Catholic priest blames dualism for contraception and moral decay.

This is one of the stranger articles I’ve ran across lately.

Contraception: The Gateway to Moral Decay

It starts by accurately quoting some statistics from a Gallup poll.

At the top of Gallup’s list of 19 issues was contraception, of which 90 percent of Americans approve, followed by divorce at 69 percent and premarital sex at 66 percent. Others making the top ten were embryonic stem cell research (65%), childbirth outside of marriage (58%), same-sex unions (58%), euthanasia (52%) and abortion (42%).

No disagreement here except that I don’t feel these statistics are an example of how far American society has fallen the way the author clearly does. One caveat, he points to these statistics as evidence that people are moving away from his positions, but the numbers on abortion have stated fairly static in America since Roe v. Wade.

Of course he brings up all the buzz words and ideas, blames “relativism” and the “sexual revolution” then goes on to say this has been a developing trend for hundreds of years.

Of course, it goes back more than a few decades. As is often the case, what seems like a sudden explosion was really the logical outcome of hundreds of years of growing confusion about who we are as persons.

No surprise here, what does surprise me is where he places this, more distant, historical blame, and why.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French scientist and philosopher who many credit with helping to launch what later became known, somewhat ironically, as “the  Enlightenment”. Among his contributions to the way people thought was to place body and soul in opposition to each other, later leading to the idea that the human body could simply be seen as an object one could manipulate according to one’s desires. Simply put, you are your mind, and you have a body; as opposed to the traditional Christian view that you are both body and soul. In this, Descartes followed Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who believed that the goal of human knowledge should be to successfully achieve not stewardship of, but domination over, nature.”

I’ve certainly seen my fair share of derision launched at the enlightenment by conservative religious apologists, but his attack on Descartes seems particularly odd since he was both a Christian and a Catholic. He is at least as well known for an ontological argument for God’s existence as he is for his work in dualism. He also ties Descartes’ philosophy to Bacon’s even though the history of philosophy tends to place each of them in the opposing camps of rationalism and empiricism respectively.

However, what strikes me as most odd is blaming of Cartesian dualism on the sexual revolution. For one thing, people who reject theism generally also reject Cartesian dualism, in fact it would seem that materialists are required to reject Cartesian dualism. Furthermore, most Christians are dualists of some kind though they may not know or agree with Descartes particular formulation. It is technically possible to reject mind/body dualism and be a Christian but most, including Catholics, do believe that the soul or mind can and does separate from the body upon death, only to reunited with it in the second coming. This is why I find statements in this article like this so odd.

Books are still being written about what became known in philosophy as mind/body dualism, a view that is rejected by the Church. This dualistic view is assumed by most today, even though most don’t realize it or see how it informs even their most basic assumptions about reality, and other people.

It should also be noted that Descartes formulated his version of dualism to deal with what he saw as a fundamental epistemic problem so trying to connect this in some way to modern sexual mores in American is tenuous at best.

The contraceptive mentality, so identified by the Church, is a perfect example of what happens when we embrace dualism. Notice how the promoters of contraception promise a consequence-free control over our lives if we could just control our fertility with their drugs and devices. All the pleasure, none of that inconvenient fertility. My body is not me, exactly, it is an object for me to control for whatever reason I want; so sex is just about my pleasure, maybe someone else’s too. It is not necessarily about giving myself to the one I love with the possibility of creating new life as a result of that gift.

And later in the article

To go against our true nature is to fracture our natural sense of responsibility towards another. Does anyone not see this happening today?

While he has been critical of our use of Cartesian dualism to justify contraception, he is quick to make use of an even older argument to justify why we shouldn’t do this. For those who don’t recognize it, this is an example of a teleological argument, which can be found in both Plato and Aristotle. The argument can also be found being made in a famous example by the great philosopher “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think.
“First of all, he said to himself: ‘That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is that you’re a bee.’
“Then he thought another long time and said: ‘And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.’
“And then he got up and said: ‘And the only reason I know of for making honey is so I can eat it.’ So he began to climb the tree.”

Teleological arguments are usually a poor justification and represent lazy thinking. One of the reasons for this is demonstrated in the previous quote, people assume, not only that a final purpose exists, but that it matches whatever they personally happen value most, in the authors case this is clearly reproduction. I should also point out that we don’t need mind/body dualism to justify premarital or non-reproductive sex.

He closes with this.

Obviously, seriously bad ideas have seriously bad consequences. Father Paul Marx, the founder or Human Life International, affirmed the Church’s point in his autobiography based on his broad experience in traveling the world:

Having traveled and worked in 91 countries, I find no country where contraception has not led to abortion, to increasing fornication among the young, to divorce, and to all those other evils we see today that make up the international sex mess.

And it is quite a mess, isn’t it? The Gallup poll should serve as a wake up call. If we are serious about strengthening the family, promoting the well-being of children, reversing the growing number of broken marriages in our nation, ending abortion, upholding the dignity of the aged and ill, and promoting purity and chastity, then let’s be honest about where the moral breakdown begins.

I can’t speak for every country Marx has visited, but abortion rates have been falling in the U.S. steadily since the 1980’s. Promoting the well being and dignity of all people means that you have to actually listen to them, and consider the facts. Deciding for them, irrespective of their wishes, is not respect. Forcing an elderly person to suffer for months from a illness they cannot recover from, after they have requested they they be allowed to die, is not respecting them or their dignity. This article is clearly filled more with pejorative language and emotional manipulation than with factual information. With questions like this, like always, I highly recommend the use of well documented research like this paper, (conclusion quoted below)

Empirical study of the aggregate relationships between contraceptive use and induced abortion has to be limited to the few countries where reasonably reliable information exists on both. Despite this severe limitation, our review of the evidence provides ample illustration of the interaction between these factors. When fertility levels in a population are changing, the relationship between contraceptive use and abortion may take a variety of forms, frequently involving a simultaneous increase in both. When other factors—such as fertility—are held constant, however, a rise in contraceptive use or effectiveness invariably leads to a decline in induced abortion—and vice versa.

Sye Ten’s debate with Matt Dillahunty a.k.a. the dishonesty of presuppositional arguments.

I just got through watching the debate that Matt Dillahunty did with Sye Ten Bruggencate. During the debate I noticed engaging in a tactic that I’ve dealt with many times in the various conversations and debates I’ve had over they years with fundamentalists, particularly those with a presuppositional bent to their apologetics. The tactic is to respond to any criticism of, or request for an explanation of some apparent problem in, Christianity by asserting that their opponent cannot account for some facet of of reality, usually logic or objective ethical propositions, and since they cannot account for those things then the Christian simply refuses to address the point.

The adage I’ve sometimes heard Christians use to explain this is “sitting in God’s lap to slap his face.” That is, they assert that the only way to account for the very system you are using to criticize a principal in Christianity is Christianity itself. I’ve seen these approach a number of times, including a Calvinist preacher who used to post here regularly a couple of years ago.

