A commenter at Uncommon Descent wrote
Keith, I am not convinced that you are an atheist. I believe that you are angry at God and suffer from cognitive dissonance. And to say that the evidence supports your materialist belief system is completely absurd!
I’ve seen versions of this “angry at God” accusation levelled at non-believers quite often and I wonder why those that use it think it makes sense. Continue reading
This post arises out of an exchange between me and one Matt Sheean at Ed Feser’s blog. I got involved there because there have been some exchanges, at times quite amusing and colourful, between Feser (assisted by some of his regular commenters) and Vincent Torley, well known to UD readers as perhaps the less unacceptable face of ID, in that he comes across as a nice guy on a personal level. Both Feser and Torley are both staunch Catholics, a religion that I find pretty objectionable (above all for it’s interference in private life and thought, the readiness of its leaders to tell others how to behave, oppression of women and minorities.. but I digress). In an earlier post at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley kindly transcribed some of Feser’s presentation (admittedly to a young, lay audience) of his version of Aquinus’ “First Way”. I was asked to summarise my impression of the video and agreed. Hence this post. Continue reading
At UD, Eric Anderson has a new OP entitled
No-one Knows the Mind of God… Except the Committed Atheist
It’s the same argument we’ve heard so many times before. Here are a few excerpts:
When is the YEC God no longer the YEC God? That question came up in my recent thread on methodological naturalism and accommodationism. In that thread I argued that science falsifies the YEC God, because it shows definitively that the earth is about a million times older than the YECs believe. If the earth is old, then the YEC God doesn’t exist. There might still be a God, but not the YEC God, because the YEC God necessarily created the earth a short time ago. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be “the YEC God” at all!
Robin and Petrushka objected because they didn’t see “the YEC God” as being essentially YEC. In other words, they saw “the YEC God” as referring to a God who would still be the same God even if it turned out that he hadn’t created the universe several thousand years ago.
Some of you may be familiar with the infamous Jack Chick tract Big Daddy?, in which a sweaty, arrogant atheist professor with a hideous combover is defeated by a young, earnest Christian student with a side part.
If so, then this trailer for the new movie God’s Not Dead will seem eerily familiar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8
I saw the movie a few weekends ago, and I’ll post my thoughts in the comment section. Meanwhile, enjoy!
Many critics of Intelligent Design and creationism are methodological naturalists – that is, they believe that supernatural topics are off-limits to science, and that science is inherently unable to pass judgment on religious claims.
Folks who believe in an immaterial soul (also known as ‘substance dualists’) face a daunting challenge. Why, if our mental and emotional functions are carried out by the immaterial soul, are they so completely affected by changes to the physical brain?
Alvin Plantinga is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Christian philosophers. Watch the video below and ask yourself, WTF?
So as not to spoil your fun, I’ll refrain from offering my take on the argument until readers have had a chance to comment.
Here’s something I slopped together recently. I’m not really familiar with the literature on any of this, so maybe it’s all pretty well known (or well known to be confused). Anyhow, comments are welcome, and I apologize in advance for my usual pile of typos, grammatical errors, and other miscellaneous blunders.
W
Johnny Woulda, 45, has had chronic tendonitis in both of his elbows since he was about 30. He’s always been told that there’s no help for it except rest and steroid injections, but the rest hasn’t worked, and he’s afraid the injections will be worse for him than the elbow pain. He takes a bus to work every day and one day he sees a poster that says “Do you have tendonitis? We are testing a new non-steroidal oral drug, and if you are an otherwise healthy male between the ages of 18 and 48 you could earn $100 by taking part in our clinical trial.” The drug company, Montrezl, is interested in testing the effectiveness of their experimental product, Elbowftra©. Based on their tests on chimpanzees, which have no belief one way or the other whether they are being given a real drug, they believe that Elbowftra© drug would have at least a 50% effectiveness rate on humans people—higher if the person is credulous (the sort of person now spending a ton of money on herbal remedies). The FDA has assured Montrezl that if they can confirm that at least 30% more human volunteers are cured by Elbowftra© than are cured by a sugar pill placebo, as determined by blind reviewers, they should have no problem getting their drug approved. On the other hand, if there’s not much difference between Ebowftra’s effectiveness and that of a placebo, there isn’t much hope.
In a post entitled “Why science cannot be the only way of knowing: A reply to Jason Rosenhouse” at Uncommon Descent web site, Vincent Torley writes: Continue reading
I take it that most (though not all) non-theists assume that atheism does not entail nihilism. More specifically, most non-theists don’t believe that denying the existence of God or the immortality of the soul entails that truth, love, beauty, goodness, and justice are empty words.
But as we’ve seen in numerous discussions, the anti-materialist holds that this commitment is not one to which we are rationally entitled. Rather, the anti-materialist seems to contend, someone who denies that there is any transcendent reality beyond this life cannot be committed to anything other than affirmation of power (or maximizing individual reproductive success) for its own sake.
