The Amalekite Ban and the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility

Here is a discussion critical of my own difficulties with believing that God ordered a ban on the
Amalekites, by Turretinfan. 

Here is the critical passage: 

There is absolutely no question that the Lord commanded the slaughter of the Amalekites.  Moreover, the explicitly stated reason for this slaughter is that they attacked Israel during the Exodus.  That does not mean that God did not have other reasons.

And he goes on to say: 

But Victor does not need to speculate.  God gives a reason.  The reason is retaliation for prior treachery.  Of course, the sucklings were not a part of that treachery, but the crime was performed by the nation and they are in a federal relationship with respect to the nation.  Absent God’s mercy, the judgment on the nation extends even to those who had no personal part in it.  Indeed, given the lapse of time between the Exodus and Saul, it seems unlikely that there were any alive in Amalek who had been in any personal way involved in the attack on Israel.  So, it is not only the sucklings who are receiving judgment from God for the sins of their fathers, but also the adults of Amalek as well.

One of Victor’s problems is that he is attempting to impose an external moral framework on the situation, instead of trying to extract a moral framework from the situation.  What God does is right.  That should be the premise.  Examples like the commanded destruction of the children of Amalek teach us about the heritability of guilt for sin. 

What people find shocking in the Amalekite case is that descendants are being given a kind of "national death penalty" for actions their remote ancestors did which the individuals involved had nothing to do with. We are inclined to suppose that children are innocent, and as such can't be blamed for actions their ancestors performed. We moderns are committed to the doctrine of individual responsibility, and from that standpoint the ban on the Amalekites does indeed seem unjust. If we can swallow the idea that someone can deserve the death penalty for the actions of an ancestor, then the Amalekite ban ceases to be a problem. 

However, the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility has an important biblical foundation, in Ezekiel 18 (NIV): 

The One Who Sins Will Die

1The word of the Lord came to me: 2“What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:

“ ‘The parents eat sour grapes,

and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?

3“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. 4For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.

5“Suppose there is a righteous man

who does what is just and right.

6He does not eat at the mountain shrines

or look to the idols of Israel.

He does not defile his neighbor’s wife

or have sexual relations with a woman during her period.

7He does not oppress anyone,

but returns what he took in pledge for a loan.

He does not commit robbery

but gives his food to the hungry

and provides clothing for the naked.

8He does not lend to them at interest

or take a profit from them.

He withholds his hand from doing wrong

and judges fairly between two parties.

9He follows my decrees

and faithfully keeps my laws.

That man is righteous;

he will surely live,

declares the Sovereign Lord.

10“Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things^a 11(though the father has done none of them):

“He eats at the mountain shrines.

He defiles his neighbor’s wife.

12He oppresses the poor and needy.

He commits robbery.

He does not return what he took in pledge.

He looks to the idols.

He does detestable things.

13He lends at interest and takes a profit.

Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.

14“But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:

15“He does not eat at the mountain shrines

or look to the idols of Israel.

He does not defile his neighbor’s wife.

16He does not oppress anyone

or require a pledge for a loan.

He does not commit robbery

but gives his food to the hungry

and provides clothing for the naked.

17He withholds his hand from mistreating the poor

and takes no interest or profit from them.

He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.

He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live. 18But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.

19“Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

21“But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live; they will not die. 22None of the offenses they have committed will be remembered against them. Because of the righteous things they have done, they will live.23Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?

24“But if a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked person does, will they live? None of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness they are guilty of and because of the sins they have committed, they will die.

25“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear, you Israelites: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust? 26If a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin, they will die for it; because of the sin they have committed they will die. 27But if a wicked person turns away from the wickedness they have committed and does what is just and right, they will save their life. 28Because they consider all the offenses they have committed and turn away from them, that person will surely live; they will not die. 29Yet the Israelites say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Are my ways unjust, people of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust?

30“Therefore, you Israelites, I will judge each of you according to your own ways, declares the SovereignLord. Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall. 31Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? 32For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!

So I am inclined to think that saying "Just follow the Bible and give up the Doctrine of Individual Responsibility" is a bit of an oversimplified answer. 

Dangit! This nutty mythicist is giving us respectable mythicists a bad name

From Richard Carrier. Here. 

HT: Steve Hays

Who created God?

As for who created God,  here  is an answer from a Catholic website. 

If something came into existence at a certain point in time—that is, if it had a beginning—then there needs to be a cause, an explanation, for why it came to be. But if something exists outside of time—like God—then it does not need an explanation for its beginning, because it does not have one.
The earth, indeed the universe, had a beginning point in time, and this is something that both the Big Bang Theory and the Book of Genesis agree on. 

Lead-footed literalism

If you are going for what I would call lead-footed literalism about the Bible, then there is going to be a clash between science and religion. But I'm not talking about Darwin or evolution, I am talking about simple astronomy. If, based on the Bible, you conclude that you have a comprehensive genealogy, then you can count back from a well established date, such as the time of King David, and count years back until you get to a beginning of the universe in approximately 4004 B. C. At least that is what one famous archbishop concluded. You see, it was the heavens and the earth that was created, Adam came into existence on Day 6, so if you count back from David to Adam, that's about what it is going to be. And since it was the heavens and the earth that were created at that point, then that would mean that the universe is 6017 years old. If that were true, then we should only be able to see stars 6017 light years away, since light from stars further away would have had to travel to far to be seen from earth. So, if you are trying to believe THAT, then Darwin's theory of evolution is the least of your worries. 

Unfortunately for Christianity-bashers, this kind of literalism was never the norm within the Christian Church. It's not as if everybody was a lead-footed literalist until science came along and pointed all of these problems out. Quite the contrary, Christians going all the way back to Augustine have avoided this kind of literalism. See here. 

The latest chapter in the "Jesus Myth" saga

Here.  

Does anyone find this stuff boring besides me?

Homosexuality and choice

I was born heterosexual, but there is nothing about my heterosexuality that requires that I perform heterosexual sex acts at any time during my lifetime. I can either engage in heterosexual behavior or not. And the same applies to homosexuals.

So, even if a person has no choice about whether or not to be gay (I must say that is certainly true in my case, and I am inclined to think that it is true in the case of at least some homosexuals), it is possible to freely choose or not choose to engage in homosexual behavior.

While sexual orientation is many cases not a choice, it has to be a choice sometimes, otherwise there would be no bisexuals.

Against Christian anti-intellectualism

Here.

Justice Scalia says Satan is real.

Here.  The Louvin Brothers would have agreed.

Stanford Encyclopedia on Pascal's Wager

Here. 

Parsons responds to the AFR

Here. 

A secular argument against same sex marriage

Here.

The End of Science

Here is a case made for putting an end to science, based on atomic fears. This is the song.

You don't normally hear an actual attack on science itself.

C. S. Lewis on Faith from Mere Christianity

A redated post.

