say which of us is right, and which of us is wrong?"

Bulverism and the AFR

A redated post. (It's time to redate it one more time).

Pat Parks, who is working on a master's thesis on the AFR at Cal State Long Beach, sent a question about the relation between the AFR and Lewis's critique of Bulverism. If Bulverizing is a bad thing, then doesn't that imply that what causes our beliefs is irrelevant to the justification of those beliefs, and if that is so then doesn't Anscombe's critique of Lewis go through. Steve Lovell, who has written a dissertation on Lewis and philosophy, responded to this query by mentioning that he had covered the same issue in the conclusion of his dissertation. Steve's comments are in bold, followed by mine.

Bulverism and the Reasons/Causes Distinction
There was a method of ‘refutation’ that Lewis encountered so frequently that he felt he ought to give it a name. Bulverism, named after its fictional inventor Ezekiel Bulver, consists in dismissing a person’s claims as psychologically tainted at source, as in “Oh, you say that because you’re a man” (1941a: 181). The Bulverist’s thought is that if a person’s convictions can be fully explained as a result of non-rational factors then we need not bother about those convictions. Lewis deplored this sort of attack on our beliefs, seeing it as an illegitimate tactic which shortcuts the reasoning process. I argued in Chapter 5 that such ‘genetic arguments’ are often, but not always, fallacious. In general, we should find out whether or not a person is wrong before we start explaining how they came to be wrong. And of course the Bulverist’s game is very easy to play. If illicit motives may operate on one side of a debate, they may equally operate on the other. We do not (at least not always) clarify an issue by delving into psychology or personal history but rather by reasoning about the subject in hand.
If you try to find out which [thoughts] are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, [you may] go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
 In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. … [Y]ou can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology. (1941a: 180-1)



In attacking Bulverism, Lewis distinguished between reasons and causes:
Causes are mindless events which can produce other results than beliefs. Reasons arise from axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulversism tries to show that the other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and not causes. A belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes is worthless. (1941a: 182)
It is unclear how this last quote fits with the general critique of Bulverism. On the one hand we have Lewis saying that we can only find out the rights and wrong by reasoning and not by explaining (away) our opponents beliefs as the product of non-rational causes, and on the other Lewis appears to claim that the presence of such causes is incompatible with the presence of reasons. Is the problem with Bulverism that it fails to distinguish between reasons and causes and so presumes that one must exclude the other? Or is it that Bulverism is too quick to attribute beliefs to non-rational causes in the first place?
 The question is interesting in its own right, but it is also interesting for the light it may (or may not) cast upon Lewis’ argument against naturalism. For if the presence of a non-rational cause for a belief does not exclude the presence of reasons, it is hard to see how the naturalist’s commitment to the presence of such causes can discredit the naturalist’s beliefs. On the other hand, if these two kinds of explanation are really incompatible, we cannot claim that the Freudian critique of religious belief commits the genetic fallacy but merely that it assumes too easily that religious belief is brought about by non-rational factors. If religious belief may have non-rational determinants (may be ‘desire based’) and yet still be warranted, then surely the naturalist’s general commitment to the presence of such determinants cannot undermine his claims to knowledge. In terms of the reasoning presented in Chapter 5, we may wonder whether Lewis’ argument against naturalism cannot be rejected on the same grounds as we rejected the Freudian critique of religious belief, that it commits the genetic fallacy. If the one argument commits this fallacy, then so too does the other. Or so it would appear.
 But to commit the genetic fallacy is to take the origin of a belief to be relevant to its evaluation and then illegitimately fault the belief because of its origin. A clear entailment is that if any arguments commit this fallacy, there must be a meaningful distinction between the causal origins of a belief and the grounds of that belief. But it is at just this point that Lewis attacks naturalism. To argue that a worldview cannot accommodate the reasons/causes distinction is not to commit the genetic fallacy but to contend that within that worldview the accusation of making that fallacy would cease to have meaning. Lewis is not only not committing the fallacy, he is arguing against a view which (if his argument is correct) entails that there is no such fallacy to commit. Alan Gerwith puts the point in strikingly Lewisian terms.
[The naturalist] thesis is unable to account for the difference between the relation of physical or psychological cause and effect and the relation of logical or evidential ground and consequent. (1978: 36)
Bulverism also connects with several other aspects of Lewis’ work. In The Personal Heresy (Lewis and Tillyard 1939), Lewis argues against E.M.W. Tillyard’s view that poetry, and literature more generally, is first and foremost the “expression of the poet’s personality”, that “All Poetry is about the poet’s state of mind” and that, therefore, “the end we are supposed to pursue in reading … is a certain contact with the poet’s soul” (quoted in Schultz and West Jr. 1998: 318). According to Lewis, to read a poem as it should be read “I must look where he [the author] looks and not turn around to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles” (quoted in Duriez 2000: 162).
I look with his eyes, not at him. He, for the moment, will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your own nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him. (Quoted in Hooper 1997: 599)
If we are to treat a person’s opinions fairly we cannot treat them as facts to be explained merely as episodes in their biography, we must consider the belief in question on its own merits. This in turn means thinking about the content of the belief and not about the belief itself. In a similar manner, to read a poem ‘fairly’ we cannot treat it merely as an expression of the poet’s personality, we must attempt to see what the poet sees and not merely to see the poet.
 Lewis’ assault on Bulverism is noted by Como (1998: 170), by Hooper (1997: 552) and by Burson and Walls (1998: 160-1) as among Lewis’ most important ideas, and its relevance to Lewis’ rejection of the Freudian critique of religious belief is obvious. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, that attempt to discredit religious belief is no more (and is perhaps less) convincing than the attempt to discredit atheistic belief in the same manner.

Steve and Pat: This is a little bit related to the internalism/externalism issue that was explored between my blog and John DePoe's. Something I have to keep emphasizing is that science depends crucially on some beliefs being *rationally inferred*. This entails a claim about how the belief was produced. If I say some people form beliefs because they perceive a logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion. That requires a nonaccidental confluence between cause and effect relations and ground-consequent relations which is prima facie very tough to square with the mechanism and causal closure of the physical. The AFR says that if physicalism is true, then this never occurs.

Contrast this with a case of Bulverizing. I offer a rational reason for believing in God, say, the AFR. You reply that I can't possibly believe in God because of the argument, I must believe because of wish-fulfillment. Then there are two problems. One arises if I claim that I came to believe in God as a result of reasoning. If I'm making that claim, then we have to ask what kind of evidence could show that this wasn't true. A brain scan maybe? Prolonged observation of my behavior? Even if I have a wish to believe, this doesn't show that the wish, and not the reasoning, caused the belief.

