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The burden of bad ideas

So, Heather MacDonald has replied to my reply to her. Take a look and then come back.

Welcome back.

Now, a little thought experiment. Suppose you were a professional physicist. Suppose further that that you came across the writings of someone whose knowledge of quantum mechanics derived entirely from discussions with high school science students. She had picked up from them some of the jargon – “collapse of the wave function,” “Schrödinger’s cat,” “wave-particle duality,” and so forth – but because their explanations were amateurish at best – always oversimplified, usually at least partially mistaken, and sometimes even grotesquely off-base – they failed to convey to her anything close to an accurate picture of the subject. Bizarrely, though, she used the bad information she’d picked up from them as the basis for an attack on the intellectual respectability of quantum mechanics, presenting it as clear evidence of the irrationality of contemporary physicists. “These physics oddballs claim they have a cat in a lab somewhere that is both alive and dead at the same time! And they also believe in little magic particles floating on foamy cosmic waves, or some such thing. Oogedy-boogedy, as my friend Kathleen would say. Maybe we conservatives ought to stay away from them. Maybe start a blog too. ‘Cause otherwise, you know, we might look as foolish and clueless as they do!”

Suppose also that, equally bizarrely, she seemed to be getting some respectful attention for these laughably ill-informed opinions. Annoyed, you pointed out to her that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that she really ought to read some serious physics books before commenting further, and that in any case she ought to leave the hapless high school students out of it. Irate, she replies that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that quantum mechanics is really worth taking seriously, and that doing so requires you to give her some “scientific evidence” that what the high school students have to say is true. She also refuses to consider the views of any actual physicists, apparently on the theory that if their complex arguments cannot be summarized for her in the comments box of one of her blog posts, then they must not be very compelling. Then she riffs a little more on some of her pet irrelevancies. “Where, pray tell, is your scientific evidence for this cat who’s alive and dead at the same time, Mr. Physicist? Show it to us, if it’s real! And what about those little ball thingies that float on the waves? Where’s your scientific test for them? Huh? HUH?!” Finally, with a flourish, she compares quantum mechanics to belief in the efficacy of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads. “So there!”

Replace “quantum mechanics” with “religion,” “physics” with “philosophy and theology,” and “high school students” with “unsophisticated religious believers,” and this is, I submit, pretty much where I find myself with respect to MacDonald. Really, what’s the point?

But I guess I’m in a masochistic mood, so let’s waste a few more pixels, shall we?

MacDonald insinuates that in my original short email to Jonah Goldberg which he posted at The Corner, and in my brief reply to her in the comments section of her blog, I was “argu[ing] for the scientific and rational basis of religion,” and she does not find these purported arguments of mine compelling. But of course, it would be idiotic to try to argue for such a gigantic claim in either a short email to a busy NRO writer or in the comments box of some blog, and so I did not try to do so. The only point I was making is that whatever one thinks of religion, MacDonald, Kathleen Parker, et al. reveal by their writings that they are innocent of any knowledge of serious religious thought – and MacDonald keeps piling up the evidence for this claim with every comment she makes in reply to me.

Presumably MacDonald wrote her own book The Burden of Bad Ideas precisely so that she wouldn’t have to repeat herself at length every time some joker demanded of her to prove, on the spot (and indeed even in emails sent to third parties) that her views on public policy are correct. “Jeez, read the book, fella!” I imagine she would say, and rightly so. (And you should read it too, incidentally, because MacDonald, whose work I generally enjoy and profit from, is very good when she’s writing on subjects other than religion.) Similarly, if MacDonald really wants to hear my case for the rational basis of religion, she can find it in The Last Superstition. (Twenty-one shopping days left until Christmas, so pick one up for Kathleen too!)

I will say this much, however. MacDonald seems to think that a rational case for the existence of God must take the form of coming up with a double-blind experiment to test claims about magic pills, or whatever the hell it is she was going on about. But the traditional arguments for God’s existence are not like that. That is to say, they aren’t quasi-scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations of this or that alleged weird phenomenon. They are instead attempts to show that perfectly ordinary phenomena, and in particular the phenomena that empirical science itself must necessarily take for granted, such as (to take just one example) the existence of any causal regularities at all, necessarily presuppose an uncaused first cause. The reasons why this is so are complicated, as are the reasons why the standard “obvious” objections to this claim are no good – that is, again, why they cannot properly be explained except at the sort of length a book provides. The point for now, in any event, is that empirical theorizing is not the only sort of rational inquiry there is. Mathematics is another. And a third is metaphysics, which is the rational investigation of those categories – such as cause, effect, form, matter, substance, attribute, essence, existence, and so forth – which empirical science cannot investigate, precisely because any empirical science must presuppose them. (Even the claim that “empirical science is the only rational form of inquiry” would itself not an empirical claim but a metaphysical one.) And this is the level at which the debate over God’s existence must be conducted – philosophy, not empirical science.

Again, though, read the book, which establishes all this at length and in detail.

That MacDonald is no philosophy whiz is in any case painfully evident from her attempted disproof of God’s existence on the basis of evil. I positively defy her to name anyone – it need not be a philosopher, just anyone at all – who has said anything to the effect that “their death [i.e. that of the miners in her example] shows God’s love for humanity, that he cares for every one of us.” True, lots of people say (quite correctly) that such tragic events are consistent with God’s love for us. But who ever made the much stronger claim that they are nothing less than “proof” of that love? No one, as far as I can tell. And yet this silly straw man attribution is essential to MacDonald’s hapless attempt at reductio ad absurdum.

Yet again, read the book, which contains a thorough debunking of the problem of evil.

Anyway, MacDonald need not count her ill-advised foray into philosophy and theology a total loss. Look at it this way: Should she ever be moved to revise The Burden of Bad Ideas she’s now got material for a new chapter, viz. an autobiographical one.

(cross-posted)

Comments (121)

Also the materlist writers do not bother to deal with the objection (noted by JBS Haldane and also by CS Lewis) that if thought is product (or by-product) of purely physical processes then it can not be trusted. But then naturalism is also a result of thought processes thus naturalism refutes itself.

Gian,
You are right. The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) is rather strong, and has only strengthened through refinement over the past 10-15 years since Plantinga first introduced it.

Ed,
I had never heard of MacDonald until this exchange (although I've probably read her work without realizing who the author was). I just finished reading through her Beliefnet "debate" with Michael Novak. She seems to be a very good writer, and I applaud her conservatism. Still, as this brief exchange and the "debate" with Novak show, she's out of her league when discussing theology. The clearest example is her inability to respond to Novak's discussion and responses except by changing the subject..."Well, what about other religions?" or "What about priests who tell people to take magical pills for healing?" If anything she comes across more as an inquisitive skeptic than someone who can make a positive case for Atheism or unbelief. Some may find questions in and of themselves convincing, but if one is attempting to make a case for unbelief (as she was supposed to be doing), then her strategy was simply unconvincing.

To be honest, those commenting on her threads have offered better arguments against belief than her own. Of course, they are not new arguments and ones that have been answered time and time again. It breaks my heart though that some are so easily persuaded by them. For instance, one commenter says that he has been persuaded by arguments from Carrier, such as that if God were real he would have done something akin to writing "Jesus is Lord" on the moon. Of course, this very suggestion is riddled with problems, and it breaks my heart that such simplistic arguments are convincing to some. I'm not someone who enjoys addressing these types of simplistic arguments online, and am thankful for the many people who are willing to address them. Hopefully through these discussions some will "have ears to hear" the truth.

Ed, welcome to the demagogue-target club. Years ago a well-known Philosopher of Famous for Being Famous took a 250-word letter to the editor I published in a small-town Texas newspaper and extrapolated from that an entire profile of my inner life and intellectual development. There's a certain obsessive madness with folks like this. They are gifted in many ways, but at some point in their professional journey came to realize that the reputation and stature they have gained through legitimate achievement can be used as a billy-club to insult and marginalize those who dissent from their pet orthodoxies. They tolerate vast amounts of ignorance among themselves and their peers once they realize they can get away with it and still achieve cultural and political power. Somewhere Nietzsche is looking up and smiling.

Ed:

My difficulty with your argument stems from the central analogy, that Christianity = quantum mechanics. As an atheist, I readily concede that there are very smart theists and rigorous intellectual discussions and challenges to be had over theological topics. (It's why I post here.) Point conceded.

But Christianity qua Christianity has no such requirements. When missionaries head to Africa, they do not say, "study theology, symbolic logic, and present philosophical arguments for the nature of God and you will be saved" -- they say "repent and trust in Jesus and be saved." When Lee Strobel sells a million copies of a book that falls below the intellectual rigor of the least of the commenters here, it isn't because of his scholarly grasp of the nuances of, say, Van Tillian presuppositionalism. It's because millions of people find atrocious arguments like, "everything that has a beginning has a beginner, and that looks a lot like the God of the Bible!" persuasive.

So yes: it would be bad to engage a nation of quantum physicists from a lay perspective. But why is it bad to engage pop apologetics at their own level? Why is it bad to tackle the reasons that real people in every day life give for believing in Jesus?

Ed,

First of all, I'm going online today and buying your book. Second of all, as I already said in an email to Lydia, the whole phenomenon of someone of Heather's intellect (and Derb's for that matter) dismissing the Bible as a bunch of out-dated fairy tales is just sad. Steven Pinker did the same thing in a letter to "Commentary" magazine and in response Leon Kass made him look foolish: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/scientism-10917?search=1.

At the very least, since I know Heather appreciates Western symphonic music and Derb appreciates poetry, you would think they would reflect on how the Bible was able to inspire and sustain so many amazing works of art (whether in music, poetry, literature, painting, etc.) I can't stop talking about Barzun's book "From Dawn to Decadence", since I'm in the middle of it, but reading such a broad and learned take on Western culture from 1500 to 2000 should give the most harded skeptic pause that something so supposedly ridiculous should provide so much wisdom and inspire so much creativity.

As someone who was a skeptical agnostic not too long ago, I can appreciate on a personal level the phenomenon you describe of learning about religion from "high school students" and thinking that this "knowledge" is all one needs to dismiss the truth claims of religion (e.g. POE, what about Islam, what about the Book of Mormon, etc.) I was lucky to come across this website and be awakened to just how incomplete my supposed "knowledge" was. Now I find myself headed to the theology section of the bookstore on a regular basis and buying Chesterson books, thinking to myself I should make time for N.T. Wright's three volume take on the Bible and early Christendom, and wondering which study Bible I should buy. In short, I recognize I am in fact ignorant of a lot of deep thinking (and writing) that has already been done on the subject of religion and Christianity and I should roll up my sleeves and study.

A fine comment, Mr. Singer. And I second your praise of From Dawn to Decadence

"But why is it bad to engage pop apologetics at their own level? " It isn't. What's bad is to present one's knocking of pop apologetics as the same as knocking Christianity, which is what McDonald does.

