So this is 40, meaning Drunk Ex-Pastors is now officially old (like a 40 year-old man or a 27 year-old woman [hey, don’t shoot the cultural messenger]). In this episode, Jason and Christian celebrate their geriatric status by swapping stories about shaving and unwanted body hair. We then bicker about whether Christian’s constant interrupting of Jason is due to the latter’s verbosity or the former’s impatience, both of which we trust are incredibly endearing. We then consider an alternative voting system that makes enough sense to never be implemented in a million years, after which we tackle the issue of money in politics. A listener’s question about the so-called “age of accountability” opens up a massive can of worms, leaving Jason vulnerable to the thorny charge of not being faithfully religious enough to murder his own children. Christian’s bieber involves his obsessive attention to a balanced check book, while Jason is biebered by any problem that can’t be solved by the mere push of a button.
Also, we’re as awesome at similes as, umm, well, some guy who knows how to compare stuff real good.
Links from our podcast:
Kenneth Winsmann
Hey guys,
Can you please stop podcasting about you two podcasting. I plugged in and listened on the way to class this morning. The first thirty minutes is about nothing but you two doing a podcast! Lol ROBBED. You should at least bookmark/timestamp when the actual conversations begin so we can skip ahead and get to the good stuff.
OK that’s it for the constructive criticism. I would like to put in a topic request. Have you guys heard of this guy Jeremy England? He is an orthodox jew MIT professor whom people are calling the next Charles Darwin. Dude has a pretty strong theory on how life begins through purely naturalistic processes. Check out this post entitled “God is on the ropes”. Would live to hear you two speak on this.
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/god_is_on_the_ropes_the_brilliant_new_science_that_has_creationists_and_the_christian_right_terrified/
Kenneth Winsmann
Easy answer to Christians kill your baby challenge:
We absolutely DO NOT know that every unbaptized baby who dies goes to heaven. As Christian would say “maybe, maybe not”. Even if there was certainty on this matter, we are commanded not to murder. We trust our children to divine providence. We have our marching orders and killing people to ensure heaven is not one of them. If that was the best course of action, God would have commanded it be done. Since God has not commanded it be done, we know this course of action is not morally permissible. God will draw His children through the means that He choses, not the ones we think best.
comradedread
I do enjoy the apologist’s biblical rules for murder and genocide. 😉
It’s bad if you do it. Unless God tells you to do it. Or your godly leader says God told you to do it. Unless your god isn’t the same as my God, in which case it’s bad again. But now God doesn’t really talk to people anymore, so it’s bad again.
Christian
Kenneth,
The first thirty minutes is about nothing but you two doing a podcast!
I’m going to have to disagree with this. Also, different listeners like different things…so we just do what we like. We’re not politicians.
Kenneth Winsmann
Christian,
I know. Just putting my vote in 🙂
comradedread
The Age of Accountability is really a man-made idea that we’ve come up with to try to reconcile the dual ideas orthodox Christianity has of a merciful, gracious, loving, and just God with the idea of eternal unending torture.
People (rightly, I think) would look upon a tiny infant who hasn’t sinned as an innocent person and object to the idea of allowing that innocent life to feel unending torment simply because Adam supposedly screwed it up by eating a fruit he got from his wife who believed a talking snake.
I don’t think any of us really believes everything in orthodox Christianity. We adopt and emphasize what matters to us, we de-emphasize what doesn’t or what we find offensive. Even if we belong to churches that claim infallibility with regards to dogma.If we really did believe it, the church would be an even more fearful place with everyone wondering when God was going to kill them for lying or hypocrisy.
Also, for the record, I’m now 15 days without booze, and I still find the podcast engaging. TV, on the other hand, I’ve just realized is shit.
And given the combination of social awkwardness and full-blown conservative fundamentalist self-righteous ass that I was in high school and bible college, adult me is cringing at the idea of any stories about young me that Jason has.
Jason Stellman
Oh, mum’ll be the word unless you ever get rich enough to blackmail. . . .
comradedread
Well, if it turns out Calvary Chapel was right, there is a rapture, and I do get elected king of the world, I will have a job opening for a false prophet.
Speaking of which, isn’t it odd in Dispensationalism that it assumes that Satan and the Antichrist will have never heard of Dispensationalism and it’s End Times theology? I mean, if I do ever find myself king of the world and bringing peace to the Middle East, the first rules I am literally carving in stone will be:
Everyone be super nice to Jewish folks.
No killing of Christians.
Everyone has freedom of religion.
Don’t make anyone take a mark
Don’t get in any land wars near Israel.
Christian
Also, for the record, I’m now 15 days without booze, and I still find the podcast engaging. TV, on the other hand, I’ve just realized is shit.
Ha! That’s good to know. We have a friend who recently went through rehab and is sober now and we were talking to her about interviewing her this year just to show that we’re not encouraging people to be alcoholics. 🙂
Christian
I mean, if I do ever find myself king of the world and bringing peace to the Middle East, the first rules I am literally carving in stone will be:
Ha! It’s that whole “if you know the future, can you change it” scenario!
comradedread
If I were funnier or wittier enough, I’d try to write a fictional story of a hapless antichrist who desperately tries to break prophesy only to have both God and Satan literally screwing with him to ensure he follows the game plan.
Corey
Love the podcast. I look forward to it every week. Christian, I am right on board with your age of accountability assessment. I have thought the same way for quite some time now. The incoherence of the doctrine of Hell was the first domino to fall for me. I am now where you are spiritually (from what I can tell so far- I’ve listened to every episode). I feel as though I am listening to myself many times when you bring up these issues. I took many years to analyze and research my questions about Christianity. It was important enough to write out questions, findings, and thoughts because of I ever decided to tell friends and family I no longer believed, I wanted them to know it was not on a whim. I finally reached the point that Christianity no longer made sense. Here is a link to a great a blog post by James Lindsay, a mathematician, on Hell. It directly addresses your topic in this podcast and helped me sort out my thoughts on the issue. Again, I love the podcast. How Infinity Breaks A Moral Calculus -http://goddoesnt.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-infinity-breaks-moral-calculus.html?m=1
Corey
And to your point, Christian, according to the majority of Christianity, killing people before they reach the age of accountability would send them to heaven. Therefore, doing so and going to hell for it would be a greater sacrifice than what Jesus did because your suffering would never end while his was just a few days. Dick Bush out.
Lane
Christian,
You said on the podcast: “I like Lane. I think he is on your team, but I like him. I like him despite his poor choices…”
Thanks! I do appreciate this.
BTW, your talk of teams reminded me of your blog post about the pledge of allegiance. I don’t like to think of us on different teams. But if we are on different teams, at least we are playing the same game: participating in dialogue to better understand the world in which we live.
Lane
Jason,
As for who interrupts who, or who talks more. I don’t know. It is clearly a conversation between friends we are listen to. However, I did listen to that other show you have occasionally co-hosted, and Mark Shea seems to never let you talk. He’ll start pontificating for what has to be 15 minutes sometimes before he realizes that he isn’t the only one doing the show. If you ever do the show again, you need to interrupt way more!
