Posted by Anthony on January 30, 2009
I have been hugely entertained by reading an extended forum discussion responding to my post yesterday which was a paraphrase of several conversations I’ve had in the last few months. As one might expect, it was immediately objected that my protrayal was mere strawman and does not represent the ‘real atheist’ position. This begs a very interesting question: isn’t any argument put forward by an atheist a real atheistic position? It begs another question: if I did not represent the real atheistic position, why do so many atheists espouse it, engage in the same kind of tactics, and why did virtually every member of that discussion leap to corroborate exactly what I was detailing?
Indeed, virtually every aspect of my ‘paraphrase’ was reflected in the answers that spewed forth, from the hypersensitivity to perceived insults “lay off the ridicule” “that’s just arrogance” while barbs are flying from their own side “are you just some smart a– 12 year old kid who got a certificate in your local church “Defense of Christianity” Sunday School Class?” to the random ‘catch-all’ argument that proves atheism right, the smug reference to ‘ancient books’ such as “You base your thought process on a 1900+ year old set of desert scribblings.” Throw in the knee jerk attempt to force the theist to argue in the terms that the atheist himself is dictating, not the terms the theist is actually presenting, “what in the world does bible god have to do with the Big Bang?!? It is not in your bible, stop trying to hijack the BB theory and pretend that your god caused it.” Let’s not forget the constant ‘rebuttals’ that in fact we ‘don’t know’ and ‘can’t know’ from people who apparently are atheists, and not agnostics.
All these are variations of my paraphrasing.
A certain fellow at the beginning complains, “Except that on this forum, the “them” aren’t straw-men who just insult you and give one word answers while you give eloquent paragraphs.”
Now of course I wasn’t singling out this forum before I began. He is responding to another theist’s accusation that my paraphrase was apt. However, his complaint has little merit if this thread was representative. The only difference are the ‘one word answers’ but that is not a substantial difference because the ‘50 word answers’ communicate the exact same sentiments as the one word answers. I could cite example after example. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on January 29, 2009
I recently had a conversation with some gents that I thought I would paraphrase for my blog. I think I’ve had the same kind of conversation a dozen times in the last three months. I have combined all the conversations into one paraphrase. The Internet is filled with conversations like this. If you have got one feel free to share. Enjoy.
Them: We believe science is the only way to learn about the world and religion is just faith-mongering superstition. There is no scientific basis for believing in the existence of God. Belief is just irrationalism. I know what you’re going to say. That there had to be something that has always existed. Why not the universe?
Me: Well, science says that the universe had a beginning. So I guess the universe can’t be the thing that has always existed. Surely that means we can explore other options.
Them: Did I say that I accepted that something has always existed?
Me: No. Do you?
Them: No.
Me: So something can come from nothing?
Them: No, that’s now what I’m saying.
Me: Well, if it isn’t the case that something has always existed then there is only one alternative, and that is that you posit that something can come from nothing.
Them: What I am saying is that we can’t know which is true, whether something has always existed or if something can come from nothing.
Me: Well, for which do you have evidence for?
Them: Evidence?
Me: Well, you’re claiming the high road of science so obviously you must be willing to accept, provisionally at least, where the evidence takes you.
Them: But we can’t know which. That’s my point.
Me: So you should be a principled agnostic, then.
Them: I’m not, I’m an atheist.
Me: But if you’re saying you can’t know then agnosticism is the proper answer.
Them: But I’m an atheist.
Me: lol, whatever. Moving on. The evidence would seem to suggest that the universe hasn’t always existed. It had a beginning. Regardless of the fact that you can imagine scenarios by which the universe could regress infinitely, it would seem that science tells us there is a hard limit on speculations about what was ‘before.’
Them: But if everything requires a cause then that would include God.
Me: Who said everything requires a cause? The whole point of our conversation to this point has been on the general agreement that something has always existed- without a cause. So you are misrespresenting the argument. The argument is really, best known through William L. Craig, is that everything with a beginning has a cause. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on January 28, 2009
Athanatos Christian Ministries is hosting a writing contest designed to encourage Christians of all ages to find creative ways to communicate the Christian worldview through fiction. The website is http://www.christianwritingcontest.com/. Cash prizes total more than $2,000. The deadline is May 15th, 2009 and each submission costs $10.
Posted by Anthony on January 26, 2009
NBC’s The Last Templar has concluded just now. Sort of a The Da Vinci Code warmed over and softened up to be more palatable to believers, I have to confess I didn’t really enjoy the show. I have no idea how close the movie resembles the book it is derived from, so I’m going to stick the blame on the writers of the show. 
I’m sure they thought that they were doing us all a favor, dangling this document that could disprove Christianity in front of our noses only to have it destroyed before anyone could read it: thus preserving faith.
But you did me no favors, The Last Templar. The idea that faith is important in its own right quite apart from the facts and evidence is an understanding of ‘faith’ common to liberal believers and a certain brand of fundamentalists. Both extremes have in common this idea that faith is by definition indifferent to facts. That is why you can have scholars like John Dominic Crossan running around insisting that they, too, are Christians, even though they have done all in their power to strip Christianity from any claim to actual truth. And why not? A mystical belief in God and a view of all humans as God’s children is all that is required, right? This perspective is what fuels the skeptic’s accusation that ‘faith’ is not merely belief in absence of the facts, but even in spite of the facts.
Near the end, when Tess (the skeptic turned ‘believer’) is confronted by Bill (Richard Dawkins at age 70) I almost thought the show was going to break some new ground. Bill is convinced that the ‘Gospel of Yeshua’ (that’s Jesus, friends) will give Jesus’ account and confirm that he was only a man, was ever only a man. Tess retorts something to the effect, “How do you know if you haven’t even read it?”
