From the "There are no objective moral truths" file:

Objective moral truths are for sissies; real men embrace relativism!

//If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.//

Doctors risking their lives for "not stamp collecting" or the "flying spaghetti monster"....

But they aren't.

They are risking their lives in difficult situations for no temporal reward for Christ.

An atheist looks at his bias against missionary medicine.

And yet, truth be told, these valid critiques don’t fully explain my discomfort with missionary medicine. If we had thousands of secular doctors doing exactly the same work, I would probably excuse most of these flaws. “They’re doing work no one else will,” I would say. “You can’t expect perfection.”

I’m not altogether proud of this bias—I’m just trying to be honest. In his Lancet article, Lowenberg quotes a missionary who insists he does not proselytize, even though he tells his patients, “I’m treating you because of what God has given me and his love for me.” That statement—which strikes me as obvious proselytizing— suggests that some missionaries are incapable of separating their religious work from their medical work. Whether implicitly or explicitly, some missionaries pressure their patients, at moments of maximum vulnerability and desperation, to convert. That troubles me. I suspect that many others have the same visceral discomfort with the mingling of religion and health care.

Like it or not, though, we are deeply reliant on missionary doctors and nurses. The 2008 ARHAP report found that in some sub-Saharan African countries 30 percent of health care facilities are run by religious entities. That system is crumbling due to declining funding, possibly motivated in part by growing Western suspicion of missionary medicine. We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.

As an atheist, I try to make choices based on evidence and reason. So until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa, I suggest we stand aside and let God do His work.//

An atheist loses his faith.

Atheist converts to Catholicism.

//(Years later, I discovered—and was absolutely pole-axed by —the following passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")//

Thoughtful.

Atheism - A Belief System for the Comfortable and Unafflicted.

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.

I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children’s father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.

They found hope where they could.

I want to go back to that 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the “see how clever I am attitude”. I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

You know that atheists are losing the rational arguments...

...when they want to eliminate logic as an argument.

Atheists in Scouting.

British Scouting considers modifying Scout oath for atheists.

Evolution favors religion.

The more religious a person is the more likely they have more children:

"It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favour those with religious beliefs," said Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany who carried out the study. "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century."

The idea that being religious is an evolutionary advantage is in direct contradiction to theories developed and promoted by atheists like Richard Dawkins who have suggested that religions are like viruses of the mind which infect people and impose great costs in terms of money, time and health risks.

Blume's work suggests the exact opposite - that evolution favours religious believers so strongly that, over time, a tendency to be religious has become embedded in our genes.

The research suggests that the key fact is simply that the more religious people are, the more children they tend to have. This is because most religions place a high value on child-bearing, suggesting it is a holy duty.

Without religion, by contrast, atheists often see far less point in having children and so have smaller families or none at all.

There are, however, other factors too, such as having strong shared religious beliefs allows people to fit into a community more easily, accepting shared tasks and rules of behaviour. This ability to work together further raises the survival chances of children.

In his research into the "Reproductive Advantages of Religion", presented at a recent conference in Bristol, Blume found that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people.

What's more, fundamentalists of all religions have the most children of all. It means atheistic or secular groups tend to die out while fundamentalists of all faiths thrive - a process which means evolution will tend to favour people with a genetic predisposition to hold strong religious beliefs.

Athiests are quite incoherent about evolution and morality. You hear atheist apologists argue that morality is the product of evolution and that things like altruism arise from the fact that altruism works. Things like reciprocity and charity were selected by evolution because they work to ensure the survival of the genes in a community when the community outcompetes communities that lack those programmed traits.

Other times they appeal to a standard beyone evolution. Could it be that enslaving other communities and intolerance of homosexuals are competitive advantages and thereby justified as moral by evolutionary history? Perish the thought; Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and others would deny that simply deny the morality indicated by the darker side of our evolutionary history.

If atheists truly believed that morality is defined by evolutionary psychology, they would promote religion - and adopt forms of religion. But they don't, because they believe in objective morality, which means that they believe in God.

Humility, arrogance and atheism.

John C. Wright reflects on his atheist days:

Now, honestly, you cannot walk around thinking yourself intellectually superior to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the founders of your republic or kingdom or nation without it being reflected in your demeanor and character.