Christian
Corey,
How Infinity Breaks A Moral Calculus
Thanks for the article! That was so interesting and is the point I was feebly attempting to get across in our early episodes, that most Christians don’t really believe much of what they say they believe.
The argument I was making in this podcast was the same. If there is an “age of accountability” and the child even has a chance of going to hell, it’s better off for the child to die early. Jason’s response is that he is commanded not to kill. However, laying down your soul for your child’s eternal safety is the only thing that really makes sense if the age of accountability were a real thing. Anything else is selfish. (Obviously, I don’t believe in an “age of accountability” or an eternal place of torture, so I’m not going to kill my kids or recommend anyone else does either. Instead, I’d recommend them to stop believing those things. Ha.
Corey
Christian, I absolutely agree. Jason’s argument that the “age of accountability” idea doesn’t make Christians kill their kids only reinforces your point that they don’t really believe it. Having been in Jason’s side of the belief fence, I understand why he says that your reasoning is a reductio ad absurdum, but that’s not what it is. And being commanded by God not to kill is irrelevant to the argument. Someone could really only deny an age of accountability exists (pure Calvinism) or say that Hell isn’t so bad to get out of the problem but then they have conceded the issue.
Greg (@greghao)
Couple stream of consciousness thoughts….
1. While this doesn’t directly address the issue of multi-party representation, as sadly I agree with Jason that the odds of the alternative vote ever happening in the US is slim to none, there is an eminently more plausible solution of the distortion of voting power for the so called battleground states, which are mostly white dying states in the midwest (and america’s wang). And that is the National Popular Vote, wherein we abolish the electoral college and votes for presidential elections are counted irrespective of state lines.
2. America’s bi-cameral legislature is the direct result of a bribe by James Madison to the smaller states like Delaware and Rhode Island in order to get them to sign onto the Declaration of Independence.
3. Definitely agree with you guys, money != speech. Much of what you guys are advocating are actually things that happen elsewhere in the world:
* Singapore and Australia have compulsory voting, punishable by fines I believe, and elections are held on Saturdays with turnout regularly over 95%.
* The campaign period in the UK is only 5 weeks.
* The thing about projected election results actually don’t matter as much as you guys think because 1. there are laws prohibiting the announcement of even projected results before the polls close, and 2. you’ll notice that projected results are ever only announced for states like California where there is little to no uncertainty to the results.
While it’s true that political science is more liberal arts than actual science, when it comes to things like elections and voter projections, it’s more like statistics and those are indeed more factually based/grounded in reality.
4. I mostly agree with Jason’s point about the invalidity of using extreme examples to punch holes in whatever we disagree with, I do take issue with him equating atheists and christians. The problem is, while all christians are/should hold to the same belief system, the same cannot be said of atheists. Because atheism is not a religion, it simply states that to the best of our knowledge, there is no God (however any religion choose to define this higher being).
Greg (@greghao)
Clearing up my bad sentence here. Projected results with low polling station reporting (e.g. announcing results quickly after polling stations have closed) only happens in states where the certainty of outcome is high, like in California. But that’s only ever top line issues like with the presidency. All the other issues that are being voted on, those results are generally not announced early.
Kenneth Winsmann
Corey and Christian,
A couple of points to highlight why I think your argument misses the mark (badly).
1. What if it was God’s sovereign plan for your children to go to heaven all along? In this case, you would only have committed a horrible crime for no good reason at all.
2. What if your child WOULD have gone to hell, but was destined to be the parent of a great preacher. One who would have impacted and saved millions or even eventually billions of souls?
3. What if at the end of the day, your interpretation of certain scriptures is incorrect, and the vast majority of humanity will in fact be in heaven. What excuse do you have then to kill your own children?
These are the problems you run into when you think yourself wiser than God. You do not see the big picture. You can not devise a better plan than He already has in motion. We humbly trust the God of the universe to know better than we do, and follow His actual commands, rather than try to think up a shortcut we deem more effective.
Hopefully, these also show how one could “really believe” what they say they do and not act like a loon.
Corey
Kenneth, first of all, I love this back and forth and have sincerely engaged these arguments in the past. But I admit I there is much I do not know and constantly re- engage with them due to their gravity. Let me be clear that this is a philisophical argument. I understand that 99.9% of Christians do not believe they would be justified in commiting murder to send people to heaven. That was Jason’s point. Its an internal critique of the interaction between the classical doctrine of Hell and what most Christians think happens to “innocents” if they die. My issue with your line of thought (a kind of skeptical theism) opens up a Pandora’s box of issues. Your comments assume a Christian God to make it plausible. So let’s grant that point to start out.
1) I am sympathetic to your point here. However I can’t get all the way there because it is impossible to know if it is God’s plan for someone to go to heaven. If you believed with all your heart and soul that Hell exists and it is a real place that even some people go, you wouldn’t risk it. What if it was God’s will for you to kill someone innocent?
2) While we are introducing skeptical theism, why not ask if God could use their death for his purposes? Maybe to save even more people? I seem to hear that a lot when a someone dies needlessly.
3) Is that what you think the Bible is saying? The way is narrow my friend.
I don’t think myself wiser that the Christian God because I no longer think “that” God is real. The problems with the Bible defy logic. If the best answer for this is we don’t know God’s plan, “what if” questions, or maybe we are just misinterpreting scripture, then it is a faith commitment and I may as well believe the Koran or Book of Mormon. When you go down this road of skeptical theism, it undercuts any attempt to know what God wants, is truly like, or has a plan for. The last resort is personal experience.
Kenneth Winsmann
Corey
Kenneth, first of all, I love this back and forth and have sincerely engaged these arguments in the past. But I admit I there is much I do not know and constantly re- engage with them due to their gravity. Let me be clear that this is a philisophical argument.
I’m your huckleberry. That’s just my game 😉
I understand that 99.9% of Christians do not believe they would be justified in commiting murder to send people to heaven. That was Jason’s point. Its an internal critique of the interaction between the classical doctrine of Hell and what most Christians think happens to “innocents” if they die. My issue with your line of thought (a kind of skeptical theism) opens up a Pandora’s box of issues. Your comments assume a Christian God to make it plausible. So let’s grant that point to start out.
The entire line of thought presupposes the Christian God. As you said, you are critiquing two classical Christian doctrines.
1) I am sympathetic to your point here. However I can’t get all the way there because it is impossible to know if it is God’s plan for someone to go to heaven. If you believed with all your heart and soul that Hell exists and it is a real place that even some people go, you wouldn’t risk it. What if it was God’s will for you to kill someone innocent?
That’s just the point of my first bullet. You don’t know the eternal fate of any individual and so can not morally take their life into your own hands. Imagine I killed my children. When asked why I said “statistically there is a good chance my kids would live horrible, agonizing lives, and I just couldn’t risk it.” See the problem? The truth is I would have NO IDEA what kind of lives my children might have and it is not my right to kill them for their own protection. In the same way, we have no idea who will be damned and who will enjoy eternal life. As such, we have no right to kill someone “to protect them”
2) While we are introducing skeptical theism, why not ask if God could use their death for his purposes? Maybe to save even more people? I seem to hear that a lot when a someone dies needlessly
I have not introduced skeptical theism. I am merely affirming the teachings of scripture and the church. We know for sure that these two propositions are true according to scripture:
A. Hell is a real place and people will be damned.
B. Gods prescription for populating heaven does not include the murder of innocents to prevent sin.
It is not “skeptical theism” to speculate on what the reason behind proposition B might entail. So long as even one speculation is possible your argument for a contradiction between doctrine and practice fails.