But what if I don't say that I myself came to believe in God because of the AFR. I don't make that kind of autobiographical claim myself, even though I have been inviting people for years to be able to make that autobiographical claim. For me, of course, it's one of a number of reasons I believe in God. Even if I am a theist because of wish-fulfilment and the AFR is an attempt on my part to rationalize my beliefs, nevertheless the argument is "out there" and has to be considered on its argumentative merits. Of course, this all presupposes that we live in a world in which at least some people at some times make rational inferences, and change their beliefs on that basis.

One can criticize Bulverism without committing oneself to Anscombe's implausible thesis that how a belief is formed is irrelevant to how the belief is justified.

I provide a link to Lovell's dissertation here:

Why Bulverism is a fallacy

Saying that Bulverism is a fallacy is simply to say that you can't refute someone's position by pointing out an ulterior motive they might have for believing in it.

Here's the way the whole thing works. Once an argument is given, the focus goes away from the person to the argument they use. 

If someone gives an argument for the claim that smoking really doesn't cause cancer, then it isn't a refutation of their argument to point out that the person is paid by the cigarette companies. They might, for all that, have a good argument. Now if they are saying "I'm an expert, trust me, smoking really doesn't cause cancer," then the fact that they are paid by the cigarette companies is a problem. But if you can evaluate the argument, you should do that, as opposed to just considering the source.

If you don't like Lewis's term Bulverism, (since it comes from a Christian) just substitute ad hominem circumstantial. 

Bulverism: A Truly Democratic Game

I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that “the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world.” Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see clearly enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that “the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting.” For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense that all can play it all day long, and that it give no unfair advantage to the small and offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds – a matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury writes book on Narnia

Here. 

How chess saves lives

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov talks about chess and education in developing countries.

Ehrman's nonrepeatability argument against the resurrection

Doug Benscoter argues that this argument wouldn't just rule out the Resurrection, it would rule out the Big Bang.

Are believers a bunch of sheeple?

It is an interesting stereotype amongst religious skeptics that they think people who believe believe like sheep, without thinking or questioning. In general, I have not found this to be the case in my experience. 

On a common rebuttal to the First Way

From Martin, here.

Some basics on the Cosmological Argument

Here. 

Can people learn to avoid simple mistakes in assessing cosmological arguments?

Atheism's cyanide pill

We have seen the argument that atheism must be true, because it's the wave of the future? But is it? Apparently atheists don't reproduce at the rate of religious believers, so the future belongs to...well, not the atheists.

Why do people avoid philosophical discussions?

Someone asked that question on a philosophy forum, here.

Imagine there's no Darwin

What would the world have been like without Darwin? Peter Bowler wrote a book on this, but Michael Flannery of Evolution News and Views begs to differ.

Why the next C. S. Lewis must be a geek

Here. 

HT: Bob Prokop

Christian crimes, and the crimes of atheists

Papalinton brings up the actions of Christians in Africa who harm children accused of being witches.

Why is this any different from bringing up the crimes of communists, and the persecution of religious believers in Communist countries.


You can't have it both ways. If these horrible actions by Christians counts against Christianity, then the crimes of atheistic communists counts against atheism.

These things were done by Christian theists, but not by Christianity. In the case of Christianity, we have Matthew 18:6, which says

"If anyone causes one of these little ones--those who believe in me--to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

That's what Christ says about harming children, so Christians who harm children have to violate the teachings of its founder to do such things. I'm not even saying that the people who did these things are not real Christians. What I am saying is that they are violating the teachings of Jesus. You cannot even say that the actions of Stalin, Mao, et al, violate the fundamental teachins of atheism. Atheism does not require such actions, but it does not proscribe them either.

Is the mental on the ground floor?

BI asked: How does supernaturalism solve the problem of consciousness?

To respond to this, I am transferring in some material I posted on Dangerous Idea 2, which eventually became part of my essay in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Here's the general idea: when we call something material, or even natural, we are presuming that, at the basic level of analysis, mental characteristics are not present. If, on the other hand, the basic building blocks of the universe are not restricted to the non-mental, then the mental is already present at the basic level of analysis. With naturalistic views, as I am understanding them, we start with a supervenience base that is mental-free, and then we have to account for the existence of mind. With "supernaturalistic" views (and I don't really like the term here, but OK, though Lewis had no problem with it), you start with the mental on the ground floor, so it is far less difficult to see how the mental could arise. It is not to be completely explained in terms of the non-mental. 

There are four features of the mental which someone who denies the ultimacy of mind maintain must not be found on the rock bottom level of the universe. The first mark of the mental is purpose. If there is purpose in the world, it betokens the existence of a mind that has that purpose. So for anyone who denies the ultimacy of the mind, an explanation in terms of purposes requires a further non-purposive explanation to account for the purpose explanation. The second mark of the mental is intentionality or about-ness. Genuinely non-mental states are not about anything at all. The third mark of the mental is normativity. If there is normativity, there has to be a mind for which something is normative. A normative explanation must be explained further in terms of the non-normative. Finally, the fourth mark of the mental is subjectivity. If there is a perspective from which something is viewed, that means, once again, that a mind is present. A genuinely non-mental account of a state of affairs will leave out of account anything that indicates what it is like to be in that state.

If the mind is not ultimate, then any explanation that is given in terms of any of these four marks must be given a further explanation in which these marks are washed out of the equation.

IV. Minimal Materialism

There seem to be three minimal characteristics of a world-view which affirms that the mind is not ultimate. First, the “basic level” must be mechanistic, and by that I mean that it is free of purpose, free of intentionality, free of normativity, and free of subjectivity. It is not implied here that a naturalistic world must be deterministic. However, whatever is not deterministic in such a world is brute chance and nothing more.

Second, “basic level” must be causally closed. Nothing that exists independently from the physical world can cause anything to occur in the physical world. Second, the level of basic physics must be causally closed. That is, if a physical event has a cause at time t, then it has a physical cause at time t. Even that cause is not a determining cause; there cannot be something non-physical that plays a role in producing a physical event. If you knew everything about the physical level (the laws and the facts) before an event occurred, you could add nothing to your ability to predict where the particles will be in the future by knowing anything about anything outside of basic physics.

Third, whatever is not physical, at least if it is in space and time, must supervene on the physical. Given the physical, everything else is a necessary consequence. In short, what the world is at bottom is a mindless system of events at the level of fundamental particles, and everything else that exists must exist in virtue of what is going on at that basic level. This understanding of a broadly materialist world-view is not a tendentiously defined form of reductionism; it is what most people who would regard themselves as being in the broadly materialist camp would agree with, a sort of “minimal materialism.” Not only that, but I maintain that any world-view that could reasonably be called “naturalistic” is going to have these features, and the difficulties that I will be advancing against a “broadly materialist” world-view thus defined will be a difficulty that will exist for any kind of naturalism that I can think of.