This tactic contains two separate claims. The first claim is that Christianity, or in the softer version of the argument a belief in a particular kind of god, provides a reasonable framework to justify belief in things like logic and objective morality. It should be noted that even when the softer version is offered by theists they will then usually follow with an assertion that only in their religion (typically Christianity  or Islam)  will you find a version of god which meets the definitional requirements needed to justify this God’s ability to be the source of these things.

The second claim is that no other systems besides their religion, or again in a softer version, any system that lacks a belief in god cannot ever account for these things in a logically consistent manner. Though again, most will assert that only a very specific type of god meets this requirement. W.L. Craig likes to assert his 7 attributes here.

The biggest problem with both claims is that they are bare assertions. It is taken as obvious by presuppositionalists that god is both necessary and sufficient to explain the existence of things like objective values and logical absolutes. On the first point specifically I think it fails quite simply because of the euthyphro dilemma. If logic was sourced in god then it would not be objective, rather it would be inherently relative. That is, what makes logical absolutes like the law of identity meaningful is that they are axiomatic, they are necessarily true, not only in this universe, but in any possible universe irrespective of any mind that might observe things.

If god willed into existence logical absolutes then it would be possible that he could have willed into existence a universe where the law of identity was not true, if he could not do so then then god is not the origin of the concept. He is, at most, a messenger for a concept that exists irrespective of his existence, and thus the concept of god is no longer needed to account for those things. This is why I’ve often argued that those who argued that god is the source of both morality and reason are the ultimate relativists despite their public eschewing of that term. On top of that problem there is an inherent epistemic problem with theistic morality. How do I determine what god, a supernatural being which I have no direct access to, has happened to declare as truth. I am convinced that, if it is at all possible to determine objective values, both theists and atheists, must do so without appealing to God. It is simply impossible, by definition, to speak of objective meaning coming from a god.

As for the second claim it would be make this post unreasonably long for me to go into a full justification for objective ethics and moral obligations from a secular perspective. I recommend is that you read my blog regularly as I talk about this subject quite often. I also recommend keeping up with Dan Fincke’s series on Empowerment Ethics. I won’t ever claim to address the subject as exhaustively as he has. As far as logic being objective, I personally think logic is axiomatic in nature and requires no external justification. Sye might find this justification unsatisfactory, but I can’t possibly see how one could find “God said so” to be more satisfactory.

Now, people like Sye might say that this isn’t sufficient justification for belief in logic, but understand he is arguing that from his world view, and under his presuppositions God is the ONLY reasonable justification for these things. What they often fail to realize or address is that I am not only under no obligation to accept his presuppositions (he acknowledges they are presuppositions) but actually think those presuppositions are wrong. The interesting thing was that in the debate Sye pretty much acknowledged that he actively refuses to consider the issue from any other perspective because he thinks to even entertain other perspectives as a thought experiment to be sinful.

However, besides the rational problems, I have a secondary problem with this argument when used as a tactic to avoid responding to a question, as Sye used it in the debate. In my opinion It is fundamentally disingenuous. Even if I were to assume that they are correct in their assertions that their system is objective and mine is not, their refusal to respond to a critique makes no sense. This is because when the question is posed I’m asking them to account for the problem from THEIR world view, not mine. It doesn’t actually matter if I can account for morality or logic in my world view, even though I believe I can do those things, because I’m asking them to present a consistent account of things from their system. The obvious reason for this transparent avoidance tactic is that rarely have a logically or ethically consistent response to the critique.

As I pointed out earlier using god as a justification ethics or logic necessarily makes you a relativist. This becomes obvious when we step away from absolute presuppositionalists like Sye and look at apologists like W.L. Craig who actually DO attempt to answer criticism. In these cases we often end up with things like his blatant attempt to justify genocides in the old testament. Of course when he is called out on that, just like Sye, he falls back on presuppositional arguments by claiming no atheists can criticize because only theists have an objective source for ethics. This behavior is not only circular it is designed to prevent the person from ever actually considering the possibility they could be wrong. The only people whose criticisms they will actually consider or respond too are those who already agree with them on the very thing being questioned. We shouldn’t let people off the hook for this sort of behavior. If a person can’t be bothered to actually attempt to answer critiques of their views why should we engage them? One could ask in what sense are they even really engaging in an actual debate?

Is Atheism a Religion?

YouTube video where I discuss the theist argument that atheism is a religion. Let me know what you think, constructive feedback always welcome.

 

An atheist reads "Illogical atheism" Chapter 7 and 8

New video up in my review series for the book Illogical atheism.

An atheist reads "Illogical atheism" Chapter 5 and 6

New video up in my review series.

Re: Atheism: The New Fundamentalism?

A few days ago an article was posted on the Huffington Post by a liberal pastor who declared declared atheism to be the new fundamentalism. The article involves Pastor Roberts recounting a discussion she had with an atheist while out at lunch after the atheists family had done her a favor. The story starts with the atheist, named “Peter,” announcing to pastor that he is an atheist.

"Well, I'm not in the business of conversion," I said, "but for the record, I probably don't believe in the same God you don't believe in," I was hoping to avert hostility and maybe open a dialogue about our understanding of the divine, since he brought it up. He wasn't having it.

This is a common avoidance tactic by liberal theologians. She assumes that the person she is speaking to is only rejecting some “simplistic and fundamentalist” version of god. This seems rooted in two basic assumptions. First that liberal theology is extremely underappreciated and unknown, and second that their more liberal interpretation of god is so completely reasonable that no one would reject it.

It is clear she thinks this way from the following quote.

"You know," I sighed, "There have been so many developments in theology in the past fifty years, it's unfortunate they haven't reached the informed general public. It's like we're still talking about an outmoded version of God who requires checking your brain at the door, which few intelligent people are willing to do--a God who is like a puppet master pulling strings, controlling life, saying, 'A billion dollars for you, Mr. Romney, but nothing for this guy in Africa. That's nutty. That's not God, at least not the God I worship."

First off the notion that there have been “developments” in theology in the past fifty years is questionable. Yes, there have been new ideas, but the great majority of them have been the same sorts of ad hoc justifications that theologians have been coming up with for thousands of years. With one notable difference, traditional theology confined it’s rationalizations to certain parameters like conformity with some attempt at a reasonable biblical hermeneutic or at least church tradition. Liberal theologians found these limitations stifling and so have just taken to making up any explanation so long as it allows themselves to have their theological cake and eat it too.

To be fair, assuming that this story is told in an unbiased fashion, the atheist involved in this conversation didn’t seem to be very educated and seemed to repeat their claim to believe in science over and over. Though I’m not entirely convinced that pastor Roberts didn’t end up writing a skewed view of the conversation given the clear attempts at psychoanalyzing him. She often speaks about the “Peter’s” attitude and level of knowledge on various subjects though her justifications for these conclusions seemed slim. Take this quote:

"I already told you, I believe in science, not God," he interrupted. In his mind they were mutually exclusive. I stopped. I wanted to ask what he thought about science and spirituality, the new physics, Einstein and Bohm, who operated with a sense of order and wonder at the universe itself as a great mystery of divine proportions. I wanted to, but I didn't because I realized he didn't want to engage with the questions; he already knew the answers. He wasn't interested in a discussion. That's when I got it.