3) Is that what you think the Bible is saying? The way is narrow my friend.
If it is true that the unborn will be in paradise, then it is certain that heaven will be quite crowded. Many more humans have died in their first 4 years than have lived to the ripe old age of 15.
Jesus may very well have been speaking from the perspective of a loving father in the text you quoted. To a father, how “many” is too many? Just one.
I don’t think myself wiser that the Christian God because I no longer think “that” God is real. The problems with the Bible defy logic. If the best answer for this is we don’t know God’s plan, “what if” questions, or maybe we are just misinterpreting scripture, then it is a faith commitment and I may as well believe the Koran or Book of Mormon. When you go down this road of skeptical theism, it undercuts any attempt to know what God wants, is truly like, or has a plan for. The last resort is personal experience.
Not quite. I have not introduced skeptical theism at all. I am perfectly happy to admit that God does not command nor will the murder of innocent children. I have not made any spacious or skeptical claims of scripture. The fact is that christians should not murder infants because we have no idea what God has planned for their life, what their contribution to society may be, what impact they may have on the souls of the lost, or what their own spiritual destiny entails. For that matter, we have no clue what the eternal destiny of ANY individual may be. Thus, any and every Christian is well within their rights to trust their children to divine providence, and to follow God’s commands as best they can. Commands that in no way entail the murder of their children.
Corey
Kenneth, just one other point… Your items 1 and 2 confirms my comment to Christian that you would have to resort to Calvanism to get around it, which is what you did. Your third point was similar to my other work-around. However you said maybe the vast majority of humanity would go to heaven rather than that hell isn’t really so bad. Either way you try to avoid the infinite suffering of Hell to get around the problem.
Corey
And Kenneth, I am being genuine and sincere here. No snark or disrespect intended.
Lane
Kenneth,
This exactly why Christian can not be a consequentialist. We simply aren’t in a place do so. This is also why no one can really be consequentialist.
Kenneth Winsmann
Corey,
I’ve got pretty thick skin bud don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I would rather you tell me what you think than edit yourself to be nice. I don’t have the slightest clue as to why you think 1 and 2 are calvinistic. So far as I can tell they only imply foreknowledge and divine providence, which all mainstream denominations believe. Not that I think there is anything wrong with predestination. My own view is very similar to calvinism. 3 is a possibility. So long as it’s possible there is no contradiction.
Kenneth Winsmann
Lol so if one holds to predestination and election this argument fails? That means it fails for the vast majority of Christian thought. I’m fine with that.
Lane
Let’s try again with less typos:
This is exactly why a Christian can not be a consequentialist. We simply aren’t in a place do so. This is also why no one can really be consequentialist. No one really knows the full consequence for any action.
Corey
Ugh…Well I spent 30 min on a response and lost it to an error when I tried posting it. I will try to recreate it when I have more time. Thanks for the conversation. It gives me a lot to consider.
Christopher Lake
Comrade,
You write that you don’t think anyone believes everything in orthodox Christianity. By what standard are you measuring/deciding, what is or isn’t orthodox Christianity?
Mike
A fresh perspective on the whole “Florida is America’s wang” bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67f1s0NYERI
comradedread
My thoughts are based on what I know of the sum of various churches’ doctrines.
The biggest, of course, is something our blog hosts have mentioned already: hell. If Christians really believed in an eternal hell and the Great Commission, they wouldn’t have much free time. They’d have work time to support themselves, maybe a bit of time to maintain family and friendships, and the rest of their time would be spent witnessing to non-believers.
But there are all sorts of things that are in the bible and even church tradition that folks ignore or de-emphasize. And other things that they emphasize.
Conservatives accuse liberals of focusing solely on the passages dealing with God’s love for humanity and ignoring judgment, while liberals point out how conservatives have elevated sexual ethics above the sins of greed, gluttony, selfishness, and partiality.
Even Catholics aren’t immune to the tendency to focus on the parts of religion that speak to them while ignoring other parts that don’t.
I suppose there might be someone, somewhere who holds all of the bible and doctrine equally and has fully embraced all of Christianity wholly, but I have yet to see, hear of them, or meet them.
Lane
Let’s look at the group on the other side of this argument about not really believing what they say. I’ll use the same tactics…
If atheists really believed what they say they believe, they would be nihilists. True atheism is nihilism. But none of the atheists I know or have seen, truly live as nihilists. If what they believe were true, there is no explanation for the world. We are here by sheer random chance. There is no ultimate meaning to life. There is no evil. There is no good. Love, happiness, joy, hate, pain do not exist; at most they are just the playing out of chemical reactions in our brain. You do not have freewill, your actions – even your thoughts – are just a link in a long running Rube Goldberg machine that no one created and has no point. Any conscience you think you experience is just an illusion. The universe will eventually run out down and the machine will stop.
Yes, maybe you can “create” meaning for your life as some argue. But you know that any “meaning” is just a false façade and you are just playing a game of pretend. Life ultimately would be better off – if there is such a thing as “better” – if everyone could plug themselves into a machine and force feed drugs that made them experience the brain chemical reactions associated with “happiness” for the rest of their existence. That is the dream I guess.
You have no meaning; nothing you do matters. Now go about your day and really live like that. They can’t. Atheists get all bent out of shape about morals, about religions, about politics. They believe in empty things such as truth and love, for example. They worry, they get scared, they get in arguments about “meaning” on the internet… The fact that no atheist can really live like a nihilist proves that none of them really believes what they say they believe. In fact, it proves that their worldview is bankrupt.
Honestly, with what Christian believes (true or not) about Christianity and what IS true of atheism, his agnosticism is understandable.
Kenneth Winsmann
I don’t understand why everyone is jumping to “they don’t really believe what they say they do”. Does sin and selfishness play into the equation at all? I REALLY BELIEVE that if I keep smoking a pack a day I will probably die younger than I would have otherwise. I’m still doing it though. Fat people really understand that their box of twinkies is causing them to be over weight…. don’t care, still eating more and more. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Has nothing to do with “not really believing what we say”
Christian
I REALLY BELIEVE that if I keep smoking a pack a day I will probably die younger than I would have otherwise.
You really believe…that you will probably die younger?
What if you absolutely believed that smoking cigarettes would send you to eternal torture?
Please tell me you see the difference between those two and that one of them would affect your behavior.
Lane
Kenneth,
Right, good point. Pointing out that Christians aren’t living up to Christianity isn’t surprising – it is part of the system.