Roughly speaking, the word faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply belief--accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people--at least it used to puzzle me--is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on Earth it can be a virtue--what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then--and a good many people do not see still--was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith; on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.....
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair; some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue; unless you teach your moods "where they get off" you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.

C.S Lewis

Now, does it take faith to be an atheist? Of course!

For Catholics Fideism is a heresy

Odd position to take for a bunch of faith-heads, don't you think.

Here. 

No evidence?? Really??

A redated post.

On Debunking Christianity Loftus was questioning my claim that there is a boatload of evidence for theism

Exapologist is right of course. I fired off those comments on my blog and then pasted them to the other blog, out of sheer irritation with the "no evidence claim."

In my view, evidence for hypothesis H exists if there is something that is more likely to exist given H than not-h. That is the long and the short of it. There are numerous features of human experience that seem more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Even if they have possible atheistic explanations, these facts seem to me to make theism more plausible than otherewise. To say that there is NO evidence for theism just means that EVERYTHING in the world is at least as likely given atheism as given theism.

I would not be inclined to say "There is no evidence for theism." and I would not want to say "there is no evidence for atheism." If I were on a website where everyone was implying that atheists were a bunch of idiots and that there is no evidence whatsoever that God does not exist, I could just as truthfully reply that there is a boatload of evidence for atheism. All told, I think the scale points toward theism myself, but not so strongly that I would want to be defending irrationaltiy charges against atheists. (As you may know, I've gotten into some exchanges with people who think that here are really no atheists).

I threw a bunch of stuff out because I thought the discussion up to that point was one-sided and even somewhat ad hominem. I an convinced that a new brand of atheist apologetics is brewing which is doing considerable harm to the quality of debate between our two sides. `

Radical Naturalistic Presuppositionalism

I have never been able to figure out exactly how there arguments for methodological naturalism are supposed to go. It seems that a lot of the time this sort of thing just gets asserted without an real explanation of why it has to be like that.

Let's take the subtitle of Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, which is "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design." Now, if this is taken seriously, it has to imply that evidence of evolution could have revealed a universe with design, but it just didn't. Otherwise, what leads us to the conclusion that the universe is without design wouldn't be the evidence of evolution, it would be the constraints of rational inquiry. The evidence of evolution would be superfluous

Russell presumably said if he met God and were asked to explain is failure to believe in him, he would say "Well, God, you didn't give me enough evidence!" But, that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense unless God could have given enough evidence, but just didn't. But, if it is a fundamental principle of reason that we can't possibly have evidence for God, then that's kind of empty don't you think?

I once asked a longtime friend who is now a well-known atheist philosopher, Keith Parsons "If I were God, and I wanted to rationally persuade you of my existence, what would I have to do?" He told me that if I, as God were to make the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster to spell out the words "Turn Or Burn, Parsons This Means You," he's turn. I guess for many naturalists, there are limits on methodological naturalism. But if Parsons were to turn, I am sure at least some of his atheist colleagues would accuse him of succumbing to a God of the Gaps explanation.

If MN is stated strongly enough, it requires you to reject a theistic explanation (which is surely logically possible) even if it were a true explanation. That's a position that I would describe as radical naturalistic presuppositionalism. Are there any naturalistic presuppositionalists out there? Are there Cornelius Van Tils in the naturalist camp?

I'm on this video of the Magician's Twin

Here. 

Abortion and Moral Objectivity

Some people think that the fact that people cannot agree about the issue of abortion is good evidence that moral values are relative or subjective. It is quite true that there are profound differences about moral values that are extraordinarily difficult to resolve when it comes to this issue. It is also true that a lot of the dispute on this issue takes place at what I call the bumper sticker level: "Abortion is murder" "A woman has the right to do as she pleases with her own body," etc.

However, disputants do agree that humans in general have a right to life. No one, (or almost no one) disputes that. There is a very strong consensus about the right to life outside the womb, even amongst pro-choicers, which is challenged in some cases by Australian philosophers taking pro-choice arguments so far as to justify infanticide, but by and large social consensus against infanticide is pretty strong. No one thinks we have the right to knock off a four-year-old just because the four-year-old is annoying us. People also believe in the right of persons, including women to control their own body. Pro-lifers are not inclined to oppose that right except in the case of a pregnancy, where they believe another person's rights to be involved. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers also agree that the quality of life matters a great deal. It is just that pro-lifers think that quality of life concerns have to be set aside in order to protect the right to life of the fetus, the exact argument that a pro-choice person would make on behalf of four-year-olds.

Hence the contemporary debate concerning abortion is a kind of in-house quarrel between people who agree on a range of fundamental principles. Looked at in this way, the dispute about abortion provides an problem for moral subjectivity, not an argument for it.

The Abolition of Man is online

Here. 

An ethical claim from Hector Avalos

From this discussion.

I would go much further and argue that all theistic ethics are inherently unethical because,
at least from a secular viewpoint, a functional ethical system is one in which all members
of a community have at least the same potential ability to verify the information on which
their actions are based.

Why assume this? In science, different people have different levels of access. Why must egalitarianism of this kind rule in ethics?

Hush Hush

I believe in at least this part of "teach the controversy," and that is that supporters of evolution shouldn't suppress aspects of evolutionary biology that are problematic, for fear of (God forbid, oops that should be Darwin forbid), providing cannot fodder for creationists. 

As the article says: 

Ball suggests that popular accounts of evolution may be sanitized because of anxiety that the uncertainty might be exploited by people who want to undermine evolutionary theory. But, he writes, "We are grown-up enough to be told about the doubts, debates and discussions that are leaving the putative 'age of the genome' with more questions than answers."

But, if we can't talk about the problems with any theory, then the whole self-correcting mechanism of science is threatened. 

Just for fun, I am including a link to the Pistol Annies' song "Hush Hush." 

Hush hush don't you dare say a word
Hush hush don't you know the truth hurts
Hush hush when push comes to shove
It's best to keep it hush hush
Best to keep it hush hush

Are there pages missing?

Actually, some recent manuscripts have been discovered which show that God first created Adam and Steve. But that didn't work out so well with regard to populating the earth, so God then created Eve to correct the situation. 

How to save a refuted theory

I understand that, for any scientific theory, the "refuted" theory can always be saved by adjusting it to fit the contrary evidence. There is no logical point at which scientists must give up their theory, but theories are often nevertheless abandoned by their adherents (possible when all the old scientists who believed the theory die off). 


The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, 'refuted" by the telescope. The scarred surface of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter can, if one wants, be fitted into a geocentric scheme... How far, by endless tinkerings, it could have kept up with them till even now, I do not know. But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can 'save the appearances." The new astronomy triumphed, not because the case for the old became desperate, but because the new was a better tool, and once this was grasped, our ingrained conviction that Nature herself is thrifty did the rest.

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 219-220. 

Reasons, causes and ontological commitments.

A redated post. 