Did the Apostles Die as Martyrs?

This video, from Stand to Reason, suggests that we have good reason to believe that, though it is an argument from silence. 

My view is that regardless of how they actually died, when you say something like this, from Acts 4: 9-10, 

If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed,then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed.

you are telling the people who had the power to get someone executed, namely Jesus, that you are sufficiently convinced of what you are saying that you are willing to die for it. This does, it seems to be, support the claim that the Apostles strongly believed in the Resurrection, and would undercut conspiracy theories. A skeptic needs a theory that explains, and does not deny, this sincere belief. 

Ayn Rand's Jack-Hammering

Ayn Rand was no fan of C. S. Lewis. See here. 

HT:  Bob Prokop

The Problem of Pain-for naturalists.

Steven Carr wrote: I really don't think Victor understands the argument from evil.

Evil and suffering occur pretty much randomly.

There is no god organising the world, just as there is no god organising quantum events.

VR: No, I think I do understand it. The claim is that if theism is true, then we should expect the world to be one in which pleasure and pain are distributed strongly in favor of pleasure, while pain or suffering will occur, if it occurs at all, only when it is necessary to some greater good. 

On the other hand, if naturalistic atheism is true, then we should expect to find pleasure and pain distributed evenly and randomly. Since that is what we do in fact find, the pain and suffering in the world gives us a reason to believe that naturalistic atheism is preferable to theism. 

But, here's my problem. I wouldn't expect there to be any pain and suffering given naturalism. Pain behavior maybe, but not real pain and suffering. Unless someone has a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, pain may be a problem for theists, but it's a devastating problem for naturalism. Why is the theist's problem of pain worse than the naturalists? 

Do you believe in the laws of physics?

I noticed Beingitself claiming that he believes in the laws of physics. Nancy Cartwright's book is an attack on the idea of fundamental laws of physics. See here.

God, Evil, and Cake-Cramming: An exchange with Keith Parsons

KP: Discussions of the problem of evil, like all philosophical discussions, tend to be conducted at a level of theoretical aridity. When discussing these issues with a class, we first go through all the standard moves and counter-moves. Then, I recommend that they step back from the theoretical for a moment and consider the testimony of those who have actually confronted radical evil. I mention two texts, Elie Wiesel's Night and Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place. Wiesel and Ten Boom, as survivors of Nazi death camps, certainly had experience of the worst that humanity can dish out. Their reactions were totally different. Wiesel says that the experience destroyed his God. Ten Boom said that she had found that God's love is deeper than the deepest evil. I then challenge my class to consider whether anyone who had not been subjected to such experiences has the right to judge those who have. Do any of us have the right to say that either Wiesel's or Ten Boom's response was irrational or perverse? I think not.

Still, I have heard testimonies of those who have encountered great loss or suffering that struck me as cheap and facile, Years ago when I was still a Christian and went to church I heard a preacher talk about a couple whose seven-year-old son had died. The couple dealt with their loss by saying that, as they viewed it, God had lent them their son for seven years and then called him back to his true home. The preacher compared those who express outrage at the loss of a child to those who bitterly complains when the owner asks for a lent item to be returned. That answer made my skin crawl even when I was devout. I cannot help but feel that there is something cheap, facile, and, indeed, callous about that answer.

It seems to me that a far more authentic response was the one of the main character in Peter de Vries' novel The Blood of the Lamb. He takes a cake to his daughter's hospital room to find the bed empty. The nurse tells him that his daughter has died overnight. On the way out he passes the chapel where there is a large crucifix. He takes out the cake and crams it into the face of the Christ on the cross.

Fortunately, I have never had a loss like that, but, if I did, I think I would be one of the cake-in-face crammers.

VR: Facile responses to the problem of evil are problems, for the simple reason that we do not know what the explanation is. What was really wrong in the preacher's comment is the fact that it sound as if the feelings of those who are angry with God for losing a child are illegitimate.


I can surely understand the cake-cramming state of mind. However, whether this grounds a rational argument against belief in God is another matter, and some people act as if that attitude is morally superior to other possible attitudes, and I don't buy it. It's the Ivan Karamazov move: This is evil, God should have done something, and nothing we might find to be true hereafter can render God innocent of allowing this kind of suffering.

I happen to think that an disconfirming argument against theism from evil probably can be made. I think "skeptical theist" responses based on our expected lack of understanding of these things decrease the weight of the argument, but they do not eliminate it entirely. On the other hand, when I think about argument from evil, I find that the very things that generate the argument, such as the capacity to feel pain (as opposed to just having one's c-fibers fire), our conscious minds, our moral awareness, and our ability to think rationally, are all things that make philosophical naturalism, which is typically offered as the alternative to being a theist, implausible to me. What I don't see is an argument from evil that somehow outweighs all the others. It is, at most, something theism can't explain, or can't explain as well as I wish we could. Why this is a more severe explanatory failure that naturalism's failure to explain consciousness has always escaped me.

I mean, people who do believe in an infinite being invariably think that that being is good. Do you know any actual subscribers to Paul Draper's Indifferent Deity Hypothesis? What that expects you to believe is that God controls the universe, and there is a moral standard, which God somehow fails to satisfy. So, I don't see any plausible alternatives if I want to reject naturalism and God both.

An exchange between Jason Pratt and Keith Parsons on evil and universalism

Here.

Materialism and Beauty

Can materialism explain our perception of beauty?

According to this, no.

Who are you, O man? The eliminativist response to the problem of evil

The idea that we have no duties to that which we create seems counterintuitive to me. That is why I'm not an eliminativist with respect to the problem of evil.
Yet, I sometimes I wonder how to argue with someone who is. And there is a Bible verse to support their view:

Romans 9:20 But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'"

Does it follow from this that if A is the creator of B, then B cannot make any moral judgments concerning A's treatment of B?

Peter Singer on infanticide

 The moral philosopher Peter Singer thinks that infanticide can be justified. See a discussion here.  

An exercise for the reader

The Bible is the basis for morality, but in the Bible such heroes as David had many wives. Thus, his affair with Bathsheba was adultery not because he was married (he could have added her to his harem), but because she was married. This was someone who was called "a man after God's own heart." But if so, should we do likewise? Try advocating that in your church. 

What principles should be used to resolve this problem?

Does theism entail the absence of gratuitous evil?

This is from a discussion I was involved with, largely with Keith Parsons, on the Secular Outpost. 

