Peter Boghossian, God is Not Dead, and the Establishment Clause

From MCFA: 

“To prevent doxastic closure it’s also important to read the work of noted apologists. The only two I’d suggest are Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, though I’d urge you not to buy their books; their projects don’t need your support. If you must buy one of their books buy it used and support a local bookstore, this way the author doesn’t receive any royalties.” (Kindle Locations 3419-3421).

Remember the debate surrounding God's not Dead? I watched the movie and for the most part I didn't care for it, because most real atheist professors don't act like that atheist professor in the movie, who tries to get the class to sign an atheist statement in order to avoid dealing with the problem of God in the course. Even the most virulently anti-religious philosophy professors that I have encountered (and I have encountered a few) don't act like this, and it's a mistake to tell Christians that this is what they should expect in philosophy courses, including those taught by staunch atheists. 

But people like Boghossian, I am afraid, make God is not Dead look realistic. 

What is more, I do think the fictional professor in God is not Dead DOES violate the Establishment Clause, because he puts requirements for passing the course on believing students that he doesn't put on nonbelieving students. 

Boghossian's course, I think, also violates the clause. That is because while he presents arguments against his own view, he provides a message in required course material that he, the professor, considers their arguments so unworthy of being taken seriously that students shouldn't provide royalties to the authors by buying their books. A teacher can say what he thinks in class so long as he also says there are intelligent people who think the opposite, and in the last analysis it is their responsibility to decide the issue for themselves. 

As Randal Rauser says 

If this really is his advice, then I must say it is absolutely terrible advice. Simply reading or listening to somebody you disagree with doesn’t prevent cognitive closure. The only way to do that is to read your opponents with charity. Needless to say, when you preface the advice to read somebody with the proviso that their works are so bad (and harmful) that you ought never pay money for the books if possible, you have undermined any hope in your reader of engaging their works with charity.

http://randalrauser.com/2014/01/peter-boghossian-on-his-opponents/

If you do this on the public dime, then you are shoving your religious views down the throats of your students, and the fact that atheism is not a religion in some other important sense does not exempt you from the force of the Establishment Clause.

Peter Boghossian's Atheism Course

Apparently Boghossian can get away with a teaching a New Atheist apologetics course at a public university, on the public dime.  Of course he denies this.

Just as the purpose of religious studies is not to convert students to a particular faith tradition, this course is not about “converting” students to atheism.

But his textbook is A Manual for Creating Atheists, written by him.

See this discussion here. 

Is anyone bias-free?

In the debate over Regnerus' investigation of same-sex parenting, it seems to me that objectivity is, by the very nature of the case, going to be difficult to come by. See the discussion here.

Christianity the Ultimate Cold Case?

Here. 

Is Neil Degrasse Tyson an ID supporter?

The ID in question would be computer simulation. Still.....Here. 

Do Christians have a persecution complex?

Here. 

Science, God, and specialization

Why are some questions philosophical rather than scientific? If someone, such as Keith Parsons, affirms this, is it because of philosophical snobbery?

I don't think so. Science is not a general field. It is divided between physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, etc. Even then, scientists are even more specialized than that. But the question of God does not fall within any specialized science, so it cannot be a scientific question.

An early memory

I grew up in a United Methodist church in Phoenix. In the early 1960s, a local fundamentalist pastor was gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would have prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.

This is something of a contrast with “equal time” laws that were developed subsequently, according to which school had to teach creationism alongside evolution. No, he wanted to re-enact something like the law Scopes violated in Tennessee.

Our pastor's response  was to publicly criticize this effort. Dr. Long thought that a battle with the theory of evolution was ill-advised, and said so from the pulpit. The Huntley-Brinkley report, then NBC’s big competitor with Walter Cronkite on CBS, picked up the story, and an excerpt from Dr. Long’s sermon was on the national news. 

 

Can atheist advocacy be limited by the Establishment Clause.

The question is whether open or implied atheist advocacy in public school can violate the establishment clause. The whole basis for the Dover decision was the idea that ID content has to be kept out of the public school classroom because those who supported it were motivated by a desire to promote religious belief. In a court case it was successfully argued that you atheism is protected by the free exercise clause, in a case where an atheist prisoner was granted access to atheist materials. 

http://www.atheist-community.org/library/articles/read.php?id=742

Now, in the Constitution, the free exercise clause and the establishment clause go together. Heck, they're in the same sentence. Atheists can't help themselves to the free exercise clause, but when accused of violating the Establishment Clause on behalf of atheism, fall back on the "not collecting stamps" argument. That's cheating. 

So, as I keep saying, the main argument in the Dover case, which was an Establishment Clause case, only works if you assume the religious neutrality of evolutionary biology. That is the official NCSE position on the compatibility of religion and evolutionary biology that people like Dawkins, Myers, and Coyne are hell-bent on attacking. 

Given the constitutional context here, the fact that atheism is not a religion in the popular sense is irrelevant. If you want Free Exercise protections, you have to live with Establishment Clause limitations. It's the American way.