This is not like being a Babe Ruth walking around thinking he is better at swatting homers than is Chuck Yeager, who admittedly is better at flying planes. This is not taking pride in your accomplishments while admitting that men in other fields are more accomplished in their fields.

This is assuming, merely on the grounds that the philosophers and prophets and sages and thinkers of old come to different conclusions than you, that the difference of conclusion is based on a defect of reason present in them and not in you.

For by the atheist philosophy, the difference of conclusions cannot be based on anything else: it cannot be fate, or a failure of inspiration, because atheists do not believe in fate or inspiration.

The atheist cannot say that atheism is one philosophy among many philosophies of equal merit: he cannot say that theism is like the Steady State Theory or the Geocentric Theory, a model of the universe held by respectable scientific opinion in its day, now discovered to be unsupported by the most recent evidence, on the simple ground that there is no new evidence. The same arguments which promoted atheism now were used to promote it among the ancient Greeks.

Atheism is a faith, undeterred by any evidence no matter how obvious, that you are smarter than men much smarter than you.

Good stuff. Read the whole thing and he comments.

Atheist Converts.

Leah Libresco, Mark Shea's favorite atheist, has a big announcement:

Starting tomorrow, this blog is moving to the the Patheos Catholic channel (the url and RSS will remain unchanged). Meanwhile, I’m in RCIA classes at a DC parish, so you can look forward to more Parsing Catholicism tags (and after the discussion of universalism we had last week, I think it will be prudent to add a “Possibly Heretical” category).

It turns out that it is intellectually confounding to hold to a consistent position on virtue without there being a Person who defines and upholds those virtues, and that for someone who thinks that there is such a thing as "morality," one tradition in particular seems to provide consistent and coherent answers:

For several years, a lot of my friends have been telling me I had an inconsistent and unsustainable philosophy. ”A virtue ethicist atheist whose transhumanism seems to be rooted in dualism? Who won’t shut up about moral lapses as wounds to the soul and keeps trying to convince us it’s better to be sinned against than sinning? Who has started talking about mortifying her pride and keeps pulling out Lewis and Chesterton quotes? C’mon, convert already.”

I could see where they were coming from, but I stayed put. I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.

While I kept working, I tried to keep my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).

Aquinas will do that to you.

Atheist becomes Christian becomes Atheist.

That atheist who became a Christian after being shown Christian love has decided that he's really an atheist:

Patrick Greene, an atheist activist in Texas who said last month he had become a believer in Christ after a Christian woman showed compassion to him, now says his conversion was merely out of excitement.

"I got all caught up in the excitement," Greene, a retired cab driver who lives in East Texas since 2005, told San Antonio Express-News.

In an apparent attempt to play a victim, the 63-year-old resident of San Antonio said, "It's easy to do when you get ostracized and treated like garbage. When you're an atheist, you're public enemy No. 1."

Having gone back to atheism, Greene is opposing Christians once again. He fought against Mayor Julián Castro's participation in the National Day of Prayer event on City Hall Thursday. In a lawsuit, he argued that the event was organized by evangelical Christians, was sectarian and therefore unconstitutional for a mayor to engage in.

It looks like my original instinct of being "more likely to pray that this guy got "crotch-rot" than pay for his groceries" was spot-on.

It also looks like Greene still has a problem of squaring his sense that humans are something more than mere animals with the atheist dogma that humans merely are animals.

This is going to be a blow to the faith of atheists.

Mathematics shows that universe had a beginning no matter what kind of ad hoc rationalizations are asserted.

In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun to study a number of new ideas that have similar properties. Curiously, these ideas are not necessarily at odds with the notion of a Big Bang.

For instance, one idea is that the universe is cyclical with big bangs followed by big crunches followed by big bangs in an infinite cycle.

Another is the notion of eternal inflation in which different parts of the universe expand and contract at different rates. These regions can be thought of as different universes in a giant multiverse.

So although we seem to live in an inflating cosmos, other universes may be very different. And while our universe may look as if it has a beginning, the multiverse need not have a beginning.

Then there is the idea of an emergent universe which exists as a kind of seed for eternity and then suddenly expands.