I'd like to start by raising a question about the claim that God has to have a justifying reason for all the evils he permits. How do you know that? Maybe a being can be worthy of worship even if he permits some gratuitous evil, or even a lot of it. 

This is an interesting essay, by Trakakis, who criticizes one attempt to deny that theism entails that there is no gratuitous evil. 

If a woman has the right to do as he chooses with her own body, then maybe God has the right to do as he chooses with his own universe???? I once, in a bad mood, said this: 

"We have to assume that a perfectly good God would want to minimize suffering. Sometimes I think there ought to be more suffering in the world than there really is. But whatever God has chosen to dish out, so long as it doesn't result in anyone being unjustly damned, accords with my conception of perfect goodness."

I don't actually believe this, but I would still be interested in seeing how someone refuted it. 

Of course, how far can we push this? Could we embrace the view by going to a very different theory of the good, a theory in which what is good is the glory of God, not human well-being, and that glory is defined in terms of the number of attributes God is able to express. On this view, if God predestines some for salvation and some for damnation, and then in the case of the redeemed, God's glory is his gracious redemption of sinners who deserve eternal damnation, and in the case of the lost, God's glory is the exercise of wrath against sinners. So, while God may command us not to run a hell for people, he is under no obligation to run one himself, if that brings greater glory to himself. 

I bring this up because this was a position I spent a lot of time arguing against a few years back, when I was arguing against Calvinists. They argue that the only problem with their position was that it was counterintuitive to me, whereas if indeed it was taught by the Bible, (as they claim that it is), then I ought to set my intuitions aside and accept it. 

I'm still convinced that this is a bridge too far, that it disconnects goodness from happiness in a way that makes the concept of goodness simply unrecognizable. 

Still, I do think the relation between the concept of God and gratuitous evil needs to be carefully considered, as opposed to being taken as simply obvious. 

An attack on "Obama's Socialism?"

Does anyone see a problem with this analogy?

Are we all just thinking meat?

Here.

HT: Steve Hays.

Conservatism, Liberalism, and Economic Luck

In understanding the difference between liberals and conservatives, it seems to me that  conservatives have a tendency to explain success in terms of superior merit, while liberals are more inclined to point to luck factors. 

Is this accurate? 

Morality without God?

           If God laid down the correct morals, and part of the morality he laid down involves giving him proper  
           worship, then atheists are going to be lacking in at least some moral categories, almost by definition.

Jerry Coyne on reductionism

Leiter and Weisberg: Nagel opposes two main components of the “materialist” view inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the “higher” sciences to the laws of physics.


Coyne: Here all three academics (Weisberg is a philosopher; Leiter a professor of law) make a mistake: the view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics, which is materialism, is not identical to an attempt to reduce all sciences to physics. The former must be true unless you’re religious, while the latter is a tactical problem that will be solved to some degree as we understand more about physics and biology, but is unlikely in our lifetime to give a complete explanation for higher-level phenomena. Remember, though, that “emergent phenomena” must be consistent with the laws of physics, even those laws may not be useful for explaining things like natural selection.


VR: Thanks, Jerry, for attacking nonreductive materialism, which is the strongest form of materialism.

David Marshall responds to Loftus's OTF book

For those interested, here. 

John Lennox Remembers C. S. Lewis

Here. 

The Return of the Index of Forbidden Books: Secular Version

“If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.” I hope that one day he regrets that sentence. It is not what Bruno, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Kant, and the other victims of the anti-philosophical Vatican had in mind.

This is from a response to the anti-Nagel mentality in the New Republic. Thomas of Torquemada will not be too far behind. 

The Case Against Cheerful Humanism

I think one very annoying feature of many of the present group of cheerleaders for atheism is the idea that somehow if we get rid of religion as a society we will simply all become cheerful humanists, and take all of what we put into God and put it instead into ourselves, thus being so much the better off.

In fact, I think that while atheism in itself is not a threat to the future of civilization, I think that a belief in what I will call the secular paradise is perhaps the most destructive idea that we can have, and will bring down civilization if people who believe in it have enough political power. The Christian heaven is not of this world, and it can't be achieved by the exercise of political power, although Christians have, throughout history, attempted to use political power for what they have taken to be divine purposes. The results have typically left black marks on the history of Christendom. Nevertheless, if Christianity is true, there are limits on what we humans can do to bring in the Kingdom of God. Religious belief, for many of us, needs to be a choice, and God is ultimately in control, not us. But the secular paradise is to be achieved my man and his own efforts. The end is noble, and it thus justifies whatever means we might use to get there. It is the combination of atheism and belief in the secular paradise that leads to the kinds of horrors we saw from the Communists.

I do not know whether the author of this essay is an atheist, but it is entitled "Where are all the honest atheists."

Redating Lewis's Conversion to Theism?

Perhaps the most famous words in Lewis's Surprised by Joy are these:

"You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" (Surprised By Joy, ch. 14, p. 266).

Alastair McGrath thinks that Lewis may have wrongly recollected his conversion to theism as Trinity Term of 1929. But I think the objections Forster presents here have to be taken seriously.

HT: Steve Hays

Missing link now supplied.

Justifiable murder and justifiable homicides

I am inclined to think that calling it murder means that you are saying that it's morally wrong. I take it justifiable homicide is not murder. So "Murder is wrong" is true by definition. However, we can imagine a society that considerably expanded the range of justifiable homicide, and the Amazon culture seems to. I can imagine a society that considered it justifiable homicide if you killed a cheating spouse. If relativism is true, then that we could never say that that society was in error for allowing such homicides.

Relativism and Inequality

The big problem I see with relativism that a lot of people can also see, it seems to me, is that a lot of cultures have rules of conduct that presupposes that people are not equal, and that some people are to be treated as inferiors. Relativists want to say that all cultures are created equal, but in order to accept that, you have to accept cultural norms that presuppose that there are superiors and inferiors. 

God and the Big Bang

The Big Bang theory posits a temporal beginning to the universe, and doesn't explain why the Big Bang happened, or why the universe exists at all. Why is there a universe, as opposed to none? Couldn't it just as easily have been the case that nothing existed? Previous theories, like the Steady State or the Oscillating Universe theory, claimed that the universe has always existed. But these theories have been rejected. With the Big Bang, this is not the case. There was a beginning. So, even if you reject the Bible from the fourth word (In the beginning God), you have to say that the first three words are OK and in accordance with science.


If something begins to exist, and nothing caused it to exist, isn't that a strange thing to say? If we are eating lunch, and a bunny rabbit begins to exist and munches on your salad, would it make any sense to say "Oh, that rabbit just popped into existence out of nothing. It didn't have a cause."