Lane
Christian,
I believe in a perfectly Just, Good, Merciful God. If eternal torture isn’t ultimately Just one of the following is true: I don’t have enough information to understand how it is Just, hell isn’t what we think it, or no one ultimately goes there. Ultimately, we don’t have enough information and are simply not in a position to judge God. Regardless, whatever will actually happen, it will be Just. I believe that MUCH more than I believe the particularities of any view of hell.
comradedread
If atheists really believed what they say they believe.
This is filled with common misconceptions. Natural selection is not random. The organism best suited for its environment thrives and reproduces. The fragility and temporal nature of life make our time here more special to us because there is no second chance, no eternity. The universe will continue without you. You exist in a brief window of time, conscious of morality. You must make your own meaning. And you must do so with everyone else.
Morality does not require a deity. There are plenty of philosophical discussions on the topic and there are moral systems in place that are based on reason and the long term best interest of the individual or society.
Indeed, I’ve found recently that having a deity really screws up the concept of morality for some folks, who have been arguing with me that genocide is morally good if God orders it. Much as I guess some folks argue that torture is morally good if God does it. In that theology, there is no objective right and wrong, only the subjective whims of a deity: don’t kill people… unless I (or a designated leader) tell you to do it.
Life ultimately would be better off
No, life wouldn’t. Life requires messy interactions between people. It requires mixing of genes. It requires families to raise offspring. It requires people to act to ensure their own future and the future of their offspring which is the legacy they (and billions of our ancestors before us) have left. Sealing yourself off in a drug induced stupor would rob you of the chance to pass along your genetic code to the next generation.
Lane
Comradedread,
You are assuming that life is important and that I should care. Why does life matter at all? Why does it thriving matter? Why does reproduction matter (consider your stance on contraception and abortion while answering)?
“Sealing yourself off in a drug induced stupor would rob you of the chance to pass along your genetic code to the next generation.”
So what. Why should I care about passing along my genetic code?
The fragility and temporal nature of life make our time here more special to us because there is no second chance, no eternity.
Not more special, more trivial. Maybe more tragic, if there was someone to even sense and experience the tragedy.
Morality does not require a deity.
For it to be objective and actually binding, and not just made up by each person, it needs a transcendent grounding. Even if you can come up with a set of morals, based on some arbitrary set of principals, why does should someone even want to follow them? I can know all the “rules”, but I have no real reason to follow them.
However, we do know that there are some things that are simply wrong. We have an experience of the objectiveness of those morals. Theism is the best explanation for this. Here is short video, that briefly lays out the argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxiAikEk2vU
comradedread
You are assuming that life is important and that I should care.
I would hazard that most people would very much care if I tried to murder them. You can claim this is all evolutionary imperative, but in our conscience state we value existence more than non-existence. Hell, even in your nihilistic ‘end’ of atheism, you posit atheists living in a drug stupor, and not committing mass suicide. Why? Because you innately value existence more than non-existence.
Why does reproduction matter (consider your stance on contraception and abortion while answering)?
Other than the biological imperative, reproduction is your chance to continue on through your offspring. Again, existence being superior to non-existence.
Not more special, more trivial. Maybe more tragic, if there was someone to even sense and experience the tragedy.
Who would appreciate a gift of $10,000 dollars? A man with 10 billion dollars or a man with 1,000 dollars? Who would be more thankful for it?
For it to be objective and actually binding, and not just made up by each person, it needs a transcendent grounding.
Existence is better than non-existence, the ownership of the self, and the social contract.
why does should someone even want to follow them? I can know all the “rules”, but I have no real reason to follow them.
You will have a better life with a better chance to find happiness, build a family, and thrive.
Conversely, why should I follow the morality supposedly written in a book 3,000 years ago supposedly by a God I’ve never seen , who orders and allows things that contradict not only the morality He supposedly laid down, but also basic human decency, and which He felt was so imperfect that He allowed His future followers to ignore it almost in its entirety? If the first version of His moral code was so flawed that it needed to be replaced, why should I trust the second version of it being perfect?
Lane
comradedread,
You can claim this is all evolutionary imperative, but in our conscience state we value existence more than non-existence.
Maybe when a person didn’t understand that they are being driven by evolutionary imperatives, they couldn’t be faulted for following them. But once you understand that you are just being driven by your genes or some other biological push, why should you continue to follow it? Why be a slave!? Just because you are born biologically male, you aren’t bound by that! Be what you want. Don’t be bound by blind forces of impersonal nature. Don’t hold yourself to trite Christian ideas of morality. Rise up and overcome! Become an Ubermensch!
“Hell, even in your nihilistic ‘end’ of atheism, you posit atheists living in a drug stupor, and not committing mass suicide. Why? Because you innately value existence more than non-existence.”
Well that’s my point. An atheist both recognizes and holds values that they have no basis for doing so on atheism. Maybe you are right; maybe a real nihilist would find ultimate power by dismissing even the need to pretend to have meaning, and just commit suicide.
“Existence is better than non-existence”
Says who? Maybe that is just your privilege showing. Maybe you aren’t suffering every minute of everyday with no hope in the future. Maybe in that person case non-existence is better.
comradedread
Why be a slave!?
And yet, that is exactly what Christianity calls upon you to become. Life, I suppose, is full of ironies.
comradedread
And to be fair, if we’re going to go to the absurd, one might as well doubt one’s ability to reason and perceive reality to begin with. After all, your brain is fallible as are your senses. Perhaps your capacity to reason is now fundamentally flawed that you cannot trust anything you sense or think at all?
And if so, would that matter at all?
Perhaps this isn’t reality. Perhaps I am mad.
I could choose to sit in quiet contemplation and do nothing but disbelieve everything and distrust my very thoughts, or I can choose to act as I see fit within the sphere of what I perceive to be reality, what makes sense in relation to that reality, and what pleases me and brings me benefit in the context of the greatest good.
Lane
Nihilist: “Why be a slave!?”
You: “And yet, that is exactly what Christianity calls upon you to become. Life, I suppose, is full of ironies.”
Now you are getting it! Now that we know that God is dead, we now know that values are arbitrary – thus nihilism. There is nothing compelling me to any values.
Lane
“And to be fair, if we’re going to go to the absurd…
Yes, atheism when really practiced is absurd.
…one might as well doubt one’s ability to reason and perceive reality to begin with. After all, your brain is fallible as are your senses. Perhaps your capacity to reason is now fundamentally flawed that you cannot trust anything you sense or think at all?
Well that is more or less Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. Evolutionarily speaking, our intellects are formed only for survival, not searching for truth. So evolutionary theory and philosophical naturalism held together is self-defeating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism#Plantinga.27s_2008_formulation_of_the_argument
comradedread
Perhaps, but the same problem holds true for the theist. You only think you know God because of your senses (perception of nature, reading a text, hearing a sermon, etc.) but we can demonstrate that your senses are unreliable. This deity may not exist at all despite your belief that your mind and senses tell you He does.
At some point, we have to discard such absurdities and realize that while this may not be reality and we may not even exist, we believe we live in reality and we perceive that we exist, so we must act and reason in that capacity as if that premise were true.
Lane
“Perhaps, but the same problem holds true for the theist.”