Explanations, causal or non-causal, involve ontological commitments. That which plays an explanatory role is supposed to exist. Therefore, if we explain the existence of the presents under the Christmas tree in terms of Santa Claus I take it that means that Santa Claus exists in more than just a non-realist “Yes, Virginia,” sense. What this means is that even if reasons-explanations do not exclude physical explanations, even if reasons-explanations are somehow not causal explanations, the naturalist is not out of the woods. The naturalist maintains that the universe, at its base, is governed by blind matter rather than reasons. So if reasons-explanations are true, we still need to know why they are true and why reasons exist in a world that is fundamentally non-rational.

Faith, Reason, Love, and Marriage

I am inclined to see the question of religious belief as a judgment call. If we are looking for proof of the sort we have for the claim that the earth goes around the sun, then this isn't going to work. But there are facts and evidence that seem to be relevant here. There are reasons that can be given on both sides. Because a lot in our lives depend on how we decide, we have to "call it" one way or the other. (Do we go to church or not? Do we follow a religion? Do we use any religious texts as a guide for life? etc.) 

Consider the question of whether someone loves you enough to get married to them. Can you prove that that person will be a good husband or wife? If you wait for proof in some strict sense, then no one will get married. But you can see evidence of someone's love, or more seriously, evidence that someone's love is deficient. Or you could ignore it. People get married to abusers. They should have seen that something was wrong, but they closed their eyes. That may have seemed like true faith to them, but it seems like a recipe for unhappiness now. 

What does it mean?

A redated post.

What does it mean to say "ID is only disguised creationism?" Creationism, I take it would be

C) The species in existence today were specially created by God, and were not produced by any evolutionary process.

Whereas Intelligent Design is committed to

ID) The species in existence today, including man, were, in part, produced by a process distinct from the processes described in neo-Darwinian theory (random variation, natural selection, genetic drift, etc.) in that these processes included the work of an intelligent designer.

But C and ID are really equivalent, because

P) In the proposed high school textbook, Of Pandas and People, numerous references to a creator were changed to refer to an intelligent designer, once the Supreme Court upheld the anti-creationism decisions.

But C and ID are not equivalent, and P does nothing to show that C and ID are equivalent. The changes, clearly, changed the meanings of the statements. Plato clearly believed in ID but not C, and a case could be made the Hume did so as well.

So when people say that ID is just disguised C, what do they mean?

The significance of the Dover decision

Can someone kindly explain to me who died and made some federal judge in Pennsylvania the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not science?

Do people realize that if there hadn't been a personnel change on the Dover school board, the case would have gone up the court system, and there is some evidence that if it had made to the Supreme Court, some justices were likely to overturn the case?

Even if it were not overturned, while we need judges to make decisions like this sometimes, the way this decision is talked about by some people it almost seems to have metaphysical significance. Why?

The Lewis quote Bob was looking for

It's from The Abolition of Man.

“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
― C.S. Lewis

One-sided academic freedom?

It sure looks like it here, at Ball State.

Some Clarifications for Steven Carr

Steven Carr: No, the whole point is that 'the power of omnipotence' is a meaningless phrase indicating the total lack of thought that has gone into working out your views.

Apparently, any being other than a god can only win a chess game by playing better moves than his opponent, while in contrast, a god wins chess games by a different method - namely the power of omnipotence.

VR: Actually, it depends on what you want explained. Winning a chess game involves making better moves than one's opponent, granted. But now if we ask "OK, I have the scoresheet, and I know what God did to win the game. But how in the world did he figure out what the best moves were?" we would be ignoring God's omniscience.

Similarly, we might get a good deal more detail about what happened when God raised Jesus from the dead. A Laplacean demon might know in detail what all the physical, chemical, and biological changes were that brought Jesus back to life. That would identify in more detail what the miracle was. But, if we then ask "OK, I see all that, but isn't that impossible given the laws of physics, so how did God do that?" then it seems the interlocutor is simply forgetting that God, ex hypothesi, is omnipotent, and has the power to create the laws of physics or to produce effects that are not possible given the laws of physics, and we would be gratuitously presupposing naturalism, which is precisely what is at issue between the defender of miracles and the opponent of miracles.

How did God do that?

Lowder writes:

The more substantial point is this. Simply claiming that a Creator/Designer is the “best explanation” hardly amounts to showing that a Creator/Designer really is the “best explanation.” In my experience, many (but not all) people who invoke a Creator or Designer as the “best explanation” fail to show that it is the best explanation. Indeed, some (and this includes WK, at least in the linked post) don’t even try! Instead, they just assume that a Creator or Designer is an explanation.  If, however, the design hypothesis isn’t an explanation at all, then it cannot be the best explanation.

This is always an interesting issue. But does it really make sense to ask of an omnipotent being how they did something. For example, I once beat a Grandmaster in a chess tournament. Now, you might ask how I did that, since as someone whose rating has never gone above expert, you might wonder how I did that. (And the answer isn't all the flattering, was able to win because my opponent had had entirely too much to drink.) But if I have all power, then the simple answer is that I used the power of omnipotence to get it done.

Lowder's Is "Freethinker" Synonymous with Nontheist?

A redated post.

Athanasius' On the Incarnation

A redated post.

Athanasius had theological reasons for insisting on the doctrine of the Trinity. It wasn't just a matter of "who won the election." He was concerned about what Arianism would do to monotheism (in spite of a unity of purpose between the Father and the Son) and he was also concerned about the fact that if Arianism is true, then someone other than God is saving us. This edition, of course, includes Lewis's fanous preface, otherwise known as "On the Reading of Old Books."

Evangelical Outpost on Zombies

Is your neighbor a zombie? Is Britney Spears a zombie? (scratch that). Joe Carter thinks that if materialism is true, we would have to worry about this possibility.

You can't argue with a zombie

A redated post.
A paper by Jaron Lanier.

The Stanford entry on Functionalism

Here. 

The final paragraph is as follows:

In general, the sophistication of functionalist theories has increased since their introduction, but so has the sophistication of the objections to functionalism, especially to functionalist accounts of mental causation (section 5.2), introspective knowledge (Section 5.3), and the qualitative character of experiential states (Section 5.5). For those unconvinced of the plausibility of dualism, however, and unwilling to restrict mental states to creatures physically like ourselves, the initial attractions of functionalism remain. The primary challenge for future functionalists, therefore, will be to meet these objections to the doctrine, either by articulating a functionalist theory in increasingly convincing detail, or by showing how the intuitions that fuel these objections can be explained away.

A question for naturalists

This is from an i'm-skeptical response

This is evidence of your own misunderstanding of what it means to be (at least relatively) free of superstition and woo. It's not the cold, dark bleakness of "mindless electrical impulses" that you make it out to be. I have thoughts and emotions, just like everyone else. Your failure to understand it, your deluded perception, does not change the reality. (I might add here that we all have deluded perceptions - reality is not what it appears.) You've convinced yourself (as have most theists) that "mindless electrical impulses" can't possibly result in cognition. As I said, there is "matter in motion" behind it, but it's anything but mindless. It is just how mental function works. Sorry to disappoint you, the materialist isn't angry and jealous because he doesn't share your happy delusions about mind. But he may well wish that you'd wake up, take a look at the evidence, and stop being so smug about your beliefs. 