Who was he talking about?

From a commentator at Debunking Christianity. How can a professor say something so moronic as: "... philosophical questions, like the existence of God". WTF? This guy is NOT a professor but a bible thumping religionist.

This is a statement about

a) Victor Reppert
b) Alvin Plantinga
c) William Lane Craig
d) Keith Parsons

What if evolution really provides an argument for atheism?

Some people think it does. Suppose teachers and textbook writers were eager to draw out the atheistic implications of evolution, and did so in public schools. (Some seem to). 

Does that mean that the teaching of evolution in school also violates the establishment clause, since it supports the religion of atheism? 

Would this mean that evolution, as well as creationism or intelligent design, could not be taught in the public schools, since it would undermine the religious neutrality of government institutions? 

The fine-tuning of the universe

1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10\60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or
expanded rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.
2. (An accuracy of one part in 10 to the 60^th power can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

3. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as five percent, life would be impossible.

4. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10\40, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible.

5. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible.

6. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be
impossible, for a variety of different reasons.

7. Either this is an accident, or a design. Or perhaps there is a multiverse, and we just happen to be in the universe that has life in it.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia on Fideism

Here. 

As against these views, it must be noted that authority, even the authority of God, cannot be the supreme criterion of certitude, and an act of faith cannot be the primary form of knowledge. This authority, indeed, in order to be a motive of assent, must be previously acknowledged as being certainly valid; before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself.

Court rules against the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a religion

Here. 

Even treating some issues as debatable is considered offensive by some

Here's a report from a cancelled debate from last February sponsored by the Oregon State Socratic Club:

We are sorry to have to inform you that the debate on Thursday, February 25th on the topic "Is Gender a Choice?" has been canceled. Our debaters were informed that some students on campus are offended by the topic of the debate and may plan to protest the event as transphobic, despite the fact that we had both sides fully represented. Because of this one of our speakers did not feel comfortable proceeding with the event. We are disappointed, but understand.
We hope you'll keep up to date with us as we continue onward.

The idea seems to be that the mere presentation of both sides of some issues is considered offensive.

Oregon State University has a Socratic Club

A redated post. I think there should be a national Socratic club, or,  better yet, and international Socratic club.

Well, it had one. And it still does.

Shouldn't all colleges? Here.

Josh McDowell on reasons for rejecting Christ

I have found that most people reject Christ for one or more of the following reasons:

1. Ignorance - Romans 1:18-23 (often self-imposed), Matthew 22:29
2. Pride - John 5:40-44
3. Moral Problem - John 3:19-20

Here. 

I've never found this persuasive, any more than I find atheist explanations of theism persuasive. 

Why atheists change their minds

Here. 

The only antidote to ideological violence

From this discussion. 

But I think New Atheist fundamentalism, and that is really what it is, really think there is a brave new godless world out there to be had if we just dump enough ridicule on religious believers. 

Consider this: 

Sheahen: You've said that baptizing a child or saying "this is a Jewish child"—that is, pasting a religious label on a child—is child abuse. In your letter to daughter, you ask her to examine what she's told based on evidence. What do you hope the world would be like if all children were raised without religion, according to your theories?

Dawkins: It would be paradise on earth. What I hope for is a world ruled by enlightened rationality, which does not mean something dull, but something of high artistic value. I just wish there were the slightest chance of it ever happening.

I'm sure Dawkins didn't mean it literally, but I think this explains some of the atheistic fanaticism out there. 

People out there really believe that we can make this world a better place for everyone by getting rid of theistic belief. That is why some of them are dissatisfied with the normal methods of honest argumentation, the principle of charity, etc. when engaging in discussion with believers. Consider this diatribe aimed at you. 

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2016/04/keith-parsons-is-just-old-that-explains.html#more

In order for religious believers to engage in atrocities, they have to think the religious end they want to pursue justifies the means. A good case can be made that the use of power on behalf of Christianity isn't appropriate,although Christians in history have not bought these arguments. Marx's version of the secular paradise isn't the only one out there, by any stretch of the imagination. 

The antidote to ideological violence is a willingness to accept, and accept only, those means of persuasion made available by a free and open society. This is possible for religious believers and religious unbelievers. The idea that you can save the world from ideological violence by spreading unbelief as opposed to belief is, in my view, delusional.

Are nones atheists?

Some people think the decline of religious affiliation is a gain for atheism. I think this is a category mistake.

Do scientists who believe in design need to look for it?

I try to imagine what I would do if I were a biologist, with respect to claims of design. Now, I have no trouble affirming the ancient earth, gradual development or even common ancestry. And while I might believe in intelligent design, I am less certain than your typical ID advocate that science can or should go looking for it. There are more proximate causes that need to be traced, I might just think that I should trace them and table the question of ultimate design. I have never been able to figure out why evolutionary biology needs to either affirm or deny intelligent design. Some people think that design was put in at the initial conditions of the universe, if so biological investigation won't necessarily turn it up.