Discovery Institute Opposes Intelligent Design "Equal Time" Bill

That's right. Here.

There are burdens, and there are burdens

There are different burdens of proof, it seems to me. There is the burden of proof that attached to the fact that you are asking someone to change their minds about something. I am not talking about that kind of a burden. I am talking about the burden that attaches to a person in virtue of his continuing to believe it himself, with a threat of irrationality charges if the person continues believing without the requisite proof.

Oxford Study shows that it is natural to believe in God

Here.

Why Evolution is......Misunderstood

A response to Jerry Coyne's speaking tour of the Southeast. What I can't figure out is why people think that the progress of science depends upon the acceptance of a "scientific world-view." (i. e. naturalistic atheism). It seems to me that evolutionary biology can be done perfectly well even by people who believe in Young Earth Creationism ,(OK, that's a stretch) or at least intelligent design.

Reply to Hitchens on Mother Teresa

Here.

A question for Bill Craig on the Inner Witness of the Spirit

I have some questions about Craig's "Holy Spirit Epistemology," which may not be quite the typical ones.

The picture that we often have of Craig's position is that while he is prepared to argue for Christian theism, he thinks even if he were to re-evaluate all the arguments negatively, he would still continue to believe, because of the inner witness of the spirit. When he says this we are inclined to picture an "inner voice in the head" that is going to continue to convince him that Christianity even though all the evidence points the other way.

If this is the picture, then I have a few problems with it. Although I believe myself to have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, I don't find a clear voice in my head that I can always identify as the Holy Spirit, as it were, by feel. Consider an inner voice that told me to commit adultery. However, much it might feel like the Holy Spirit, I am sure Bill Craig would tell me that it can't possibly be the Holy Spirit, but probably has to come either from the flesh or the devil. He would direct me, no doubt, to the Bible's prohibition against adultery and argue that, no matter how strongly I felt that I should commit adultery, and no matter how much the feel of this prompting resembled the feel of other promptings to, say, help my neighbor, or go to church on Sunday, it cannot come from the same source. People who think the inner witness of the Holy Spirit tells them to commit mass murder, or violate any other of the Ten Commandments, have to be  mistaken. Something external to the inner voice, in this case Scripture,

I think it's a mistake to think of the witness of the Holy Spirit as an inner voice that some how goes on speaking within one's head regardless of what is outside of it. Rather, it has to operate, in large part, by calling our attention to things outside ourselves.

Is it reasonable to suppose that God might allow me, by honest reflection on the arguments about belief in God, come to believe that insofar as reason is concerned, none of the theistic arguments are good, and that some atheological arguments, such as the argument from evil, are good, but then enable me to continue believing because of an inner voice? I don't see the Holy Spirit doing that.

Craig does says this on his website.


Now it might be said, that God would, indeed, not permit a person to fall into circumstances where the rational thing for him to do is to apostatize and turn his back on God, but what God would do is provide sufficient evidence to such an individual so that he is able to defeat through argument and evidence the alleged defeater. I grant that such a view is possible (how could anyone who believes in middle knowledge think differently?). But as I look at the world in which we actually live, such a view strikes me as naïve.

The vast majority of people in the world have neither the time, training, nor resources to develop a full-blown Christian apologetic as the basis of their faith or to defeat the sundry defeaters which they encounter. I have been deeply moved by the plight of Christians as I have traveled abroad and seen the sometimes desperate circumstances in which they find themselves. In Europe, for example, the university culture is overwhelmingly secular and even atheistic. I met many theological students when we lived in Germany whose professors had exposed them to nothing but radical biblical criticism and anti-Christian scholarship. These students held on to Christian faith in spite of the evidence. It was far, far worse in Eastern Europe and Russia. I wish I could convey to you the spiritual darkness and oppression that existed behind the Iron Curtain during the days of the Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian believer, "Have you no resources to help you in your Christian life?" He replied, "Well, there is an encyclopedia of atheism published by the state, and by reading what is attacked there, you can learn something. But that's about all." These bothers and sisters endured horrible oppression and atheistic indoctrination by the Marxist regime and yet did not abandon Christ. As I emphasized in my answer to Question #13, evidence varies from generation to generation and from place to place and is accessible only to those privileged few who have the education, leisure time, and resources to explore it. God has provided a more secure basis for our faith than the shifting sands of evidence and argument, namely, the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Now, admittedly different people have different intellectual needs which might be met differently. When I was in my teens and early twenties I used to get frustrated with many Christians who didn't seem to need to think critically about their faith as intensely as I did, but as I have gotten older I realize people have other fish to fry, and not everyone is cut out to be a philosopher. However, some of us, like Dr. Craig and myself, have been exposed to arguments for and against theism. Could a Christian decide, yeah, the cosmological argument is bad, the design argument in all its forms is bad, the AFR is bad, the historical evidence for the resurrection is poor, the problem of evil looks like a strong case against God, but I have this inner voice that tells me Christianity is true nevertheless. Or maybe a warm fuzzy feeling? Does the Holy Spirit work like that?  Remember I said that even those of us who believe we have the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit can't introspectively determine whether a voice inside our own head is the Holy Spirit of indeed from a less sanctified source.

So I wonder if this picture of Craig's position is really what he thinks, or is it a straw man?

If you attack something, you have to defend your attacks

Papalinton: Dawkins showed more than a modicum of wisdom when he intelligently noted, in paraphrase, "It [a debate] would look good on his CV but not on mine." Why give unwarranted oxygen to an aficionado of implausible supernatural superstition?

VR: Because you went to the bother of attacking that superstition. If spend your energy attacking something, you then have to put your own view and the view you are attacking on a level playing field and follow the argument where it leads. You have to be ready to have it out with the leading advocates of the opposing view. Otherwise, you conducting a one-sided discussion, where only the ideas on your side are considered. You may conclude that the public-debate format in which Craig thrives is a bad format. Fine, find another format.

I have never had a public debate with a Mormon apologist. But, if I wrote a book called The Mormon Delusion, and a Mormon were to reply to my objections on behalf of the LDS, then I would have to be prepared, in some format or other to engage that defender of Mormonism, and if several Mormons were to respond, then I should at least engage the best people on the Mormon side.

If Christians aren't important enough to debate, then they're not important enough to attack. Craig is one of the world's leading defenders of theistic arguments. If your thesis entails that theistic arguments are no good, then you have to respond to advocates of those arguments. From what I can see, Dawkins doesn't even know how to state Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument, much less refute it.

Dawkins' failure to debate Bill Craig

In any event, Dawkins' failure to debate Craig is not something I have a problem with per se.