Because McDonald deeply believes that Christianity is pure nonsense, she probably considers it an enormous waste of her time to study it with any depth.

Andrew T., you are wrong about Strobel. He is providing a service to Christians who for reasons of time and lifestyle, family and profession, cannot set aside a decade to study the rigors of philosophical and theological argument. Because Lee knows that there are more sophisticated versions of the arguments he documents in his books, he, rightly, sees nothing wrong in providing to the Church a useful resource to help encourage his brothers and sisters in Christ.

You write, "It's because millions of people find atrocious arguments like, `everything that has a beginning has a beginner, and that looks a lot like the God of the Bible!' persuasive." I don't recall Strobel offering an argument like that. But having said that, it's not an atrocious argument at all. It's a simple version of a more complicated argument called the Kalam Cosmological Argument. (Or it could be a version of the Thomistic version).

Francis Beckwith:

I think you're proving my point. You agree with Strobel's conclusion, so it's okay for him to offer a simplified apologetic arguments; that does "a service to Christians" who lack the time to get a philosophy degree. But somehow it's not okay for Mac Donald, or Dawkins, or Harris, or Hitchens to do the exact same thing for time-constrained atheists? Come on.

---

On Strobel: I will drop it after this post, but respectfully: you are very wrong about Strobel. He perpetrates an outright, verifiable falsehood to this very day in reprints of The Case for Christ , in interviews, and (apparently -- I haven't read it; I haven't the stomach for any more of his lies) in The Case for Christmas:

McRay knew I was raising an issue that archaeologists have wrestled with for years. He responded by saying, "An eminent archaeologist named Jerry Vardaman has done a great deal of work in this regard. He has found a coin with the name of Quirinius on it in very small writing, or what we call 'micrographic' letters. This places him as proconsul of Syria and Cilicia from 11 BC until after the death of Herod."

I was confused. "What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means that there were apparently two Quiriniuses," he replied. "It's not uncommon to have lots of people with the same Roman names, so there's no reason to doubt that there were two people by the name of Quirinius. The census would have taken place under the reign of the earlier Quirinius. Given the cycle of a census every fourteen years, that would work out quite well."

This sort of nonsense seems preposterous on its face -- there are almost-invisible magic secret letters carved (how?) into Roman coins 2,000 years ago (that somehow survived the wear and tear that reduces a copper penny today to a smudge in a decade), etc., etc. But then you do a little digging and realize that a) Vardaman never showed anybody of his 'magic coins' -- only his own drawings! and b) hilariously, that Vardaman's microletters include the letter 'J' despite the fact that the letter 'J' wasn't invented for another eight centuries!

This gives you two possibilities: Strobel is either the stupidest, worst 'journalist' in the world; someone incapable of doing 10 minutes' worth of research on google and asking a question that would occur to your average 10-year-old -- or he is an out an out liar.

Then you realize that people -- including honest Christians, exemplified here on the RealClearTheology blog -- have been calling Strobel on this nonsense on this for years. And not only does Strobel continue to say it, continue to reprint The Case for Christ, but he actually went out of his way to add it to a new book, The Case for Christmas.

You tell me. Is that honest?

(Note that I haven't begun to discuss the general schtick of pretending to be a journalist and skeptic while asking softball questions of only those with whom he agrees completely; that's a farce even if you're not a despicable liar.)

You know the stories of those Japanese soldiers they find on an isolated island who are still fighting a war that ended decades ago?

You W4 folks are like that. Secular science HAS marginalized you because your methods are a failure. Medieval Scholasticism has been relegated to the trash heap of history, and rightly so. Meanwhile you superstitious magical thinkers are hiding in a cave with a death grip on your ancient holy myth books.

It is time you came out into the light.

But you won't. You like the special place in the universe your myth books place humanity. You can't give up your childish need for immortality.

Jeff writes, At the very least, since I know Heather appreciates Western symphonic music and Derb appreciates poetry, you would think they would reflect on how the Bible was able to inspire and sustain so many amazing works of art (whether in music, poetry, literature, painting, etc.)

Yes, so I did think. Both are welcome to be more generous with the good things they might still know and appreciate. To be sure, if the it were as bad as they say, it certainly would never have been potent enough to create a civilization.

**it's okay for him to offer a simplified apologetic arguments; that does "a service to Christians" who lack the time to get a philosophy degree. But somehow it's not okay for Mac Donald, or Dawkins, or Harris, or Hitchens to do the exact same thing for time-constrained atheists?**

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a popularizer. The problem with these atheist popularizers, however, is that they don't know enough about their subject to offer an informed critique. Even some of their better-read atheist brethren say this.

"I'm going online today and buying your book"

I've done the same. Looking forward to it, Ed.

I asked this question on the other thread but maybe you missed it. Do you refer to Michael Polanyi at all in the book? I've just started reading him and see some similarities between certain aspects of his thought and some of the things written about your book on Amazon, esp. in the blurb by Frank.

Rob G writes:

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a popularizer. The problem with these atheist popularizers, however, is that they don't know enough about their subject to offer an informed critique. Even some of their better-read atheist brethren say this.

If anyone can produce an argument that Lee Strobel knows more about atheism than Christopher Hitchens knows about Christianity, I'd love to see it.

Andrew T.: you keep insisting that Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins etc. are merely trying "to engage pop apologetics at their own level."

But Hitchens did not write *Lee Strobel is Not Great* - he wrote *GOD is not great*. Harris did not write *The End of Lee Strobel* - he wrote *The End of FAITH.* Dawkins did not write *Lee Strobel's Delusions* - he wrote *The GOD Delusion.* They all seem to think that they are decisively refuting not just naive folk religion, but all religious belief as such. Heather MacDonald seems to think the same thing.

But they're just not.

Perhaps some sophisticated religious thinkers are too inclined to indulge the shallowness and foibles of pop apologetics. But perhaps you are too inclined to indulge the shallowness and foibles of pop atheism.

I can't defend Strobel as I've not read him. There is a difference in approach, however, as from what I gather he's writing from a defensive posture while the New Atheists are on the offensive.

Well said, Frank and Jeff. And thanks, Jeff and Rob, for your interest in my book.

Bocce: Beg the question often, do you? Medieval scientific theories were refuted by modern science, but the philosophical or metaphysical ideas of the Scholastics were not. You are spouting cliches rather than speaking from knowledge. Read my book and you will discover how historically and philosophically ill-founded your position is. Or remain a clueless troll. Whatever.

Rob, re: Polanyi, I don't mention him in the book, and my own argument is somewhat different from his, but I agree that he is on to something important.

Andrew T., to reiterate something Frank said, the trouble with MacDonald -- as with Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett -- is that they claim to be exposing the irrationality of belief in God per se, not just the flaws of pop apologetics. That's why my quantum mechanics analogy is apt (apt to make this specific point, that is, even though the analogy, like all analogies, is of course imperfect).

Re: Strobel, I have not read him, and thus have no opinion.

Ed:

My difficulty with your argument stems from the central analogy, that Christianity = quantum mechanics. As an atheist, I readily concede that there are very smart theists and rigorous intellectual discussions and challenges to be had over theological topics. (It's why I post here.) Point conceded.

But Christianity qua Christianity has no such requirements. When missionaries head to Africa, they do not say, "study theology, symbolic logic, and present philosophical arguments for the nature of God and you will be saved"


See, this is why I have problems with Fundies.

God is an Infinite Being. To think that God can be reduced to simply a book is flat out ridiculous.

Although, personally, I believe Scripture to be the Word of God; that does not mean that everything there is to know about God is exhausted within a book.

Really, can the Infinite be so reduced into something so constrained and finite as a book?

Also, I find it risible that some folks (I speak of other venues) actually believe Quantum Mechanics and Christianity are mutually exclusive.

Even futher, that Quantum Mechanics actually disproves God.

I have not read the "Case for Christmas," and I am certainly not saying that everything Lee Strobel has written is absolutely correct on every matter. I don't even think my own work rises to that level of perfection.

But if that's how you read a book, looking for one mistake in order to dub someone a liar or a retard, then you have some serious growing up to do. For example, I have learned much from reading the philosopher James Rachels. But his work on abortion--where he cites the work of historian James Mohr--is flatly wrong. Do I think that Rachels is a liar or a retard? No.

Recently a certain Philosopher Famous for Being Famous cited Paul Krugman's disparagement of scholarship that argues that the Great Depression was not the result of free market economics. The comments dripped with condescension and self-righteousness. And yet, the case is pretty clear--especially given the groundbreaking work of Murray Rothbard--that Herbert Hoover was no free market capitalist. Do I think the Philosopher Famous for Being Famous is a liar or a retard? No. I think he just trusts certain authorities (e.g., Krugman) that he should be as skeptical about as he is of intelligent design advocates.

Do I think the Philosopher Famous for Being Famous is a liar or a retard? No.

Actually, such folks aren't retards; on the contrary, they're quite expert in taking advantage of those who are.

Ed,

I also just ordered your book, and have followed you since your "brush" with Leiter a few years ago. Keep up the good work!

Frank - well said. I'm really weary of the sort of argument, constantly encountered on blogs, that goes more or less like this:

"You dare defend Joe Schmoe? JOE SCHMOE??? But he once said 'X' - and 'X', as is well known, is evil &/or crazy! So Joe Schmoe is evil &/or crazy! And everything Joe Schmoe says is evil &/or crazy! And anybody who defends anything that Joe Schmoe has ever said is evil &/or crazy! And I refuse ever again to read Joe Schmoe! - or anybody who defends him!"

So anytime I cite some brilliant point (or even just a clever remark) made by, say, Mark Steyn, or Steve Sailer, I can count on some nattering nabob giving me the third degree about something else they said, years ago, that I never heard about.

It wears me out. It really does. It just really does.

By the way - is the "Philosopher Famous for Being Famous" who I think he is?

Edward, I shall read your book, my order is in.

The point for now, in any event, is that empirical theorizing is not the only sort of rational inquiry there is. Mathematics is another. And a third is metaphysics, which is the rational investigation of those categories – such as cause, effect, form, matter, substance, attribute, essence, existence, and so forth – which empirical science cannot investigate, precisely because any empirical science must presuppose them.

That reminds me of a quote from Richard Feynman:

"A philosopher once said, 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.' Well, they don't!"

Your claims about what empirical scientists must presuppose are false. Philosophers argue about what science is exactly and whether the findings of science are more reliable than other methods. But you guys are just spouting words about words, and scientists for the most part ignore your armchair philosphizing.

Meanwhile, science continues to progress.

Science and scientists are not perfect. Science cannot prove anything true, but can only show what is false and demonstrate what is most likely true. The future may hold a method that is better and more reliable and efficient.

But so far, science delivers the goods. It makes the most reliable predictions. It provides us the best technologies. No other method of human inquiry even comes close. Why is it two religions of the 20th century, Christian Science and Scientology, hijacked the word?

Because science delivers. Care to deny that? Try doing so without using the tools science provides you.

