Barry Arrington, owner of the pro-ID blog, Uncommon Descent is alleged to have written the following in an email to a contributor:
We are in a war. That is not a metaphor. We are fighting a war for the soul of Western Civilization, and we are losing, badly. In the summer of 2015 we find ourselves in a positon very similar to Great Britain’s position 75 years ago in the summer of 1940 – alone, demoralized, and besieged on all sides by a great darkness that constitutes an existential threat to freedom, justice and even rationality itself.
In this thread I don’t want to discuss the rights and wrongs of the email itself, nor of whether or not TSZ constitutes a “great darkness”. Barry is entitled to decide who posts at UD and who does not; it’s his blog.
What interests me is the perception itself, which I suspect is quite widely shared.
Indeed it’s my perception that a lot of people are truly frightened by much that the modern world seems to represent – evolutionary biology, social and economic liberalism, atheism, the decline of religious observance, multi-culturalism, abortion, LGBT issues, the welfare state – and feel that they are somehow part of a coordinated, or at least related attack on values held very dear. Indeed, that was made explicit in the Wedge Strategy document:
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.
Barry clearly believes (or did back in the summer) that the War is being lost (“and lost badly”). Here are the reasons why I think he should Stop Worrying And Learn To Love The Bomb Materialists.
- We are no threat to freedom. Those of us who call ourselves “atheists” for the most part do not hold the belief that there is no God (or gods), we simply do not hold the belief that there is. We have no problem if you do. Indeed, many of us are glad that there are people who find themselves inspired by their beliefs to do much good in the world. Most of us believe that a pluralistic multicultural society is something to be proud of, and those cultures include yours.
- We are no threat to justice. Even the most ardent materialist utilitarian is unlikely to have any problem with the idea that people must be held accountable for their actions, and that the role of social and legal justice systems is to ensure that people treat each other fairly. The fact that some of us do not think that wrongdoers will be punished in the next life does not prevent us from thinking that it is a very good idea to provide major disincentives in this.
- We are no threat to rationality. I think this fear arises from the sense that scientists frequently demonstrate that what seems obvious (aka “self-evident”) ain’t necessarily so. Turns out the earth isn’t flat. Turns out that “down” points in all kinds of different directions depending on where you are standing. Turns out there is a speed limit for information. Turns out that time is relative. Turns out that reality at quantum level is simply weird. All this, in the past, theists have taken in their stride, albeit with a bit of a lurch. What I suspect the real threat is that science – neuroscience! – is, in places, appears to be claiming that our powerful sense that in each of us there is a soul-y thing, a homunculus, who is the “I behind the eyes” – isn’t what we think it is. That some of us are, in effect, denying that we – I – exist, except as “a bag of chemicals”. That A is not-A. That I is not-I. My response is that this fear too, is unfounded. Even if some of us think that there is no immortal (or otherwise) homunculus in the brain directing operations, but rather that the brain is an organ of the body consisting of a vastly complex distributed decision-making system that acts recursively thus generating as a property of the decider the capacity recognise herself as an intentional agent, by analogy to the other similar intentional agents she observse and interacts with, that does not amount to a denial that “I am”. It is merely an attempt to account for why there should be an I that can say “I am”.
So sleep easy, Barry! We are not Nazi Germany, nor yet a Great Darkness. Our ideas are not billowing blackly from Mount Doom. They are transparent, humane, pluralistic, and provisional. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.
We are in a war. A war against ignorance and stupidity. And we’re losing.
Please don’t be ignorant or stupid. Thank you.
p.s. or slimy.
The fact that you can’t beat ignorance and stupid says more about your position than ours.
You owe it to yourself, not them.
We did notice.
Glen Davidson
I don’t understand what you mean, and I’m trying to be charitable in my interpretation – but no, I don’t owe it to myself to be better, to be more compassionate, to be less bored by the fact that Gregory has once again tried to shame all atheists (including me) for offenses we have never committed – nor even wished to.
When we examine the bogeyman “militant atheist” he fears, we find a uniquely-Russian political movement which redressed injustices of a millennia of human destruction wreaked by minions of the Russian orthodoxy. The wheel turns, they paid with their souls for the new balance.