It is very interesting to me that both religious and non-religious scientists do perfectly good science. Atheists like to portray religious scientists as living in a world of cognitive dissonance, of believing in design while leaving design out of their science. But probably they just do the science and, when asked about design, just say, "Well, I'm not in the business of looking for it."

 

Religious Violence and Cultural Fragmentation

The problems that surround the "religious violence" claim have to do with the level of generality at which the issue is addressed. For example, one of my complaints with Dawkins is that he claims that 9/11 gave him a reason to start a militant crusade on behalf of atheism as opposed to religion. My objection to him bears considerable similarity to my objection to the claim by Donald Trump that Muslims should be excluded from coming to America because some of them are terrorists. The problem is that while bin Laden and I are both theists, I am more than willing to operate within an open society, and he wants to use political power and even terror to advance what he takes to be the cause of Islam. I object to Trump's statements because in order to get from Islam to the terrorist ideology you have to take about three right turns, and there are plenty of Muslims who exist quite peaceably in an open society. I think there is a difference between Christianity and Islam in that Christianity has no statecraft in its founding documents, (all the Bible says about government is "Render unto Caesar"), while the Qur'an does purport to tell you what to do with government. 

Religion can lead to violence since religions typically assert what is most important to those who believe them. But religion does not guarantee how much a believer will care whether others believe as they do. In fact, I've seen atheists care a whole heck of a lot more about other people believing as they do than I do as a Christian. I am also inclined to concur with Christian thinkers from Lactantius to Locke and the Christians who moved Europe toward democratic government and instituted religious freedom, in that I maintain that meaningful religious devotion should be free and voluntary, and there is something inherently self-defeating about forcing religious truth on others. If one thinks one's views in matters of religion are true, then to some extent we want others to agree with us, but there are ethical and unethical ways of getting others to agree with us. (Ridicule, as a method of persuasion, seems to me to be a form of violence. Sticks and stones can break our bones, but it is just false to say words can never hurt us). 

It is sometimes asserted that religious believers have more motivation for coercive conduct than secularists, since believers think there are eternal consequences of believing or not believing, while secularists do not recognize such eternal consequences. I don't buy this. Some atheists say we are on the cusp of history, that whether we renounce faith or not will determine whether we will progress or regress as a culture. If you really believe that, then it's going to be tempting to advance the cause of atheism any which way you can. Some forms of atheist advocacy, they become widespread, may convince some people, but it may at the same time prompt religionists to protect their culture by homeschooling their kids or sending them to Christian schools, and it will also prompt a resurgence of the Religious Right. What we will get is more cultural fragmentation than we have already, and I think that will be unfortunate.

It's only a model

 In Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, the assembled knights look in awe upon the imposing walls of “Camelot”… until someone points out that “it’s only a model.”

Bob Prokop wrote:  
I remember well a discussion I had about 2 years back with astrophysicist Dr. Ron Lee. I was floored when he told me that no serious cosmologist believes that something called the "Big Bang" actually occurred billions of years ago. The Big Bang (or, to give it its official name, the Standard Cosmological Model, or SCM) is simply a mathematical construct that helps make sense of and provides a framework for observations made in the contemporary universe. But as to what really happened at the Dawn of Time, I was told, "That's not a question for science, but for theology."

Similarly, nuclear physicists employ something called a quasiparticle to explain what occurs within matter at the subatomic level. Quasiparticles have no physical existence, but once again are merely mathematical models used to account for observations.

It turns out that quite a lot of scientific terminology is like that.

VR: Why do we NEVER hear this sort of thing from evolutionary biologists? 

C. S. Lewis on talkative communities

It's as if he knew what the internet would be like long before Al Gore invented it!

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

Is all knowledge scientific?

I don't see how it can be. In order to do science, you have to be able to do mathematics. (Ever try to pass a science course without it?) But mathematics is not science. It operates using a infinite set of non-natural entities called numbers. If there are no numbers, there's no science.

What if Dawkins had said....

So religion is the problem, and 9.11 showed this? Let me ask this question. What if Dawkins had written the following:

“Allah of the Qur'an is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Would he be alive today?

Larmer's essay on methodological naturalism

I forgot the link for this. Here. 

Parsons and Feser on Coyne

 From the letters page at First Things. Amen and amen.

Old Atheism

I once read that the Los Alamos physicists during the Manhattan Project refused to consult doctors. Instead, they read medical books on their own, diagnosing themselves and prescribing their own treatments. They assumed that medical science must be trivially easy for anyone who could master nuclear physics.

After reading Edward Feser’s review of Jerry A. Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact (“Omnibus of Fallacies,” ­February), I conclude that some contemporary scientists must have much the same attitude toward philosophy. If you can do population genetics or you are comfortable with tensor calculus, then surely philosophical argument must be a snap. No need for any special training. Wing it, and you will be as good as a pro. Sadly, this is not the case, as amply demonstrated by some of the efforts of the “New Atheists.” When a philosophical pro such as ­Feser subjects their texts to an appropriately astringent analysis, he makes their logical lacunae and sophomoric mistakes glaringly obvious.