She makes huge sweeping generalizations about her audience and assumes he was not interested in discussion, and her statements about science sound like they belong in a Deepak Chopra book rather than in a legitimate conversation about actual science. She continues:

was talking to a fundamentalist. What I was saying threatened his very identity and construct of life. My lunch companion knew who God was, and he didn't believe in "him." It was a Santa sort of God, the kind that a small child believes in and then is disappointed by when he doesn't get a pony in his stocking. I remembered being told he was abused as a child. Clearly that God had failed him.

And she wonders why “Peter” sounded defensive and didn’t want to engage with questions? She belittles both his intellect and his personal experience, as well as demonstrating her rather bigoted views of unbelievers as unintelligent children angry because god didn’t get them a pony and she is surprised that he wasn’t interested in polite conversation? If I had an inkling that this was what someone thought of me I’d be tempted to be less than friendly too.

When did atheists become the new fundamentalists? I have known many atheists beginning with my wonderful dad, who insisted I not use the word "God" or pray at his funeral. But this new breed is different: closed-minded, entrenched, and bellicose, shouting and proselytizing their disbelief in the God of their fathers as determinedly and humorlessly as their forebears proselytized with such certainty for a definite, iron-clad system of punishments and rewards in a pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Why do these new atheists allow the Christian fundamentalists to define their reality? And why are they so angry?

I personally find many liberal theologians to be just as, if not more, obnoxious as the fundamentalist ones. I’ve had many less than stellar interactions with them. Sure, they tend not to hate homosexuals as much, but when it comes to discussions of things like meaning and ethics they have the same annoying tendency to believe that they are the only ones to have seriously examined these questions. It’s not just atheists who do not meet with their approval, because according to them the majority of religious believers aren’t doing it right either. Of course this all sounds suspiciously like the sort of narrow minded and rigid, fundamentalism Roberts was just criticizing, but that’s just silly right? So I say to pastor Roberts you might consider the possibility that not all atheists are allowing fundamentalists to define their reality. I, for one, know a good deal about your liberal version of god…”It” doesn’t exist either.

Book review of Illogical atheism: Chapter 4

I review chapter 4 of the book Illogical atheism, completing the first of the four books published in this series.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t understand ethics.

Huckabee is up in arms about the possibility that a brain dead patient may have their life support removed. According the the doctors the person died several weeks ago and the doctors have recommended removing life support since there is no chance of recovery once brain death has occurred.

He has this to say about it:

There is no such person who is disposable, one whose life has been deemed by others to be less than others and therefore expendable, I can’t share that.

The road that starts that way in deciding that some lives have less value and are unworthy of protection, that leads to a culture that tolerates the undeserved killing of over 55 million unborn children in this country. It leads to China’s birth policy that limits the number of children for a family and enforces forced abortion if they deviate from the state-determined ideal.

Now one could reasonably point out that this statement makes no sense in the context of this situation because the doctors aren’t disposing of a “person” since everything that made this girl a person, in any meaningful sense, disappeared once brain occurred.

However, I actually have another problem with this statement on a level that is more basic to the issue of human ethics. He implies that we cannot, as humans, ever treat one life as worth more than another. On the surface it seems somewhat reasonable, but let me provide a thought experiment. Let’s say that you come across two people and one of them is trying to murder the other, and further, the only way to stop the murder is to kill the one who is attempting to commit the murder. Would you consider it moral to kill in this circumstance? If the answer is yes then you have, in fact, taken the position that it is moral at least in some circumstances to value one life more than another. It’s one thing to argue that a particular instance of this is unwarranted for some reason but it is quite another to simply argue that we are never allowed to judge one life as preferential to another.

In truth, the only way to live consistently within the framework Huckabee proposes would be pacifism.  Which would make Huckabee, who has supported nearly every military engagement the U.S. has engaged in for the last several decades, massively hypocritical. Which brings us back to the original story. I imagine that even though the scientific information is clear on the matter of this persons brain death the family members probably still find making the choice to disconnect life support to be emotionally troubling. For Huckabee to interject his ill formed opinions, and create a public spectacle in the midst of this family's troubles in order to score points for his political agenda is unbelievably selfish and immoral.

Book review of Illogical atheism: Chapter 3

In this video I review chapter 3.

Book review of Illogical atheism: Chapter 2: Part 2

In this video I complete my review of chapter 2.

Book review of Illogical atheism: Chapter 2: Part 1

Next video in my review of the book Illogical Atheism.

Book review of Illogical atheism: Part 1.

I recently ran across a book on Amazon.com that I thought would be interesting to review. I’ve been toying around with the idea of doing some video blogging to mix things up a bit and also because it might attract new readers if I posted videos on YouTube. Anyway, here is the first video in this series.

Video games made me a better person.

There is a pernicious idea that has worked it’s way into American culture particularly in the in the religious right, but in many other places as well. It’s the idea that video games are harming kids. I’ve written on my blog before about my time as a fundamentalist Christian in college, but believe it or not I was a gamer even back then, and I was often told I shouldn’t be by religious friends that I had. I was told that it was a waste of time and I was told I should spend that time sharing the gospel with people and other similar arguments.

Further in culture at large video games are blamed for even worse things including several of the school shootings which have happed in the last several decades, and the recent shooting in D.C.. Teaching people to be amoral murder machines in virtual worlds where there are no consequences will turn them into such things in real life eventually so the argument goes.

Most people reading this are probably familiar with some of the arguments gamers have made about these issues. Poor reporting by the media was responsible for people associating a false causative relationship between the violence perpetuated by these youths and the video games they played. So most people reading this are probably on board with the idea that video games don’t actually make people less moral. However, I’m going to argue that my so called misspent youth playing video games actually made me a better person today than I would have been other wise.

To explain let me give an example from a game I played years ago, Suikoden III. It’s an eleven year old game, but just in case there is anyone out there who hasn’t played it and plans on doing so there will be some plot spoilers here. The game has an original way of telling it’s story, it had three main characters. The game was divided into five chapters, the first three of which had to be played through by each of the main characters. What makes this particularly interesting is that each of these characters are leaders in a country which is at war with the other two.

There is an iconic scene in this game that involves two of the main characters. Chris, a Zexen Knight, and Hugo, son of the Karaya Clan Chief. While playing through Chris’s story your government orders you to attack the Karaya clan’s village after an attack on Zexen that you later find out was wrongly attributed to the Karaya clan. While Chris is leading the attack she sees a suit of Zexen armor in the village that she recognizes as belonging to her father who disappeared without a trace years before. She assumes that the Karaya must have killed her father and taken the suit as a trophy and in a moment of anger orders her knights to exterminate the village. She is unable to carry out the order because Hugo shows up with some others and drives her knights away, though she does kill one of Hugo’s friends in the process of retreating. While playing through her story her actions, while perhaps extreme, make sense. She isn’t a bad person, but she has spent her whole life wondering what happened to her father and thinks she has found his murders. She also regrets her order and later becomes angry at those who call her a hero for attacking the village.