I’m not so sure that is the case. If God exists, my experience of objective morals is justified. If God exists, objective truth and my mind being able to recognize it is not surprising. If God exists, the universe being rational and ordered is not surprising. If God exists, my life has meaning and purpose. I can go on, but I think you see where I’m going with this. Life in general, and our experience of it, is much more plausible and rational on theism than on atheism. Living out true atheism makes life absurd.
comradedread
Yes, but at the core, you have zero proof or reasons to believe in the existence of deity without appealing to some sort of data that your senses have perceived or argument that your brain has constructed.
As we’ve established that your senses can easily be fooled, sensory data must therefore be regarded as unreliable.
And as the state of our rational capacity is in doubt, such arguments constructed with reason must also therefore be considered unreliable.
But my reasoning capacity was created by God, you object.
How do you know that? Your mind tells you it. And the state of your mind is in question.
So again, as cute as this line of thought is, it is absurd. In order to have any sort of argument at all, we must act as if the following premises are true:
1. I think.
2. I exist.
3. This is reality.
comradedread
I’d like to revisit the topic of why you would believe that morality as dictated in the bible would be superior to a morality that is not.
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
It is a problem of grounding. Without a diety, one has no way of grounding a claim of objective moral duties and obligations. We could state the way things are, but could not say how things ought to be. For example:
How things are: “avoiding muder helps species thrive.”
How things ought to be: “Our species should thrive.”
It is the second statement that can not be grounded by anything real. The “should/ought” questions give atheists all kinds of headaches.
PS natural selection is not random but the mutations ARE random. So it’s a silly play on words to say “natural selection is not random.” We are still the result of random mutations and processes that randomly happened to fall together
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
You can prove the moral argument wrong easily. Just explain to us why African Americans should have the right to vote and own property. Please do so without appealing to certain God given rights. Good luck 😉
Kenneth Winsmann
Christian,
But I never have absolute certainty of someone going to hell….
Lane
comradedread ,
“Yes, but at the core, you have zero proof or reasons to believe in the existence of deity without appealing to some sort of data that your senses have perceived or argument that your brain has constructed.”
Well if we going to through out all arguments, proof, and reason, because our brains – on your system – can not be trusted at all, I have no idea what we are doing. This just begs the question.
“As we’ve established that your senses can easily be fooled, sensory data must therefore be regarded as unreliable.”
I don’t think we have established this. Otherwise, again this just begs the question.
“How do you know that? Your mind tells you it. And the state of your mind is in question.”
All of this is begging the question. I see no reason, on theism to doubt my mental faculties. The fact that you want to do this, means your entire argumentation is self-refuting because you are saying that argumentation is impossible to do reliably. You are using a reasoning, to prove reasoning doesn’t work.
However, If you are trying to demonstrate the following argument:
1. Atheism entails nihilism.
2. Nihilism makes life absurd.
3. Life is not absurd.
4. Therefore, atheism is false.
Then I’m in agreement.
Lane
opps: “Well if we going to [throw] out all arguments…”
comradedread
Well if we going to through out all arguments, proof, and reason, because our brains – on your system – can not be trusted at all, I have no idea what we are doing
We are demonstrating the absurdity of this line of thought, which I thought was obvious and I’ve repeatedly said so. Once you open the door to doubt your very capacity for reason and intelligent thought, you’ve reached a dead end. Doesn’t matter if what side of the argument you’re on.
I don’t think we have established this. Otherwise, again this just begs the question.
Let us recall the question from several weeks ago about whether the dress was white and gold or blue and black. Or other optical illusions. Or magic tricks in general.
Our senses have blind spots in them. Or rather, how our brain interprets sensory data can, at times, be unreliable. Which seems like an oversight if we were truly designed intelligently. Maybe we’re the prototypes and the Designer will work out all the bugs with the 2.0 line. 😉
comradedread
Mike
Comrade,
I applaud you for trying to engage these apologist. Although maybe you should change your name to comradesisyphus. It’s impossible to fairly and logically engage in any honest debate with apologists. It is impossible for them to look at anything objectively because they have already reached their own conclusion. Then, if you bring up any sort of objective logical question or point of view outside of the parameters of terms they have already set for the conversation they are dismissive and non responsive. All of that being said, it really is interesting to see how people really think and what makes them think that way.
Christopher Lake
Mike,
I used to be an atheist. Everything that you say, broadly and unfairly, about Christian apologists can also be said of, broadly and unfairly, of people who enthusiastically promote atheism. *Some* Christian apologists are dismissive of logical challenges which come from other perspectives.The same is true of *some* atheist apologists.
Are Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins *truly* interested in engaging, at length, with serious Christian Biblical exegesis and serious Christian thinkers? From the evidence of their books on religion, I don’t see that they are. In one chapter of “The God Delusion,” Dawkins does try to address the “Five Ways” of St. Thomas Aquinas, but even some of his fellow atheists have admitted that Dawkins does a terrible job with it, partially due to his lack of theological and philosophical training.
I’m honestly surprised to hear Christian quoting “God is Not Great,” by the late Christopher Hitchens, as though the arguments against Christian beliefs in that book are somehow devastating to the faith. Perhaps the faith of a more than a few hardcore Protestant fundamentalists would take a beating from “GISN.” Hitchens does often seem to think that *that* particular form of Biblical interpretation simply is *the* Christian faith. However, similarly to Dawkins and Harris, I don’t get the impression that Hitchens looked too deeply into the two thousand years of Catholic theological and philosophical thought (beyond bringing up the Galileo episode and a few other matters).
Robert Barron is a Catholic priest who loved to listen to and read Hitchens’ work, even while seriously regretting the man’s misconceptions about the God of historic Judeo-Christianity. Here, Fr. Barron replies to “God is Not Great”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBp9Tgkmk7w
Christopher Lake
Christian,
I’m curious– do you really find Hitchens’ “God is Not Great” to be a book which thoughtfully engages with serious Biblical exegesis and Christian thinking?
As I wrote above to Mike, some strains of hardcore Protestant fundamentalism are *definitely* challenged by “GISN,” but from all that I have read and heard from Hitchens, he doesn’t seem to have been very aware of most of historic Catholic Biblical exegesis and theological thought.
In any event, if you are interested, as you read “GISN,” I’ll leave these links here to three *short* videos of Father Robert Barron, a pretty thoughtful guy, replying to the book (Barron was actually a fan of Hitchens in many ways):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBp9Tgkmk7w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZR3UVYeddg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8EhqVbJaY
Christopher Lake
Christian,
Hmm.. the first two links posted, and the third one embedded! I’ve never seen that happen. Anyway, if you or anyone else are interested, there they are.
Christopher Lake
Ugh, sorry, Mike and Christian! Obviously, I should have typed “GING,” not “GISN,” re: Hitchens’ book, lol! What was I thinking?! It has been a long day, seriously.. I was almost hit by a car while going out for groceries earlier in my wheelchair… Time for sleep.
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
Perhaps, but that begs the question by assuming that God exists and that you’ve chosen the right God.
No, it is an observation that objective moral values and duties can not be grounded unless God exists.