I would like to ask I-S whether, in saying that mental explanations are true, he is saying that they are basic-level explanations. Richard Carrier, in his lengthy critique of my book, agrees with me that purposive and intentional basic explanations are unacceptable for naturalists.

Reppert attempts to generalize his arguments to all forms of naturalism only in a very vague and haphazard way when he comes to his defense of "explanatory dualism" as his alternative. For example, he deploys what I earlier described as the Causation Fallacy again when he argues that naturalism's reliance on only two categories of fundamental explanation—necessity and accident—eliminates reason (87), which is teleological (a third category). But this is a non sequitur. Just because our basic explanations are limited to accident and necessity it does not follow that this exhausts all explanations available to us—for not all explanations are basic. Reppert knows very well that naturalism allows teleological causation as a category of explanation (human behavior, for example), and that we explain the emergence of this type of cause as an effect of a complex system of more fundamental nonteleological causes.

Do you think that Carrier has accurately characterized the commitments of naturalism. 

Theological Voluntarism and the debate over Calvinism

Roger Olson, an Arminian, thinks that the heart of the Calvinist-Arminian debate concerns theological voluntarism. I think that it really does boil down to this, although I have run into arguments to the effect that Calvinists are not necessarily committed to voluntarism.

When I debated the issue a few years back with the people over at Triablogue (mostly) I thought they were getting away from straightforward voluntarism, but that their position ended up in something like it in the final analysis. I think Calvinists like to cast the debate as reliance on intuitions vs. reliance on Scripture, but can we have knowledge of moral truths in the Platonistic sense which permit us to form judgments about what is can be plausibly attributed to God, which in turn affects our understanding of what we take from Scripture?

Philosophical terms as understood by nonphilosophers

This is great

A Musical Debate

The Louvin Brothers affirm belief in God with There's a Higher Power.  Robbie Fulks responds with God isn't Real.  How would the Louvins have responded to Fulks' argument from evil? Probably with Satan is Real. 

Another version of the AFR

1. If there is no God, then all causation in the universe is blind, physical causation. 
2. If that is true, then what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation. 
3. But science exists. And if science exists, then scientists also exist. And those scientists do form beliefs because of the evidence for those beliefs. Otherwise, we would not take scientists any more seriously than tea leaf readers. 
4. But if science exists, then it is not the case that what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation. 
5. But if it is not true that what everyone believes is the result of blind, physical causation, then it is not the case that all causation in the universe is blind physical causation. 
6. If it is not true that all causation in the universe is blind physical causation, then God does exist. 

Heard from a Quad Preacher back when I was at the University of Illinois

A redated post.

Do they still have the fire-and-brimstone quad preachers that always get a big crowd around?

Back in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, God had all the homosexuals in one place. So he smote them with fire and brimstone. Now, they're spread all over the world. So he sent AIDS.

McAtheism

This is a brilliant term, which we can always use when we get tired of "gnu." Here.

Would you like fries with that?

A William Lane Craig Interview

On Reasons to Believe. Here.

Six Atheist Arguments. But are they new?

Apparently this atheist thinks its more of the same darned thing.

A Common Sense Atheism post on whether Christians really believe what they say they do

Here. In particular he is talking about the belief in soteriological exclusivism, which says that only Christians go to heaven and everyone else is going to roast in hell.

If we really believe this, would we spend every waking moment trying to evangelize the lost, and worrying ourselves sick that some of the people we really care about won't make it?

Back when I was an undergrad, a couple of guys by the names of Bob Prokop and Joe Sheffer convinced me that soteriological exclusivism was false, and interestingly enough, they brought up some of the same points that this atheist does.

Laying out the problem of evil: If there is a God, why does my back hurt so much?

Here is a version of the argument from evil. 

(1) Gratuitous evils probably exist
(2) Gratuitous evils are incompatible with the God of theism (omnipotent, omniscient, all-good
(3) Therefore, the God of theism probably does not exist. 

Gratuitous evils are unnecessary and pointless evils. On the face of things, there seems to be a number of those. My back hurting a lot of the time seems on the face of things to be unnecessary. In fact evolutionary biologists explain it as what happens when creatures transitioned from four legs to two legs, and started standing up straight. That put's pressure on a back that was evolved from creatures with four legs who didn't put so much pressure on their backs. 

What is the best way to respond to an AFE that is spelled out in this way? 

A note from someone on a discussion group I frequent

BTW I was talking to a Christian astronomer on Thursday. Curiously, even those scientists who believe that Nature is "the whole show" are in a quandary at the moment on the subject of "Dark matter" and "dark energy". Many scientists firmly believe these exist. They hypothesize the "dark" stuff from its "effects", but have no idea what it is and hence how to detect it (huh? methinks, how can they be sure that they are observing dark matter/energy's "effects" then?) 

Lewis's voice recording has moved

To here.

The Atheist's Guide to Reality

James Anderson claims that Alex Rosenberg has unwittingly produced an excellent case for theism. Thanks, Alex.

Peter Bide

Peter Bide is the Anglican priest who prayed for Joy Davidman Lewis, after which her cancer went into remission. He passed away in 2003.

HT: Steve Hays

The Kalam Cosmological Argument from Philoponus to Prokop

A redated post

To preface this, Bob Prokop, a sometime commentator here, is an friend of mine from undergraduate days at ASU, whom I met in a History of the Middle Ages class in 1973. I remember Bob explaining a theistic argument to me in a classroom at ASU in 1975, some four years before William Lane Craig published his first work on the Kalam Cosmological argument. I later discovered that the argument had been used by the Scholastics during the Medieval period. Little did I know that Bob's argument would become the most discussed theistic argument of the last 25 years. I got back in touch with Bob after a long time out of touch, and he wanted to see what I thought of this argument he invented when he was an undergrad.

The reason I wanted to e-mail you is that I would like you to try and find a flaw in what I believe is an iron-clad proof that the universe must have been created, and cannot possibly have always existed.


As prelude to my argument, I have to confess that for myself, my very existence has always been evidence enough for a Creator (read: God). My mind simply can not and will not accept the idea that the universe "just is". So for me, the existence of God is Case Closed, and I generally find debates on the subject to be rather pointless. BUT, I am fully aware that existence itself is not considered to be sufficient proof of a Creator by the hard-core atheist, who generally respond with two objections which they think are fatal flaws in the "Argument for Existence".


First Objection: "Then where did God come from?" This one is simple. The question is semantically null - without meaning. The Creator is by definition the Creator, and not a creation. To ask who created the creator is to string words together to no purpose.


Second Objection: Now this one is worth refuting. The argument runs thus. Existence does not require a Creator, because the universe has always been here from eternity, and therefore "just is".