I’m okay with that. I accept that justice is always imperfect.
If they’re not okay with that, they can take it up with their god.
As one atheist to another, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Neither do millions of wrongs.
If you think you’re in a war, you are. Very likely one of your own making.
If you think you’re losing, you are.
i didn’t say they do.
But I won’t stand for it when Gregory wants to taint all of us with the conduct of his bogeyman “militant atheists” who were in fact doing what they had to do to wrest their own country (not mine, not his, theirs! ) from the forces of darkness.
I not only cannot be sad about that – it’s not in my nature – I should not be sad about that. No one should. This is the Trolley Problem writ gigantic: I’m not going to be sad about throwing one priest onto the tracks to save a whole train-full of women and children. If you can’t bring yourself to be happy about saving those people, fine, then you don’t have to say anything at all, but your moral timidity is not my problem.
I refuse to be hypocritical about it and cluck about how those militants weren’t really doing it “in the name of atheism” (unlike of course the destruction of millions of humans by theists “in the name of god” ** sarcasm** ) exactly because it’s not as simple as atheist good theist bad. Duh. Contra Gregory’s slavering fear and hatred of atheists, and despite being the most outspoken anti-theist you’re ever likely to meet, I don’t actually advocate murdering theists simply for existing. I don’t applaud atheists just because they’re “on my side” for murder or mayhem. I’m smart enough to admit atheists can do bad things and what’s more can do bad things “in the name of atheism”. I’m not a stupid tribalist.
But this Russian militant-atheist history is clear enough: they were doing what they had to do for the good of their motherland and for their literal mothers to escape the clutches of the life-destroying (and traitorous) orthodox church.
Gregory is wrong on every level. I may not be exactly right but I’m closer to right than he’ll ever be. If that’s not good enough for you, well, sorry not sorry.
I don’t think so, Mung. If the war is against “ignorance and stupidity”, I think that the human species are gradually winning.
I’m at least encouraged by the Paris climate agreement. And I think that Stephen Pinker at least has a case that we are gradually becoming less prone to kill each other, and more likely to look after each other instead.
Gregory,
I did say ‘appears’. What is one to make of a self-described scholar who advances the loose notion that subjectivist morality is based merely upon ‘whim’, and ‘unanchored’?
Phoodoo, if I could, I would make you the reference spokesperson on behalf of religion everywhere. People like you are why you’re “losing badly”.
I recommend that you redouble your efforts. If every person arguing for religious faith was like you, I’m confident we could totally eradicate religious superstition in less than a century merely by having everyone read your posts.
Robert Byers,
Speaking as someone who actually lives there, I have to declare that you are, in the vernacular, talking shite.
I have to raise the issue of how much Barry really believes this or whether he’s even being consistent with his own words.
Consider according to his ever changing story, that my dismissal from UD was because I reported on Mark Armitage’s lawsuit. So where is Barry to be seen fighting for a fellow IDist? Is Barry embarrassed to associate his brand of ID with Armitage’s? I mean isn’t Armitage representative of 20-30% of the USA in terms of Christian belief?
Is Barry coming out and attacking Nazi Collaborators like me publicly? Where is the courage to wage his war against the forces of darkness and deal with supposed traitors now? Why all the silence?
It’s evident few if any of these words are serious. They are just insults. If he really believed his own rhetoric, he has some explaining to do in regards to Armitage.
If this is a war, why doesn’t WJM post a comment at UD and say, “Hey Barry you need to call Sal out publicly for being a Quisling Traitor and for him supporting the forces of Darkness. How about a post at UD saying, Sal is Quisling. And let’s go support our fellow IDists like Armitage who are really under siege!”
“Oh, wait, that would take some splainin’ since Sal reporting on the Armitage affair (which was reported in NATURE) was the reason Barry gave to Sal for being tossed from UD. Quick, until the UD spin doctors figure an explanation, get KairsoFocus to flood the front pages of UD with FYI-FTRs to create so much smokescreen and incomprehensible confusion the enemy can’t see UD forming up a counterattack on the forces of darkness at TSZ.”