On the other hand while playing through the same sequence as Hugo, he returns to find his village in flames and a Zexen knight ordering the death of everyone in his village. From his perspective she looks downright evil. Further, you know from his story that the suit of armor belongs to someone who lives in the village. It turns out Chris’ father is actually alive and living in with the Karaya. It turns out he left Zexen to protect Chris from assassins that were perusing him.

 

I know, this plot probably seems super typical of high fantasy novels like Lord of the Ring and such, but this story confronted the young 20 something me with an idea that has stuck with me to this day. In this story both Chris and Hugo held a perspective about the events going on around them that made sense given their world view and the facts that they had available to them. It is undeniable that both of them, while right about some things, were incredibly wrong about others, yet from their perspective the choices they made seemed totally rational. Now some might say that you could talk about this idea in a movie or a book ,but I think this idea was actually far better communicated in game form than it could have been in those ways. See in a book or a movie you are passively watching other take action, but in a game you are taking action, you feel as if you are influencing the world the game exists in and in effect you become the character. While playing a game I often come to identify with and understand the main characters motivation in a way that I don’t with movies or books because I feel as if I take on the role of that character. With this game it meant that I could actually understand and empathize with both the feelings and motivations of two people who hated each other in the first chapter of the game. In short it this game encouraged to me to think about complicated philosophical questions like epistemology and ethics, It also forced me to conceder the notion that an idea can seem reasonable from one perspective but still ultimately be untrue.

These ideas helped me grow as a person, and probably contributed to my willingness to abandon my religious beliefs, but this is hardly the only game out there that encourages people to think about complex moral issues. For instance games like Skyrim which allow you to make opened ended choices to resolve quests make people think about ethical dilemmas. I find it absurd that video games are often billed as a special type of cultural phenomenon that only wastes time or even worse is dangerous and causes people to become killers. Yet I’ve seen people who watch 40 hours a week of TV claim that people shouldn’t play video games because it is a “waste of time.” I’ve also seen news casters immediately ask after a school shooting if the shooter played video games (and sometimes if they were an atheist) which is an absurd question because in this day an age almost everyone under forty has played a video game. They wouldn’t assume that someone’s TV watching or book reading habits caused them to go on a shooting spree so why video games?

Another blogger who thinks evolution is an atheist conspiracy…

Recently the Kentucky Board of Education updated their science standards, and surprisingly enough I don’t have much of a complaint about that. Usually when when I pickup a story about science standards being changed, particularly in highly religious states like Kentucky, it’s because some creationist group is trying to insert creationist propaganda into the science curriculum. Surprisingly, this time the Kentucky board actually backed reasonable standards. On evolution the board stated

the fundamental, unifying theory that underlies all the life sciences…“there is no significant ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding the legitimacy of evolution as a scientific idea.

They also rejected the idea of pulling information about climate change out of science text books. They point out that the standards do not advocate for a particular political response, but do present climate change scientifically supported which seems to be exactly the way a science class should handle the issue.

Unsurprisingly many creationists and unhappy with these standards. While looking up information on this story I ran across a particularly irrational screed on The Matt Walsh Blog.

Christianity has done more for science than atheism ever could

Of course he makes an error right in the title of the post by assuming that evolution and atheism are synonymous. Considering Kentucky's religious background is is quite likely that that the school board is made up mostly of Christians. They are promoting evolution in the science curriculum because it is good science not because they are secretly atheist agitators as Matt seems to think. He gives two reasons that he thinks “progressives” are celebrating this decision.

1) It will put us in line with many other states, which is great because we all know a diverse and enriching education must be in utter uniformity with the national collective and in compliance with the federal agenda.

I always find it funny that a group of people who believe that everyone who doesn’t believe in their religion will suffer eternally in hell start criticizing atheists for our lack of “diversity,” but in the end they don’t actually understand what diversity is all about. I’m all in favor of diversity in regards to individuals personalities, likes and dislikes, etc. However, facts are still facts and to promote a version of diversity that allows people to have their own facts is to promote a relativist notion of truth. The odd thing is that I know for a fact that most Christians would regard this notion as false. Even Matt here wants Christianity taught in science class, not other religious beliefs just Christianity. How positively uniform of him.

2) The criteria calls for a renewed emphasis on man-caused climate change and, of course, evolution. Evolution — atheistic, nihilistic, materialistic, mindless evolution — must be taught as fact, without other ideas presented to compete with the theory.

All good science is technically materialistic because science is involved in measuring things it can actually measure. As soon as Matt, or anyone else, can propose a way for science to empirically measure supernatural entities and events then the supernatural can qualify as science. The thing is most Christians reject the notion that one can empirically measure such things. Christians often don’t want their beliefs to be potentially falsifiable the way scientific claims are so they reject the standards of science from the start and then demand that science respect their beliefs. It is not unreasonable to suggest that people like Matt pick one or the other. Evolution, on the other hand, is falsifiable and does meet scientific standards. If Matt thinks that those standards should be changed that is another discussion, but it is a philosophical one not a scientific one.

He then goes on to say that “members of the church of atheism” are the one really hostile to science, history, and philosophy. While I will admit that there are plenty of atheists out there who are ignorant on those topics, this is really entirely irrelevant to science standards since ideally those setting such standards should be knowledgeable about science regardless of their beliefs. The real irony, however, is that one sentence after he extols the Christians ability to properly value philosophy he uses the following quote from the apologist G.K. Chesterton

a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern philosophy

So he claims Christians are better and philosophy while simultaneously saying that philosophy is nothing but breezy platitudes?

He then tries answer the question of how science and religion are compatible with a litany of completely irrational arguments and biased ethnocentrism. He claims that Christians have the scientific high ground because:

As a Christian, you aren’t just a member of a religion — you’re a member of a rich intellectual tradition unmatched by any group, anywhere in the world.

It’s like he is just completely unaware of all of the rich intellectual traditions around the world that are unrelated to Christianity. He continues in this vein later on in his post so I’ll comment further there.

He then claims that an atheist recently told him that “Christians have always hated science.” I’ll actually agree with him that this is a rather bizarre thing to say. However, he metaphorically shoots himself in the foot when he calls atheists “historically illiterate fools,” and then later on in the post he complains that atheists are mean and insulting to Christians. He also claims that Modern science wouldn’t exist without religion which to me seems like an equally bizarre statement, as well as un-provable,

He claims that Christianity is the major driving force for science and he tries to demonstrate it by listing scientists who are Christian. In this he subtlety engages in a correlation vs. causation fallacy. He assumes that because these scientists were Christian that Christianity was the cause of their scientific achievements. However the pertinent question in the evolution vs. creationism debate is not whether or not Christians can be good scientists, I will happily acknowledge that they can.