I respond to that proposition with a simple thought experiment. Call this a sub-set of the "Argument from Existence" - maybe a good name for it would be the "Argument from there being a Now". Thus:


1. Imagine a time a billion years in the future. You know that in a billion years from now, that time will be the present. The same works for any finite number you can name, no matter how large. At some point, we'll get there, and some future person will be able to experience that point in time as "Now".


2. Now, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the future. In this case, no matter how long you wait, we'll NEVER arrive at that point. It will never be the present, but always and forever an infinite time in the future, and no one will ever experience that time as "Now".


3. Now let's go in the other direction. Imagine 14 billion years ago (the current rough estimate of the age of the universe, give or take a billion years or so). Starting from that point, we eventually get to where (when?) we are today - the present time.


4. Finally, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the past. Just as in step 2, we would never, ever get to today. Our present existence becomes an impossibility. It would always be an infinite time in the future, and never arrived at.


THEREFORE: The universe (Creation) requires a beginning, before which there was nothing. It cannot have always been here, or we would not be here "Now". Creation Ex Nihilo


So my challenge to you - where is the flaw in this argument? I cannot find one. Also, as an aside, has anyone else ever used this argument. I don't recall ever seeing it anywhere. (Here's where you get your chance to show how uneducated I am, and point out that it dates back to Augustine, or something like that!)


Bob

I gave a couple of replies to Bob: I remember you came up with an argument for theism which had not been discussed much by the early 70s, but a Christian philosopher named William Lane Craig developed it, and his book, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, was his first major publication, tracing it back to Islamic thinkers of the early Middle Ages.



Here is some Craig stuff on the argument:

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/existence.html

And this is the response of who I think is his best critic, Wes Morriston.

There is also the move that says that the beginning of the universe just doesn't need a cause, that a cause is required only if there is a time prior to the beginning.

Whenever you see the phrase, "Kalam Cosmological Argument," that's the argument this is talking about.

Thomas Aquinas didn't use this argument.  I think Joe Sheffer (another friend of ours from undergrad days, and a big-time Aquinas aficianado who, tragically, passed away in 1989) criticized the argument also, but my photographic memory fails me as to just how that discussion went. Here is a discussion on Aquinas's understanding of the infinite, which provides the reason why he rejected the argument, and made the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning (and therefore a temporal first cause), an article of faith known through revelation, rather than something established by natural reason alone.

When Bob asked me my own view of the argument, I replied (well, mostly):

Well, you have to realize that, thanks to William Lane Craig, this argument has gone from being an obscure argument dating back to golden age of Islam, and used by some scholastics (but NOT Aquinas), to being the most discussed argument for the existence of God in the past 30 years. A large body of papers have been written about it, I've only read a fraction of them. The very latest is a paper by William Lane Craig and James Sinclair in Craig and Moreland, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

The argument basically says that, when it comes to counting anything, infinity can't be real. More precisely, a completed infinite set of past moments is impossible. Yet there is an infinite set of integers. All these numbers do exist, yet there is an infinite number of them. There is a set, but I suppose there is the question of whether it can be traversed. Hence there had to be a beginning, because if there wasn't, there would be no now. Mathematicians make a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite, and say that an actual infinite is impossible.

One question might be to ask you how many moments are there in our heavenly future? If there can be an infinite number of future moments in which we praise God, (we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun), then can't there have always been an infinite number of past moments prior to this one?

I haven't worked through what are considered to be the strongest objections to the argument against an infinite number of past moments, and I haven't worked my way through the question of why Aquinas rejected the argument, concluding that the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning was an article of faith, rather than provably false, which is what your argument shows if it works. (If it had made it into the Five Ways, it would have been extensively discussed by philosophers).

An interesting sidelight to this whole argument has to do with Big Bang cosmology. Is cosmology trending in the direction of accepting a beginning of the universe, as attempts to get rid of an absolute beginning at the Big Bang keep going down the tubes. Is science showing that there was a beginning?

The argument seems right to me, but I have some questions about it.

Bob replied:

I followed your link to Aquinas's take on the subject, and was somewhat startled to find myself disagreeing with him. The issue of future moments is not relevant. We will never arrive at a point an infinite number of years in the future. there is no requirement to traverse that interval, as there is, were there an infinite amount of time in the past (i.e., it has to have happened in actuality, not conceptually).

I had been mistaken, however, in attributing the argument to Islamic sources. Craig and Sinclair wrote:

The kalam cosmological argument traces its roots to the efforts of early Christian theologians who, out of their commitment to the biblical teaching of creatio ex nihilo, sought to rebut the Aristotltelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe. Iin his works Against Aristotle and On the Eternity of the World Against Proclus, The Alexandrian Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus (d. 580?), the last great champion of creatio ex nihilo prior to the advent of Islam, initiated a tradition of argumentation in support of the doctrine of creation based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regression of events (Philoponus, 1987, Philoponus and Simplicius 1991). Following the Muslim conquest of North Africa, this tradition was taken up and subsequently enriched by medieval Muslim and Jewish theologians before being transmitted back again to Christian scholastic theology.

The argument from asymmetry

A redated piost

From the debate with Craig: Jesseph's atheistic argument from Asymmetry
This has been a tough one for me to make sense of. I think he has in mind something like this:
1) All believers in supernatural religions accept some supernatural claims and reject others. They, for example, explain the growth of Christianity in terms of the working of the Holy Spirit, but the belief that Joseph Smith translated the tablets with divine help as the result of some kind of delusion or dishonesty.
2) However, once you accept the supernatural, there is no principled way to prefer on supernatural explanation to another.
3) Therefore, theistic religionists of all stripes reject some claims and accept others for no principled reason.
4) But one should have principled reasons for accepting some beliefs and rejecting others.
5) Therefore, you should reject theism in favor of atheism.
Questions about Premise 2
The key premise is 2. It does seem that some supernatural claims seem antecedently more plausible than others. Actions attributed to God that serve a redemptive purpose seem more probable than those that don’t serve any. There is also better or worse testimonial evidence in favor of some claims as opposed to others. So I don’t see how premise 2 can be defended.

The role of religious scientists

A discussion of this is here.

Moderately conservative sexual ethics

One question I might pose is whether long-term happiness in relationships depends in any way on our willingness and ability to make fidelity promises and to keep them, taking into consideration the kind of stable atmosphere for childrearing that provides. If the answer to this question is yes, then what I would call a moderately conservative sexual morality results. I say moderately conservative because it doesn't rule on questions like what people of clearly homosexual orientation ought to do about it, or whether committed couples should have sex before the actual wedding ceremony. A lot of traditional religious people want to go further than the moderately conservative position to a full-blown conservatism that limits sex strictly to marriage and forbids gay relationships, but I am inclined to think that the discussion of sexual ethics should proceed in a two-stage fashion: we first ask if moderate conservatism about sex behavior is true, then proceed to discuss whether or not the moderate conservative position should be extended to full-blown conservatism. Intuitively, I think moderate conservatism can be defended without religious premises, but the conservative position needs them. 