Like I said, Barry’s own words as a serious description of the state of affairs raises questions about his own prosecution of this supposed war. Is he willing to sacrifice his own neck for this supposed war? Is he willing to stick up for Armitage and his work like I tried to do?
So how consistent is Barry with his own rhetoric? It may have been an academic exercise to take his words at face value, but one has to question how seriously believed the claims were in the first place.
I didn’t say that, you’re confusing me with someone else.
Do you agree with Barry about the supposed war? That was he topic after all.
Not sure I understand the question. If you’re asking me why I believe in a god that is similar to the God you believe in, it depends on what you mean by “similar”. I believe in God as foundation of existence and root of the absolute qualities that frame our experiences (logic, math, morality, etc.). I believe that everything is part of god, and that existence is in a constant state of creation from multiple internal (to God) perspectives. So, I don’t know how “similar” that is to your idea of God.
I believe in that kind of God because I choose to. I find it both intellectually and spiritually satisfying and my view of God allows me to enjoy life and be a good (enough) person. That view has quelled the sense of spiritual isolation and longing I experienced before that perspective, which endured through both my prior atheism and other religions I was involved in before that.
An interesting summary Sal. Thanks for sharing!
I have a question for you (or anyone who believes in miracles for that matter). I had my fifth kidney transplant about a year ago. To my knowledge only around 8 or so people have had 5 or more transplants and survived. About 20% of the people with kidney disease cannot have transplants and of those who can, the vast majority can’t have more than three (and few of them get that far given the limited number of organs available). The reasons for this are many, and I’m happy to go into that if you’d like, but the point is that my situation is exceedingly rare.
So, is it a miracle? And before you answer, consider the conditions required for this rare event to even be possible.
I confess that from my perspective, if there is a god behind the scenes of such situations, I would find it to be the most abominable and evil entity imaginable. But…well…I’m biased…
Well, he has engaged in some question begging in terms of his expectations regarding “non-life” and there’s a fallacy of the general rule in his dominoes example. And then there’s the false dichotomy in his expectations for how matter should behave (either chaotic or directed. Uggh! There are many, many, many, other conditions of matter between those two extremes).
Other than that…
Those sentiments are completely understandable. As I pondered it, on some level many might prefer to believe there is no God because that would imply malicious intelligent design in the world. That was the topic here:
So how does this relates to the OP? Why is Christianity (I presume Barry was talking about Christianity) losing numbers:
1. If one carefully considers what the Christian God as Intelligent Designer means, it reasonably means it’s not a God many people would want if they really come to terms with the idea.
2. The Designer has chosen to be unseen and is not as obvious as the air we breathe, hence the Biblical phrase “The Unseen God”.
See:
and
So given that, it’s amazing there are any Christians at all! As I said, I thought Barry’s words aren’t to be taken that seriously anyway, but if we did, loss of faith doesn’t appear to be because of a “war” on Christianity so much as the ordinary difficulty that would be expected in sustaining faith in a technologically and scientifically advanced society that is living in unprecedented prosperity.
Faith will tend to prosper in destitute and illiterate conditions. Unfortunately illiteracy is the wrong way to elevate the numbers of faithful. If people become scientifically literate and leave the faith, that’s no reason to diminish science literacy.
After acquiring one of my science degrees, I had bouts of agnosticism because science and engineering train one in a sceptical mindset — scepticism is a virtue, gullibility is not. The affect of studying science on me however was ultimately a different outcome than the effect it has on most (which is toward agnosticism or atheism).
Hey thanks for your response. I had some fragmented accounts of your journey. Unfortunately some of places where you recounted your story are now in the archives of cyberspace that is too large to search. They were good reads when I read them.
A few remarks:
(1) Gregory is right that the secularization thesis no longer has the unquestioned status in the social sciences that it once did. There’s a truly excellent blog devoted to these questions called “The Immanent Frame“. (I don’t work on these issues but I have friends who do, and they keep me informed.)
(2) I do not think that religions could go away and I do think it would be good for human civilization if they did. I’m a secularist about wanting to quash the political power of any specific religious institutions, but that has nothing to do with whether those religious institutions should be eliminated. And since there’s quite compelling evidence that religion can’t be eliminated, advocating for its elimination seems quite foolish. The religious impulse is too deeply ingrained in human nature, and that’s not a bad thing. (Nor is it a good thing. It’s just a thing.)