Now that would have been something, because the common atheistic take is that any historical discovery will only serve to undermine Christianity. The truth is that discoveries continue to vindicate Christianity. ‘Discoveries’ like the ‘Gospel of Judas’ are trotted out with fanfare as bringing down Christianity but always after people have a look for themselves (if they look, that is) Christianity remains strong. No one seems to wonder what would happen if something popped up that destroyed atheism or gnosticism! Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on
There are days when I wish I didn’t keep abreast of the news. I learned today that Nancy Pelosi and the Dems are trying to pass funding for contraception in the stimulus bill that they are trying to get through Congress. Now, in theory this money would only go towards ‘family planning,’ ie, contraceptions, not abortions. However, we have to remember that for many people, abortion is a contraception. The clearest example of this is the belief that just because you wipe out a human embryo in the first couple of days after conception, you haven’t actually aborted the child.
That the Dems are looking to fund Planned Parenthood is no surprise to me. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. Actual funding for abortions is obviously imminent. After all, Obama moved quickly to fund them overseas.
This connection between the economy and children is one that is not often aired in public, however. The reasoning follows inevitably from the view that humans decide when life begins and when life is valued and when ‘quality of life’ is believed to be one of the chief criteria in the equation. And when you don’t believe in God and believe that the only important things in life are those already alive, as best managed by the omnipotent and omnipresent and omnibenevolent State, the primary ‘life’ you are worried about is our own. In other words, having too many people around diminishes your own quality of life. So if you can get rid of them, you should. Why not? You only answer to yourself. And if the others can’t defend themselves? All the better.
Today it is uncouth to point out how this reasoning has historically been extended. The idea that economic well being and family size is connected goes back a long time, well beyond even Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (under a different name). Back in the 1920s and 1930s, they were pushing eugenic programs and sterilization programs, and things of that sort, all with the goal of improving the quality of life for everyone else. This fell out of vogue because of that embarrasing application of the logic in the concentration camps and gulags but the reasoning still holds- and there are still people who believe it today.
Someone put the matter in troubling terms on the news today. They said, “Well, if it succeeds and the measure improves the economy, I guess we’ll know they were right.”
What the bloody H E double hockey sticks does it matter if the economy improves because of this? If the economy improves as measured by Planned Parenthood’s bottom line improving and however many more thousands murdered, who cares if it improves? This is like evaluating Hitler’s programs based on their effectiveness. Effectiveness doesn’t matter a lick to whether or not its right.
I have nothing against contraception if it doesn’t involve the slaughter of innocents. I don’t believe that taxpayers should fund it, period, even if it will ‘reduce the costs to the state.’ If you liberals want to hand out condoms, go ahead and spend your own d*mn money to do so. But we are all plain stupid if we don’t think that this measure will not result in more abortions- albeit indirectly- at taxpayer expense. And maybe the point is moot, for direct tax payer subsidized abortions is imminent, anyway.
This, of course, is what Obama meant when he talked about reducing abortions, you see. Isn’t it great to stand on such common ground?
Posted by Anthony on January 23, 2009
Hat tip to Eric Redmond for posting this article on Facebook from John Piper’s website. Here is what was quoted from Lincoln:
You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. (“Fragments: On Slavery“)
This ties into a conversation I’m having with a friend about whether or not the abortion issue is derived from inherent principles of democracy and/or capitalism or because we haven’t actually held true to our founding principles.
But I don’t wish to dwell on that here. The source article points out that this reasoning applies equally to abortion. It certainly does. We would have to pull out the implications, but for example we might say in light of the evolutionary outlook possessed by so many today,
Ah, but you retort, it is really a matter of development, and the unborn are in an earlier stage of development then you. Be wary, at any moment you will encounter someone in a later stage of development then you. By this rule, you just be the play thing of the first man you come across older than you.
Not at all, you say. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on January 22, 2009
Astute, yet snarky readers, will fix on this title and surmise from the start that I’ve got it all wrong. I’ve done it backwards. The Euthyphro Dilemma has nothing to do with Man and everything to do with God or the gods. “He’s got it wrong!” Nonsense. I am a professional apologist. I always know what I’m doing.
But seriously, it is not uncommon to hear the Euthyphro dilemma issue forth from atheists and skeptics. There is always a smug satisfaction latent in their tone of typing as the invoke it, confident they’ve laid an unanswerable doozy in your lap.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to concede that it is indeed an unanswerable doozy. What that proves exactly, I don’t know. The problem is that if it is in fact an unanswerable doozy, and especially if you then conclude that it shows theism to be untenable and incoherent, the problem doesn’t go away. What has happened in that case is that the argument is taken from the now proved non-existent deity of your choice and plopped down into the laps of individual humans.
The attempt is frequently made to try to fight off the charge that moral relativism is open season by invoking concepts like the ‘collective’ and ’social contracts.’ This accomplishes nothing. In the end, as you sit there reading this entry, whether or not you will behave in this way or that depends on your own conceptions of what are good, decent, and right. The idea of a ’social contract’ is just another one of your conceptions. So, are the things you choose good, decent, and right because you choose them or do you choose them because they are good, decent and right?
The Euthyphro Dilemma returns with a vengeance. Now, instead of the problem being distilled into a single entity, putatively non-contingent, transcendent, immanent, eternal, etc, it is diffused out over the billions of little gods wandering around in their little neck of the wasteland. Here the secular humanist’s attitude becomes twisted and warped. They are the first to make the argument that humans believe that God cares about them out of sheer arrogance, as if God would care about our petty affairs, yet here is an arrogance that far exceeds that, by far. For if there is no God then there is only we ‘gods’ and the Euthyphro Dilemma proves that we don’t exist. I guess.
I am not so arrogant to believe that the sum of all moral truth is determined and dictated by my existential experience of reality. Read the rest of the entry… »