So these modern cosmologies suggest that the observational evidence of an expanding universe is consistent with a cosmos with no beginning or end. That may be set to change.

Today, Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts say that these models are mathematically incompatible with an eternal past. Indeed, their analysis suggests that these three models of the universe must have had a beginning too.

Their argument focuses on the mathematical properties of eternity--a universe with no beginning and no end. Such a universe must contain trajectories that stretch infinitely into the past.

However, Mithani and Vilenkin point to a proof dating from 2003 that these kind of past trajectories cannot be infinite if they are part of a universe that expands in a specific way.

They go on to show that cyclical universes and universes of eternal inflation both expand in this way. So they cannot be eternal in the past and must therefore have had a beginning. "Although inflation may be eternal in the future, it cannot be extended indefinitely to the past," they say.

They treat the emergent model of the universe differently, showing that although it may seem stable from a classical point of view, it is unstable from a quantum mechanical point of view. "A simple emergent universe model...cannot escape quantum collapse," they say.

The conclusion is inescapable. "None of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal," say Mithani and Vilenkin.

Since the observational evidence is that our universe is expanding, then it must also have been born in the past. A profound conclusion (albeit the same one that lead to the idea of the big bang in the first place).

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1204.4658: Did The Universe Have A Beginning?

Richard Dawkins - Just another atheist whiner.

The script has become a cliche Atheist matches up against theist. Atheist looks like an idiot. Atheist whines to atheist fanbase about how the game was rigged and how he will do so much better next time when the audience is less beastly, he is not so jet lagged and the sky is bluer.

I haven't watched the debate but it sounds like Dawkins stunk up the joing in his "debate" with Cardinal Pell because this time it is Richard Dawkins' turn to explain away his disappointing performance in his "debate" with Cardinal Pell of Australia over at Pharyngula:

richarddawkins

10 April 2012 at 12:48 am

I too was disappointed in this so-called debate. I don’t want to put all the blame on my jet lag (I had spent the whole night on the plane from Los Angeles and, incidentally, missed the whole of Easter Day crossing the Date Line). The two things that really threw me were, first, the astonishing bias of the audience and, second, the interfering chairman.

Right from the start when we were introduced, it was clear that the studio audience was dominated by a Catholic cheer squad. The cheered whenever the Cardinal said anything, however stupid and ignorant. To be fair to the ABC, I am confident that they were not responsible for stacking the audience. I believe it was genuinely first-come-first-served, and I can only think that the Catholics must have got off the mark very swiftly and rallied the troops. Our side just isn’t very good at doing that: perhaps it is one of our more endearing qualities. It was encouraging that the vote of viewers at large came down heavily on our side, to the evident surprise and discomfort of the studio audience.

Such an extreme audience bias was a little off-putting, but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the chairman had allowed us to have a proper debate instead of continually racing ahead to get in another dopey question. There were times when the Cardinal had doled out more than enough rope to hang himself but then, in the nick of time, the chairman blundered in and rescued him with yet another samey question from the audience. The only time the chairman did a good job was when he pressed the Cardinal on what seemed perilously close to anti-Semitism.

More and more, I am thinking that discussions of this kind are positively ruined by an interfering chairman. That was also true of my encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, which could have developed into an interesting conversation but for the meddling chairman who, to make matters worse, was a ‘philosopher’ with special training in obscurantism.

Cardinal Pell had evidently been well prepped, formally briefed (for example with his alleged fact that Darwin called himself a theist on page 92 of his autobiography). I knew it wasn’t true that Darwin was a theist and said so, but I obviously couldn’t counter the “Page 92″, which duly got a cheer from the touchline. I’ve since had a chance to look it up and, as expected, it refers to the way Darwin felt earlier in his life, not his maturity when he said he preferred to call himself ‘agnostic’ because the people “are not yet ripe for atheism”.

Another missed opportunity on my part was when the Cardinal nastily insinuated that I had not read to the end of Lawrence Krauss’s book having written the Foreword. Actually I didn’t write the Foreword, I wrote the Afterword, which suggests that the Cardinal hadn’t read the book. Indeed, the content of what he said suggests that he (or whoever briefed him) had read only the infamous review in the New York Times, again by a philosopher not a scientist.