(3) Religious naturalism allows for a satisfactory reconciliation of naturalistic humanism and religious humanism.
(4) There are probably at least three separate axes of political position: capitalist/socialist, libertarian/authoritarian, and traditionalist/progressive. In the US context (which is what I know best), Obama and Clinton are capitalist, authoritarian progressives. The GOP is split between capitalist authoritarian traditionalists (like the Bushes) and capitalist libertarian traditionalists (like Cruz and Rubio). (Trump is an unusual case, to say the least.) Sanders is a socialist libertarian progressive.
(5) The phoniness of “the culture wars” has always been that the focus gets put on the opposition between traditionalists and progressives in order to conceal the underlying shared commitment to capitalism and to authoritarianism on the part of the two major US political parties. Republicans agitate cultural traditionalists to get angry about gay rights and the right to abortion in order to give bigger tax-breaks to corporations, and Democrats agitate liberals to stand up in defense of gay rights and the right to abortion in order to give slightly smaller tax-breaks to corporations. The culture war is a shadow-play, and damn us all for not seeing that there’s only one puppeteer behind the screen.
Well, I appreciate the response, though I don’t feel you addressed my question.
What I’d like to see addressed sometime (and I really feel this type of issue gets glossed over or ignored in the claims of miracles) is the arbitrariness and whimsicalness that claims of miracles present.
Taking my situation, it strikes me as absurd that any deity would arbitrarily pick a ridiculously small group of people to endure multiple difficult surgeries (and all the ensuing complications that come with that) to eek out a few more years of life, while allowing the deaths of literally millions of others with the same condition. It seems all the more ridiculous when one considers that in principle it would be just as easy to take away the underlying illness in the first place.
For me then, the claim of “miracle” has always struck me as question begging.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m not sure I agree with the first. In practice it isn’t possible to implement socialism without authoritarian laws. The same holds for some forms of crony capitalism, of course, but authoritarianism is not essential to capitalism as it is to socialism.
I wouldn’t characterize either of them as libertarian. Both pander to the religious right by supporting authoritarian policies. Rand Paul is the closest to a libertarian in the current crop of presidential contenders.
Either barking mad or the greatest Poe in recent history.
I disagree. Sanders wants to increase the size, scope, and power of government. That is authoritarian.
That would be true if we presume all designs were intended to be benevolent, I’ve suggested a large fraction of designs are malicious. But that answers one question only to raise an even more terrible problem, why would the Designer deliberately make a creation that He eventually curses? My best answer is the designs are not for our benefit, but for His.
We make creatures inside video games for us to blast away and destroy just for kicks. Some affluent people acquire large lands just to have fun hunting. Some raise dogs (like Michael Vick) to enjoy the sport of dogfights (illegal, but it happens). Vick especially made cruel designs on dogs.
I actually agreed with you. The existence of such a cruel God isn’t something to be happy about, but one might feel a bit better if one is one of the chosen few His grace falls on.
That’s probably not a satisfying explanation for the problem of pain and suffering. Probably there is no satisfying answer, and ID isn’t necessarily the most comforting, but could be the most horrifying of explanations. Darwin himself said it:
Btw, sorry you had so much pain with your situation. I had a family member recently pass away because of a kidney ailment (among other things). I’m not trying to be callous about anyone suffering. It’s been a sad time for lots of people in my family.
If it might be any consolation, let me say, it appears you’re one of the chosen few to survive the way you did. Perhaps one can take away a little solace from this. I extend well wishes for your health.
stcordova,
I still disagree and still don’t understand why, if you believe in this entity, you aren’t spending your life figuring out how to destroy it.
Ok, trying to tie this to the OP…..
Such sentiments are also at the root of why Christianity is reducing in number. Not primarily because of a war on Christianity plotted by others.
People today have access to Bibles and google and freedom of thought on an unprecedented scale and skeptical hard questions like this one you are asking. It is not surprising people don’t want anything to do with the Christian God when what the Bible actually says is studied.