The question is, why is the anti-materialist mistaken about what non-theists are rationally entitled to? (Anti-materialists are also welcome to clarify their position if I’ve mischaracterized it.)
The Jews before Jesus believed that blood had redemptive powers:
all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness
(Hebrews 9:22)
To regard a substance as having such abstract powers invariably comes from a form of thinking known as sympathetic magic. JG Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1889) extensively documents and elucidates such rituals. The Jewish belief in the abstract restorative powers of blood stems from a naive essentialism that should be anathema to the modern educated mind:
Continue reading
VJ Torley has a post at UD where he claims that
Atheism destroys many more innocent human lives than religion ever will.
His argument is that atheists commit suicide at a higher rate than theists. While this is true, “disingenous” is a charitable word for his failure to include, at the very least, statistics on murder.
Continue reading
From a comment I made last year at UD:
It’s impossible to verify the reliability of a cognitive system from the inside. Why? Because you have to use the cognitive system itself in order to verify its reliability.
If the system isn’t reliable, you might mistakenly conclude that it is!
This even applies to God himself. From the inside, God may think that he’s omniscient and omnipotent. He seems to know everything about reality, and he seems to be able to do anything that is logically possible. But how can he know these things with absolute certainty?
What if there is a higher-level God, or demon, who is deceiving him into thinking that he’s the master of the universe when he really isn’t? How, for that matter, can God be sure that he isn’t a brain in a vat?
He can’t. Defining him as omniscient doesn’t help. Like everyone else, he can only try to determine, from the inside, whether his cognitive apparatus is reliable. He can never be absolutely sure that he isn’t being fooled, or fooling himself.
In the fifties, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released records as that most familiar American duo, Tom & Jerry. It was the sixties before their now famous Jewish names were allowed an airing. A similar thing happened with Jesus. Truth is, without Paul, Jesus may have been simultaneously too Jewish, too old fashioned, and too radical to make it big. Jesus in the Gospels is not quite the laissez faire hippie that many Christians want him to be. He is quoted as saying
Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery
(Matthew 19:9)
yet good Christians divorce for reasons other than infidelity all the time. Society’s moral values have changed, and the moral values of Christians have changed with them. Jesus says nothing against slavery whereas a modern Christian placed in his situation and time might feel compelled to speak out.
And here we arrive at what the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.
This article seems to capsulize much of what we’ve been discussing. Everything from evolution and scientism to atheism and creationism.
A Quiz for ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Proponentsists
(Even for those IDist outliers like nullasalus at UD who don’t think IDT is scientific, but who think they are tricking people that logically & responsibly reject IDT)
Another simple YES/NO exercise.
Acronyms:
IDM = Intelligent Design Movement
IDist = Intelligent Design ideologue
DI = Discovery Institute
IDT = (Uppercase) Intelligent Design theory
USA = United States of America = )
Questions:
1. Is the DI-led IDM making a concentrated, dedicated effort to distinguish good science from bad science by actively and publically rejecting the outdated ‘young Earth’ views of many undereducated, anti-science, evangelical Christians in the USA?
2. Have IDM leaders Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and Phillip Johnson *all* linked their own version of IDT to their personal Christian faith in public statements, interviews and/or articles?
3. Have several prominent Abrahamic theists (particularly those active in science, philosophy & theology/worldview conversations) openly rejected IDT on the basis of distinguishing Uppercase ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory (the Discovery Institute’s ‘strictly scientific’ theory) from lowercase ‘intelligent design’ (aka the non-scientific, theological/worldview ‘design argument’)?
In a comment at UD, Sal Cordova says:
One could of course argue the New Testament is a fabrication and exaggeration, but then it is well attested that the Romans inflicted cruel deaths upon Christians, some of whom claimed to be eye-witnesses of Jesus. Why die such a horrible death for a lie?
It lends too much credibility to the New Testament.
Sal seems to be unaware of phenomena such as cult suicides and suicide bombings.
The “who would die for a lie?” Christian trope confuses conviction with truth. It is a persistent apologetic, since the confusion of conviction and truth is the fundamental error of the religious. It is something all humans are vulnerable to. Hence we always have to be wary of con artists and other charismatic people, governments, authority figures, and the media.
Over to you. Who would die for a lie?
Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God knowingly create a world containing the evil we see all around us? That, in a nutshell, is the well-known theological “problem of evil”.
A standard Christian response runs as follows: God, being omnipotent, certainly could have created a world without evil. However, a world without evil would be a world without free will, because free will implies the ability to choose to do evil. In a world without evil, we would effectively be robots preprogrammed to do only the good. God values free will so much that he chooses to grant it to us despite knowing that we will misuse it. In short, God chooses to create a world containing free will, at the expense of some concomitant evil, rather than creating a pristine world full of robots.
Now consider heaven, a perfect place in which there is no evil. Do believers have free will in heaven?