You assume these things because you believe them to be so, and thus you are basing your own set of morality upon the writings of bronze age Hebrews. Which we have yet to establish is any better than basing your morality upon “the survival of humanity” or “doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people”.
I have established that it is better because the bronzed age Hebrews could ground their morality on something (supposedly) real while nonbelievers can not. The implications are as follows
1. Objective moral values and duties can not exist without God.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist
3. Therefore God exists.
First comes the observation that objective morals can not exist without God. Then comes the observation that these objective morals and duties do exist. Therefore God. It’s not the kind of argument that is supposed to prove “which God”.
And I can dive into the morality of the bible and show that said morality is completely subjective to the whims of its supposed Author.
Please save yourself the effort. I’m not interested in the lecture and it is irrelevant to the conversation. At best that would merely disprove biblical inerrancy or rule out the Christian God. It does nothing to show that objective morality exists apart from God.
I could start with the principle of self ownership, empathy and human commonality.
Good luck with that. Who says we OUGHT to subscribe to such ideas? Why should I let empathy dictate my actions? Who cares about human commonality? As soon as someone challenges these ideas you are left with no response other than outrage that person X doesn’t agree. You have no way of grounding these principles.
We’d then need to revisit the Enlightenment writers and thinkers who influenced our own Founding Fathers as to why a Republican or Democratic form of government was superior to the monarchies of the day.
Why would you do that? We had a democracy without female or minority votes for quite some time.
I do think it’s funny you chose that example since:
1. Many Catholic theologians long supported the idea of the divine right of kings and were opposed to peasants overturning and replacing their governments.
2. Biblical passages endorse slavery and subjugation of people, and were frequently cited by American clergy in the South to justify the oppression of African Americans.
3. Biblical passages were cited to endorse the idea of racial separation in America in support of segregation.
4. The bible has very little to say in regards to the superior form of human government.
Points 1-4 do not build your case at all and only distract from the challenge. The fact is that the civil rights movement was primarily propelled by arguments regarding the dignity of the human person, natural law, and God given rights. All of which vanish or become irrelevant once God is subtracted from the equation.
comradedread
No, it is an observation that objective moral values and duties can not be grounded unless God exists.
You haven’t proven this and even IF it were true, until you prove that God exists, your morality is just as subjective and uncertain as you claim non-theistic morality to be.
Actually, until you prove that either a singular god or king of the gods exists, that He or She is unchangeable, that It ascribes to the same objective moral standard, you haven’t proven that any theologically based morality system isn’t subjective.
I have established that it is better because the bronzed age Hebrews could ground their morality on something (supposedly) real while nonbelievers can not.
Great. I ground my morality on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s now objective and real. Woo-hoo!
Or you know, I could ground it upon reason, logic, and to a lesser extent empathy and commonality.
First comes the observation that objective morals can not exist without God. Then comes the observation that these objective morals and duties do exist. Therefore God. It’s not the kind of argument that is supposed to prove “which God”.
Unfortunately, you haven’t proven any of those premises and the conclusion doesn’t follow. As I said, you would still need to prove that this God is singular and unique or that He was powerful enough to suppress all other competing gods and their morality systems or that He has convinced the other gods to adopt his morality system.
At best that would merely disprove biblical inerrancy or rule out the Christian God. It does nothing to show that objective morality exists apart from God.
I’m sure we could go through other holy scriptures and likewise dismiss other versions of God. But it is nice that you at least see the possibility that your version of God is bunk.
Good luck with that. Who says we OUGHT to subscribe to such ideas?
Reason and logic. Your body is yours, and acting with empathy is beneficial to your long term survival, freedom, and happiness, which is why many morality systems include some variant of the Golden Rule.
All of which is backed by the social contract of the nation-state, as biblical morality would be.
Points 1-4 do not build your case at all and only distract from the challenge. The fact is that the civil rights movement was primarily propelled by arguments regarding the dignity of the human person, natural law, and God given rights. All of which vanish or become irrelevant once God is subtracted from the equation.
Points 1-4 demonstrate that your supposedly superior moral system is deficient and that it took the ideas and the principles of the Enlightenment to drag Christianity forward to rejecting biblical passages on the morality of slavery and supposed segregation and embracing the universal commonality of mankind.
It is liberalism and the Enlightenment that continue to try to push Christianity forward into accepting all men as equal and allowing gay men and women the dignity to live in peace and build their own families.
Mike
Christopher,
“Everything that you say, broadly and unfairly, about Christian apologists can also be said of, broadly and unfairly, of people who enthusiastically promote atheism. *Some* Christian apologists are dismissive of logical challenges which come from other perspectives.The same is true of *some* atheist apologists.”
I think the distinction is that *true* Christian apologists cannot and will not consider any other idea or conclusion other than the one they’ve already drawn before the conversation even starts. Even if they do encounter something that contradicts their position or something that cannot be explained, the trump card is, “well it just hasn’t been revealed to us yet by the Holy Spirit/God”. The problem is that, in their minds, there is no other possible alternative or answer to anything except God, the Christian god for that matter, and they run around in circles characterizing theological beliefs as evidence thereby (maybe intentionally or not) clouding up the conversation.
Atheists or agnostics or whoever are OK with admitting they are wrong if truly hard objective evidence is presented to them. This is impossible for apologists to provide when they present theological beliefs as evidence.
“Are Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins *truly* interested in engaging, at length, with serious Christian Biblical exegesis and serious Christian thinkers?”
I think Sam Harris is, and has. I think Dawkins now refuses to debate evangelical apologists, not because he’s worried about being schooled in a debate, but because he thinks it is pointless. I tend to agree with him there. I think Harris does it to hopefully get people to consider other perspectives than the ones they have already been indoctrinated with. It’s hard to do that though when the other side sets ridiculous terms and when you refuse to play by those terms they say, “Hah! Gotcha! Now repent!”
Apologetics is not for convincing non-believers that Christianity is true, it’s for reassuring Christians that they’re right and everybody else is wrong.
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
You keep asking me to “prove” that objective morality can not exist without God. How would you propose I do so? Am I supposed to give a refutation of every single feasible moral theory? If you think the premise “objective moral values and duties can not exist without God” is false, then all you need to do is provide a system that accounts for objective morality without God. Go for it.
The premises of an argument don’t need to be proven with certainty (we can prove and know almost nothing with certainty!). A good argument is a sound argument in which the premises are more plausible in light of the evidence than their opposites. You should compare the premise and its negation and believe whichever one is more plausibly true in light of the evidence. It’s hardly fair to start with premise one and say “but you haven’t proven God exists!”…. No kidding! We are only on the first premise! There is nothing in premise one that begs the question.
Morality can not be grounded in Zeus, invisible monsters, or any other creatures of great contingent power. Just as it can not be grounded by saying “because Hitler said so”. On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the “Good.” He is the locus and source of moral value. He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth. God is defined in such a way so as to be absolutely necessary. Meaning that there is no possible world in which God does not exist and therefore no possible world in which the same objective moral values and duties do not exist.