Darwin solved the problem of Bad Design with some kind of distant almost Deist type God who instituted some cosmological scale ID but didn’t trifle with biological ID, but even that he wasn’t fully convinced of — he was a self-described agnostic.
To paraphrase the Borg:
“Resistance is futile. I have been assimilated.”
PS
Off topic. Just notice my spell checker works differently depending one which machine I’m on! One likes British English and the other American English! HA!
Sal,
Are you saying that you’re a victim of Stockholm syndrome where this malicious god of yours is concerned? If so, that’s an interesting theological position. I suppose it hasn’t been uncommon in history, during much of which gods were capricious, often malevolent, and capable of being appeased and distracted.
What I’m describing is not an issue of ‘design-must-be-benevolent’, but rather an issue resulting from miracles always being defined that way. How many people refer to hurricanes or earthquakes (or the ultra rare illness for that matter) as miracles?
The term “miracle” is universally applied to rare, unexplainable, seemingly beneficial events. Cancers inexplicably going into remission after doctors have tossed up their hands is routinely touted as “miraculous”. People regaining sight from some faith healer is labeled a “miracle”. Survivors of plane crashes or similar tragic events (like hurricanes and earthquakes or even mass shooting survivors) are labeled as beneficiaries of divine intervention. And so forth.
This is the basis of my issue. It seems to me that people who point to such events as “miraculous” are a) begging the question and b) not really examining the implications of such claims from a bigger picture perspective.
This strikes me as a non-sequitur. That some men interact with this world in a destructive manner doesn’t (to my mind) offer any insight into how deities behave or ought to behave. It strikes me that such examples exemplify the issue I have with the use of the term “miracle”; that offering those examples as indications of why a deity might behave malevolently begs the question and ignores the implications of such comparisons. For instance, no matter how destructive a given man may be (say Vick and the dog fighting), how many of those dogs did Vick create? What of the dog fighting? Did Vick establish that? No. So considering Vick’s behavior and saying, “hey…maybe The Deity is just looking for kicks” as an explanation for why 11,936 people die from an ebola pandemic either establishes a grossly limited deity or makes the considerer look silly.
But there in lies the root of my issue: exactly how are people measuring or identifying this “grace” (or, to use the term I have issues with, “miracle”). Is my ability to have nie until unlimited painful and difficult surgeries (to say nothing of all the wonderful medication side-effects, difficulties in recovery, complications, diets, and so forth) an example of this “grace”? Is my having diseased kidneys in the first place an example of this grace? What identifies this “grace” of which you speak?
It might be satisfying if using the term “grace” didn’t appear to be question begging…
Thank you.
Well, I don’t feel chosen. To me, it’s a rather dubious accomplishment. I equate it to doing extremely well in the stock market by shorting a bunch securities, knowing that the companies are likely doomed to failure. Nothing like surviving in spite of the misery of others…
I appreciate your effort to be charitable, no offense intended and certainly not to advocate for more compassionate or less bored attitude towards Gregory. It just seemed to me that tolerance of injustice to those we feel guilty is dangerous and risky as is dismissing the innocent as collateral damage. As you said, the wheel turns.
It’s fine, it’s all fine. 🙂
Robin,
Very few. And if I can try again to answer the question regarding miracles. There are two kinds:
MIRACLES SPECIFIED BY HUMAN PATTERN IN ADVANCE (AKA PRAYER):
The “miracle of Dunkirk” was a horrific storm deemed miraculous by some because it grounded the Luftwaffe and yet the seas were unusually calm, and all this after the sort of prayer that is rarely performed by an entire nation.
There was were several earthquakes in the Bible deemed miraculous as they delivered the Judgment of God. Now setting aside the issue of whether it was true or not, there is a principle this illustrates.
If I laid out in advance a string of letters
H T T T H T H H H H H T H……
where H is for heads, T is for tails, and then you took a coin and your flips matched the pattern I specified in advance, if enough coins were involved, there might be a point one deems an event miraculous.