Altogether an unsatisfactory evening. Much better was the radio interview the following morning, after I had had a night’s sleep and had my wits more properly about me:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/04/bst_20120410_0815.mp3

Richard

I don't doubt that Dawkins was thrown off by adverse audience reaction; his constant need for pandering adoration from his fan-base is palpable, and it's clear that he has been running from William Lane Craig because he knows that Craig will not treat his foolish metaphysical arguments with deference.

"God is dead! Can I have his stuff?"

Zac Alstin reviews Alain de Botton's "Religion for Atheists."

I listened to Justin Brierley's conversation with Bottin on Unbelievable. As with all of Brierley's shows, it's well worth listening to.

The best that can be said about Botton's "pitch" is that he testifies to the human need for the numinous, even when that need is found in a person who is crippled by upbringing from being able to fully appreciate the numinous, kind of like a blind person who wants to experience the beauty of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" but can't.

The worst is that Botton likes pretty things to fill up his day.

David Berlinski—Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

The Death of the Intellect.

One of the disheartening thing about modernity, for anyone interested in such things, is just how simultaneously stupid and arrogant modern people are about anything more rareified than the instructions for playing an X-box.

Take Dan Brown, whose chief virtue is that he flatters his readers into thinking that they are smart.

Another example is the argument style of the New Atheist who believe that they can dismiss thousands of years of thought by people who spent their lives thinking about intricate and esoteric matters with a snort and few lines of text. Edward Feser disembowls this pretension in this essay:

Richard Dawkins is equally adept at refuting straw men. In his bestselling The God Delusion, he takes Aquinas to task for resting his case for God’s existence on the assumption that “There must have been a time when no physical things existed”—even though Aquinas rather famously avoids making that assumption in arguing for God. (Aquinas’s view was instead that God must be keeping the world in existence here and now and at any moment at which the world exists, and that this would remain true even if it turned out that the world had no beginning.) Dawkins assures us that Aquinas gives “absolutely no reason” to think that a First Cause of the universe would have to be all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, etc.; in reality, Aquinas devoted hundreds of pages, across many works, to showing just this. Dawkins says that the fifth of Aquinas’s famous Five Ways is essentially the same as the “divine watchmaker” argument made famous by William Paley. In fact the arguments couldn’t be more different, and followers of Aquinas typically—and again, rather famously (at least for people who actually know something about these things)—reject Paley’s argument with as much scorn as evolutionists like Dawkins do.


And those are only (some of) the errors on pages 77–79.

You will find similar howlers throughout the works of the other New Atheists. Their grasp of the chief arguments for the existence of God and related matters is, in short, comparable to the scientific acumen of the college sophomore who thinks the lesson of Einstein’s revolution in physics is that “it’s all relative, man”—or that of the fundamentalist preacher of my opening example. It’s that bad.

For more Feser, see his post on the "argumentum ad Himmlerum."

Participate in a Sociological Experiment.

At Unequally Yoked, the geeky atheist fighting with her Catholic boyfriend is running an interesting experiment to see who can fake belief/non-belief better:

This is a contest inspired by a post by Bryan Caplan in which he came up with the idea of an Ideological Turing Test. The conventional Turing Test is a computing challenge -- the goal is to build a computer that can carry on a conversation via text well enough that a panel of judges can't tell the difference between the computer and a group of human ringers.


Caplan challenged partisans to see if they could explain and the positions of their opponents well enough to pass as one of their ideological enemies. He offered his original challenge to Paul Krugman for an economics-off, but I've borrowed the idea and put a religious spin on it. Here, Christians will sham amidst a group on genuine atheists and vice versa. The plausibility of their conterfeits will be determined by open voting. The first Ideological Turing Test: Religion Edition took place in July 2011, but it may be repeated in the future. You can find all relevant posts under the tag "ideological turing test," but the links below should help you navigate the competition.

List of Contest Questions - Four questions to answer in the guise of atheists, four to answer as Christians

Answers to Atheist Prompts - This link will let you peruse all the answers to the questions for atheists. See if you can pick out which are sincere and which were written by Christians!