Francis Beckwith:

I do not want to beat this point into the ground, but I cannot let go an equivocation you make. It may be unintentional; it may even be my fault for not being clear enough. So let me try to be clear. You say:

I have not read the "Case for Christmas," and I am certainly not saying that everything Lee Strobel has written is absolutely correct on every matter. I don't even think my own work rises to that level of perfection.

But if that's how you read a book, looking for one mistake in order to dub someone a liar or a retard, then you have some serious growing up to do. For example, I have learned much from reading the philosopher James Rachels. But his work on abortion--where he cites the work of historian James Mohr--is flatly wrong. Do I think that Rachels is a liar or a retard? No.

Respectfully: that's not my argument. Errors crop up everywhere. Honest errors, errors of omission, errors due to bad editing, errors due even to understandable carelessness when the deadline looms, etc., etc. My book has plenty of 'em; so does yours; so do most folks'.

What I documented was manifestly not a "mistake." It is also not merely a throw-away line in a new book; it originally appeared in the Case for Christ (beginning at online p.74) a decade ago. Then, despite multiple corrections, Strobel not only repeated the falsehood online, but then wrote an entirely new book in which he repeated the same patently false stuff.

You can say this is only one example, but to me, that smacks of complaining that a murder indictment only identifies one victim. This is deliberate deceit of the worst kind, and it exposes a morally bankrupt methodology. It is an easily-verifiable fraud. It is a fraud upon which Strobel has been corrected -- both by godless heathens like me but also by well-meaning brothers and sisters in Christ -- and yet it is a fraud that Strobel insists on repeating, not just by omission (i.e., by failing to correct The Case for Christ in reprints, which as we both know is pretty trivially easy to do), but by affirmative commission -- in interviews, on TV and radio, and in a new book written long after the initial fraud was exposed.

This cannot and should not be whitewashed.

Mr. Beckwith, suppose you corrected me on an egregious and obvious falsehood on this blog. Then suppose you found me repeating that same falsehood in million-copy best-sellers over and over again. I suspect you would -- rightly, in my opinion! -- wash your hands of me. I try not to behave that way. I suspect (based only on our limited interaction so far) that you would not behave that way. So why go out of your way to make excuses for Lee Strobel having behaved that way? To forgive a mistake is charity; to whitewash a liar is to share in the complicity.

Again, I want to be clear: I take this allegation very seriously and would not toss it around carelessly. For example: I am not much impressed with Frank Turek and Norm Geisler's I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist; I think the arguments are facile, the tone sneering, and the conclusions wrong. TBut I do not and would not consider them to be liars, even when they repeat arguments that I think are clearly incorrect. I do not think Turek and Geisler set out to propagate falsehoods. They are not, at their core, liars. Strobel is, and that's the difference.

---

Ed Feser:

Andrew T., to reiterate something Frank said, the trouble with MacDonald -- as with Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett -- is that they claim to be exposing the irrationality of belief in God per se, not just the flaws of pop apologetics. That's why my quantum mechanics analogy is apt (apt to make this specific point, that is, even though the analogy, like all analogies, is of course imperfect).

The difference, I think, is that none of these books attempt to claim that God doesn't exist with metaphysical certainty. Were I not at work, I could even point you to the page of The God Delusion that makes that clear; it's the seven-point-scale bit, and I think it's around page 40. In any event, the arguments typically take the following form:

1) Those who assert a belief in God have an affirmative obligation to provide evidence to substantiate that claim;
2) X particular piece of evidence is defective for Y reasons; so therefore,
3) The assertion fails

To answer that with, "well, you haven't considered A or B or C or..." strikes me as missing the point. Millions, perhaps tens of millions of people believe in God because of X, where X includes arguments as lame as those made by Lee Strobel, Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, whomever. There is a value -- if only an academic one -- in refuting those arguments.

---

Rob G:

I can't defend Strobel as I've not read him. There is a difference in approach, however, as from what I gather he's writing from a defensive posture while the New Atheists are on the offensive.

Again, where you stand is a function of where you sit. Strobel titled his book "The Case for Christ," not "The Case That I'm Not A Complete Moron For Being A Christian." Christians certainly use it as an affirmative apologetic, as does Strobel himself (on programs like The Bible Answer Man. So I don't see it as simply "playing defense," although if I were a Christian, perhaps I might. :)

Bocce continues:

Because science delivers. Care to deny that?

No. Why on earth would I?

And why on earth do you think (as you seem to) that the claim that empirical science is a rational form of inquiry entails the further claim that ONLY empirical science is a rational form of inquiry? Or (as you also seem to think) that denying that science is the only rational form of inquiry somehow entails rejecting science? Neither of these entailments holds. Indeed, it is quite obvious that neither of them holds. You are not thinking carefully, but, again, flinging around simple-minded cliches.

Your claims about what empirical scientists must presuppose are false.

So you're saying (for example) that empirical science does not presuppose that there are causal regularities in nature waiting to be discovered?

Good luck with that one.

Anyway, I appreciate your purchase of the book. Hope you enjoy it.

Andrew T.:

As Keaton said to McManus in The Usual Suspects: "No. You're missing the point." (Insert Irish accent.)

Most people who believe that relativity theory, quantum mechanics, evolution by natural selection, etc. are true do so more or less because that's what they were taught in school. They couldn't give you a very sophisticated argument in defense of these theories if their lives depended on it. And even pop science books that explain these things are usually simplistic. Does that entail that these theories are wrong? Of course not. And someone who rejected them simply because he can refute all the arguments in their favor given by the man on the street, or because he can easily expose the inadequacies in Bluff Your Way Through Physics or some PBS documentary on Darwin, could hardly be said to have given them a fair hearing.

Similarly, if someone is going to claim, not only that God does not exist, and not only that such-and-such theistic arguments are bad, but also that anyone who believes in God is irrational, ignorant, etc., he had better focus his arguments on the best representatives of theism, and certainly not focus on the lightweights. That's the trouble with MacDonald, Dawkins, et al., and why they deserve all the abuse that can be heaped upon them. (Cf. Steve Burton's remarks above.)

Andrew, you're obviously intelligent and well-intentioned. Why keep defending these people? Why not just admit "Yeah, they're fools, but the skeptical cause doesn't depend on them," and move on?

Try doing so without using the tools science provides you.

Heh... Not that anyone 'round here would try, but if we did, we'd have to use the tools made by engineers--scientists' weak-eyed sisters who've done most of the work with very little of the credit.

Interesting how it were the pop apologists who have been deliberately selected by the antagonist on arguments for God to put up against the likes of Dawkins et al instead of more weighty individuals as Prof. Antony Flew or even distinguished physicist, Dr. Anthony Rizzi.

But, I suppose if I were a defender of Atheism, I would likewise have stacked the deck to my advantage.

Dreadful, dreadful post by John Derbyshire, in response to Ed Feser's replies to Heather MacDonald.

These guys seem intent on embarrassing me for being in their company.

Steve, Derbyshire's post seems to me to confirm the truth of the ancient observations to the effect that the obsessive becomes what he despises.

I find it risible that some folks (I speak of other venues) actually believe Quantum Mechanics and Christianity are mutually exclusive.

Indeed. On the contrary, few discoveries have weakened scientific materialism as much.

Millions, perhaps tens of millions of people believe in God because of X, where X includes arguments as lame as those made by Lee Strobel, Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, whomever.

I think that is more or less hogswill. Billions of people believe in God because they were taught to do so, and deem it traitorous to do otherwise. The millions or tens of millions buying those books are just the ones flirting with the treachery. They don't believe because of X; they've already conceded the ground to enlightenment rationalism, convinced of its hegemony, and are looking to win a game (rigged against them) in which X just happens to be the best thing going. Your familiarity with the genre, Andrew, suggests that you've been down this very path.

This part from MacDonald is astonishing:

Apologists like Mr. Feser want to turn our attention to Medieval metaphysics; I ask him to turn his attention to the actual practice of religion and defend its “rational basis.”

So, nevermind if those metaphysical arguments for theism are actually correct, let's talk about the rationality of all the people who agree with their conclusion nowadays instead. It's as if MacDonald thinks that logic is mutable over time. It's as if she thinks we need to prove the Pythagorean Theorem again, just in case it became false since yesterday. Or even worse, it's as if she thinks that we need to forget about actual proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem altogether and focus instead on whether all those who profess belief in the Pythagorean Theorem right now can articulate a rational basis for doing so, and that if they can't, we need to conclude that the Pythagorean Theorem is bunk.

It's funny. Western atheists love to pat themselves on the back endlessly about their own superior "reason", even to the point of self-parody. But this looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to avoid engagement in the actual hard work of reasoning on MacDonald's part.

Derbyshire sounds like the Tempter: "If you are the Son of God . . ."


Maximos - I've got a couple of comments in moderation over there. We'll see if they appear.

Ed, I find it funny that you bring up Quantum Mechanics. Someone who has a decent to excellent understanding of QFT can quite easily explain why not only does it NOT "necessarily presuppose an uncaused first cause" but in fact quite easily allows for the opposite - that nearly all eventualities don't have direct causal relationships and that it is merely our interpretation of events - the tendency for our brains to construct narrative, anthropomorphic explanations - and our inability to comprehend the quantum world that leads us to this belief.

I could go on but clearly you haven't read enough books on physics. *Ahem*.

"But so far, science delivers the goods. It makes the most reliable predictions. It provides us the best technologies. No other method of human inquiry even comes close. "

What method of human inquiry did you rely on to draw these conclusions about science? Probably a little bit of history. But you also relied on philosophy. You seem to be assuming that we ought to believe that science is a rational discipline because it "delivers the goods," which depends on a deeper truth: if X delivers the goods, then X is a rational discipline. But these claims, which your view presupposes, are not deliverances of science. They are philosophical reflections on the nature of science.

Also, what precisely is a good? Suppose you say, "health." I agree. But what does it mean to be healthy? I'll throw this one out: when an organism is functioning properly. But what does it mean to function properly? Lungs, minds, and hearts all seem to be purposed toward the exchange of oxygen, the pursuit of truth, and the circulation of blood, respectfully, all for the good of the whole organism. But "health" and "proper functioning" are not scientific concepts, since people knew exactly what they meant long before the advent of modern science.

If you read Ed's book you'll come to realize that much of what all of us take for granted could not be produced by philosophical materialism and its attendant notions of philosophical nominalism and moral relativism. Yes, science delivers. But it only delivers because all the hard philosophical work was done in the Middle Ages that made modern science possible (see., e.g., the work of my colleague Rodney Stark, FOR THE GLORY OF GOD [Princeton University Press, 2003]).

Frank:

Ed, welcome to the demagogue-target club.... They are gifted in many ways, but at some point in their professional journey came to realize that the reputation and stature they have gained through legitimate achievement can be used as a billy-club to insult and marginalize those who dissent from their pet orthodoxies. They tolerate vast amounts of ignorance among themselves and their peers once they realize they can get away with it and still achieve cultural and political power. Somewhere Nietzsche is looking up and smiling.