However, I find the charge of "defending genocide" to be somewhat misstated. Could an omniscient being ever be justified in ordering a genocide if he thought that the overall balance of good over bad would be enhanced by so doing? Regardless of what you think the answer is on this, I don't think you could use that as a basis of supposing that your opponent was an evil person, or that you shouldn't be seen on stage with someone like that. Unless you thought this person could end up advocating a present-day genocide, I don't see that such a position would render someone dangerous. And if you really thought someone might end up justifying a real genocide, wouldn't you want to debate them to make sure that such ideas were effectively refuted? I certainly would.

But the fact is, I have no trouble with Dawkins not debating Craig, except that I consider it to be symptomatic of an overall unwillingness to be responsive to critics of his atheistic programme. An atheist might think that a public debate format is a bad setup for that person to engage the points at issue betwee Craig and himself, which is fine. What he has not done is shown either the ability or the willingness to engage, say, Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument, beginning with an effort to state the argument clearly enough so that his audience can be sure he knows how to distinguish that argument from other versions of the cosmological argument. To take a page from Jesse Parrish's book, anyone who writes about the credibility of belief in God should be able to pass this Simple Test For Understanding. Otherwise....

Craig on Intentionality and Mathematics

Here.

A rabbi bashes the new atheists

It's Rabbi Moshe Averick.

Classic line: Wouldn’t it have been simpler to reprint Bertrand Russell’s succinct essay, “Why I Am Not Theist,”  and have been done with it?

Well, actually the essay was entitled "Why I am not a Christian." But the point still stands.

Peter Williams' New Book on Lewis and the New Atheists

What if C. S. Lewis debated Richard Dawkins? Oh, don't worry. Even if Lewis were around to debate, Dawkins would come up with some reason not to go on stage with him!

The trailer for it is here.

Ben Schuldt replies to me on behalf of Carrier

Here. He also replies to Darek Barefoot here.

Dale Tuggy's Review of the Craig-Rosenberg debate

Here.

Sins of the physicalist literature

Back before I opened Dangerous Idea, I gave this response to physicalist critics of the AFR, on Bill Vallicella's blog.

 A lot of the physicalist literature is guilty of one or all of the following sins, which in my estimation are:
1) A dogmatic pre-commitment to materialism.
2) Changing the explanandum in order to make the physicalistic explanation possible.
3) Presuming the very ideas one is trying to explain naturalistically.
4) Issuing gigantic promissory notes to future science, when we have no idea how future science will go.

Callard on Naturalism by Definition

This is a really forceful response. HT: William.

Searle: For us [naturalists], if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact like any other. To the four basic forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces—we would add a fifth, the divine force . . . [I]t would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural. [Searle, 1998, p. 35]


Callard: This sort of terminological appropriation, whether it is applied to God, numbers, or anything else, fails to address the underlying question. By decreeing that the word ‘natural’ (or ‘physical’) is to be applied to any phenomenon we discover, the naturalist robs naturalism of any content relevant to the substantive dispute between naturalists and those who disagree with them. I have claimed that efficient causal relations between non-spatial, necessary, eternal, unchanging objects and spatial, contingent, changing objects are strongly possible, and I have used the word ‘abstract’ to refer to the former sort of objects, and ‘physical’ or ‘material’ or ‘concrete’ for the latter sort. But the truth of my claim is not affected, or illuminated, if we decide to use these words in some other way instead.

-- Callard, Benjamin, The Conceivability of Platonism, Philosophia Mathematica (III) 15 (2007), pp. 347–356.

Martin's AFR powerpoint

This is really very nice. Here.

Corduan on confusing miracles and magic

I am redating this post, because of this comment:

So we have a guy who believes in ghosts and magic and an invisible superman telling me that my position isn't rational. It takes brass.


Still, before going any further, I promised that I would clear up why Mr. Carrier and some of his colleagues in their critique of miracles make the mistakes that they do. The answer is very simple: they confuse miracles and magic, and doing so is such a common practice that it seems to me that few people are ever even aware of it, though the distinction is not too hard to catch. I am using the term “magic” here in the technical sense, as one would in the study of comparative religion, not in the sense of sleight of hand for the sake of entertainment. Magic consists of the manipulation of spiritual forces for the sake of bringing about a certain end. A miracle is a free action by God, done by him as he sees fit, and never coerced by human beings, though it may be, if God so wishes, a response by him to human beings. This is not a distinction that I have invented just now (or for that matter, a few decades ago), but one that has been accepted in religious studies and the anthropology if religion, not to mention theology, for a long time, but it seems to be unknown among philosophical skeptics of religion, unless they deliberately ignore it. Its roots lie in another fundamental distinction, namely that of religion as rituals for reasons of personal gain and religion as the worship of a supreme being simply because of his exalted position. As anyone who has read some of my other works knows, I contend that a natural disposition of fallen human beings is towards magic and rituals, and that those procedures wind up infiltrating almost all religious cultures. Nonetheless, from an abstract, conceptual point of view, the difference between the two is crystal clear.

The Rage of Unbelief

This is in response to Alex Rosenberg's debate with William Lane Craig. Not mentioning any names, but this does seem to be a real problem with "movement atheism." If this movement becomes more predominant, we may find ourselves in a society deeply bifurcated on religious grounds--a kind of intellectual apartheid, where we are no longer able to talk to one another. The societal damage this would do would be incalculable.

HT: Bob Prokop

Robin Collins responds to Victor Stenger on Fine Tuning

Here.

The external world and the burden of proof

Should the burden of proof be on the side of a person who believes in the external world? Should believers in the external world have to prove that there really is an external world independent of our minds? After all "The external world exists" is a positive existence claim, in just the way that "God exists" is a positive existence claim. So, if theists have the burden of proof, do external worldists have the same burden?  Do we have the right to believe in the external world if the we can't refute the claim that we are brains in vats who are being given the experience of a world that really does not exist?

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Keith Burgess-Jackson on Nagel, Plantinga, and Leiter

Here is his response to Plantinga's review of Nagel, and here is his response to the Leiter-Weisberg attack on Nagel.

Some of the attacks on people like Nagel really do remind me of the Spanish Inquisition.

More on circumstantial ad hominem

Here's what I put in the last post. 

"You think you have reasons to believe in God. But actually, you only believe it because you can't stand the idea of going out of existence when you die. You don't have reasons, just rationalizations."

In other words, this response is addressed to a believer who thinks he has reasons for being a theist.

Now, I am perfectly willing to point out that there are POSSIBLE non-rational motives working in both directions. But to think that we know that actual motives of other people assumes powers of mindreading that I am afraid we all lack.