Thus if one prophesied (without any sort of seismic indication from geological devices) for an immediate Earthquake and it happened immediately because of no man-made cause, it would be deemed miraculous. Otherwise, it is just a rare random event, with no appearance of design. That was the miracle Moses invoked that killed his opponent Dathan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dathan
Thus even though storms of certain magnitudes are rare, we might not call them miraculous unless one were praying for them to happen at a specific time. I’ve gone on record saying, the miracle of Dunkirk might not be formally a miracle, but considering the circumstances that it happened right after a national prayer, many viewed it as such, and I can’t blame them, especially the mothers praying for the sons stuck on the beach with the Luftwaffe blasting their machine guns at their sons. The events seemed to match the prayers somewhat like coin flips matching a pattern specified in advance.
Regarding a rare illness, I don’t necessarily view them as miraculous since I think many rare illnesses are inevitable due to the statistics of genome mutation. However, if the Apostle Paul pronounced blindness on Elymas the sorcerer, and immediately Elymas went blind, then what would otherwise be an unsurprising medical malady becomes a miracle.
One might reasonably object that this is a made up story, but that is beside the point. It illustrates at least the principle of how a rare event might be deemed miraculous without a whimsical-after-the-fact usages of statistics.
MIRACLES NOT SPECIFIED BY HUMAN PATTERN IN ADVANCE (i.e. life)
How do we then say something is miraculous or designed without making the statistics whimsical and after-the-fact and when we don’t have something like prayers in advance of events to help us determine if something is miraculous?
Consider that we expect 500 fair coins randomly shaken to not be 100% heads, even though every outcome is itself astronomically rare, one outcome would be especially astonishing (100% heads) based on the system itself, not any whimsical after-the-fact choice on our part. Why this is so is a little deep, but suffice to say, there are whole bodies of statistical literature that would justify this claim.
If a human designer wanted to communicate design with 500 coins to another human, making them 100% heads and laying them out on a table would communicate design because the natural expectation from random undirected forces is they will be about 50% heads, not 100% heads.
There are some patterns that would be deemed naturally astonishing in advance. Also there are some patterns which we have never seen in advance nor conceived in advance which would still tell us they are not the expected result of ordinary undirected processes — like a Rube Goldberg machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
One would just have to labor a little harder to demonstrate the inference a Rube Goldberg machine was not a whimsical after-the-fact inference. Such an inference can be done if the designer intends the inference to be visible to those wishing to see. i.e. I put a cascade of dominos on their edge on a table. Such a system violates natural expectation of undirected random forces. Systems with such empirical properties look designed.
As far as doing things more simply, that may have utility for us but not necessarily for the designer. I’ve suggested that Rube Goldberg machines illustrate the real issue with design, namely systems that almost serve no purpose except for amusement yet are the sort of things that don’t arise by accident.
The structure of a Rube Golberg machine isn’t for the benefit of the machine, but for the designer of the machine. He might get a kick that something goes through so many gyrations to work.
There could hypothetically be Rube Goldberg machines at the molecular level. Some, like Michael Behe, consider life to be a molecular Rube Goldberg machine. Hence he and other IDists view life as intelligently designed.
The philosophical issue (which has no formal answer) is how far away from natural expectation must an event be for it to qualify as miraculous? How rare must something be for it to be a miracle? Once in a lifetime, once in the history of the solar system, once in the history of the galaxy, once in the history of the universe, once in the history of a buzzillion universes? I’d go for 1 in a buzzillion universes. That would be enough for me.
It seems to me that the impressive Dunkirk miracle would have involved a defeat of the Nazis. As good as it was that the British soldiers got away, it was clearly a defeat for Britain and a considerable win for the Nazis, who went on to perform assorted evil acts. A great deal of military equipment was lost by the UK, some of which the Nazis made use of for further conquests, such as using British trucks to invade the Soviet Union (fortunately, the lack of spare parts tended to minimize the utility of captured equipment).
On the whole, if I were presuming that there was some sort of divine force at work at the time, it would seem to me that divinity was favoring the Nazis. Why not? They were on a roll, even if the gods of war apparently changed their minds at Moscow, and even more decidedly at Stalingrad and Kursk. On the other hand, there were quite material matters that seem able to explain those shifts.
Glen Davidson
Easy.
You win: goddidit.
You get your ass kicked: goddidit.
Either way it’s God swill.