If what is done by Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne is the “new” atheism, then I am an ­unapologetic advocate of “old” atheism. That is, I favor atheist advocacy that is argument-dense and skips the invective. Lampooning your opponents as ignorant Bible-beaters may be lowbrow fun, but it is bad manners, and, more to the point, ineffective. Don’t call them names. Defeat their arguments. That is the worst thing you can do to them. However, defeating your opponents’ arguments requires (a) taking their best arguments seriously, and (b) doing your philosophical homework. “Old” atheism is therefore hard. Caricaturing with broad strokes is easy, but it cannot be said to advance rational debate.

In fairness to Coyne, he is no doubt understandably frustrated that his excellent book Why Evolution Is True still needed to be written. Over forty years ago, Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Even back then it had been true for a long, long time. Coyne is exactly right that the continued cultural resistance to evolution has its source in ideology rather than science, and that the obscurantist ideologies are religiously motivated. However, the way to address this ­issue is not by setting up simplistic false dichotomies between “faith” and “fact.” True, if you define “faith” as Ambrose Bierce did—“Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel”—then it is easy to equate religious belief with obfuscation. Again, though, the purposes of rational debate are not served.

From the first publication of the Origin of Species, Darwin had religious allies. Darwin gladly accepted the aid and support of such allies. Harvard botanist and conservative Congregationalist Asa Gray was perhaps Darwin’s leading supporter in the United States. Evolution’s conflict is not with religion per se, but with certain dubious theological tenets. The best antidote to bad religion is good religion, but you lose the potential aid of the latter when you tar everything with the same brush.

Keith M. Parsons
The university of Houston-Clear Lake
Houston, Texas

Edward Feser replies:

I thank Keith Parsons for giving us a little of that old-time atheism. That the dispute between theism and ­atheism is essentially a philosophical disagreement rather than a matter for empirical science to settle is as true today as it was in Aristotle’s age, or Plotinus’s, or Aquinas’s, or Leibniz’s. And as the “old atheist” philosopher David Stove once said, “it takes a philosopher to catch a philosopher.”

Yet as philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend once lamented, the ­scientists of his generation—­Feynman, Schwinger, et al.—despite their brilliance, were, compared to the generation of Einstein and Bohr, “uncivilized savages” who “lack[ed] depth” when addressing matters of philosophy. Sadly, the generation of Dawkins, Krauss, and Coyne makes even Feynman and company look like philosophical giants. Combine these premises and we get the conclusion that contemporary skeptics are well advised to look to professional philosophers like Parsons rather than to amateurs like Coyne if they want their atheism to be improved as well as “new.”

From Robert Larmer's 'is Methodological Naturalism Question-Begging

Larmer considers an argument as follows:

1) If one is a metaphysical naturalist then one should be a methodological naturalist. i. e. refuse ever to postulate nonphysical entities as the cause of a physical event.
2) One should not believe in nonphysical entities without good evidence.
3) There is no good evidence for nonnatural entities.
4) Therefore one should accept metaphysical naturalism, and by logical extension, methodological naturalism.

He then develops a dialogue between the metaphysical naturalist and his opponent over premise 3.

NN: I disagree that there is no good evidence for nonnatural entities.
MN: Such evidence cannot exist.
NN: Why not?
MN: Because any investigation of the causes of physical events must employ methdological naturalism, i. e., it must assume that it is never, in principle, legitimate to posit a nonnatural cause for a physical event.
NN: Remind me once more of your good reason for thinking that metaphysical naturalism is true.
MN: The good reason for thinking that metaphysical naturalism is true is that there is no good evidence that nonnatural entities exist. NN: Would methodological naturalism ever permit one to posit a nonnatural entity as the cause of a physical event?
MN: No. I have already made that clear.
NN: Let me get this right. Your acceptance of metaphysical naturalism is based on the fact that there exists no evidence that nonnatural entities ever cause physical events?
MN: Yes.
 NN: And your endorsement of methodological naturalism follows from your acceptance of metaphysical naturalism?
MN: Yes.
NN: This seems question-begging. You endorse metaphysical naturalism on the basis that there exists no evidence that nonnatural entities ever cause physical events, yet adopt a methodology that rules out the possibility of ever recognizing evidence of nonnatural causes. You are using your metaphysic to justify your acceptance of methodological naturalism, but your acceptance of methodological naturalism serves to guarantee that even if evidence for the existence of nonphysical causes exists it can never be recognized as such.

Rod Dreher's Sex After Christianity

Here. 

Is gay marriage enough?

Not for some activists, including Gloria Steinem and Barbara Ehrenreich. Here. 

Nagel's review of Plantinga's newest book

Here.

The "If you walk away I win" fallacy

From Tom Gilson. Here. 

If Jesus was not resurrected, then what?

Here is a popular resurrection argument.