It is precisely because WWwtW's authors, you included, so persistently decline to brandish the billy-club that the blog remains so enjoyable to read. (My own occasional WWwtW-commenting experience has endured a few sharp ripostes from authors, you included---and of course we have all watched Paul judiciously evict a few carousers---but those are different matters. One never sees an author here heft the billy-club.)

Regarding Heather MacDonald, that she disagrees with you is one thing. It is hard though to understand why the question agitates her so.

That Heather Mac Donald is agitated there is no doubt in my mind. Look, for example, in this symposium at The American Conservative entitled "What is Left? What is Right?"

If you browse through there you find many views, but Heather Mac Donald's answer is stark in how it does not address the symposium topic.

Thanks for the heads-up, Steve. I've posted a comment on Derbyshire's screed in reply.

Greg, unfortunately you evidently don't understand the difference between the kind of explanation QFT offers and the kind that theism (as understood e.g. within Thomism) offers. They are not competing and thus not at odds with one another. But I guess now I'm supposed to offer you an introductory account of the difference between empirical theorizing and metaphysical inquiry and its relevance to philosophical theology, and one that is both brief enough for a blog comment but thorough enough to answer all the great many misconceptions on this subject that are floating around in the pop science literature. Sorry, but I've got better things to do.

Do keep callin' that kettle black though...

A fast in and out, which I suspect will be appreciated.
The criticism of religion, or more specifically Christianity, as being unprovable, based only on faith truly is old,if not ancient, hat. Such fun as has lasted centuries, yet todays battlers for rationality act as if they are trail blazers, bold seekers of truth as opposed to, yes what else, superstition. Pardon me while I snicker.

Yeah, sadly religion is based mostly if not entirely on faith, so what?

We just finished an election in which a race hustling, Chicago agitator, with somewhat more experience than the town dog catcher, has been elected President. Faith?
What propels the fantasies of government in spite of untold failure, scandal, and disappointment, { yes I know they build the roads and schools and are responsible for life itself } if not a faith so blind, so impervious to even introductory evidence, that a child should be shamed to hold it.

Faith comes in all sorts of packages and I would rather believe in transubstantiation than the promises of an increasingly degenerate political class and media in something more agreeable to cynicism than faith, which runs much further, widely, and deeper, and more perverse, than faith in Jesus Christ.

Place your bets and make your statements.

EF - fortunately, your comment seems to have called forth JD's better nature, and he now promises to read your book. I feel much better about liking him, now.

Wow, you weren't kidding, Steve. Check out our last few comments. It's a Rodney King moment.

Anyway, I feel as you do. I hate disagreeing with the Derb, whose work I've always enjoyed and admired.

And BTW, thanks for the assistance over there...

One comment from me on this thread, then I'm done:

It seems to me that one's apologetic, just like one's theology, ought to be cut from the same piece of cloth as the revelation one is defending and explicating. For Christians and for Jews, that revelation is historical and textual -- both the events and the words that explain the events. That means that the closest disciplines to theology are history and literary criticism, not philosophy. As long as you insist on defending Christianity as if it were a philosophy and not a historical and textual revelation, you are altering the fundamental nature of the faith, which is incarnational Trinitarianism, not theism, and is historical, not metaphysical. I'm not interested in defending that. Instead of the metaphysical approach, we ought to focus on things like the resurrection, not on Thomas's five ways. Put differently, God is Christologically defined, not metaphysically defined. If, in our theology, we emphasize the incarnation, then in our apologetics we ought take resort to history, not metaphysics. According to the gospels, God is the One you meet revealed in Christ: "He that has seen me has seen the Father." "I and my Father are one. "I do what I see my Father do." "I say what I hear my Father say." "No one comes to the Father but by me." I suggest we do better to defend that, rather than generic theism, and make our opponents prove it false. I think we ought to change the grounds of the debate.

You'll recall that in his effort to build a bridge to the Muslims of his day, Thomas tried to establish a common ground by proving that God exists. Problem is, Allah does not, even though Thomas "proved" he did.

Thomas does not prove that Allah exists, he proves that God exists. iirc, he even takes the extreme position that Muslims do not worship the same God as Christians do, because of their errors.

Regarding the second claim--I don't think Aquinas makes it explicitly, but it can be inferred from another claim that he makes. (I'm trying to find his exact words at the moment.)

PB,
I promised only one comment on this thread, so this reply breaks my promise. I'll try to be mercifully brief.

(1) We simply disagree on how to read Summa Contra Gentiles. I see books 1-3 as an effort to establish a common ground upon which Christians, Jews, and Muslims all can stand, which includes proving from natural reason that God exists, a fact from which he does not expect readers from any of those three traditions to dissent. He thinks he's hooked them with those three books. Having brought them all to God, in book 4 he brings them to Christianity, but without negating what he established earlier.

(2) Christian apologetics ought to be concerned with defending not theism but Christianity. Christianity is incarnational Trinitarianism historically and textually revealed, not generic theism.

Ed Feser:

Andrew, you're obviously intelligent and well-intentioned. Why keep defending these people? Why not just admit "Yeah, they're fools, but the skeptical cause doesn't depend on them," and move on?

Two things:

1. Why do obviously smart people on this board keep defending frauds like Lee Strobel? Why not just admit, "Yeah, he's a liar and a fraud, but the cause for Christianity doesn't depend on him," and move on? This really feels like a "beam in your own eye" moment, if you'll forgive my offhanded paraphrase of Matthew 7.

2. In any event, Dawkins is not a fool, and you have not provided evidence of such. At most, you've critiqued him for shooting at easy targets. My response (unchanged) is that these "easy targets" are selling millions of books and persuading millions of people, and it's intellectually appropriate to engage them on their own terms.

Look, here's an example: I can't tell you the number of times sophisticated Christians have pointed me to the Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft. Now, look through Kreeft's arguments; they're exactly the same arguments that Dawkins tackles on pages 77-109 of The God Delusion. Same claims, same level (or lack) of depth.

So: is Kreeft a good enough target? Or do all roads have to run through Alvin Plantinga?

Andrew T. Dawkins' "tackling" of these arguments is really, really, really, really, really, really lame. Here's how he introduces Thomas's arguments, for example:

The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress - the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.

1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover.
This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God.
Something had to make the first move, and that something we
call God.

2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect
has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress.
This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call
God.

3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time
when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist
now, there must have been something non-physical to bring
them into existence, and that something we call God.
All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and
invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted
assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we
allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to
an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need
one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with
any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence,
omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such
human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading
innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians
that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If
God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene
to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means
he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not
omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in
equally engaging verse:

Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?

To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God
to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big
bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown.
Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.
Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets
invites us to 'Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into
the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight
or perhaps nine times.' Some regresses do reach a natural
terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you
could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why
shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even
smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively
terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a
nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly
larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine
electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single
atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a
natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It
is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the
regresses of Aquinas.

Dawkins simply does not understand Thomas.

Francis Beckwith:

I agree with you that most of Dawkins' response to Aquinas is indeed lame. (I do think he correctly describes the first three ways as involving special pleading around an infinite regress, but I wish that (a) he'd shown that the predicates for those arguments are simply false and (b) he'd explained by that's a bad form of argument.

So: fair point.

Can you do likewise? Will you concede the obvious -- that Strobel has engaged and continues, to this day, to engage in outright falsehoods and frauds?

Andrew T.,
In regards to Kreeft you say, "Same claims, same level (or lack) of depth" comparing his presentation of philosophical arguments to the level of Dawkins response.

The difference in this situation is that Dawkins doesn't have the philosophical training to move beyond this level of argumentation. That's understandable, for the majority of "The God Delusion" he's arguing outside of his fields of expertise, so we wouldn't expect him to speak as an expert. As I think we all agree, this causes for some rather amusing discussions of theology and philosophy.

The difference with Kreeft is that he has the philosophical training and ability to explain the arguments in greater depth, yet usually refrains from doing so. Kreeft usually keeps things at a pop philosophy level though as most of his audience isn't concerned with the more in depth version, nor are most of the detractors that they will discuss these arguments with at work. Occasionally in a debate with a fellow professional philosopher he will show his ability to argue at a much higher level, but his books and majority of audio aren't intended for professional philosophers and thus he doesn't intend to argue in depth.

Andrew T. Okay, I acquiesce, Strobel is wrong in continuing to offer an argument that he should know is unsound. But that's like admitting that the minor A-league bench-warming player in the Yankees farm system threw a spit-ball once he got a chance to play and that strike out he pitched shouldn't count. But we still have Ruth, Gehrig, Dimaggio, Mantle, Munson, Jackson, and Jeeter. I'll give you Strobel, if you want him.

Dawkins' presentation of the three ways is not accurate, I'm not reluctant to report. For example, Dawkins seems to assume that the infinite regress is chronological and sequential, like in the Kalam argument. This is, of course, a common mistake among my first year philosophy students who arrive in class with no experience or knowledge of philosophical argument.

Dawkins is also assuming that one can only be rational in believing in God if one has defeated every reasonable objection to one's arguments. But that is a standard of epistemic virtue that no view can escape, including his.

I'm very much in sympathy with what Michael Bauman has said about the defense of Christianity: it is a historical religion, and the most direct defense of it is historical. My only (very slight) caveat would be on the matter of Aquinas's proofs. I think Aquinas understands himself to be proving that there is a being with certain properties. Jews, Christians, and Muslims will all accept that these are properties of God as they conceive him; they are all free, therefore, to take Aquinas's proofs, as such, as evidence for the existence of the deity. The distinctions between the Muslim and the Judeo-Christian conceptions of the deity are a separate matter, and Aquinas takes them up in SCG 4. But it would be more accurate to say that in his earlier arguments Aquinas has (if successful) demonstrated the existence of a being with certain properties and those properties are compatible with the properties of Allah than to say that he has demonstrated the existence of Allah as such.

On the Strobel issue, I may be missing something, as I have merely glanced at and not read straight through any of his books, but going strictly from what Andrew is saying, this looks like a tempest in a teapot. Strobel interviewed McRay a decade ago, and McRay made a reference to a paper or presentation (I'm not clear on this) by Vardaman. Some internet infidels got online and criticized Vardaman, who had died in November of 2000.

Suppose for the sake of the argument that they're right and Vardaman was mistaken, or even (despite his credentials) completely incompetent, or even that he perpetrated an outright fraud and fabricated his evidence. How does this make Strobel a liar? Are we being asked to assume that Strobel knows about the criticism? Why should he care, or even notice, what some internet infidels say? How does his failure to notice this critique make him a liar?