Judging the Atheist Responses - Voting is now OPEN. Read through the answers and rate whether you think the author is sincere or shamming.

Answers to Christian Prompts - This collection of responses has the atheists shamming and the Christians speaking honestly

The Big Reveal - A list of everyone who participated with a brief description of their beliefs and links to which posts they wrote

Statistics and Awards - Who was most persuasive when they took the other side?

Why so many atheists?  And why are they so angry?

Father Barron observes:

The CNN Belief Blog, which has graciously featured a few of my pieces, just celebrated its first anniversary, and for the occasion, its editors reflected on 10 things that they've learned in the course of the year. The one that got my eye was this: that atheists are by far the most fervent commentators on matters religious.


This completely coincides with my own experience as an internet commentator and blogger. Every day, my website and YouTube page are inundated with remarks, usually of a sharply negative or dismissive nature, from atheists, agnostics, and critics of religion.

In fact, some of my YouTube commentaries have been specifically targeted by atheist webmasters, who urge their followers to flood my site with "dislikes" and crude assessments of what I've said. And one of my contributions to the CNN site -- what I took to be a benign article urging Christians to pray for Christopher Hitchens -- excited literally thousands of angry responses from the haters of religion.

What do we make of this? I think we see, first, that atheists have come rather aggressively out of the closet. Following the prompts of Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and many others, they have found the confidence to (excuse the word) evangelize for atheism. They are no longer content to hold on to their conviction as a private opinion; they consider religion dangerous and retrograde, and they want religious people to change their minds.

This fervor has led them, sadly, to employ a good deal of vitriolic rhetoric, but this is a free country and their advocacy for atheism should not, of course, be censored. But it should be a wake-up call to all of my fellow religionists. We have a fight on our hands, and we have to be prepared, intellectually and morally, to get into the arena.

And:

We shouldn't imitate the Internet atheists in their nastiness, but we should certainly imitate them in our willingness to come forward boldly and showing some intellectual teeth. But the fierce and vocal presence of so many atheists on the CNN Belief Blog and so many other religious sites also speaks to what I call the Herod Principle.


The Gospels tell us that Herod Antipas arrested John the Baptist because the prophet had publicly challenged the King. Herod threw John into prison but then, we are told, the King loved secretly to listen to the prophet, who continued to preach from his cell.

St. Augustine formulated an adage that beautifully sums up the essentials of Christian anthropology: "O Lord, you have made us for yourself; therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in you." A basic assumption of Biblical people is that everyone is hard-wired for God in the measure that everyone seeks a fulfillment that cannot be had through any of the goods of this world. Long before Augustine, the psalmist prayed, "only in God is my soul at rest."

My wager, as a person of faith, is that everyone -- at that includes Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, and Richard Dawkins -- implicitly wants God and hence remains permanently fascinated by the things of God. Though the fierce atheists of today profess that they would like to eliminate religious speech and religious ideas, secretly they love to listen as people speak of God. This goes a long way, it seems to me, toward explaining their presence in great numbers on religious blogs.

So I say to Christians and other believers: be ready for a good fight, and get some spiritual weapons in your hands. And I say to the atheists: I'll keep talking -- because I know, despite all of your protestations and sputtering, that your hearts are listening.

This is probably how Socrates felt after talking to the Sophists -

"You people can't be either (a) serious or (b) so dense."

"Richard Dawkins is so popular because people are so unsophisticated in their thinking." (William Lane Craig)

The Irrational Harris.

Vox Day observes:

Harris: Good means maximizing human well-being for the largest number of people. Religion is not necessary for a “universal” morality. Religion is a bad foundation for “universal” morality.


As I pointed out in my column last November in which I reviewed The Moral Landscape, "Harris simply ignores the way in which his case falls completely apart when it is answered in the negative. No, we cannot simply accept that "moral" can reasonably be considered "well-being" because it is not true to say that which is "of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong" is more than remotely synonymous with "that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings." One might as reasonably substitute "wealth" or "physical attractiveness" for "well-being".

So, all things being equal, what is the transcendental point that allows someone to argue against a person who preaches that people should be miserable and suffering so long as they look good?

Atheists don't have no songs.



Via Frances Beckwith