1. If Jesus was not resurrected, the something else happened.  Therefore some plausible story can be spelled out which explains the known facts naturalistically.
2. The most popular naturalistic explanations are the swoon theory, the hallucination theory, the theft theory, and the wrong tomb theory.
3. The swoon theory is not plausible. Jesus endured six trials, scourging, a crown of thorns, had a purple robe rubbing against his scourged back, endured crucifixion, and burial. Then he endured three days in the tomb with no medical attentions, pushed a huge stone out of the way, put a flying tackle on an entire Roman guard, and walked on pierced feet to greet his disciples. Why is that a less of a miracle than a resurrection?
4. The hallucination theory is also not plausible. Group hallucinations do not normally happen. If three people drop acid, they always experience different things, not the same thing. Also, hallucinations do not transform lives, and turn cowardly disciples like Peter into bold witnesses.
5. The stolen body theory is also implausible. If the disciples stole the body to advance the cause of Christ, they would have had to face the very people who got Jesus crucified. A successful career as a television was not in the cards for them, instead it was the same cross on which Jesus died. Neither the Romans nor the Jewish leaders had any reason to steal the body, either.
6. The wrong tomb theory is also not plausible. Would any reasonable person forget the location of loved one's grave who was buried only 72 hours earlier?
7. Therefore, there are no plausible naturalistic theories concerning what happened with Jesus.
8. Therefore, the only alternative left is that he was resurrected.

Islam without Sharia

Here. 

Islam: Can Ijtihad make a comeback

Ijtihād, ( Arabic: “effort”) in Islamic law, the independent or original interpretation of problems not precisely covered by the Qurʾān, Hadith (traditions concerning the Prophet’s life and utterances), and ijmāʿ (scholarly consensus). (Encyclopedia Brittanica). 

Discussed here.

What does the Euthyphro really show?

It seems to me that the dilemma, as it is it typically used, is an argument in favor of the claim that moral values are metaphysically neutral. So, for example, it is used to show that Christian theism adds nothing to morality that would not be available to a metaphysical materialist. Yet. it comes in Plato's philosophy. Plato has a very strong metaphysics of morals, involving the Form of the Good. I think his actual argument is that a deity (and in this case a Greek deity such as Apollo) represents not too strong of a metaphysical foundation for morality, but too weak of one. Of course, Plato appealed to divine commands as the basis of his entire enterprise as a philosophical questioner (see the Apology). I think Plato would have agreed with religious believers today who think modern metaphysical materialism undermines morality. His morals are centered around the Theory of Forms, which are, if nothing else, nonmaterial entities. 

Christian theology treated Platonism (as opposed to Epicureanism, Stoicism, and even Aristotelianism) as the most friendly philosophical theory in the ancient world. Christian theology tended to absorb the Form of the Good into their conception of God, which might permit those philosophical concepts to get around the Euthyphro dilemma. 

Aesthetic Arguments for the Existence of God

By Peter S. Williams. Here. 

I suggest that the four categories of aesthetic arguments for the existence of God deserve greater attention than has traditionally been the case. Secular philosophers, like Anthony O'Hear and Roger Scruton, recognize that aesthetics lends itself to religious treatment, and it is noteable how strong a pull towards God they feel when considering aesthetic phenomena. However, being unprepared to follow this evidence where it leads, secular philosophy ends either by denying the objectivity and meaningfulness of beauty, or by requiring a leap of blind faith into Schaeffer's `upper story' if the validity of aesthetic creativity and appreciation is to be retained. A theistic world-view, on the other hand, provides a natural environment for the existence, appreciation and rational understanding of aesthetic reality.

Evidence-based reasoning failures amongst the secular elite

This is a comment by Luke Breuer here. 

In this case, you may be interested in a few books which target a failure in (i) critical thinking and (ii) evidence-based reasoning:

• Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
• Ronald Dworkin's Is Democracy Possible Here?: Principles for a New Political Debate
• Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason
• Mary Douglas' and Steven Ney's Missing Persons: A Critique of the Personhood in the Social Sciences
• Steven D. Smith's The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse
• Christian Smith's The Sacred Project of American Sociology
• George Yancey's Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

In all these cases, the failures being examined are largely among the secular elite, not the religious masses. In Jesus' time, one reason the Pharisees' error was so great is that they were the epitome of excellence, the character ideals for everyone. If you wanted to be righteous, you became like them. In our time, the character ideals for the kind of population aren't measured by level of righteousness, but by ability to reason based on the evidence. What if, on average, those who are supposed to best be able to do this are pretty massive failures in areas critical to the future thriving of democracy?

From Lennox's God's Undertaker: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Conceptual Confusions

At least some of the heat results from the fact that the term ‘intelligent design’ appears to convey to many people a relatively recent, crypto-creationist, anti-scientific attitude that is chiefly focussed on attacking evolutionary biology. This means that the term ‘intelligent design’ has subtly changed its meaning, bringing with it the danger that serious debate will be hijacked as a result.