Waiving that, suppose that Strobel was told that some atheist who boasted that he was the equal of Aristotle as a philosopher had gotten online and critiqued Vardaman viciously. Why should he care? Strobel interviewed McRay, and McRay is a credentialed scholar. Strobel is not. So he's got a choice: trust the credentialed scholar with an academic position, or trust somebody with no credential in the field, or roll up his sleeves and learn enough about the issue to make a (nonexpert) adjudication. Personally, I always prefer option 3 when it is available, but I'm a bit of a research maniac, and not everyone is. It seems to me that Strobel could reasonably take option 1, shrug, and move on. No dishonesty there.

Strobel aside, what rides on the coin defense? If the issue is the correctness of Luke 2:2, there are a lot of reasonable options that have nothing to do with a second Quirinius. There is Calvin's suggestion, endorsed by numerous subsequent scholars, that εγενετο means "set in motion," a meaning it does bear in other classical writings. There is the suggestion of Theophylact, endorsed by Herwart, Tholuck, Greswell, and Birks, that we should take πρώτη as a term of comparison, on the model of John 1:15 (... πρωτος μου ην ...), and read the verse as "This enrollment took place before Quirinius’s government of Syria." Such a reading does require that we take the Greek as idiomatic, constructing a genitive of time with adverbs of comparison; but this construction is found in the Septuagint, e.g., Jer. 29:2. Both of these solutions are well within the bounds of reasonable discussion.

Ignore this fact; suppose that the text is in error. If Luke's general trustworthiness is the issue, then we ought to note two considerations. First, Luke 1:5 - 2:52 is very widely acknowledged to be a source not written by Luke but (likely) by a member of Jesus' family. Luke simply incorporated it into his narrative. If there is an error in the chronology, it needn't be Luke's own fashioning; he is giving us the document as he has it. there is plenty of other evidence that demonstrates it.

Waive that; suppose that the chronological reference is in error and that it comes from Luke's own pen. That will make inerrantists unhappy. But even if we were to assume that Luke, personally, made a mistake about the date of the census, this would not seriously detract from the value of his gospel as an historical source. It happens with other historians like Tacitus (e.g. Annals XI 23), and we do not for that reason declare them to be generally untrustworthy. No double standards, right?

Oops! Typo time. The line "... there is plenty of other evidence that demonstrates it" was meant to go with "this would not seriously detract from the value of his gospel as an historical source ..." but in the wordprocessing they got separated. Sorry for any confusion.

Greg, unfortunately you evidently don't understand the difference between the kind of explanation QFT offers and the kind that theism (as understood e.g. within Thomism) offers. They are not competing and thus not at odds with one another.

So it comes down to a question of "How" – "How does this process function" vs. "Why" – "Why is this process happening?" does it? Well then, that's fine with me, as long as you recognize that one of these lines of questioning is meaningless. And it's not the "How."

"Why," as it pertains to meaning and purpose, are purely human inventions. It is not based on any formal theories or logical constructs that we ask these questions, it is only to validate a purely psychological need to answer questions that fulfill basic suspicions brought about not by evidence but by evolutionary presupposition.

It certainly makes sense for humans to have developed a need to ascertain purpose and meaning. It is a helpful social tool to be able to place yourself in the position of someone else. Over the course of our evolution from other primates, we've become quite good at judging the purpose behind another's actions, as any good investigator or detective will surely attest. However, it comes at the cost that this 'awareness' is constantly on, constantly trying to derive meaning and purpose from that which does not contain it.

You see it when people find the images of religious figures in simple stains, or when people misinterpret atmospheric or psychological phenomenon as evidence for extra-terrestrial contact. Brain scans have proven it - when we're not quite sure what it is we're looking at, our brains don't go into analytical mode. The meaning center goes into overdrive.

Everything we've learned about "How," in contrast, directly shows this search for meaning is not only fruitless but pointless. It is not that you are asking different questions – it is that one of the questions can provide continuous degrees of answers and additional lines of inquiry, and one of them is needless anthropomorphic pontification.

As I said on my blog, her whole premise here for proving the existence of beings that are both sentient and capable of disappearing from our ability to perceive them is inherently flawed. If you accept the basic nature of God--or even deities in general--as well as spiritual beings like demons, you cannot simply force them to come to you, lay down on an examination table and study them like a monkey in captivity. Proving or disproving their existence is simply impossible because we have no natural pull on them, as we can gain on the forces of nature, to conduct experiments on them.

Furthermore, it's not obvious that traditional conservative notions about human behavior are particularly rational outside of a religious context. Conservatives used to accept it as a given that man is a fallen being and all that came with that, but I don't see how that's possible in a secular context. From an evolutionary context, much of what we call sinful behavior is, in fact, conducive toward the strengthening our species. How can a secular conservative who embraces an evolutionary and naturalistic view of humanity condemn that which got us to being the robust race that we are today? I fail to see it. It would be irrational on the grounds that it obviously worked, and worked very well if we are alive and thriving today.

In any event, Dawkins is not a fool, and you have not provided evidence of such. At most, you've critiqued him for shooting at easy targets. My response (unchanged) is that these "easy targets" are selling millions of books and persuading millions of people, and it's intellectually appropriate to engage them on their own terms.

Why don't you do a Google search on voxday.blogspot.com for Dawkins and read The Irrational Atheist, then. Vox Day did a pretty good job of humiliating Dawkins.

Hello Andrew T.,

Re: Strobel, again, I have never read anything he's written, so I have nothing to say one way or the other.

Re: Dawkins, even if one were to concede that his other work is important, the profound awfulness of his anti-religious stuff coupled with his absurd confidence in its value would all by itself merit him the label "fool."

Is his other stuff any good? Well, I will concede that he is a skilled expositor, and that his popular expositions of Darwinism are valuable. But his original ideas? Not so good. For example, the "meme" stuff is all crap, bad philosophy masquerading as bad science. I say a little about it in the book.

Re: Kreeft, I pretty much agree with what Ranger said.

Finally, you say:

"I do think he correctly describes the first three ways as involving special pleading around an infinite regress."

Sorry, no way. In fact almost no one outside of experts on medieval philosophy who comments on the Five Ways knows what he is talking about. And whatever else one thinks of the first three ways, they by no means commit such a blatant fallacy. Understanding why requires understanding the Aristotelian conception of efficient causation in general and the notion of a causal series ordered per se in particular. I get into this in detail in the book, and in even more detail in my book on Aquinas, which will be out next year.

"her whole premise here for proving the existence of beings that are both sentient and capable of disappearing from our ability to perceive them is inherently flawed"

True. I've seen a version of this called the "ghost argument" or something like that. If ghosts really do exist, and if they are sentient beings of some sort, then it's possible they don't want to be detected, and when they've been seen, it's only been by accident, as it were. Therefore, if you go into a reputedly "haunted" house with a half-dozen psychics with infrared cameras and microphones, they assuredly won't show up. Hell, we can't even get our cars to repeat the noise at the mechanic's that it makes on the road.

Another issue, when it comes to God, is the matter of compelled belief. If tonight when the moon arose it had written across it in large letters "Jesus is God," that would be proof enough for most people, but it would be proof of a coercive sort that wouldn't require either faith or love. If the Christian God, however, desires faith and love to be the primary foundations of his relationship to his creation, coercion of this sort would be out of place. It'd be the equivalent of a metaphysical shotgun wedding.

Dawkins seems to assume that the infinite regress is chronological and sequential, like in the Kalam argument.

One wonders how much jumping up and down and yelling has got to be done before this distinction starts to sink into the brains of your average Thomist/Aristotelian critic. Feser, at least, is holding up his end.

Ed,

And why on earth do you think (as you seem to) that the claim that empirical science is a rational form of inquiry entails the further claim that ONLY empirical science is a rational form of inquiry?

I never approached saying anything like that. I said the methods of science are the most reliable. I suspect, but don't have the data, that most philosophers would agree with me. (But that's no argument that I'm right.)

Your claims about what empirical scientists must presuppose are false.
So you're saying (for example) that empirical science does not presuppose that there are causal regularities in nature waiting to be discovered?

That some events seem to cause other events in some situations is an observation scientists make, it is not a necessary presupposition to do science.

Francis,

You seem to be assuming that we ought to believe that science is a rational discipline because it "delivers the goods," which depends on a deeper truth: if X delivers the goods, then X is a rational discipline. But these claims, which your view presupposes, are not deliverances of science. They are philosophical reflections on the nature of science.

I would never tell anyone what they ought to believe. I might suggest that what they do believe is almost certainly false. And again, I am not claiming that empirical science is the only rational form of human inquiry. Rather, I think its methods are the most reliable.

Philosophy can be useful. But a lot of philosophy, like a lot of science, is garbage.

Mike T:

Why don't you do a Google search on voxday.blogspot.com for Dawkins and read The Irrational Atheist, then. Vox Day did a pretty good job of humiliating Dawkins.

You're criticizing Mac Donald and Dawkins and endorsing Vox Day??? The mind boggles. Evangelical Realism has -- overly politely, I might add -- taken apart that silliness.

This goes back to my fundamental point I made earlier. Christians are more inclined to excuse the intellectual laziness, superficiality, and misstatements of Christian apologists; atheists are more inclined to excuse those traits from their counter-apologists. This shouldn't really surprise anyone, and the argument that the atheists are "worse" about it -- while likely to get a chorus of "amens" among a Christian audience and likely to get howls of derision among a secular audience -- doesn't seem to be substantiated, at least not on this thread.

More later.

I remembered not being impressed with Evangelical Realism's attempts to rip apart TIA, but the very first entry on that category listing reminded me why. It is a very weak argument, that fails to even understand the point that Vox was making that the Golden Rule is simply not a moral statement at all because it provides no inherent, objective guidance on what we should do. If a psychopath or a sociopath were to follow the golden rule as the foundation of their moral code, it could lead to some extremely *ahem* "interesting" situations. Hence why Vox said that the Golden Rule only makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system to your actions.

Evangelical Realism also works from the assumption that there is no possibility that the Torah, prophets and Gospel were given to us by revelation. Their "debunking" simply writes off that possibility as though it were already proven beyond any reasonable doubt that this could not be considered by a reasonable person. I would hazard to guess that ER's somewhat civil tone was due primarily to being on fairly shaky ground here.

Furthermore, if you ever read TIA, you would know that Vox opens up with the line that he is not trying to convert anyone, and that he honestly doesn't care what happens to the reader in eternity as it is their decision and consequences, not his. The book is no work of apologetics, but rather a long fisking of the arguments against religion in general put forth by the so-called New Atheists.

Evangelical Realism also works from the assumption that there is no possibility that the Torah, prophets and Gospel were given to us by revelation. Their "debunking" simply writes off that possibility as though it were already proven beyond any reasonable doubt that this could not be considered by a reasonable person. I would hazard to guess that ER's somewhat civil tone was due primarily to being on fairly shaky ground here.

In addition to this, I think it's fair to say that this is an area where Christians and atheists often differ in their approach to these questions. Many Christians have doubted and can doubt for the sake of argument, that their religion is true. Yet atheists almost invariably start from a discussion point that Christianity simply cannot be true or taken to be true just for the sake of argument. I don't think it really requires more brain power to step into a position of belief in something, than it does to stop from that position into one of non-belief for the sake of argument about belief/non-belief. Rather, it takes a more open mind.