Can altruism pass an outsider test?

Some people might ask whether or not we have come to think a meaningful life has to do with doing things for other people because we have been brainwashed in our society to think that way. If we look at this from a perspective of an outsider, would we prefer a life concerned with others over a self-centered life? 

Where did we get that idea?

Well, we came up with the idea of a three-headed dog by having the idea of three, the idea of heads, and the idea of a dog, and putting them all together. How did we come up with the idea of God? 

Relativism and the Westboro Baptist Church

Moral relativism is often motivated by a desire to be tolerant. Yet, it can end up providing a justification for the most extreme forms of intolerance. 

If morality is in the eye of the beholder, then people who, say, condemn homosexuals and carry "God hates fags" signs to military funerals can't be criticized morally, since they are doing exactly what their culture (Westboro Baptist Church) says that they ought to do. 

The Haldane-Krauss Argument

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

This is an argument that people who practice or accept science ought to be atheists, and it has been endorsed recently by Lawrence Krauss.  But what is the argument exactly? Here numbered premises might be nice. 

Maybe this: 

1. In setting up experiments in science, scientists set aside the possibility of divine interference changing the result of the experiment. 

2. To be consistent, therefore, someone who practices science ought also to discount the possibility of divine interference in all areas of life. 

3. To discount the possibility of divine activity in the world in all areas of life is to be, at least in practice if not in theory, an atheist. 

4. Therefore consistent thinking on the part of scientists leads to atheism. 

But I fail to see why I should believe 2. If I ask a scientist about  whether or not a hundred  dollar bill will remain in my drawer if I leave it there, the scientists might answer "yes." By this I take it he would mean that the bill did not have properties that will cause it to disintegrate there, or spontaneously combust. . But he doesn't know whether a burglar might get into the drawer. In other words, the scientist is going to tell me what will happen to the bill left to itself. It is mapping the world apart from interference, telling you what will happen all things being equal. But it is a further question as to whether all things are equal. 

Lowder on Dawkins not debating Craig

I had missed this. Lowder offers real reasons for Dawkins' refusal to debate. I'd take it a step further, and say that even a philosopher of religion can do a disservice to his position if he doesn't have the ability to operate within a debate format. There are good philosophers of religion, both theist and atheist, who would fit in this category. 

However, Dawkins a) has gone away from actual science to doing philosophy of religion, however amateurishly, b) engages in a intellectual crusade while systematically avoiding genuine engagement with people who take the  position he's crusading against. It isn't Dawkins' failure to debate, it's the way he refuses to debate that I find objectionable. 

Fred Dretske RIP

His passing, noted by Eric, is reported here.

Just suppose

Suppose we were to discover that messages that we thought had to come from outer space. We use them for information. We learn to build spaceships based on that information. Then, discover evidence that the source did not evolve. Now what do we do?

Electrons and faith

We walk by faith and not by sight. 

Not seeing is different from not having reasons. I have never once seen an electron. I believe they exist. By faith?

A distinction essential to conservatism

Conservatives tend to think that if something is a protective function of the government, it is worth doing, but if it doesn't protect, then the government shouldn't do it. So, for example, the military protects us, so we support it, but reforming health care isn't something where we need protection, so we shouldn't involve the government in something like that. 

But some people think that protection from disease and protection from enemies trying to kill us are not so different after all. Would you call them liberals? 

Rate Your Morality

Most people think that they are more moral people than the average. But half of us are below average, right? 

How do you solve Hempel's Dilemma?

Here.  How you solve it is important  because it affects the strength of the argument from past explanatory successes, which Danaher dealt with first. The reason for this we need to give an account of what it is for something to be a success for physicalistic explanations. It would have been thought, prior to the discovery of quantum mechanics, that physicalistic explanation means deterministic explanation, but that got abandoned when quantum mechanics came along. So, not everything turned out to be physicalistically explicable if pre-quantum expectations are presupposed. Similarly, the discovery of a beginning of the universe would have been thought to have been an explanatory failure for physicalistic explanation from the point of view of the people prior to the discovery of Big Bang cosmology. What this suggests is that we ought to be rather cautious as to what exactly we are claiming when we say that the mind-body problem will have a physicalistic explanation. What might turn out to be the case is everything that the dualist thinks is true of the mind really is true, but since neuroscience discovers this, the "soul" gets built into physics, and physicalism "triumphs" after all.

Larmer on God of the Gaps reasoning

I'm redating the post on Larmer's essay on God of the Gaps.

I conclude that there is nothing wrong with the reasoning typically involved in “God of the gaps” arguments. The widespread dismissal of such arguments as unworthy of serious consideration is, therefore, unjustified.--Philosopher Robert Larmer.

I am a tad surprised that people haven't picked up on this, since it's a direct attack on one of most often-used arguments in the atheist playbook. I do note that Tom Gilson has picked up on it, however.

"God did it" explanations

A redated post.

Since the God of the Gaps issue has been discussed in several places, I thought I would redate this post from a month ago relevant to that issue.

We are often told that "God did it" explanations are "cheating" that they are "pseudo-explanations." I saw this in reading the combox on Tom Gilson's Thinking Christian site, to which I link here. But what if God actually did it? "The butler did it" is a bad explanation unless, well, the butler did it. Does that mean that we, as rational people, are condemned to not believing the truth because to accept a true explanations would be to accept an unacceptable explanation? Are there any limits on the ban on theistic explanations? Consider this passage from Norwood Russell Hanson:

Suppose that on next Tuesday morning, just after breakfast, all of us in this one world are knocked to our knees by a percussive and ear shattering thunderclap. Snow swirls; leaves drop from trees; The earth heaves and buckles; Buildings topple and towers tumble; The sky is ablaze with an eerie, silvery light. Just then, as all the people of this world look up, the heavens open—The clouds pull apart—Revealing an unbelievably immense and radiant Zeus-like figure, towering above us like a hundred Everests. He frowns darkly as lightning plays across the features of His Michelangeloid face. He then points down at me and exclaims, for every man, woman and child to hear, “I have had quite enough of your too-clever logic-chopping and word-watching in matters of Theology. Be assured, N. R. Hanson that I do most certainly exist. 1

Keith Parsons, in his debate with William Lane Craig, says that if that were to happen he would be on the front row of the church. I once asked Keith this question: Suppose I were God, and I decided to do everything I could to convince you that I existed. What would I have to do? (Keith had sent me a paper defending a broadly Humean position on miracles). He said "If the sky were to spell out the words "TURN OR BURN THIS MEANS YOU PARSONS" he said, he would turn. In fact examples like these are often used as a basis for challenging believers to provide evidence for belief in God. But why demand that theists provide evidence, if, whatever the circumstances, there couldn't be enough evidence. If "God did it" explanations are really verboten, then it hardly makes sense to complain that theists haven't provided evidence for their position. By definition, that's the one thing they can't do.