The question is whether or not modern Christian fundamentalism is philosophically compatible with science. Anyone who knows history well, as Matt claims he does, would know that Christian fundamentalism is a movement that started in the 19th century in part as a reaction to what some people viewed as an encroachment into religious questions by science. This is important because beliefs like the scientific inerrancy of scripture, which are common to modern evangelical Christians in the U.S., were popularized if not outright developed by fundamentalism.  This is why it is particularly interesting that all of the scientists that Matt lists, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, Mendel, Boyle, lived before the 19th century. It is undeniable that their version of Christianity differed from the modern fundamentalism that informs Matt’s views is some significant ways.

He devotes a great deal of his article to just repeating the claim that Christianity is responsible for science because by listing a number of Christians who influenced western scientific development while simultaneously ignoring the fact that many of the Christians were maligned by other Christians from their time for undermining religious beliefs. I suppose Matt thinks those people weren’t real Christians like the scientists were.

He then criticizes an atheist who sent him an email full of personal attacks and insults. As I have said before I actually agree that this is a bad way for atheists to present themselves in these debates, but no one can prove their own position correct by simply pointing out that some people who disagree with them are doing so in an insulting manner. Further Matt made a point of being insulting towards atheists at multiple points in this post so all I have to say is this:

He does expand on his earlier ethnocentric statements with this gem.

When western scientific knowledge came to places like China and India in the 1600′s, it came by way of Christians and their science-hating Christianity

I’m not sure what to make of this. If I take this statement at face value he sounds like an 18th century imperialist who thinks the only good ideas come from western civilization. Perhaps he only said this because wrote himself into a corner by trying to claim that science owes Christianity everything.

Just so we know this is not true, other civilizations have invented great pieces of technology and advanced science in myriads of ways. China invented gun powder. The first blood transfusions were done by the Incas. The list could go on for days. However, it’s even a mistake to think that Christianity was around for all of the scientific developments even in the western world. Galileo may have proved the heliocentric universe, but Greek Mathematicians proved the earth was round using geometry (which they also invented) hundreds of years before Christianity existed. Last I checked both of these discoveries were instrumental in the development of western science, so by Matt’s logic we should still be worshiping Greek god’s for teaching us Geometry.

At this point he makes the most bizarre statement this entire post.

But are we Christians all “idiots”? Well, I don’t mind if you say that about me, but was Da Vinci an idiot? Aquinas? Shakespeare? Mozart? Washington? Locke? Martin Luther King Jr? Edison? Tesla? Alexandar Graham Bell? Adam Smith? Marconi? Chesterton? Lewis? MacDonald? Dickens? Faulkner? Tolkein? Marco Polo? Neil Armstrong? Magellan? Columbus? Henry Ford? All of these guys are idiots, along with the scientific pioneers I mentioned earlier?

His statement here clearly implies that everyone he just listed here is Christian, but this is untrue, at least by the these people’s accounts of themselves.. Edison was a deist. Tesla’s views are debated by historians, but he seemed to be some kind of universalist or possibly deist. Neil Armstrong was, again, a Deist. Adam Smith was at most a deist, and may have been an agnostic or an atheist. He was certainly close friends with David Hume who many consider an atheist, and smith never evokes god as an explanation in his any of his philosophy. Alexander Graham Bell considered himself agnostic.

Columbus I will give him, but also point out that Columbus was kind of an awful human being. Columbus wrote in his log when he first met the Arawak Indians that, “They would make fine servants,” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Also, he discovered America, not because he was brilliant, but because he reached a foolish conclusion and got lucky. That is he badly underestimated the size of our planet. The only reason he and his crew didn’t die in on a boat in the middle of the ocean due to his miscalculation was because there was a giant undiscovered continent half way between Europe and India.

Certainly, while most of the others were likely Christian the fact that he clearly got so many wrong makes me wonder how much he actually knows about history. He claims atheists are rewriting history to suit their narrative, but given his lack of knowledge about these well known historical figures how would he know?

Towards the end he says we should not teach atheism in school, which is one of the few things he says which I actually agree with. I don’t want public schools teachers telling students god doesn’t exist anymore than I want them telling students he does. Where he gets it wrong is assuming that teaching evolution is equal to teaching atheism. This should be obviously wrong given that fully half of the U.S. believes in evolution while less than 10% of us are atheists.

His last paragraph really wraps all of his biases about atheists up into a nice package.

Really, we must get atheism away from education before we all end up like the modern atheist’s greatest prophet, Nietchsze, who died insane and naked, eating his own feces in a mental institution. This is not the sort of fate we should wish upon our children.

Think of the children, for goodness sake.

First of all Nietzsche (he misspelled his name) went insane because he had syphilis. Matt’s blasé dismissal of a serious illness which would cause insanity in anyone regardless of their religious predilections is both offensive and scientifically duplicitous. To assert that being an atheist will cause people to eat their own feces is not only factually inaccurate, it is blatant fear mongering. This is not the scientific and rational thought he claims to be arguing for. Earlier in the article he claimed that atheists have to twist facts to justify their position but what is he doing here if not blatantly twisting facts?

So Matt Walsh I assert that I am thinking of the children. I will be a father soon my self, and it is my devotion to objective moral ideals, scientific curiosity, and intellectual honesty that leads me to my atheism, my skepticism, and notions of social justice. I feel strongly about these things precisely because I want to leave this world a better place than I found it…you know, for the kids.

Prophecy is bad argument for god.

When I have debates with theists I often ask what evidence there is to convince us there is a god, if the conversation goes on long enough eventually they will bring up bible prophecy that predicts events before they happen as clear proof that a god exists. I happened to run into such a person just today

@SkeptimusPrime the prophets who god spoke through told of god being made man (deity) that's proof for me. @marikanotions

— Kieran (@TheLastik) July 29, 2013

So why do I think this is a bad argument? First to be fair in my assessment we need to set up some ground rules about what would make a good prophecy, so we can determine if the bible meets these standards. I will also keep it simple so that no one can accuse me of creating unreasonable standards.

In my estimation prophecy would need to be able to do two things to prove, within reason, that it is actually foretelling the future.

First it ought to be specific. For instance, say  I told you my psychic abilities gave me the ability to predict the winning lottery number. However, when you asked for proof I produced a spreadsheet that listed every possible derivation of numbers that could possibly appear in said lottery and said the winning number is one of these. I would technically be right, but only in the sense that my prediction was so general that it could not possibly be wrong. Not only does this not demonstrate supernatural abilities, it not going to improve your chances of winning the lottery. So predictions that are too general are out because it is too easy to get things right without actually knowing anything about the future. We see examples of this in action all the time with psychics who “predict” banal things like earth quakes. They could fix this by giving us the exact time, and location of the earthquake, but they won’t because they don’t want to make a claim that is falsifiable.