Bocce writes:

That some events seem to cause other events in some situations is an observation scientists make, it is not a necessary presupposition to do science.

Well, among the other things science does, it quite obviously intends to tell us something about the relationship between events, which presuposses that they have some relationship in the first place. But answering the question of what that relationship is is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one. And of course, the usual answer is that the relation is causal.

Now the way you put it is that events "seem to" be causally related. Why "seem to"? Are they or aren't they? Perhaps the reason you resorted to this locution is that you realize that if you say flatly that some events do cause other ones (whether or not we know specifically which ones cause which), then you will already have opened yourself up to Humean objections. And, since these objections are philosophical ones that require a philosophical resolution, you will also thereby have effectively conceded that science makes philosophical assumptions after all.

So, if that is what you're up to, does your "seems to" dodge work? Not for a moment. For we now need to know what "seeming to" itself amounts to. For starters, you need to justify your claim that things really do even seem to cause one another, as opposed e.g. to simply seeming to succeed one another . And even that way of putting it implies -- quite falsely, as I argue in the book -- that causation always entails temporal succession between events as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition. Hence, even to make sense of "seeming to cause vs. seeming to succeed temporally," you will need to develop a theory of causation, and are thus necessarily hip-deep in philosophy.

Then, of course, we also need to ask how "seeming to be such-and-such" differs from "really being such-and-such" -- a difference which itself surely entails a reference to the different ways in which our perceptions are caused. And that in turn raises more general questions about the nature of perception.

I could go on and on. But that's enough to make the point that even your reference to how "some events sometimes seem to cause other ones" is very heavily freighted with philosophical baggage. Hence, even if you wanted to claim that the relationship between phenomena that science presupposes is not a causal reltionship but only a "seeming to cause" relationship, you will not have dodged the conclusion that science must make philosophical assumptions (whether or not one wants to quibble about what specifically those assumptions are).

Mike T:

Many Christians have doubted and can doubt for the sake of argument, that their religion is true. Yet atheists almost invariably start from a discussion point that Christianity simply cannot be true or taken to be true just for the sake of argument. I don't think it really requires more brain power to step into a position of belief in something, than it does to stop from that position into one of non-belief for the sake of argument about belief/non-belief. Rather, it takes a more open mind.

Hopefully, you are not lumping me among the "invariably." Notwithstanding whether that's true mathematically (I don't think so, but I don't have hard data, either), all I can say is that personally it's not the way in which I try to present and discuss these issues.

Rob G:

Another issue, when it comes to God, is the matter of compelled belief. If tonight when the moon arose it had written across it in large letters "Jesus is God," that would be proof enough for most people, but it would be proof of a coercive sort that wouldn't require either faith or love. If the Christian God, however, desires faith and love to be the primary foundations of his relationship to his creation, coercion of this sort would be out of place. It'd be the equivalent of a metaphysical shotgun wedding.

I hear this argument a lot, and it strikes me as completely wrong. Maybe you can help clarify it for me or answer what I think is a pretty obvious objection:

Right now, we know with ironclad certainty that fried mozzarella sticks, cigarettes, and tasty Sierra Nevada Pale Ale are all uniformly bad for you. There's no debate. And yet no one would argue that people don't have the free will to choose to consume those things anyway. More information doesn't make things "coercive" -- it just makes our choices better informed.

Similarly, if the God of Christianity were to immediately and personally make himself known to every person on the planet right now and to expressly lay out the terms for salvation, that wouldn't "force" anyone to accept those terms. Oh, sure: lots more people probably would. But some people -- and certainly a numerically large number of people in a world of 6 billion -- would reject them anyway, for the same sorts of reasons that some 25-year-olds start smoking in this day and age (i.e., prioritizing short-term gain above long-term consequences).

Again, let me be clear: I am not going as far as the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. All I'm saying is that the rejoinder I hear commonly among Christians that more evidence would undermine our free will strikes me as preposterous.

Hopefully, you are not lumping me among the "invariably." Notwithstanding whether that's true mathematically (I don't think so, but I don't have hard data, either), all I can say is that personally it's not the way in which I try to present and discuss these issues.

I'm not. I am, however, lumping in prominent atheist writers from Dawkins, to PZ Meyers, to Evangelical Realism into that category. For example, if ER had actually considered the Christian side for the sake of argument, much of that entire post would have collapsed on its face without Vox firing a single countershot.

I suppose the reason that I tend to have no respect for such atheists is that I used to be a functional atheist, and when I was, I rejected religion-inspired morality without trying to rationalize its existence on other grounds. I recognized that such behavior was wishful thinking at best, pathetic weakness at worst. Perhaps that explains why many Western atheists cling to the trappings of religion while passionately denying the possibility that what the religion says about God is true. They try to stare straight ahead, rather than up in the air toward Heaven, or down below into the Abyss.

Childish need for immortality?

Come on, don't stoop to that level. It could equally be said that atheists have a similar childish need that they be freed from eternal consequences for their actions. A true atheist would have to agree that the only rule to live by is "don't get caught". Anything else would be irrational.

I tend to agree with you thought that I don't much care for the whole line of "why doesn't God show Himself directly to each person" sort of thing. Heck, I don't know why. Even when He came down, got crucified and rose from the dead He still didn't show Himself to each and every person on earth at the time, or even all of His followers.

But that seems more of a side issue - whether He directly reveals Himself to all of us today or not doesn't prove or disprove His existence.

A desire for immortality is a natural consequence of being a sentient being who has grasped the meaning of death.

Ed,

That was all quite nice, but does not address anything I have said. I did not say scientists do not make any assumptions. Rather, I dispute the specific assumptions you stated which I quoted. And again, I do not think all philosophy is worthless.

Now the way you put it is that events "seem to" be causally related. Why "seem to"? Are they or aren't they?

Because that's all I can say with any reliability. Science is rife with uncertainties, and I'm comfortable with that. Concerning your larger point though, I will leave you with a quote from from Victor Stenger:

"The laws of physics were not handed down from above. Nor are they somehow built into the logical structure of the universe. They are human inventions, though not arbitrary ones. They are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. They are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior."

So when If I say the rose is red, that means it seems red to me. Is it really red you want to ask. I have no idea what that question could mean.

c matt:

A true atheist would have to agree that the only rule to live by is "don't get caught". Anything else would be irrational.

Um, no we wouldn't. Care to explain why you think atheism necessarily implies that?

Um, no we wouldn't. Care to explain why you think atheism necessarily implies that?

You don't understand because you still cling to religion-inspired morality. You've obviously never experienced that moment of truth where you reject God and embrace the moral abyss that rises up to replace God when you realize that there are no natural laws of morality and that morality is only now an argument between you and everyone around you.

"A desire for immortality is a natural consequence of being a sentient being who has grasped the meaning of death."

Don't you mean to say "who has realized they are going to die" or something to that effect? If the atheist is correct, then death has no meaning does it?

Mike T:

You don't understand because you still cling to religion-inspired morality. You've obviously never experienced that moment of truth where you reject God and embrace the moral abyss that rises up to replace God when you realize that there are no natural laws of morality and that morality is only now an argument between you and everyone around you.

And you know this... how?

I don't mean to be overly sarcastic here, but if you've perfected a way to read minds over long distances on the basis of a handful of blog posts, then I suspect you could find a far more lucrative use for that talent than winning arguments on a message board.

Andrew,
You didn't prove Mike T. wrong by actually showing him how you arrived at some other moment of truth. So let's hear it. Give us the rationale for reason in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root; give us a rationale for morality in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root; give us a rationale for meaning in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root.

That some events seem to cause other events in some situations is an observation scientists make, it is not a necessary presupposition to do science.

It is interesting that you did not say "an observation scientists seem to make." But, according to the understandings of knowledge and reality that I think you are defending, the observing scientist is an event in the world as well, and his inferences about causal relationships are at least partially the result of (or the effect of) something external to his mind. What you are doing is privileging an event for which the "seems" disclaimer is not required. But why not extend your Humean skepticism to the entire intellectual project and include the scientist himself and all that he claims to know as a consequence of his investigations of the world?

What I hope this exercise is doing--with the outstanding assistance of Ed Feser--is to show how much you, me, and everyone else rely on a cluster of background beliefs that we take for granted and would instantly reject if we subjected them to the same level of unrelenting skepticism that you subject the beliefs of theists. And yet, these background beliefs, ironically, make the most sense in a universe teeming with immaterial realities that the mind can know, such as minds, final causes, moral properties, etc.

Michael Bauman:

Give us the rationale for reason in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root; give us a rationale for morality in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root; give us a rationale for meaning in a world with mindless matter and the chance collocation of atoms at its root.

I honestly don't understand what you're asking for here. Perhaps you're using the word "rationale" in a way in which I'm not familiar? Otherwise, I'm afraid my answers are going to come off awfully glib -- something like, "we have reason, morality, and meaning because we are self-aware creatures." Why are we self-aware? Well, biologists and evolutionary psychologists (among others) are still working on that. I'm comfortable with the fact that there are still mysteries in the world -- it gives us something for which to strive.

I sense this is going to be an unsatisfactory answer, but I'm not really sure what you're driving at. Help me out here?

If the atheist is correct, then death has no meaning does it?

Actually, it is in the imaginary cartoon universe of the theist where life and death become meaningless. I will prove it to you, using math.

Suppose I live 50 years and you live 100, then the ratio of my life to yours is 50/100, or as a percentage, 50%. Now, suppose the implausible myths of Christianity are true, and you will exist for eternity in heaven after death. That gives us 100 years/infinity, or as a percentage, 0%. I think we would agree that a 0% life is meaningless. (More precisely, in the language of Newton's invention, the limit of 1/n as n approaches infinity is zero.)

For me on the other hand, the ratio of my life is 50 years compared to non-existence, or 50/0, which is infinite. (Or using calculus, the limit of 1/n as n approaches zero is infinity.) So my life is infinitely meaningful.

So, for the theist, life is meaningless, while for the atheist, life is infinitely meaningful.

QED*

*All of this is pure non-sense, as it fails at the empirical imperative, as well as commits a blatant reification and more subtle equivocation. Pure math and pure philosophical reasoning are fun games, but that's all they are, games. We should not take games, or philosophy, too seriously.


teeming with immaterial realities

Oy vey, what a muddle. Anyone have the time to unpack all that baggage?

"Oy vey, what a muddle. Anyone have the time to unpack all that baggage?"

This, coming from a guy who uses "math," an immaterial reality if there ever was one.

I've been looking for the number 3 all my life. Where can I find it, and under what microscope or by what telescope should I look? Is it in a test-tube, under a rock, in a fossil, snuggled away behind Pluto? While you're at it, why don't you stop by the metaphysics store and pick me up some some "aboutness," a box of Ockham's razors, a "one ought to be rational," and two laws of logic. You may have to ask a Thomist clerk to help you, since none of these things can be seen, ever.