Now ‘intelligent design’ strikes some as a curious expression, since usually we think of design as the result of intelligence – the adjective is therefore redundant. If we therefore simply replace the phrase with ‘design’ or ‘intelligent causation’ then we are speaking of a very respectable notion in the history of thought. For the notion that there is an intelligent cause behind the universe, far from being recent, is as ancient as philosophy and religion themselves. Secondly, before we address the question whether intelligent design is crypto-creationism we need to avoid another potential misunderstanding by considering the meaning of the term ‘creationism’ itself. For its meaning has changed as well. ‘Creationism’ used to denote simply the belief that there was a Creator. However, it has now come to mean not only belief in a Creator but also a commitment to a whole additional raft of ideas by far the most dominant of which is a particular interpretation of Genesis which holds that the earth is only a few thousand years old. This mutation in the meaning of ‘creationism’ or ‘creationist’ has had three very unfortunate effects. First of all it polarizes the discussion and gives an apparently soft target to those who reject out of hand any notion of intelligent causation in the universe. Secondly, it fails to do justice to the fact that there is a wide divergence of opinion on the interpretation of the Genesis account even among those Christian thinkers who ascribe final authority to the biblical record. Finally, it obscures the(original) purpose of using the term ‘intelligent design’, which is to make a very important distinction between the recognition of design and the identification of the designer. These are different questions. The second of them is essentially theological and agreed by most to be outside the provenance of science. The point of making the distinction is to clear the way to asking whether there is any way in which science can help us with the answer to the first question. It is therefore unfortunate that this distinction between two radically different questions is constantly obscured by the accusation that  intelligent design’ is shorthand for ‘crypto-creationism’ 

Nonadaptive order: a problem for Darwinism?

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/03/a_nightmarish_s102692.html

Stump your Darwinist friends by asking them to explain, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, biological features like the precise pattern of the maple leaf or of an angiosperm flower. "That's a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism," says Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton in this brief but delightful video conversation -- a "nightmarish scenario." Why? Because Darwinism by definition must justify such features, including the taxa-defining novelties, as having been seized upon by natural selection because they were adaptive. I mean, that pattern specifically and not some other.

It's the specificity that's the problem. This is a deep point by Denton. For classic evolutionary theory, the curse of non-adaptive order resides in the fact that non-adaptive patterns -- beautiful and complex ones -- absolutely pervade life. An aesthetic choice might explain the act of selection. But blind, dumb natural selection, focused like a laser beam on fitness, carefully designing these thing to be just as they are and no other way? Sorry, that doesn't fly.

The confirmatory fine-tuning argument

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

Robin Collins defends a more modest version of the fine-tuning argument that relies on a general principle of confirmation theory, rather than a principle that is contrived to distinguish events or entities that are explained by intelligent design from events or entities explained by other factors. Collins's version of the argument relies on what he calls the Prime Principle of Confirmation: If observation O is more probable under hypothesis H1 than under hypothesis H2, then O provides a reason for preferring H1 over H2. The idea is that the fact that an observation is more likely under the assumption that H1 is true than under the assumption H2 is true counts as evidence in favor of H1.

This version of the fine-tuning argument proceeds by comparing the relative likelihood of a fine-tuned universe under two hypotheses:

1. The Design Hypothesis: there exists a God who created the universe such as to sustain life;
2. The Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis: there exists one material universe, and it is a matter of chance that the universe has the fine-tuned properties needed to sustain life.

Assuming the Design Hypothesis is true, the probability that the universe has the fine-tuned properties approaches (if it does not equal) 1. Assuming the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis is true, the probability that the universe has the fine-tuned properties is very small—though it is not clear exactly how small. Applying the Prime Principle of Confirmation, Collins concludes that the observation of fine-tuned properties provides reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis.

At the outset, it is crucial to note that Collins does not intend the fine-tuned argument as a proof of God's existence. As he explains, the Prime Principle of Confirmation "is a general principle of reasoning which tells us when some observation counts as evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another" (Collins 1999, 51). Indeed, he explicitly acknowledges that "the argument does not say that the fine-tuning evidence proves that the universe was designed, or even that it is likely that the universe was designed" (Collins 1999, 53). It tells us only that the observation of fine-tuning provides one reason for accepting the Theistic Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis—and one that can be rebutted by other evidence.

The confirmatory version of the fine-tuning argument is not vulnerable to the objection that it relies on an inference strategy that presupposes that we have independent evidence for thinking the right kind of intelligent agency exists. As a general scientific principle, the Prime Principle of Confirmation can be applied in a wide variety of circumstances and is not limited to circumstances in which we have other reasons to believe the relevant conclusion is true. If the observation of a fine-tuned universe is more probable under the Theistic Hypothesis than under the Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis, then this fact is a reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis to Atheistic Single-Universe Hypothesis.

