Posted by Anthony on September 8, 2009
I’ve been chewing on this for a long time but a recent comment on one of my posts inspired me to finally post on it. The post was discussing some ’scholarly’ debate on “Gabriel’s Revelation.”
In the midst of the long comment, the gent said:
“ALL believe (sic) systems must be debunked when they claim their beliefs as fact”
There are several sentences like this, including one where he says there are “inherent frailties involved in trying to “prove the truth” of Christianity.” and adds, “It really applies to all belief systems. An honest search, perhaps lasting years as mine has (decades) will tend to inform that “Truth” is based on what a person’s convictions inform.” (emphasis mine)
Naturally, the commenter exempts himself from his own criticism. There is just one thing that he hopes that people (religionists) have: ” some humility when they preach and so we no longer have the fate of the world in the hands of true believing fanatics of any brand.”
From my experience dealing with secularists, ‘true believing fanatics’ is really a redundancy to them. A fanatic is, virtually by definition, someone who truly believes what they say they believe. Likewise, a ‘fundamentalist’ is anyone who believes what he reads in the Bible. ‘Humility’ in practice means, someone who doesn’t act on what they believe.
My response to the gent was brief:
Is your belief system a fact?
Clearly, if your belief is that all beliefs that claim to be fact must be debunked, then it is also true that this very belief that all beliefs must be debunked must be debunked. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on March 13, 2009
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” GK Chesterton
This post is inspired by some discussions about sin and the nature of God that are going on on my forum but also by my own introspection this Lenten season.
The question put to my atheist friend was “Are you claiming to be perfect?” Of course he denied it and embraced the notion that he was far from perfect. He seems to have a problem demanding with God demanding perfection and associating that demand with any kind of consequence. What I wanted to know is how he knew he wasn’t perfect if he didn’t have some notion, however foggy, of a standard of perfection. That gives you the gist of the conversation.
I was thinking to myself how hard it is to be ‘good’ and how easy it is to be ‘bad.’ For the introspective nonChristian, especially in today’s day and age where great pains are expended to eliminate both concepts, that nagging voice of conscience is still quite audible. Have you ever actually tried to follow through on everything your own conscience demands? Never mind the words of an old book or the collective pronouncements of a bunch of religious wingnuts, what about your own conscience? Try to be entirely good, even by your own standards, for just a day. I think you will discover that it is extraordinarily difficult. But not living up to your standard is easy. So easy. Doesn’t this require an explanation that covers all the facts? Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on October 13, 2008
In NBC Heroes tonight we had more religious overtures and a thorough playing out of moral equivocation across the board. The question basically asked was: “Are these men and women angels or are they monsters?” There seemed to be no way to distinguish ‘good’ guy from ‘bad’ guy and previous ‘good guys’ now seem to be monsters whereas ‘bad guys’ are becoming winsome.
In my opinion, this sort of moral confusion doesn’t bother me all that much. Really, the whole thing typifies what life could conceivably be like in a godless universe. True, it doesn’t match up with our own universe, but it is interesting to see some consistency for once. ‘Good’ is whatever the ‘heroes’ think is best at that particular moment, and by ‘best’ they have utilitarian standards, such that in one case Hiro slays his most loyal friend in cold blood ‘to save the world.’ (Of course we don’t believe Ando is actually dead). But really, apart from raw utility, in a godless universe what other kind of moral motivation can there be? I mean rationally.
A question is posed in this episode that ties in and I think is noteworthy. Nathan Petrelli wants to know who else could have bestowed all these powers except for God himself. By the end of the episode we know that mad scientists are the culprits and that his visions and sense of ‘divine purpose’ are the spinnings of another ‘hero’ that can control the mind. In this madcap universes of the heroes (and our own) the question is reasonable: just how would you know that it was God at work, that you were on the side of the angelic and not the monstrous?
On this vital point, the series has made it impossible, in theory and in principle, for any character in the show to be able to reliably discern the truly divine. Why? Because every criteria by which we might have judged the question is represented by an attribute by some ‘hero.’ They can walk on water, they can rise from the dead, they can travel through time… the ‘laws’ of nature have been reduced to chaos. As such, you wouldn’t be able to recognize when a truly transcendent entity had intervened within the system because his actions are essentially indistinguishable from the actions of the other characters.
This is a compelling paradox. Atheists cling to the ‘laws of nature’ on the belief that they will inexorably persist into the future and that the universe, our system, is self-explaining, but it is the very fact that the universe appears to be orderly and predictable which makes the detection of a miracle possible at all! In other words, an orderly universe is a pre-requisite if God exists and wanted to communicate with his creation. And we have such a universe.
That does not mean that there is a God, but it does mean that if he exists, he has made the universe in such a way that he could conceivably communicate with us. We might plausibly decide, then, that we should be looking for revelation. This revelation can be ascribed to God if, and only if, it is authenticated using means that are otherwise outside our capabilities- theoretical and actual.
And how many revelations in human history have such authentications? How many of those are historically substantiated? Things to ponder after another exciting night of NBC Heroes.
Posted by Anthony on August 20, 2008
When I was in college I made a nuisance of myself once by finding the slope of a vertical line (which, we are told, is ‘undefined.’) Impossible, you say. As did the math instructor. But I ‘found’ it by rotating the grid beneath the line and recalculated, for now, of course, the line wasn’t perfectly vertical anymore.
You may say that this was a cheap trick and doesn’t really find the slope of a ‘vertical’ line. You might say that we are required, by assumption, to take the graph in a certain way. I might reply that that is only an assumption and there is nothing that says I can’t rotate the grid back and forth as it suits my fancy. If I want to find the slope of the vertical line I can change the grid for a moment and then change it back. To this you might say that this is all well and good but the net result of such an approach is that you couldn’t trust any slope measurement and moreover, the whole program seems designed specifically to attack one particular mathematical proposition (ie, a vertical line has an undefined slope).
Such an exercise illustrates what anyone worth their salt already understands: most of what we believe is true rests on assumptions which can’t themselves be demonstrated. The data of our experience is set upon a particular ‘grid’ or ‘graph’ which by convention we accept and adopt.
In order to make any progress at all, we have to posit a certain ‘alignment’ of our graph. Here now is the problem: What if in the course of talking someone they begin by having the same alignment as you but halfway through they ‘rotate’ their grid – specifically to undermine a particular assertion you’ve just made- and then hoping you don’t notice, rotate it back? And how if you call them on this, they denied that they performed such a rotation and/or that there was never an agreed upon frame of reference in the first place?
Or, how if you don’t begin with the same ‘alignment’ in hand at all? Now the two people are setting their data in different frames of references and their calculations may be using the same formulas but the conclusions will be different? How could it be that either individual could say that the other is ‘wrong’ in their ‘calculations’?
This is precisely what transpires every day in debates between theists and atheists. Read the rest of the entry… »