Bocce:

Whoever told you that Christianity is just about getting into heaven? It's mostly about getting heaven into you. That's the good news. Who would want to pass that up?

Trade in your American fundamentalist comic book and pick up some Chesterton, Lewis, or, in the words of Bob Dylan, that "Italian poet from the 13th century."

Frank

Okay, I can't pass this up:

"Blatant reification"?

As opposed to what, accidental reification, what-the-f**k was I thinking reification, or I-was-just-minding-my-own-business-and-poof-there-it-was reification?

Resist the temptation to adjectivize every belief you consider evil.

In the unforgettable words of Sergeant Hulka:

Lighten up, Francis.

since none of these things can be seen, ever.

Oh yea of little faith. All those things, including the concept of '3', are neurons firing in patterns, and hence material. We are doing some amazing things with neuro-imaging. Perhaps one day we will be able to point to a "sense of humor" in the brain. Who knows what the future holds?

As opposed to what, accidental reification

Yes, that is it exactly. Sometimes people accidentally commit a reification fallacy. I treated an abstract concept, infinity, as if it were concrete, intentionally reasoning fallaciously.

Andrew T: **More information doesn't make things "coercive" -- it just makes our choices better informed.**

With your average question that occurs on the day-to-day level this is true. But when you're dealing with a question the answer to which exerts a rational or moral claim on one, the situation is different. The question of 'coercive' knowledge related to God is more along the lines of the existence of gravity rather than what beer to drink. You can believe, if you want to, that despite the existence of gravity, jumping off the Space Needle won't cause your death. But if it can be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that it will, it becomes irrational for you to continue believing otherwise. In that sense the knowledge is coercive, because if you choose to act contrary to it, you will be acting irrationally. There is a sense in which gravity "forces" you or compels you to believe in it. God, on the other hand, does not compel belief of this sort.

"including the concept of '3', are neurons firing in patterns"

The concept of "neurons firing in patterns" is itself merely "neurons firing in patterns"? Hmmm!

But there goes your "meaning of life argument" based on math, since we can now just dismiss it as a bunch neurons firing in your brain. Most of us thought that you were appealing to universal truths with which we have direct awareness. Silly us. It was just your neurons all along. And when your neurons die, so will the number 3, apparently.

Are the laws of logic just neurons as well? If so, then so are goodness, truth, and beauty. They are not out there in things or propositions, but in us and a consequence of physical events internal to organisms (which, of course, is an observation of my neurons, which means you can dismiss this as well). But in that case, please do not bring up the problem of evil (just neurons), bad theists (just neurons), elegant arguments (just neurons), or even Ockham's razor (just neurons).


Bocce: "All those things, including the concept of '3', are neurons firing in patterns, and hence material."

Your response to this is dead on, Dr. Beckwith. As Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon put it:

"If physics is the only area of cognitive meaning, then all meaning is physical, including the very proposition that all meaning is physical. All thought is simply a physical exercise, which means that thought itself must follow physical laws. And since physical laws are determining laws, all knowledge is necessarily determined; therefore, there can be no certainty about the truth value of any proposition whatever, even the proposition that makes this assertion."

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=14-07-028-f

Frank,

take a deep breath. My math argument was a joke. I thought that was obvious.

And when your neurons die, so will the number 3, apparently

A universe devoid of brains would be devoid of concepts.

there can be no certainty about the truth value of any proposition whatever, even the proposition that makes this assertion

Word. Life is a paradox, no? Deal with it.

You boys have a fetish for certainty. I am not so afflicted.

"A universe devoid of brains would be devoid of concepts."

That's only if the #3 is only a concept that the only minds that exist are brains.

"You boys have a fetish for certainty. I am not so afflicted."

Ignore him. It's just the neurons talking, of which he is most certain.


Ignore him. It's just the neurons talking, of which he is most certain.

That's what I was looking for! I declare victory, and will leave you in peace.

Andrew,
By "rationale," I mean "give me a metaphysical or theological justification for your invocation of things like reason, morality and meaning." That is, root them properly in your view of the universe.

In other words, it makes all the difference in the world whether we start from "mind comes from matter" (secularism) or "matter comes from mind" (theism). If mindless matter is at the core of all reality, as your worldview proposes, then you have a universe of one sort -- a universe in which mind (and all that it invents) is merely a temporary epiphemonenon that besports itself for a while upon the face of mindless matter and then is gone forever -- nihilism -- or, as the theistic worldview proposes, you have a universe in which mind itself gives rise to matter, gives rise to a universe in which reason, righteousness and meaning actually make sense, are actually at home in the world, and not alien to it.

In a secularist worldview, reason, morality and meaning are made up things -- fictions, inventions -- not things we discovered in the real world, but things we invented that the real world did not supply. In a God-less world, they are not things you can get from the world; they are only things you can impose upon the world: ad hoc morality, ad hoc meaning, ad hoc reason. In the end,they, and we, and all we concoct, come to nothing. But for some reason, many contemporary folks want to be free from God and still have a universe with meaning, goodness and rationality -- nihilism and meaning, nihilism and reason nihilism and moral absolutes. But they don't go together.

Or, if that is unclear, and if you'll permit me to recommend an outside source, then I'd simply say take a look at CS Lewis' book Miracles, the third chapter, in which he shows at length how a universe without God cannot give rise to the things to which you wish to appeal.

In a secularist worldview, reason, morality and meaning are made up things -- fictions, inventions

Wow. You are so confused, you aren't even wrong. Google emergentism. Not that emergentsm is necessarily correct, but it exposes your false dichotomy.

But even if secularism did lead to nihilism, that would not make a secular worldview wrong. That's called an argument from final consequences, and is fallacious.

Good grief, Bocce, don't you get it? No one is making the dopey argument you think they are. You completely miss the point.

Of course it doesn't mean that secularism is false. It does mean that secualrists can't invoke reason, meaning, or goodness.

So don't. Those things don't belong in a secularist worldview. They're stolen concepts.

Bocce,

Not that Mr. Bauman needs my help but...

It seems to me that he is arguing that the secular view cannot produce meaning. I don't see that he's making a direct demonstration of its wrongness on account of the fact that it produces meaninglessness. If he did, perhaps he'd be guilty of the fallacy of argument from final consequences, although that is not always a fallacy in every instance of its use--it depends on what one is trying to prove. If Andrew thinks you can have meaning without God, and Bauman doesn't, then Bauman is going to argue "from consequences" since it is the consequences (whether or not there is meaning without God) that are under discussion. You've created a straw man by putting words in Bauman's mouth ("wrong"). You shouldn't do that, since folks here will recognize it right off. And you'll look like either an inattentive reader, or a dishonest interlocutor. Otherwise, what do you think of this argument:

1. If God does not exist, then the world does not have meaning.
2. The world does not not have meaning.
3. Therefore, God does not not exist (1,2 MT).
4. God exists (3 DN)

Looks valid to me. You might like to dispute premises 1 and 2, but there's no logical fallacy such as you accuse Bauman of. I'd have to ask Mr. Bauman himself, but in a 'round about way he might have been arguing more or less thus. All those premises need a variety of supports, of course. I think that's what the thread has come to be about. Its blog chat, and you are getting overly pedantic and contentious, and not contributing much, if I may say so.

Go ahead, Bocce, show me the metaphysical basis of reason, morality and meaning in a secularist universe. I'm waiting. Actually make your case. But up until now you have not. You have repeatedly evaded the points made against you, as when Beckwith tied you up in the contradictions of your own viewpoint and all you did in response was declare victory. You have repeatedly misconstrued them. Your opponents are not saying or arguing the things you think they are. In other words, you don't seem to recognize when you've been roundly refuted.

You cannot pull morality, meaning and reason out of a hat. For example, you can't simply invent the rules of logic free hand. But go ahead, try. Make your case. Give us the metaphysical justification for reason, morality and meaning in a God-less universe.

Rob G:

With your average question that occurs on the day-to-day level this is true. But when you're dealing with a question the answer to which exerts a rational or moral claim on one, the situation is different. The question of 'coercive' knowledge related to God is more along the lines of the existence of gravity rather than what beer to drink. You can believe, if you want to, that despite the existence of gravity, jumping off the Space Needle won't cause your death. But if it can be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that it will, it becomes irrational for you to continue believing otherwise. In that sense the knowledge is coercive, because if you choose to act contrary to it, you will be acting irrationally. There is a sense in which gravity "forces" you or compels you to believe in it. God, on the other hand, does not compel belief of this sort.

This seems to me to merely be the argument that God proving the brute fact of his existence would deprive us of the "free will" to disregard that fact. That seems pretty noncontroversial; for example, I am also deprived of the "free will" to believe that 3 = 8. That doesn't seem to have moral consequences, so again, I'm confused as to why God is constrained from providing this sort of evidence.

Michael Bauman:

By "rationale," I mean "give me a metaphysical or theological justification for your invocation of things like reason, morality and meaning." That is, root them properly in your view of the universe.

I still am afraid I don't understand. I think this stems from some assumptions you're drawing about atheists in general (and about me in particular) that are not necessarily true. So what I'm going to try and do here is clarify them in this response. Let me know if this helps.

First, I'm not really sure that I have a comprehensive "worldview." I think that you and I probably share enough of a worldview -- that our brains process sensory inputs in a logical way, for example -- for us to communicate. And so when I respond to an argument, I do so from that shared basis of communication, or I'll try to identify the assumptions I'm making. Feel free to call me out if I forget to do so; otherwise, we'll be two ships passing in the night.

But I don't know that I have a larger, confident, affirmative postulate about Ultimate Reality. I'm comfortable with the fact that some of my knowledge is tentative. In particular, I would not describe myself as affirmatively asserting ontological (or epistemological, if you'd prefer) naturalism, although I am certainly a procedural naturalist when it comes to science. I do -- as you may have noticed -- have an affinity for Kant and his intellectual progeny, including Robert Nozick, and as such I would not rule out noumena a priori.

On the other hand, I do reject dualism on the basis of the empirical evidence -- if I crack open your skull and obliterate your brain, I obliterate your mind with it; if I tweak your brain, I can tweak your mind as well. I don't think any of the things you assert in your post follow from that premise, though.

In other words, it makes all the difference in the world whether we start from "mind comes from matter" (secularism) or "matter comes from mind" (theism).

I must have missed this portion of the Bible! In any event, this strikes me as simply wrong on both prongs: (a) one could be a nontheist of many different stripes and still believe in non-material things; and (b) there are plainly theists (and Christians, even) who reject Cartesian dualism.

P.S. What's your beef against matter, anyway? I happen to be quite a fan of it!