I do not need to “prove” the premises. They only need to be more reasonable in light of evidence than their opposites. Once you finally get around to supplying some feasible alternative to any of the premises, we can really get down to evaluating the argument. Just go ahead and pick any premise and give it your best shot. The argument itself is a MEANS of proving that God is singular, unique, powerful, and the absolute standard of morality. It is this very definition of “God” that we are dealing with in each premise. Objective moral values and duties can not exist without that very definition of “God” existing… yet they do exist… therefore God (as defined by theism) exists.
Lol. You can not just wave your hand and say “reason and logic” as if that is an argument all of its own. You need to SHOW with reason and logic why one must be accountable to these principles. My body is mine, but that does not mean that my actions should not be dictated by another. It also doesnt mean that I have a right to freedom, property, and equality. Further, saying that something is “good for my survival and happiness” does not mean that something is “morally good”. Those are two different categories of thought. After all, some situation might arise where rape, murder, genocide, theft, dishonesty, adultery, etc. are good for my own personal survival and happiness.
It demonstrates no such thing. You have conflated epistemology (how we come to know moral values and duties) with ontology (that moraql values and duties exist). Your points only at best demonstrate a failure on the part of many Christians to KNOW and UNDERSTAND morality. It does nothing to show that some other mystical/mysterious atheistic enlightenment philosophy is superior.
comradedread
Morality can not be grounded in Zeus, invisible monsters, or any other creatures of great contingent power. Just as it can not be grounded by saying “because Hitler said so”. On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God.
Morality cannot be grounded in Yahweh, because my magical Flying Spaghetti Monster is the only source of objective morality because moral values are rooted in His noodly appendages and tasty marinara sauce.
comradedread
After all, some situation might arise where rape, murder, genocide, theft, dishonesty, adultery, etc. are good for my own personal survival and happiness.
Which would ignore the rationality of self-ownership, ignore the social contract, and because you acted without empathy open you up to consequences of violence and sexual assault on your own person.
(And it probably wouldn’t be fair of me to point out the instances where the supposed source of objective morality, Jehovah tells his people to rape, murder, and pillage to their heart’s content?)
Let me ask you a question and give me an honest answer… if you discovered tomorrow without a doubt, without any possibility of being wrong, that there was no God. That it was mythology. That there was no heaven, no hell, no eternity. Just right now.
Would you really discard all moral values as irrelevant and unfounded? Or would you use your brain and start building a foundation for morality?
comradedread
I think this discussion is pushing me closer to being an agnostic.
Mike
Join us comrade. The water’s fine, I think, and from what I can observe at this particular moment, I have no reason to say otherwise.
Greg (@greghao)
At the risk of having my agnostic card revoked, amen to that.
Jokes aside, I think this conversation is a good distillation of why I have never been able to become religious (of any sort), the mental contortions that are necessary in order to make everything fit into a specifically prescribed worldview that is, generally speaking, inflexible to change.
I’m reminded of this when Anthony Kennedy said this during oral arguments on the same sex marriage case currently before the Supreme Court, “One of the problems is, when you think about these cases and the word that keeps coming back to me, in this case, is ‘millennia.’ [….] This definition has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the Court to say, ‘Oh, well, we know better.’” But humans, as we exist today, have been around for what, 100,000 years? What is a thousand years when placed in that context? And of course, this is pretty much only in a Western cultural context as well.
Mike
Hah, Greg. Good for you man on never becoming religious (especially evangelical Christian like I once was). I am jealous. For the better part of my life (I’m 31) I was basically told by people in authority positions that there was something inherently wrong with me and that I needed to be saved from eternal torture because two naked people were tricked by a talking snake when the apparently omniscient god that created them had his back turned. Messed me up a little bro.
It reminds me of a meme I saw online somewhere: “Christianity: You’re so terrible you made God kill himself”.
Christian
Ha! That reminds me of one of my favorite memes:
Greg (@greghao)
lol@christian.
mike – i think you might be new so i’ll quickly rehash something i mentioned on a thread a while back. the fear thing that you write about is something that i have noticed before. if the religion (any religion) was truly based on love, one would never hear its adherents speak in terms of fear but a great majority of the time, whenever i read a woman’s profile on match.com or wherever, they always put it as “fear God”, probably only 20% of the time do i see “love Jesus” or “love God”.
i know that that’s not necessarily the prevalent view and i trust that most christians are faithful out of a genuine desire and love for god but as Christian’s meme puts it so eloquently, there’s certainly a lot of stick to go with that carrot.
comradedread
Most of the ‘sermons’ I hear on the radio down here are all about fear: fear of hell, fear of God’s wrath, fear that America is declining, fear of foreigners, fear of gays, fear of irrelevancy, fear of socialism.
I know the evangelical subculture of Christianity the best and much of it is simple fearmongering.
Lane
Comrade,
The argument presented does not at all identify which transcendent god the objective morals are based on, only that a god is what grounds them.
We could consider your spaghetti monster if you like. But as we step through each of the proofs for god (Cosmological Argument from Contingency, Teleological Argument from Fine-tuning, Kalam Cosmological Argument, Ontological Argument…) for each to go through, the spaghetti monster has to meet certain conditions. Namely, a maximally great being which is transcendent, necessary (non contingent, self existing), infinitely powerful, infinitely intelligent, existing outside of time, existing in every possible world, etc. … If your spaghetti monster meets all of these, then he sounds no different than the god of classical theism. But I digress.
Back to the moral argument for God’s existence:
1. God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The argument is logically sound. It does not assume a god as a premise; it is a proof for a god. To refute it, you must attack one of the premises. Like Kenneth said, the 1st premise can be refuted with a demonstration of objective morals without a god. Good luck. Or you can attack the 2nd.
If you attack the 2nd, you are admiting that no morals are binding on anyone; you have yours, I have mine, both are equally valid. Most people are uncomfortable attacking the 2nd, because they KNOW that some things are wrong – are wrong every time in every context.
You asked Kenneth:
With the proof in mind, to be able to know without a doubt that there is no god would entail me being convinced that objective morals don’t exist. But they DO exist! Therefore a transcendent god exists. So it looks like you need to prove premise 1 wrong; it sounds like you are in favor of the 2nd being true.
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
That’s a funny response, but completely void of substance. As I’m sure you know. On a serious note, I think you are suffering from a very elementary view of what God is like. You seem to be under the impression that God is just like any other creature, but with super powers. You mentioned having to “prove He was king of all other Gods”. This is representative of what I like to call “crayon christianity”. I am trying to discuss the existence of “grown up” God while you seem to want to discuss the old man in the sky that you colored in Sunday school. If you wish to abandon crayon christianity and have a mature understanding of God I recommend you read here.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm
You still haven’t explained why anyone shouldn’t ignore those concepts. Until you do, we’ve reached an impasse.
There is no such thing as “building a foundation for morality” with my brain! It either exists or it does not. It can not be woven out of thin air. If I was convinced that God does not exist I would have the courage of ny convictions and admit rhat life is meaningless. I would land in nihilism despite the fact that it’s a grim worldview.
At this point it would be the more honest label for yourself.
Lane
The founding fathers got mentioned. And tgat reminded me of the Declaration of Independence.