Walter said: It's also quite annoying when we skeptics are told that the only reason we refuse to believe is because we love our sin and autonomy too much to bend the knee and submit to Jesus as our master.

Of course it is. It is also annoying when skeptics assert that they couldn't have psychological motives undergirding their beliefs.

I'm skeptical wrote: Please tell me about this empirical evidence regarding wish fulfillment. I always thought the atheist based his beliefs on evidence.

Well, we all think the evidence is on our side. We all at least try to believe based on evidence. How well we do it is precisely what's at issue. I don't know if he was thinking this, but sometimes atheists really talk as if atheistic naturalism is so emotionally repulsive that only evidence could persuade anyone that it is true. That strikes me as extremely naive. If you'll buy that, I've got some oceanfront property in Arizona, from my front porch you can see the sea.

Ad hominem circumstantial

"You think you have reasons to believe in God. But actually, you only believe it because you can't stand the idea of going out of existence when you die. You don't have reasons, just rationalizations."


How many times have you heard this?

We call it "going bad" in Narnia

Papalinton: However, the arguments providing epistemic support for atheism is growing as we speak. What remains in the wash, following the exponentially burgeoning level and array of research and investigative discoveries into the nature of reality through the sciences, history, archeology, the humanities etc that demonstrate the god-concept superfluous to explanation, is an attitude; an attitude of denial of evidence, an attitude of disbelief despite the mounting proofs, and the verification and corroboration of those proofs. It is an attitude that defies logic, reason and rational thought. The god-concept is an illusion. Belief in a god is delusion.


Victor, you chose the Confederacy. The Confederacy lost. The Confederacy today is an illusion, despite the flags, meets, celebrations and swapping badges.

VR: Is that your argument, Papalinton? We are winning?

That is not an argument. If the Nazis had won WWII, would the Holocaust have been morally justified?

"But that would be putting the clock back," gasped the governor. "Have you no idea of progress, of development?"

"I have seen them both in an egg," said Caspian. "We call it 'Going Bad' in Narnia...."

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Interestingly enough, Lydia McGrew makes use of the same Narnia passage in the discussion of a different topic.

Whether the intellectual trends of a culture consistitue real intellectual progress, or not, is precisely what is at issue.

All arguments can be outweighed

Prokop: Ultimately, I think that the arguments from design and from fine tuning are both only "convincing" to the convinced. They both convince me, but I am a believer without either of them.

VR: When you make statements like that, you have to be careful. Atheists, particularly of the New variety, are likely to say that theists don't follow evidence, rather, they are originally convinced of what they need to believe and find "evidence" that isn't really evidence to support a conclusion they are committed to emotionally. Atheists, on the other hand, look for REAL evidence which, of course, is not forthcoming.  You don't want to come anywhere near admitting that. It's like mentioning "faith" when talking to a Gnu. They will automatically assume you just put both of your hands in the air and surrendered.

Because we can't consider every piece of evidence at any one time, all arguments can be outweighed by other considerations. Not everyone is at the tipping point with respect to their beliefs on the God question, and so an argument might provide epistemic support for theism or atheism while at the same time fail to bring about an actual conversion.

I happen to think, for example, that the argument from evil, if properly defined and isolated, provides some epistemic support for atheism. What I have never understood is why this argument somehow transcends all other considerations in considering the question of God.

Cumulative Case Apologetics

Explained here.

The fine-tuning argument

This is presented here. Interesting quote:

Analogically, the fact of the fine-tuned universe means the universe is life-allowing rather than life-prohibiting. This is very imporbable on atheism. This is not improbable on theism.


The main atheist objection to this is: multiverse theory. “If there is only one universe,” British cosmologist Bernard Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” (Discover, December 2008)

Are Humans a Plague on Earth?

David Attenborough thinks so.

The Flew question once again

Was Flew simply manipulated into changing his mind?

According to this piece, no.

A Jewish Scholar argues against the claim that Jesus claimed to be God

Here.

Why arguments about who is a real Christian bore me

Jeff Lowder accused Mark Driscoll of "mind-reading" when he said that Obama is not a Christian, and Steve Hays replied that we have good reason to deny that he is a Christian given his some of his social views and his sympathy with black liberation theology.

A little biblical exegesis might put this in perspective.

Trouble here is that the word "Christian" appears in the Bible as something that the followers of Christ were called by others. It appears, as best I can recall, twice in the whole Bible. It was actually a dirty name, associated with persecution. Acts 11:46 says "and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch." I Peter 4:16 says "However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name."


In other words he's telling the followers of Christ to praise God for bearing a name given to them by persecutors. Later Christians accepted the name. That's one of the reasons why I find endless discussions about who is, and is not a "real" Christian rather boring. I am inclined to think that acceptance of certain central doctrinal tenets of Christianity are more important that social/political issues, because these involve not merely what is right or wrong, but also what the state should do about it. And since the New Testament was written during a time when Christians had no political power, all it says about the state is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

Now, if you're a Catholic, you have a Church mechanism for determining who is a Catholic, and if you part of a church that has a doctrinal confession, you can decide that some people don't belong in  your church because they publicly deny central elements of your doctrinal confession. Catholics do say they are the one true church, but they don't deny that those outside aren't Christians, while other churches don't even make the claim that they are the one true church.

On the other hand, Richard Dawkins says that Obama is probably really an atheist, since he is such a sensible person. But I think Jeff would have to accuse him of mind-reading as well. (Interesting point of agreement between Driscoll/Hays and Richard Dawkins).

Wreck of the Old Humanist Culture

Is humanism a train wreck? According to this sociologist, it is.

While I'm at it, my favorite train wreck song, "Wreck of the Old 97, by Hank Snow.

Nagel on ID and Public Education

Here.

I really think the ID message is getting skewed, partly, by the debate about public education. Still, the attempt to suppress discussion of questions concerning Darwin's theory strikes me as troubling.

Does size matter? An argument for atheism

A redated post.

John Loftus takes this argument from Nicholas Everitt. Lewis always included responses to the argument that the size of the universe gives us a good reason to reject Christianity. In the first place, he maintained that, contrary to popular legend, we have known since Ptolemy that the universe is pretty big. Second, if the universe were smaller, wouldn't atheists complain that God should have made a bigger one?

Is C. S. Lewis out of date?

An argument to that effect was discussed here. To make that case, you'd have to commit the fallacy of chronological snobbery.

HT: Bob Prokop.

Ridicule, Representation, and the Courtier's Reply: Why Loftus' position is unstable

This is in reply to the Lowder-Loftus exchange. The thread I was responding to is here.