If mindless matter is at the core of all reality, as your worldview proposes,

Not my assumption.

then you have a universe of one sort -- a universe in which mind (and all that it invents) is merely a temporary epiphemonenon that besports itself for a while upon the face of mindless matter and then is gone forever -- nihilism --

Wow. That's a lot of assumption packed into a single fragment. First, you're arguing that there are consequences to failing to draw the distinction between "mind" and "matter." But this assumes the argument you're trying to prove; namely, that there is a distinction to be drawn. So far, empirical science seems to suggest to the contrary.

Second, you argue that mind "besports itself upon the face of mindless matter." I don't think this accurately describes what the brain does.

Third, you argue that if minds are transient, nihilism is the natural result. While I suppose one could make that argument, as of yet you have not, and I certainly don't think you can assert it as a premise.

or, as the theistic worldview proposes, you have a universe in which mind itself gives rise to matter, gives rise to a universe in which reason, righteousness and meaning actually make sense, are actually at home in the world, and not alien to it.

Again, you're assuming what you ought to be proving. Why do "reason, righteousness, and meaning" necessarily follow from the theistic worldview?

In a secularist worldview, reason, morality and meaning are made up things -- fictions, inventions -- not things we discovered in the real world, but things we invented that the real world did not supply.

Again, not necessarily so. To use just one example, Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena suggests otherwise.

(And yes, I am aware that Kant himself is some sort of theist, but his argument is entirely secular.)

In a God-less world, they are not things you can get from the world; they are only things you can impose upon the world: ad hoc morality, ad hoc meaning, ad hoc reason.

Again, that's one view, but I would suggest it is not even the dominant view among secularists.

----------

Let me ask it this way: in your view, if there were no God, would 7 + 5 still equal 12, or could it randomly equal 2 billion, or zero, or pink unicorns, or the letter Q?

Michael,

I just had an epiphany, from reading your posts and Beckwith's. You are skeptical of bottom-up self-organization. You don't believe that consciousless neurons firing in patterns could give rise to love or joy or whatever abstraction we choose. You don't believe that mindless atoms can organize into stars and planets and plankton.

So I started wondering why that is. Why are Beckwith and Bauman skeptical? And I came up with a hypothesis, that may be wrong, but I think it has enough merit to explore.

You trust your intuition.

All of that science stuff is counter-intuitive, and because you have such a high regard and trust in your intuition, you dismiss it.

But, 300 years of rigorous inter-subjective accumulated science has demonstrated that our intuitions are almost always dead wrong.
So, let go of your intuition. Intuition is an incompetent epistemic guide.

But don't take my word for it, not that you would in a million years.

Take five minutes, it's beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE

It's even more beautiful when you understand it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)

Now grab your iPod and headphones and take 50 minutes in a dark room:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/18

We can have meaning, and beauty, and joy, and purpose - that all emerge from meaningless matter in motion. It's a beautiful thing.

Andrew,
You're misreading my argument almost entirely, for which I take full responsibility. So, I politely suggest you turn to Lewis' rendition of it in chapter 3 of his book Miracles and take it from there. Because I have apparently been unclear, you have wasted a good deal of time and effort responding to an argument I was not making. In that case, mea culpa.

It will save us talking past each other if I simply refer you beyond this thread to a fuller and clearer account of what's actually being put forth.

Cheers.

And I came up with a hypothesis, that may be wrong, but I think it has enough merit to explore.

Does intuition play any roll in forming hypotheses?

let go of your intuition

You first. I'll watch, and see if it's safe to follow suit. I just have a feeling you aren't giving good advice. I don't know why, just a hunch I guess. I think it's got something to do with the number of times I've watched Star Wars. Yoda and Obi-Wan always telling me to trust my feelings. It starts to sink in after a while.

Sorry, Bocc. You aren't actually following a single argument made to you. You can't tell the difference between intuition and deduction.

I haven't seen anybody swing and miss that often since Dave Kingman retired.

So, I'm done. It's got something to do with Matthew 7:6.


Sorry, Bocc. You aren't actually following a single argument made to you.

That is false. My previous post was an explicit response to your assertion:

In a God-less world, they are not things you can get from the world; they are only things you can impose upon the world: ad hoc morality, ad hoc meaning, ad hoc reason.

Emergence is not something I can explain in a few sentences. If you really have a desire to understand, check out the links I gave you. Purpose can, and does, emerge from purposelessness. It is extremely counter-intuitive, but the evidence for the phenomenon is overwhelming.

Give us the metaphysical justification for reason, morality and meaning in a God-less universe.

Sure thing, as soon as you tell me the Laws of Metaphysics. Why would I offer something so weak and useless as a metaphysical argument when I have strong and useful empirical science?

If the Emergence podcast peaked your interest, I would next recommend Steve Grand's brilliant book, Creation - Life and How to Make It.

**I am also deprived of the "free will" to believe that 3 = 8. That doesn't seem to have moral consequences**

Try telling that to the hardware store owner who demands $8.00 for his hammer, when you only want to give him three, because the two are equal.


"Does intuition play any roll in forming hypotheses?"

Byronicman, I'm sure, knows the correct answer to his own question.

Bocce, on the other hand, needs to read Michael Polanyi.

Bocce, on the other hand, needs to read Michael Polanyi.

That would confuse him even more. I think what he needs is a college level philosophy class or two (Bocce, if you live in the Pasadena CA area, I recommend Dr. Feser's classes)--that and to unplug himself from the internet while he takes those classes. When someone smugly asks to be told "the laws of metaphysics," I know I'm in a fruitless argument. "So tell me, what is this alphabet of which you speak?"

Rob G:

**I am also deprived of the "free will" to believe that 3 = 8. That doesn't seem to have moral consequences**

Try telling that to the hardware store owner who demands $8.00 for his hammer, when you only want to give him three, because the two are equal.

No, you misunderstand. I'm not saying that 3=8 would not have consequences. I'm saying that being deprived of the "free will" to believe that 3=8 does not morally restrain my free will.

Michael: I will check out the argument.

I haven't seen anybody swing and miss that often since Dave Kingman retired.

Michael, thanks for the great laugh and reviving some sweet memories. Kingman's home runs and strikeouts were equally majestic, though the latter came far more frequently.

Glad to do it, Kevin.

I always enjoyed watching Dave Kingman play, even though I was, and remain, an ardent Phillies fan. Baseball reached its zenith in 1980, much like America (wink).

When someone smugly asks to be told "the laws of metaphysics," I know I'm in a fruitless argument. "So tell me, what is this alphabet of which you speak?"

We have a commonly agreed upon alphabet, which makes it a useful tool.

On the other hand, there are no commonly agreed upon rules or restrictions with metaphysics. That is why metaphysics is so impotent, and physics is so potent. Because metaphysics is so vague and nebulous, anything that you get from using it will be vague and nebulous as well. The commonly agreed upon and verifiable laws of physics are solid and stable. Physics provides solid and stable results and predictions.

You folks are free to continue using your vague, nebulous, unreliable, impotent method all you want. Just don't expect to be taken seriously.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post discussing the extent to which empirical science does and does not rest on a well-agreed-upon language, formalism versus interpretation, etc. As with anything the length of a blog post it merely touches on a few key issues, of course.

But I always find it hysterical when raving lunatics like Bocce, thinking themselves at the epicenter of well founded rationality, trumpet an unreasoned "metaphysics, schmetaphysics!" with eyes and ears firmly shut. And expect to be taken seriously.

raving lunatics like Bocce, thinking themselves at the epicenter of well founded rationality

Well aware of my propensity for foolishness and cognitive bias, I do my best to to stay ever vigilant and avoid cognitive errors as best I can. One method I have found fruitful is to study the cognitive psychology literature as well as investigate the neuroscience of belief formation and maintenance. Here are the books I have found helpful in this regard:

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

Of these, the first and last listed are the best, I think. Any others in this genre I would love to hear about. Thanks.

You folks are free to continue using your vague, nebulous, unreliable, impotent method all you want. Just don't expect to be taken seriously.

On this site, you are the one who isn't being taken seriously. No one here thinks you have even the slightest idea what you are talking about.

On the other hand, there are no commonly agreed upon rules or restrictions with metaphysics.

Sure there are. You use them and benefit from them everyday, and you are using them even as you write in these posts. Your ignorance of that fact, and your arrogance in spite of your ignorance, is the source of your confusion. You are a boy scout, heaving pebbles at a tank. No one posting here thinks of you as a peer. You don't even understand the ideas you think you are advancing, much less do you understand that what you are arguing against, and so your posts don't even count as arguments proper, but (as another poster has said) petulant hand-waving. In short, you've wandered in to the wrong blog.

though I was, and remain, an ardent Phillies fan. Baseball reached its zenith in 1980,

Two words. Bake. McBride.

Bake McBride, indeed.

Once or twice a year, Byronicman, I still watch my recordings of the playoffs with Houston and the Series with KC. One of my favorite plays of all time (besides Romeo and Juliet) was Rose catching the pop up that bounced out of Boone's glove.

Geez, that was fun.
Luzinski, Bowa, Schmidt, Maddox, McBride, Carlton, rose, Boone etc.

I got a bit of the same feeling watching this year's series -- but just bit. Rollins and Victorino are old style ball players, and I like that.

I was a wee lad in '80, my first experience of the wonder that is the MLB World Series, and so I remember all those big names. I never turned into a baseball junkie, but I consider watching the yearly Series a patriotic duty, and an enjoyable one.

This is too fun. Bocce's bibliography:

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
(except the reason in this book)

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking
(except if you think like the author of this book)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(like your neurons, which come to think of it, produced this book)

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
(doesn't matter; it's the damn neurons)

A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
(except when you agree with this book)

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
(of which we are certain)

Well aware of my propensity for foolishness and cognitive bias, I do my best to to stay ever vigilant and avoid cognitive errors as best I can. Here are the books I have found helpful in this regard:

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

Of these, the first and last listed are the best, I think. Any others in this genre I would love to hear about. Thanks.


Are you so moronic and possess such overwhelming fear of your own idiocy so much so that you actually require of yourself mandatory scheduled reading of such literature in order to control this behavioral handicap of yours?

Based on your own statement, I would advise strongly that you seek professional medical help to remedy the gravity of your mental deficiencies before innocent people suffer potential harm on account of your person, seeing that you yourself had admitted you are not in full control of your own mental faculties and an incapacity for reason and rational behaviour.

I can't help it, the temptation to snark is too much.

Return to Rome: People living in glass houses should throw stones, i.e. how to be mistaken for so long but not this time.

"Are you so moronic and possess such overwhelming fear of your own idiocy so much so that you actually require of yourself mandatory scheduled reading of such literature in order to control this behavioral handicap of yours?"

Oh, come on. People make mistakes. You and I make mistakes. In fact, you and I probably have beliefs that contradict other beliefs of ours. Moreover, people make cognitive mistakes in predictable ways. It's good to know those ways so you can increase the likelihood that you'll avoid making them. (I'd go even farther and so that people make moral mistakes in predictable ways, and it's good to know what kind of situations increase the likelihood of those, so as to avoid those situations.)

I take it that you're just snarking on Bocce because he's a doof.

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