Another Oxford Urban Legend Debunked

Debunked by J. R. Lucas, here.   Compare his treatment of the Anscombe Legend here.  I have corrected the link.

Some AFR stuff I'm working on

The argument from reason is a name applied to an argument, or a group of arguments, which attempt to make a case against a naturalistic philosophy by pointing out that such a philosophy undercuts the claim to hold rational beliefs. The argument is best-known in the writings of C. S. Lewis, but is considerably older. Some have actually found this line of argumentation as far back as Plato, and a version of it is found in Kant.

What these arguments invariably target are doctrines known as naturalism, materialism, or physicalism. All of these concepts are notoriously difficult to define. What seems to be common to all of them is the idea that at the basis of reality are elements which are entirely non-mental in nature. We can begin thinking about this by contrasting two different types of explanation. One type of explanation is what might be provided by how we might explain the movement of rocks down a mountain in an avalanche. If I am standing down at the bottom of the mountain, we can expect the rocks to move where they do without regard to whether my head is in their path or not. They will not deliberately move to hit my head, neither will they move to avoid it. They will do what the laws of physics require that they do, and if my head is in the wrong place at the wrong time, it will be hit, and otherwise it will not be hit. The process is an inherently blind one.

Consider, by contrast, how we might explain what happens when I decide to vote for a certain candidate for President. I weigh the options, and choose the candidate who is most likely to do what I want to see done in the country for the next four years. The action of voting for Obama or Romney is one filled with intention and purpose. I know what the choice is about, I have a goal in mind when voting, and I perform the act of voting with the intent to achieve a certain result.

If we look at the world from a naturalistic perspective, we are always looking to find non-mental explanation even behind the mental explanations that we offer. Take, for example, Einstein developing his theory of relativity. If a naturalistic view of the world is correct, then we can, and must explain the development of Einstein’s theory in mental terms, in terms of certain mathematical relationships obtaining, and so forth. But, Einstein’s brain is, according to the naturalist, entirely the result of a purely non-intention process of random variation and natural selection. The appearance of intention and design is explained by an underlying blind process that not only produced Einstein’s brain, but also, the processes in his brain are the result of particles in his brain operating as blindly as the rocks falling down the avalanche and either hitting or not hitting my head at the bottom of the mountain.

Contrast this with a theistic view.  On such a view, there may be particles the follow the laws of physics, but those laws are in place because they were built into creation by God. Presumably, if God had wanted there to be other laws of physics, he could have made a world with laws of physics very different than the ones that we see. So, on the theistic view we see the opposite of naturalism. Even what seems on one level to be completely explained in terms of the non-mental has a mental explanation.

The argument from reason tries to show that if the world were as the naturalist, or materialist, or physicalist, says that it is, then no one can be rational in believing that it is so. Rational beliefs must, according to the argument, must have rational causes, but naturalism holds that, in the final analysis, all causes are non-rational causes. But if this is so, then human beings really don’t reason, and if they don’t reason, they don’t do science either. So, the very naturalistic world-view which is supposed to be based on science, is actually the very view that render science impossible.

In the original 1947 edition of his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Lewis presented a version of the argument from reason which can be formalized as follows.

1)      If naturalism is true, then all thoughts including the thought “naturalism is true,” can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.

2)      If all thoughts that are the result of irrational causes, then all thoughts are invalid, and science is impossible.

3)      If all thoughts are invalid, and science is impossible, then no one is justified in believing that naturalism is true.

4)      Therefore naturalism should be rejected.

In 1948, the Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued that against Lewis’s argument in a paper at the Oxford Socratic Club. She argued, first that one has to distinguish between irrational causes on the one hand, and non-rational causes on the other. Irrational causes for a belief would be such things as wishful thinking or mental illness, or unreasonable fears. Irrational causes always interfere with the possibility of believing  rationally. Non-rational causes would by physical events which, while not rational, don’t necessarily make rationality impossible. While naturalists hold that all thoughts are the result of nonrational causes, they need not hold that they are the result of irrational cases.

Second, she argued that when we say that something or other makes a thought invalid, we are presuming a contrast between valid and invalid thoughts. Hence, the very existence of the distinction entails that some thoughts are valid and others are not, and so it cannot be the conclusion of an argument that no thoughts are valid.

Third, she argued that there is an ambiguity in the terms “why,” “because” and “explanation” conceal the possibilities that a naturalistic explanation and a rational explanation might not actually turn out to be compatible. Thus, when we are asking “why” in the context of identifying a cause for a certain event, we are asking a radically different question from when we are asking “why” when we are asking why someone believes something. Thus, we could simultaneously give “because such and such brain event caused it,” and “because there is good evidence to think it true” as explanations without contradicting ourselves.

Now, in response to these arguments by Anscombe, some responses can be made on Lewis’s behalf. First, with respect to Anscombe’s first argument, Lewis had already drawn the distinction between nonrational and irrational causes, when he distinguished between two types of irrational causes. He wrote:

“Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error.”

                With both nonrational causes, in Anscombe’s sense, and irrational causes, reason is absent from the causal process. Yet, in paradigmatic cases reasoning that a naturalist cannot deny ever occur, such as the reasoning process that led Darwin to explain the variation in beak sizes on the Galapagos islands in terms of natural selection, reasoning is definitely present. Naturalistic thinkers frequently insist that people require evidence for their beliefs as opposed to believing on blind faith, but this implies that reasons can and do play a critical role in the production of many beliefs. If this were not so, there would be no science.

                Second, while  it might be unsound to argue that there no thoughts are valid, the conclusion of Lewis’s argument is the conditional statement, “If naturalism is true, then no thoughts are valid.” So, even though Anscombe’s  paradigm case argument might show that there must be a contrast between rational and irrational thoughts, Lewis can affirm that there is indeed such a contrast, but existence of such a contrast can exist only if naturalism is false.  

                Third, although causal relationships are different from evidential relationships, when we think about being persuaded to believe something, we are inclined to suppose that somehow the fact that an evidential relationship obtains is causally relevant to the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event. Anscombe actually says “It appears to me that if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they genuinely are his reasons, for thinking something, then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements may be said about him.” (Anscombe, 1981, p.299.) But it seems to me that part of what it is for something to be someone’s reasons for believing something has to do with the role those reasons play not only in producing, but also sustaining that belief. If someone gives a reason for believing something, but it turns out that the presence or absence of that reason would have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a person continued to believe what he does, then it is questionable whether these reasons are operative at all.

                If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might be inclined to consider him a very rational person. But if you were to discover that he rolled dice to fix permanently all his beliefs, you might on that account be inclined to withdraw from him the honorific title “rational.” We sometimes consider persons who continue to hold the positions they hold regardless of the evidence against such positions impervious to reason. But if naturalism true, it might be argued that everyone is impervious to reason, because, in the final analysis, because the existence of reasons is irrelevant to how beliefs are produced and sustained. In the last analysis, all beliefs are caused, not by mental, but rather by physical, and therefore nonmental causes. 