Secondly the source of the predictions needs to be consistent. That is, it should be able to make many predictions all, or at least most, of which turn out correct. This is because of a little thing called statistical inevitability. That is to say even if the chance of something happening is very low, if you produce the circumstances in which the event can occur enough times eventually it becomes likely that it will have happened in at least one of those instances. To put it another way, if I make hundreds of thousands of predictions, even very specific ones, eventually one of them will turn out right even without actual prophetic powers. Further, given this, even if I make only one prediction that turns out to be right, it is still probably more likely that I got lucky than I’m actually a prophet. So we need multiple data points to build a case that something significant is going on.

So the key is to make detailed prophecies of future events that almost always turned out to be highly accurate. So before we delve into the bible to see if it holds up lets look at a non-biblical prophecy to see how these standards work. 

A quick Google search turned up a webpage that speaks favorably about Nostradamus’ predictions

Here is a quote from Nostradamus that his devotees regularly quote as being a prediction of nuclear weapons:

"Near the gates and within two cities
There will be scourges the like of which was never seen,
Famine within plague, people put out by steel,
Crying to the great immortal God for relief."

So is this claim exact? It mentions two cities but does not tell us the name of those cities, it does not tell us anything about the date that this might occur, it does not mention nuclear bombs, atoms, or even explosions for that matter. It is all very vague. One could argue that saying two cities is specific, but with all of the events out there in the world if he had said 3 cities or 10 people could have easily attached this to some other event. How does the website deal with the passage?

This one is hard to dispute... It's an accurate depiction of the nukes being used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Scourges the like of which was never seen,"  and people "crying to the great immortal God." Of course it's vague - and you could insert other events that have effected 2 populaces - but in our known history, the dropping of atomic weapons on Japan is a huge turning point in our history, warfare, and politics.

He claims it’s an accurate description of nuclear weapons being used at the end of WWII but his reasoning is completely ad hoc. There is no way you would look at this passage and know what was going to happen before it happened. He clearly just finds an event in history that looks vaguely like the description and then shoe horns it in to the passage. As far as the second rule, Nostradamus does make a lot of predictions, but unfortunately for him they are all about as clear as this one.

Now, lets move on to the Bible, I’m not going to look at the whole thing because that would be much longer post so we will suffice for now to look at a fairly famous examples of prophecy in the bible.

Isaiah 7:14 is one of the passages that is famous for supposedly predicting the birth of Jesus.

7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 7:15 Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.

It is, of course, important to note that there is reason to suspect that the use of the word virgin in verse 14 is incorrect. The Hebrew word translated here refers to a young woman but not necessarily to her sexual status. The confusion there was originally caused by a mistranslation in the Septuagint which was the source for the original KJV bible.

Next, the passage isn’t quite a vague as Nostradamus, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. No dates or times listed. It says a woman will conceive, but does not name her and a woman having a child is not particularly out of the ordinary, especially in a world sans reliable birth control.

Jesus was of course never called Immanuel in the gospels but most Christians say that was meant to be metaphorical since Immanuel means “god with us.” Still it stretches credulity, prophecy always seems to be filled with statements that people decide should be read metaphorically after the fact. If they were clear as I suggest then we wouldn’t have these issues to sort out. In addition, some of the details it does give are not only fairly useless, but also make no logical sense. It says he will eat butter and honey so he will that he may know to refuse evil. How exactly does eating any kind of food help one refuse evil? This is not only vague it doesn’t even make any sense.

Further, if you read the wider context of this section by going back to the beginning of the chapter, is not even attempting a prophecy of for Jesus. It is clearly speaking about a war with Syria.

7:1 And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it.

Then the king hears that Syria is allies with Ephraim, so Isaiah goes to speak to Ahaz and to tell him to not be worried because they won’t win and Ephraim will be destroyed within five years. So God speaks to Ahaz and offers to give him a sign as proof that they will be protected in the coming war. This child's birth is offered as such a sign. So not only is the passage a weird and vague failure of a prophecy it never even attempted to be the prophecy Christians want it to be. This is not an isolated passage either, one can find the same kinds of flimsy “prophecy” littering the bible.

I want to go one step further than this though. For the sake of argument let us assume a reality where these passages did live up the standards I posed above. The prophecies were both incredibly detailed and consistently right. Christians present this best case scenario as definitive proof of a god, but, in fact, it is not. The only thing that this scenario actually proves is that the person who wrote it knew things about the future that he should not have been able to know given our current understanding of how the universe works.

Certainly god could be a possible explanation for this scenario, but then so could time travel or psychic abilities. Sure there is no evidence for those, but neither is there any evidence for god outside of the aforementioned prophecies. Of course the theist might point out at this point that if the person giving the prophecy claimed that god was the source of his revelation that would lend credence to the god hypothesis, but this is a fairly weak argument. He could be lying, he may believe god has given him the revelation, but be mistaken, or the actual source of the information could intentionally deceiving him. Admittedly these scenarios are unlikely, but then without some further evidence beyond the prophecy itself God is also an unlikely explanation. In this way, prophecy is a very weak argument for the existence of god.

Now that this has been explained I’m sure theists will stop using this as an argument now.  Right?…

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is concerned about the lack of philosophical nuance he sees in the new atheists.

I ran across the following article today on the spectator.

Chief Rabbi: atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians

Sacks starts his article with a quote, “On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial,” which he says reminds him of new atheists. After reading his article I am tempted to throw his own quote back at him.

Lets go through his main points:

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

He starts with this volley. The interesting thing is that I don’t know any atheists who actually believe that all religion will go away if we convince people Genesis is not literally true. Most of us are aware that there are varieties of religion which do not hold to fundamentalist beliefs. On the other hand, he speaks almost as if he believes that the people who actually believe in creationism are a vanishingly small minority which they are most certainly not. Criticism of creationism and defense of evolutionary theory are just that and no more. I also don’t know any atheists who think that getting rid of religion would fix all of the worlds problems, or that there would no longer be any disagreements. This sort of strawman is common but lets me know that Sacks doesn’t seem to know much about atheists.  He continues:

Whatever happened to the intellectual depth of the serious atheists, the forcefulness of Hobbes, the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche? Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

I hear this a lot from theologians that fancy themselves as more “sophisticated” than fundamentalists. I again, point out that he seems to not know much about atheists. One common thread I notice is many people who talk about “new atheism” seem to only be familiar with a few really famous writers like Dawkins. Yet in this case I am still left scratching my head, Dennett is quite well known and a professor of philosophy, yet he never addresses Dennett anywhere in his article. He does address Dawkins later on, but Dawkins is a biologist. If he wants to talk about new atheism’s lack of philosophical understanding wouldn’t it be better to deal with arguments from actual philosophers?