It’s rather obvious there’s a war going on. A war against Uncommon Descent in general and and Barry Arrington in particular. Just look at the last few OP’s here at TSZ.
Just look at the site rules. We’re “The Skeptical Zone.” We’re not like that other site. LoL.
Also, if people here were not at war with UD, they wouldn’t be forever keeping their eye on the goings on at UD.
Eternal vigilance! It’s the price of war. Stay awake you warriors!
God swill?
People actually drink that stuff?
Well, for Barry, the war is a matter of life and death.
For me it’s a diversion, an entertainment.
Away from the keyboard I never think about the war. I occasionally regret saying something stupid, but I perceive no threats from the opposition.
Yeah, see…this is a perfect example of the point I was trying to raise (thank you Glen!) Applying the term “miracle” to some event seems to require that one frame events by limiting the scope or some other mental gymnastics that ignore some broader implications. This is why, on the whole, I don’t buy the claims of miracles.
People who deny self-evidence truths and the foundations of logic are, by definition, threats to rationality. People who do not know the basics of arguments are a threat to rationality.
Don’t want to be a threat? Don’t be irrational. Thank you.
This is hilarious coming from a person who believes a magical person existing in the absense of a physical brain and body, is simultaneously three persons in one, and can literally *wish* entire universes into existence with magic.
Don’t talk to anyone about being rational.
Rumraket,
Irony deficiency.
stcordova,
One is following an objective standard, the other pandering to whim …
stcordova,
But, as with all your probabilistic musings, you don’t know the distribution. So you don’t even know if your event is in your assumed tail, even if we accepted that truncating the curve at some point is a reasonable definition of ‘miracle’. Miracles (it seems to me) are simply an artefact of insufficient information.
This is wrong, and quite badly wrong.
Firstly, the concept of “self-evident truths” contains a fatal ambiguity — resolving the ambiguity reveals the concept to be either platitudinous or empty.
Secondly, there are serious, world-class logicians who disagree on what the “foundations” of logic are, and even if it has any at all.
Thirdly, neither self-evident truths nor the foundations of logic are necessary for rational argument, because the priority of self-evident truths and the foundations of logic depend upon an outdated conception of formal reasoning. It neglects the important difference between reasoning in formal domains (logic, mathematics) and reasoning in substantive domains (science, law, ethics, politics), and it also presupposes an antiquated picture of what formal reasoning actually consists of.
Bloody ‘ell! That’s what I call thinking!
KN:
The problem with formal reasoning in “substantive domains” is that reality doesn’t provide us with suitable axiomatic premises.
Formal reasoning about real problems is always vacuous.
Perhaps that’s why we have elections rather than computers to enable law and policy making. Nothing rational there.
KN,
Well said.
“100 pennies = 4 quarters” is in a substantive (substance) domain. It is a true statement that cannot nicely be represented in a formal logic (abstract) domain.
Ironically, comments to that effect led to the very e-mail in the OP.
KN said:
Note: “antiquated” and “outdated” are not synonymous with “wrong”, even though one can arrange a paragraph in a way to make it seem that way. Just because one has a “new” way of thinking about things doesn’t mean that “new” way is anything other than a big steaming pile of sophistry.
BTW, KN, did you ever answer the following? If you’re not going to answer, please let me know.
You originally said:
I asked:
You said:
I responded:
You replied:
My reply and questions:
Can you clear this up for me? Because it seems to me that what you are calling the “objective ground for morality” is actually an objective grounds for scientifically sorting and politically administering that which you already consider to be moral.
IOW, it’s like EL when she picks a definition of “what morality is about” (a certain kind of social success), and then develops a means of objectively evaluating, sorting and administering that morality.
Is that a fair assessment? Or am I missing something?
KN said:
You can’t reason with someone that denies the validity of logic. Explains a lot of what we see at TSZ.
Ironically, it is just such “reasoning” that is a threat to rationality.
This is ad hominem, and furthermore the conclusion does not follow. This is an example of what we mean by a threat to rationality. Don’t be a threat. Don’t be irrational. Thank you.
Everyone here at TSZ knows differently, including you. Even Elizabeth knows the importance of not equivocating over terms.