Wieseltier on Dennett

Here. 

HT: Steve Hays

Kenny on McGrath on Lewis

I like this quite a lot, and I didn't know about it, so thanks, Crude.

Defining ID

This is a definition of intelligent design by Jay Richards of Discovery Institute.

ID proponents argue, on the basis of public evidence, drawn from natural science, that nature, or certain aspects of nature, are best explained by intelligent agency. Most ID proponents are critics of neo-Darwinism as an adequate explanation for the adaptive complexity of life, and of the materialistic theories of the origin of life and biological information. Since ID is minimal, it is logically consistent with a variety of creationist and evolutionist views, but is identical to none.

I wonder if some people (Feser perhaps) conflate intelligent design with certain ways of arguing for it.

INGX24's AFR

Here. 

I'm always glad to see people of different stripes developing this. Also, Hasker's contributions to the argument are extremely important. Bill and I were fellows together at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame in 1989-1990.

John Lennox's AFR

Here. 

What "The Fundamentals" Actually Said about Evolution

Here. 

The fundamentalism of "The Fundamentals" is not what you saw at the Scopes trial.

Did Jesus pass Saturn on the way up?

This is treated here. 

Some further points on ridicule in response to Loftus

John, I knew you would fall for this.

You are obviously deliberately missing my point. What I mean by ridiculous is that it can be made to appear silly from some perspective. I can, for example, ridicule the claim that if my my younger daughter stayed on earth and my older daughter went up in a spaceship that approached the speed of light, and came back after 50 years, that my younger daughter would be and look 78, while my older daughter would in fact be 80 but would not have aged at all. Now, that's absurd. How much you age can't possibly be affected by how fast you go, otherwise I would age less in an airplane than I would on earth. Hardy Har Har.

Man came from monkeys? Then why are there still monkeys around? Wouldn't they have all become humans? Hardy Har Har.

Light is a particle, but it's also a wave? That's about as crazy as saying, well, that Jesus was both God and man. Hardy Har Har.

Ridicule can exist without refutation. Something can be made to appear while being at the same time perfectly rational to believe in.

Why you're wasting your time ridiculing what I believe

I just thought of something. I can listen to someone mock my beliefs, in fact I can even mock them myself, and not find any reason whatsoever in the mockery for rejecting that belief. I enjoy this kind of mockery.  In fact, I hold that there are certain beliefs that are on the one hand completely ridiculous, and on the other hand, completely true. Ridiculousness and truth are not incompatible.

The Chief Rabbi on atheism.

Here. 

"[Y]ou cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his latter-day successors fail to grasp at all."

The Dawkins Model: A response to Keith Parsons as part of a dialogue on ridicule

This is the original thread.

But you have to realize that in the atheist community today, following what I call the Dawkins model, any kind of religious belief is open to ridicule. Remember Dawkins' famous speech at the Reason Rally. There the example he used was the doctrine of transubstantiation. Now, I don't believe in transubstantiation myself, having decide against becoming a Catholic way back in 1975. But I know plenty of intelligent, serious people who do believe exactly that, going all the way to two of my best friends as an undergraduate. If you attempt to show that the doctrine is evidently self-contradictory, then you have to face some very serious work aimed at showing that this is not the case, from Aquinas in the 13th Century to philosopher of science Frederick Suppe in our time. Refuting such positions is hard work, but resorting to ridicule has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Part of the Dawkins model involves presuming that committed religious believers are impervious to reason, but by showing how much contempt you have for their beliefs, you might peer pressure "fence-sitters" to think twice about believing as they do. That's what I mean by talking over people, and I find it reprehensible.

This is the statement I have in mind:

Dawkins: Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

You probably aren't going to persuade real hard-core Gishites that there is something wrong with YEC by ridiculing them. So, what is the point? What do you hope to accomplish? Winning over low-information "fence-sitters" through what amounts to little more than peer pressure isn't going to cause anyone to become a genuine critical thinker. So, ridicule of this sort has little value over and above entertainment.

So long as all you have to do is quote them to generate the ridicule, that's one thing. But there is an occupational hazard that everyone who uses ridicule faces, and that is misrepresentation and straw-manning. Dawkins, for example, is frequently accused not only of failing to understand the arguments he criticizes, but of not  even trying to understand themAnd his response was provided by P. Z. Myers in the Courtier's Reply.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyn...

The trouble with this is that theists do have arguments for their position, not just theology which presumes the truth of their position. And if you put ridicule in place of a serious attempt to understand your opponent, then once again, you are taking a path that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Maybe we should thank God for Gnus

They may be driving some people back to God. 

Of course, not doubt this is because they were never real atheists in the first place. 

Is dialogue between theists and atheists possible?

Well, I would have thought so, but I am starting to wonder. Are we moving toward a society bifurcated on religious grounds, where believers and unbelievers can't even talk to one another in a reasonable fashion?

I have had several conversations with nonbelievers which I have found enjoyable and worthwhile. I remember getting my first discussion with Keith Parsons when I was in seminary, who lived in the same house I did on North Decatur Road in Atlanta. He was using the Bultmann line that modern persons cannot accept miracles, and I responded with Lewis's critique of chronological snobbery. I thought I got the better of that discussion, but I thought he got the better of most of the discussions that followed, because he was already a grad student in philosophy and knew more philosophy than I did at that point. I remember another discussion I had with a fellow graduate student when I got to the University of Illinois. He told me that had an easy time debating with theists, but arguing with me was a good deal more difficult.

Later, I presented a paper at the APA meetings in 1988 which eventually became my first philosophy publication, "Miracles and the Case for Theism."  Apparently my paper inspired an undergraduate student at Claremont-McKenna college to write a paper in response to me (and several other defenders of miracles) called "Miracles and Testability," which he published in an undergraduate philosophy journal. I wrote a response to him, pointing out what I thought was the naive philosophy of science which underlay his paper. I didn't think much more about it until he wrote me, thanking me for my courteous critique and telling me that he had become a Christian in the meantime. What effect my response might had in producing such a conversion I do not know, but I was of course happy to hear about this.

Nevertheless, in thinking about what my goal might be in engaging in philosophical dialogue, I would have to say that what I am doing is not attempting in any way to convert anyone, since conversion involves far more than intellectual assent. If I were to describe what I am trying to do it is to engender intellectual sympathy for what I believe. You may not end up agreeing with me, and we may be very far apart on our positions, but I always hope when we get finished that you will get more of a feel for what it is like to think as I do, and will have more intellectual sympathy and less contempt (if you have any) for what I believe than you came in with.

This doesn't always work, especially when dealing with people who operate from what I call a zero-concession mindset.

Lewis founded the Oxford Socratic Club to follow the argument where it leads on the topic of Christianity. But maybe the Internet is not the place for this sort of thing.

Lewis the reluctant convert

This contains a discussion of the T. D. Weldon incident.