I personally think that atheism is making a valiant effort to address the problem of creating social bonds without religion, though we probably aren't as good as religions which have had centuries to perfect them. Yet, It is important to note that few atheists would have a problem with religion if it most people viewed it as nothing more than rituals and narratives. It is the fact that many people believe they are literally true that bothers us. Next he says:

Should we not simply accept that just as there are some people who are tone deaf and others who have no sense of humour, so there are some who simply do not understand what is going on in the Book of Psalms, who lack a sense of transcendence or the miracle of being, who fail to understand what it might be to see human life as a drama of love and forgiveness or be moved to pray in penitence or thanksgiving? Some people get religion; others don’t. Why not leave it at that?

My first thought on reading this was who says atheists don’t appreciate and enjoy life. Just because most of use wouldn’t use religious language to describe this doesn’t mean we are missing out on something. I feel like one of the problems that atheists and liberal theologians like Sacks have in communicating with one another is that they are so used to communicating these kinds of feelings in the language of religion they come to the unfortunate conclusion that people who do not use such language are somehow missing something important about the human experience.

Fair enough, perhaps. But not, I submit, for readers of The Spectator, because religion has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all.

Ah, now we get to his real concern, he thinks atheism will result in the downfall of western civilization. The difference between his reasoning and that of the fundamentalist is that, while fundamentalists believe atheists will be the ones to destroy civilization, Sacks believes that it will happen because atheists will simply have no intellectual defense against all of the evil out there.

I take some issue with the notion that western civilization owes it’s entire existence to Christianity. We owe at least as much, if not more, to Greek philosophy. He then goes into a conversation about Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Time and again in his later writings he tells us that losing Christian faith will mean abandoning Christian morality. No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead the will to power. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak. ‘An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner.’ Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, but there are passages in his writing that come close to justifying a Holocaust.

Now, I don’t consider myself an expert on Nietzsche, but I think he misunderstands him here. It is true that he advocated we get rid of Christian morality, but I think to suggest that Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power.” implied a moral vacuum where the strong controlled or killed the weak is a major misunderstanding of his philosophy.

I also wonder, if this is Sacks understanding of Nietzsche, why he claims to respect him as the greatest of all atheists.  I have a theory though, religious people like the argument that morality cannot exist without god, It makes them feel good about their religious beliefs. So when they read anything from atheists that seem to acknowledge this opinion in any form they latch onto it. They believe that such atheists are better because at least they acknowledge that all the good morality comes from religion. Then they accuse all of those uppity atheists who have the gall to claim that morality is not the sole domain of religion, and possibly not the domain of religion at all, of lacking philosophical nuance in their arguments. If they had a really nuanced view of philosophy, they argue, they would admit that morality can only be explained by religion.

The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto. After this cost humanity two world wars, a Cold War and a hundred million lives, we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society, all of which are ways of saying that there is no morality beyond personal choice so long as you do no harm to others.

Another piece of language I find to be kind of frustrating from theists is their attempt treat every new idea as some kind of replacement for god. Further exactly what is so bad with a morality that says it’s ok to do what you want as long as you do no harm to others? If everyone lived by such a mantra I imagine things would be pretty good.

He then descends into several paragraphs that I won’t bother to quote lamenting the decline of western civilization, he blames “materialism, individualism and moral relativism” but offers no real reason to actually blame these things. At least one thing he points out, the lack of communal support, is a modern cultural trend which probably has more to do with peoples tendency to move long distances, something which was much more rare prior to the 20th century.  Mostly however, I just think he engages in a bit of confirmation bias, he looks at statistics that he thinks have trended in a direction that points to societal decline but ignores piles of statistics that could just as easily be used to suggest an opposite trend.

It’s the end of the article that I probably take the most issue with though:

In one respect the new atheists are right. The threat to western freedom in the 21st century is not from fascism or communism but from a religious fundamentalism…The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies. That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

He views liberal religion as the last bastion of hope in defense against the fundamentalists of the world. I think this argument is rather bizarre considering their actual track record and responding to fundamentalists. Take a look at any country currently overrun with fundamentalists pushing their religious agenda and ask yourself if it is the moderate or liberal religious people you see standing up to them or is it the atheists?

Take the U.S., the religious right took over the republican party in the early 1980’s and more liberal denominations did nothing. It was a mix of atheist and secular groups that started stemming that tide in in the last ten to fifteen years. In the meantime liberal/moderate religious groups have spent most of their time telling atheists to be quiet , or complaining that we are just as bad as the fundamentalists. Then take Muslim theocracies like Iran, is it the moderate Muslims taking the government to task for allowing the fundamentalists to run everything or is it the atheists, sometimes in fear of their lives, doing that? As far as there being no society to maintain morality without religion, that isn’t particularly surprising given that almost all societies in history have been explicitly religious. The notion of church state separation is rather new, after all. Further, most of those societies actually allowed or even encouraged some really horrible behavior despite their religion. Personally I am aiming higher than that. It may, in fact, be more difficult to build a successful society without a religion to prop up our communities and social networks but if we are willing to put in the work we might just make something better.

Another Christian claims that atheism will spell some sort of shadowy doom for us all.

So I ran across this tonight.  Go ahead and read it:

As atheism rises, America declines

So now I'm going to offer a few thoughts on this spiteful bigoted piece of journalism.  First, it should be noted that even though the title of this article is the claim that atheism is destroying America he provides not one shred of evidence that America is even in decline, much less that atheists are causing it

First we get this statement.

Man rebels against Him, and is offended by the mere suggestion of His authority. This culminates in an inevitable downward slouch that has accompanied so many great civilizations of the past. So it appears to be with us.

So he is claiming that all or at least most civilizations have failed because they failed to acknowledge a god. Exactly how does he propose to prove this claim?  I have studied a bit of history, and I could give you a run down of the causes of, for instance, the fall of the Roman empire.  At the top of the list was an invasion by Germanic tribes in the north, not abandonment of god.

Where does he go next? I'll give you a hint, presuppositional apologetics.

They fail to grasp that apart from the eternal consistency provided by the biblical God, they would have absolutely no basis for reason at all.

Logic fail, reason is based upon axioms. Axioms are intrinsically true, they do not become true because a god wills them to be true.

And this:

The very fact that an atheist can argue about the laws of science "proving" there is no God, is actually proof in and of itself that He must exist.

Yes, he actually argues that if we proved there was no god it would prove there IS a god. How does one even engage with this level of delusion?

Rationalwiki has this to say about presuppositional apologetics.

Presuppositionalism is a bullshitting tactic cooked up by Christian apologists when they realized that their old arguments were not working .

That pretty much sums it up, this is circular reasoning at it's finest, and when employed it's how I know it will be functionally impossible to have a rational conversation someone about logic or morality.

He goes on to call us fool...well technically he just quotes a bible verse that calls us fools, but that's a rather minor distinction.

Then he delves into the most sublime of all arguments: "I know you are but what am I"  He responds to the claim that atheists make that Christians are arrogant by saying:

Obviously, when it comes to the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians believe we have it right and others are wrong. But it is wholly inaccurate to suggest that Christians think they alone are right on the most fundamental question there is, and that everyone else is wrong. That distinction belongs to ... you guessed it ... the atheist.