Nevertheless, the confirmatory version of the argument is vulnerable on other fronts. As a first step towards seeing one worry, consider two possible explanations for the observation that John Doe wins a 1-in-7,000,000 lottery (see Himma 2002). According to the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis, God wanted John Doe to win and deliberately brought it about that his numbers were drawn. According to the Chance Lottery Hypothesis, John Doe's numbers were drawn by chance. It is clear that John's winning the lottery is vastly more probable under the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis than under the Chance Lottery Hypothesis. By the Prime Principle of Confirmation, then, John's winning the lottery provides a reason to prefer the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis over the Chance Lottery Hypothesis.

As is readily evident, the above reasoning, by itself, provides very weak support for the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis. If all we know about the world is that John Doe won a lottery and the only possible explanations for this observation are the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis and the Chance Lottery Hypothesis, then this observation provides some reason to prefer the former. But it does not take much counterevidence to rebut the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis: a single observation of a lottery that relies on a random selection process will suffice. A single application of the Prime Principle of Confirmation, by itself, is simply not designed to provide the sort of reason that would warrant much confidence in preferring one hypothesis to another.

For this reason, the confirmatory version of the fine-tuning argument, by itself, provides a weak reason for preferring the Design Hypothesis over the Atheistic Single Universe Hypothesis. Although Collins is certainly correct in thinking the observation of fine-tuning provides a reason for accepting the Design Hypothesis and hence rational ground for belief that God exists, that reason is simply not strong enough to do much in the way of changing the minds of either agnostics or atheists.

C S Lewis on Scientism

Here. 

The Curry-Merriam debate on whether science points to God.

Curry says it does, Merriam says it doesn't. Here.

How would the God of the Old Testament reply to Dawkins?

Dawkins: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

But what if a being matching just this description were to, in fact, be real. Would he say back to Dawkins:

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?'"

Some arguments for the historicity of John

Here.  Although John is supposed to be the latest of the gospels, it is the one that claims to be written by an eyewitness. And John seems clearly to have been Jewish and familiar with Jerusalem. .

Arguments for John's historicity were made in the 19th Century by Westcott.  Have they ever been answered?

HT: Eric Vestrup

Why shouldn't we treat some people as inferior?

Some of the most historically influential arguments for not treating groups of people are inferior are religious in nature. They say that everyone was created by God, Jesus died for everyone, therefore, no person, in virtue of being a member of a group, should be treated as inferior.

On the other hand, if you assume the secular view that human beings are in the groups they are in through evolution, then you have to deal with the idea that creatures are entitled to the survival advantages that evolution has provided them. Thus if being white, or male, gives you a position of power that makes you, (as opposed to others) better able to pass on  your (selfish) genes than other people, then why shouldn't you take advantage of that superior power?

I realize that the former kind of argument has not prevented religious people from exploiting others, nor has the second argument prevented secularists from being nonexploiters. But what would be the secularist rebuttal to the latter argument?

Two books on revelation

One by William Abraham, the other by Menssen and Sullivan. Here. 

From Menssen and Sullivan:

Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan provide a straight- forward defense of using revelation to defend belief in God’s existence...Menssen and Sullivan specifically target what they call the “tacit assumption” of philosophy, namely, that one must show that God exists before one can ask whether God has revealed.

The tacit assumption is that a claim to have received a revelation can be evaluated only after the existence of God has been proved. In opposition to the tacit assumption, they make the following claim: If it is not highly unlikely that God exists, then it is reasonable to examine particular claims to revelation from God as evidence for God’s existence. It is not highly unlikely that God exists; therefore, it is reasonable to examine particular revelation claims as evidence for God’s existence. More boldly, they contend that if the existence of God is not highly unlikely, then a reasonable inquirer must actually examine a number of revelation claims before a judgment can be made that God does not exist.

Consider, they say, the proposal that a single person named Homer was responsible for the Iliad. In the course of history, many have rejected that possibility because it was believed that no preliterate person, such as Homer, could have composed such a work. Given the complexity and length of the poem, the argument reasoned, a single individual could have produced it only if that person had the capacity to write. If it were impossible for a preliterate person to produce the poem, no amount of contrary evidence internal to the poem would raise the likelihood that a single person produced it. In other words, the probability of an impossibility is zero and any evidence added to an impossibility does not improve the odds.

Suppose, however, that it were possible for a single individual, in a preliterate context, to produce such a long and complex poem. The probabilities change, and evidence for authorship does matter. Once such a possibility is recognized, then internal evidence derived from the content of the poem itself becomes relevant for judgments about authorship.

Menssen and Sullivan take revelation claims to be closely analogous to arguments about the production of the Iliad. If the possibility of God’s existence were nil, or next to nil, then no appeal to the internal content of revelation could support belief in the existence of God. On the other hand, if it is not highly unlikely that God exists, then just as it is relevant to look at the content of the Iliad to determine authorship, so is it reasonable to look at revelation claims for evidence of God’s existence.