I think you have an unstable position. If people are anything like me, when they hear ridicule, they instantly look for straw men. The more you use ridicule, the more likely your readers, especially those who have been around a little, are going to assume that you are misrepresenting your opponents in order to get ridicule off the ground. If I were to sit here are ridicule evolution, people at this site would immediately start looking for ways in which I don't understand Darwinian biology. So you have to be ready for that. The easy way out of that problem is to use the Courtier's Reply, essentially saying that "Your position is so ridiculous that I don't even have to bother to do my homework and understand it to see how ridiculous it is." Now, you have indicated dissatisfaction with the Courtier's reply, but with the Courtier's reply, you don't have to worry about how accurately you represent your opponent. I suppose it's possible to ridicule something while making a careful effort at representing it correctly, but I have seen only one person come close to doing that, and even he wasn't completely successful. Normally, this isn't done, and so the person whose position is being ridiculed is going to suspect a straw man, and ninety nine times out of a hundred he will be right. I suppose ridicule might persuade a "low information believer," (the equivalent of a low information voter), and I suppose if  you thought the end (of faith) justifies the means, it might be a worthwhile tool. But it strikes me as a dishonest one. As Russell once said in another context, it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

But the context here is not exactly the use of ridicule, but the effort to criticize arguments that support a conclusion one believes in strongly. What you seem to be doing in response to Lowder is criticizing him not because his critiques of your argument aren't good, but because he, as an atheist, should be loyal to the cause and not criticize arguments that support your cherished conclusion, atheism. It's like saying to a Christian who has troubling questions "Are you saved? Do you know Jesus? If you were truly born again, you wouldn't be questioning like this." If I hadn't run into Christians who did NOT respond this way to my questions, I might will have ended up believing what you do now.

Fellow Christian philosophers have criticized William Lane Craig's theistic arguments. Suppose you were to find out the Craig had responded to them by saying "Look, you agree with me that Christianity is true, and people need Jesus. My arguments help people see this. You are taking away from the progress of the Gospel when you criticize my arguments, so you shouldn't be doing that." Wouldn't you consider that to be proof positive that Craig was not an honest scholar?

I don't advocate civility in argumentation because it's nice. That's a point that a lot of people miss. I advocate it because incivility is typically correlated with the misrepresentation of opposing views. The correlation isn't perfect, but from what I have seem it's pretty good. So, the more you ridicule my position, the more my straw man detectors will be out in full force.

Relying on ridicule leads logically to embracing the Courtier's Reply. That's why I call your position unstable. 

Did Nietzsche say "God is dead?"

Well, not in his own words. Austin Cline explains the passage here. Nietzsche put the famous words in the mouth of a madman.

So apparently, this madman can't be talking about the literal God believed in by so many theists. Instead, he's talking about what this god represented for European culture, the shared cultural belief in God which had once been its defining and uniting characteristic.

Download a chapter of The Magician's Twin free

Here.

A Rational Fideism?

This is the entry on fideism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It mentions the possibility of a rational fideism.

Whose side are you on, Jeff?

Jeff Lowder has been criticizing Loftus on some of his arguments. Since both are atheists, John asks why Jeff is doing this:

This ends our exchange so far. I've written a lot about these subjects so consult them for more. What I want to know is why Lowder is playing the devil's advocate. He either thinks religion harms people or he doesn't. He either thinks faith based processes are unreliable or he doesn't. I can only suppose he doesn't think so, or at least, not to the degree I do.


So I respectfully challenge Lowder to tell us if he thinks religion harms people, and if so, how much he's alarmed by it. I also challenge Lowder to tell us whether faith based processes are unreliable, and if so, how unreliable they are.

The fact that John asks this question is telling. Does religion harm people? Does atheism harm people? I happen to think there are people alive today who would take their own lives forthwith if the could no longer believe in God. The idea that everyone would become a cheerful humanist if they were pried loose from their religious beliefs is, to my mind, a delusion. Now, if someone declares atheism to be true as the result of an honest and fair pursuit of the truth, then if someone takes their own life because of it, I can't fault them morally. If they commit suicide because of a successful propaganda campaign on behalf of atheism, not so much.   Again, Loftus relies on catchphrases like "faith based processes," which are inherently ambiguous. Clarity is not one of his strong points.   Even when we can win more converts by violating it (at least in the short run), maintaining the honesty of the process of thinking about religion is absolutely vital. It is called following the argument where it leads. Anscombe criticized Lewis's argument, Aquinas rejected Anselm's argument, and Plantinga criticizes various theistic arguments. When I read some atheists, I think "These people wouldn't recognize evidence for God if it bit them."   I will never forget the time when Jeff first asked me to put the first argument from reason paper on the Secular Web, and also asked for my paper on miracles.   Jeff has responded to John, here.

Bob Prokop on what skeptics are looking for

This deserves its own post. 

BP: Usually what skeptics are asking for is "signs and wonders". Some, like Loftus, have quite specifically demanded to see stars arrange themselves to spell out Bible verses, or some such nonsense like that.

It's quite amusing, actually. They are perfectly willing to accept all sorts of stuff "from authority", such as the Big Bang, or Dark Matter, or the existence of subatomic particles, or even (especially!) historical events like the execution of Socrates or the Battle of Salamis, for which we have but single sources of information... but when it comes to the New Testament, nothing short of they themselves being eyewitnesses will satisfy them.

Should God have to make everything clear?

One theme of atheists is that if God were to exist, he would make everything clear, and there would not be a multiplicity of religions. Why think a God, if God existed, would make everything clear. If everything were clear, we would have no real choices. There would be one choice, and all other choices would be punished, and everyone would know what that punishment was and do the right thing for selfish motives.

Ross's Immaterial Aspects of Thought

A redated post.

See also this by Russell Howell on why we wouldn't be mathematicians in a naturalistic universe.

Chris Hallquist critiques Feser's defense of Aristotle's Metaphysics

Here.

Gordon Clark's elimination of the problem of evil

Gordon Clark wrote:

Man is responsible because God calls him to account; man is responsible because the supreme power can punish him for disobedience. God, on the contrary, cannot be responsible for the plain reason that there is no power superior to him; no greater being can hold him accountable; no one can punish him; there is no one to whom God is responsible; there are no laws which he could disobey.


The sinner therefore, and not God, is responsible; the sinner alone is the author of sin. Man has no free will, for salvation is purely of grace; and God is sovereign.

That does it. God is good because he has all the power. We are told not to kill people because the most powerful being in the universe told us not to. But God didn't command himself to prevent killing and suffering, so he has no such obligation.

Gosh, I wish it were that easy.

Loftus answers Torley

Here.

Does Newton refute the First way?

Feser, to no one's surprise, says no.