Well, to be frank he is right that we think people who believe in god are wrong, though we don't believe their incorrect belief will land them torture forever like Christians do, so there is that.  I would also question the claim that god's existence is the most fundamental question.

He ends with an analogy:

Imagine a four-lane highway full of traffic all traveling in one direction. Then suddenly, one singular car traveling the opposite way down the same roadway appears, heading into oncoming traffic. While it's possible that the driver of the one car was the only one who knew the right way and everyone else was just mistaken, logic and rationality would suggest otherwise. It would take an extremely arrogant driver to stick his head out of his sunroof and start screaming at all the other drivers about how dumb they were, without ever pausing to consider he might be in the wrong.

He uses this as the basis for his claim that atheists are "irrational, arrogant and foolish" but lets look at this analogy.  The analogy fails for several reasons.  First, the direction one drives is selected arbitrarily, the way everyone is driving becomes right by default because that's the way people are driving.  The question of God's existence is not arbitrary, everyone believing in him is not an indicator of his existence.  Second, at it's heart this analogy is an argument from popularity.   The reality is that large groups of people are wrong about things all of the time.  If people lived by this analogy we would still think the sun revolved around the earth.

In conclusion guest columnist Peter Heck doesn't understand logic, history, or American culture.  He's also kind of a jerk.

William Lane Craig being dishonest in another debate.

I run across debates online every once and a while and a couple of days ago I ran across and excerpt from a debate between William Lane Craig and an atheist whom I have never heard of.

The interesting part comes at the end during Q and A.  A woman asks the atheist what his evidence that god does not exist is, since he claims to only accept claims supported by evidence.  The atheist quite reasonably answers that he is not making the claim that god does not exist but only that there is no evidence he does and thus people who believe this without positive evidence are delusional.  Now I would have probably worded my answer quite a bit different than he did but what I found problematic was Craig's actions after the answer.

Craig basically had three options after the question had been answered. One option was to say nothing, which would have been proper given the usual rules during a Q.A. session in a debate.  The second option would be for Craig to let the questioner know it that it is always important to fairly address the debaters actual position rather than demand they defend a position they don't even hold.  Unsurprisingly Craig takes a third option and agrees with the questioner, claiming that the atheist has made a claim he did not prove.  He flat out asks his opponent to defend a claim he had just said he wasn't making.

Now, I don't blame the questioner for asking the question because they may not know much about philosophy. They may not understand the concept of burden of proof, or the, admittedly subtle, difference between claiming god does not exist and a rejection of someone else's claim that he does.  Craig does not have these excuses, however.  He has a PhD in philosophy and he should have learned a few things about proper debate tactics.   It is difficult for me to imagine he is simply unaware of how duplicitous a tactic this is in a debate. (unless he slept through most of his philosophy classes)

Looking over the posts on the YouTube video the comments seem almost fanatical in their need to praise Craig.  I personally find it a bit cult like to be honest, and every time I've talked with one of his followers they get very personally offended that I think Craig is either very bad at logic or he is a fraud, but I can't think of any other options.

Debate on Morality I did on ReapSowRadio.

So a few weeks ago I did a spot on the angry atheist podcast and I mentioned a few discussions I had had on the blog with Vocab Malone. Reap from angry atheist suggested we do a debate on his other show ReapSow Radio and Vocab heard the show and accepted.

It took a couple of weeks to get everything together, but this last Saturday Reap moderated a debate between Vocab and I over Skype. It was just put up so you can take a listen here.

ReapSowRadio #23

Anyway, take a listen and let me know how I did.

Rabbi Moshe Averick explains to us how he doesn't understand evolution or atheism.

I've written about Moshe Averick a few times before.  Every so often he like to make some inflammatory  post over at the algemeiner about how atheists are amoral and so on.

Moshe Averick's Article: …But Atheism Does Teach That We’re Animals 

So he decided to chime in over Rick Warren's tweet about the Colorado shootings.  I do not believe Warren's explanation about how it was really referring to premarital sex, but even if it was, it wouldn't really make the tweet less stupid.  His ignorance of evolution is still there for all to see.

Anyway, Averick's post is the usual inane ramblings about how we atheists have no reasons to not be pedophiles, but there are a few points to bring up.  First, atheists do not say we are animals, biology says that, and it wouldn't matter if there were no atheists, hell it wouldn't even matter if evolution turned out to be false, we would still be animals.  Further, this fact has no bearing on how we should behave, nothing to say about how we form our ethical framework. 

He tries to argue further that without god we are only accountable to ourselves so we can do whatever we want.  However this is simply not true.  Our ethics are formed through a complex process of biological and societal influences, and further refined by our own observations about the results of our actions and the goals we set in our society and as individuals.

Certainly we can choose to shirk the accountability of those systems and ignore the results our actions cause, but what exactly stops theists from doing that too?  Couldn't we tell god to fuck off as easily as society?  Sure he may punish us the afterlife for it, but if your only motivation for behaving is a possible punishment then is that really morality?  Plus we have no experience of said afterlife punishments anyway so how much of a impetus for good behavior could it be?  Psychology shows that most humans are more scared of knifes than guns because most people have been cut but never shot, a pain you have never felt is not a very useful threat.

In any case, statistics don't lie on this, theists are no less likely to commit crimes or behave immorally than atheists.  This is a fact that is roundly ignored or sidestepped every time this topic is brought up.  To claim that the reason for this is because we atheists were raised in a Judeo/Christian society, as Averick claims, demands evidence which he seems reluctant to give.

Of course one of the reasons Averick gives for his claims is that after all, atheistic philosophers agree with him on this.  (argument from authority anyone?)  Of course he backs this claim up with a quote from Philosopher Dr. Joel Marks from an article here.

“I have given up morality all together! [I] have been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…I experienced  my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists  are correct; without God there is  no morality…Hence  I believe there is no morality…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and  since I am an atheist, I must  therefore embrace amorality…even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything…there are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…I now maintain nothing  is literally right or wrong because  there is no morality…”

Well, there you have it folks, Marks agrees with Averick completely. It does seem like pretty damning evi....wait what are those three little dots at the end?  Could it be that there is more to the quote?  Lets read the rest.

...Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

OK, the rest of the quote starts with a "yet," This usually implies that he is going to say something different, and he does.  I can't personally say I totally agree with Marks even here, but still this completely undoes Averick's argument that Marks agrees with him.

I would like to give Averick some room here and say that maybe he just didn't realize that he was quote mining this guy like a political speech writer, but it is hard to believe that he could have accidentally missed the guy completely contradicting Averick's argument here.  Here is a tip, when you see the words like "yet" or "but" there is probably something important there for you to read. 

He then continues his weird line of quotes by quoting Jeffery Dahmer, as if the fact that a psychopath used evolution as a rationalization for his crimes says something important about the science of biology. 

What was I just saying about theists having no better ethics than atheists?