HT: Triablogue

The Argument from Reason and Natural Theology

III. The Argument from Reason and Natural Theology
We might ask the following question: In what sense is the argument from reason a piece of natural theology. The job of natural theology is supposed to be to provide epistemic support for theism. However, the argument from reason, at best, argues that the ultimate causes of the universe are mental and not physical. This is, of course, consistent with various world-views that other than traditional theism, such as pantheism or idealism.
It's a good idea to look at what happened in the case of the argument from reasons’s best-known defender, C. S. Lewis, to see how the argument contributed to his coming to belief in God. Lewis had been what was then called a "realist", accepting the world of sense experience and science as rock-bottom reality. Largely through conversations with Owen Barfield, he became convinced that this world-view was inconsistent with the claims we make on behalf of our own reasoning processes. In response to this, however, Lewis became not a theist but an absolute idealist. It was only later that Lewis rejected absolute idealism in favor of theism, and only after that that he became a Christian. He describes his discussions with Barfield as follows:
(He) convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, “realists”; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed to the senses. But at the same time, we continued to make for certain phenomena claims that went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was “valid” and our aesthetic experience was not just pleasing but “valuable.” The view was, I think, common at the time; it runs though Bridges’ Testament of Beauty and Lord Russell’s “Worship of a Free Man.” Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thought were merely a subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned. If we kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the sense, aided by instruments co-ordinated to form “science” then one would have to go further and accept a Behaviorist view of logic, ethics and aesthetics. But such a view was, and is, unbelievable to me. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1955), 208.

Lewis did not, however, embrace theism at this point. Instead, he opted for Absolute Idealism, a philosophy prevalent in Oxford in the 1920s, although it is not widely held today. He wrote of this again in Surprised by Joy:

It is astonishing (at this time of day) that I could regard this position as something quite distinct from Theism. I suspect there was some willful blindness. But there were in those days all sorts of blankets, insulators, and insurances which enabled one to get all the conveniences of Theism, without believing in God. The English Hegelians, writers like T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet (then mighty names), dealt in precisely such wares. The Absolute Mind—better still, the Absolute—was impersonal, or it knew itself (but not us?) and it was so absolute that it wasn’t really much more like a mind than anyone else….We could talk religiously about the Absolute; but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us…There was nothing to fear, better still, nothing to obey.

Nevertheless, further considerations drove Lewis out of idealism into theism. He wrote:
A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person? After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's "God" do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did. So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyanism; but Berkeleyanism with a few top dressings of my own. I distinguished this philosophical "God" very sharply (or so I said) from "the God of popular religion." There was, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more "meet" Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn't call Him "God" either; I called Him "Spirit." One fights for one's remaining comforts.So did the argument from reason that Lewis accepted make theism more likely in his mind? It certainly did. In his mind it gave him a reason to reject his previously-held naturalism. Now you might think of Absolute Idealism an atheistic world-view, but is does deny the existence of the theistic God as traditionally understood. However the playing field was now considerably narrowed.

Consider the following argument:
1. Either the fundamental causes of the universes are more like a mind than anything else, or they are not.
2. If they are not, then we cannot make sense of the existence of reason.
3. All things being equal, world-views that cannot make sense of the existence of reason are to be rejected in favor of world-views that can make sense of the existence of reason.
4. Therefore, we have a good reason to reject all worldviews reject the claim that the fundamental causes of the universe are more like a mind than anything else. 

Now if you want to hold out the idea that a idealist world-view is nevertheless atheistic, then my argument merely serves to eliminate one of the atheistic options. But suppose someone originally thinks that the likelihoods are as follows:
Naturalism 50% likely to be true.
Idealism 25% likely to be true.
Theism 25% likely to be true.

And suppose that someone accepts a version of the argument from reason, and as a result naturalism drops 30 percentage points. Then those points have to be divided amongst theism and idealism. Therefore the epistemic status of theism is enhanced by the argument from reason, if the argument is successful in defeating naturalism.

Dualism persists in the science of mind

Here. 

A book entitled "A new kind of apologist"

Here. 

Relevance for the present campaign?

“The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

When I look at Trump, all I see is arrogance.

An AFR-related trilemma argument

From Manuel Alfonseca's blog. 

On the question of human freedom, whose reality is denied by deterministic philosophy, Brigitte Falkenburg proposes another trilemma, a little different, because in this case any two of the three alternatives can be true, but then the third must be false. This is her trilemma:

1. Physical causality is closed. In other words, physics is deterministic. Every physical phenomenon has been caused by other physical phenomena.
2. Mental phenomena are different from physical phenomena. In other words, the mind is not controlled by physical phenomena. In a previous post I mentioned the four different answers given by philosophers to the mind problem. This assertion would correspond to the dualist approach, or perhaps to emergent monism.
3. We can cause physical phenomena with our minds. That is, final causality is possible. Our intentions (mental phenomena) can have physical consequences (such as pressing a button).

Trump gets evangelical support, from nominal evangelicals

Here. 

Does atheism increase interest in science?

No. 

Time Travel?

A discussion of that here. 

David Marshall's case against Trump

Here. 

Sean McDowell as an atheist impersonator

I think it is good for people to be able to take a certain amount of time and present oneself as if one were someone who believes the opposite of what one actually does. Sean McDowell, Josh's son, does that here.