Hell, even our country’s founding is founded on God and the objective morals we all can come to know as self-evident! Any talk of “rights” are predicated on morals being objective. How else could I have a right, a demand on you? These rights, which include life, better well be grounded firmly. Firmly, as in our Creator.
The fact that our Creator is rational means that the morals should also be rational. The fact that we are moral agents, created both to be able to come to know and be held accountable for our actions, means we can hold others accountable. The fact that people from every culture, even without knowledge of God, come to very similar morals (cowardice is no where a virtue for example) is only unsurprising once we realize that we all share a common design and Designer.
Lane
I think this discussion is pushing me closer to being an agnostic.
I thought you were an atheist, or at least an agnostic, this whole time. You know, since you were trying to refute an argument for god.
comradedread
As was your answer. That was the point.
Sweet Christmas, the arrogance astounds me. I’ve read my bible through several times, studied in bible college, have read apologetics books, have read counter apologetics books, studied church history, studied how the bible came to be, and studied ancient religions of the Near East. I am not some Christmas/Easter Christian.
I have explained why someone would not wish to ignore the moral implications of self-ownership, the negative ramifications of ignoring the social contract, and the loss of security and the risk of pain from ignoring common empathy. You either choose not to see, or do not find such circumstances compelling.
We are at an impasse. And you are the last person I would want to judge someone’s faith or absence thereof.
comradedread
I’ll refer you over here: http://casualentropy.blogspot.com/2012/05/debunking-moral-argument-for-existence_14.html
Since I have neither the time nor inclination to repeat what is aptly written there.
comradedread
Hell, even our country’s founding is founded on God and the objective morals we all can come to know as self-evident!
No… not quite. Unless you’re of the creative school of history like David Barton, most of our Founders were deists. And for that small clause in the Declaration of Independence, we have an entire constitution that does not mention, nor endorse, and even forbids the state from endorsing God or gods.
Lane
I wasn’t saying we were a Christian nation. I said we declared our independence, thus founding our nation, based on God and the denial ofobjective rights. That first clause basically says: “Hey England, you know that Creator of ours? He gave us rights, everyone knows that, and you are infringing them. Therefore we have the right to deny your authority”.
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
It is not arrogance. I am only noticing that your comments betray a very childish understanding of divine aseity. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.
I have explained why someone would not wish to ignore the moral implications of self-ownership, the negative ramifications of ignoring the social contract, and the loss of security and the risk of pain from ignoring common empathy. You either choose not to see, or do not find such circumstances compelling.
You have not explained any such thing. You merely repeat that these concepts are logical with a wave of your hand. You’re pretty good at cobbling scriptures together and tossing them about, but philosophy is clearly not your strong suit
Lane
Comrade,
I already knew you were well informed. However, so that I can better understand your point of view, how would you describe your current beliefs?
As for me, I grew up nonreligious. My parents took me to church maybe 2 times total, both under the age of 6. I wouldn’t say I grew up agnostic, more like I never thought seriously about anything important. I didn’t become Christian until my mid 20s after meeting my future wife. No Bible college for me; I studied electrical engineering. I both became serious about Christianity and also became Calvinist a few years later. After a few years Calvinist, I just became Catholic. So I’m no fundamentalist nor ever was. I’m also no evangelical. So I find people’s stories about growing up fundamentalist as fascinating as it is shocking. So the podcast is very entertaining to me.
comradedread
Kenneth, if you need a primer on self-ownership there are plenty of libertarian sites that will assist you.
As to your claim, once again, anyone can claim that any deity exists (from the aforementioned flying spaghetti monster to the great prophet Zarquon who will appear at the restaurant at the end of the Universe.)
You’ve failed to impress upon me any reason to believe your claims.
Serena
These ladies were the first to recognize that Florida was America’s schlong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC59IF5Jar4
Serena
Re: Andrea Yates the “hell fire and brimstone” pastor did have an influence on her, but you didn’t mention her post partum psychosis. Any religion or philosophy could have been twisted in that malfunctioning brain of hers. You could also more easily blamed heretical non-denominational Christianity instead of Christianity as a whole for her religious influences.
comradedread
Weak theist or weak agnostic depending upon the day.
I’d like to believe and be confident, but the more I read, hear, study, and argue on the topic, the more I’m persuaded that none of us knows what the hell we’re talking about when it comes to the topic of the Divine and we’re all sort of making it up as we go.
But I’d really like to believe in a kingdom of God where the poor become rich, men think of one another first, the oppressed are set free, and love and justice reign.
But, then again, since we were told to pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” I don’t really see why we need to wait until we die to hope for such a place. We could try to build that kingdom here and now.
Kenneth Winsmann
comrade,
ill take that as a concession that you have not the slightest idea why anyone ought to subscribe to the principles you suggest. All three premises are more reasonable than their negations, and the conclusion follows logically from those premises. I am not making any claim about “God” existing until the CONCLUSION and thus not begging the question. Cheers.
Christopher Lake
Mike,
So, is it accurate to say that, in your estimation, “true Christian apologists” are unable or unwilling to think outside of their worldview, while atheist apologists such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins are truly willing to consider Christian arguments *objectively* and consider that they might be wrong about God and Christianity? I just haven’t seen those attributes from Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens, and I speak as one who used to who their atheistic views.
Over my time as a Christian, I have been willing to admit that I’ve been wrong about particular aspects of things that I believe. I was once a young-earth creationist, and that humans were not the products of evolution. Now, I believe that the world is billions of years old, and that evolution may well be the accurate account of how humans came to be. (I’m not 100% convinced about it, because even some scientists have serious questions about evolution.) I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am willing to look at evidence from science and to consider the arguments of non-Christians and admit that I might be wrong about certain things.
About the central claims of Christianity, am I willing to admit consider evidence that I might be wrong about them? If someone could prove to my satisfaction to me that God likely does not exist, and that Jesus never rose from the dead, and that therefore, the disciples and all of their successors have lived, and often, been killed, for a lie, then I suppose that I would have to re-embrace atheism.
However, the ways in which Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens engage the Bible and central Christian claims don’t convince me of anything, other than that they think the only way to read the Bible and think about Christianity is in a fundamentalistic way which has little resemblance to my Catholic faith.
Also, when atheistic scientists, such as Dawkins, try to use science to argue against God, from the way that I view faith and science, they are making a category mistake. Science exists, largely, to tell us how the universe, and things and people in it, work. It is not the province of science to answer philosophical, ethical, and theological questions, such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “Is human life sacred and worth protecting, born and unborn?”
Science can tell us about evolution, but it can’t tell us why human life should be protected, even when it may nor contribute to society in the ways that many people deem to be most important. (I’m thinking of my life, as a physically disabled man with Cerebral Palsy, and of the lives of other disabled people, and of unborn human lives).
Christopher Lake
Mike,
Typo in the first section of my above reply to you– I meant to say, “I just haven’t seen those attributes from Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens, and I speak as one who used to *hold* their atheistic views.”
comradedread
Kenneth, you may take it as whatever you like. I’ve posted a link to a page that addresses your supposed solid argument and points out the flaws in it.
I’m tired of this, if you’re too myopic to see how raping, murdering, and pillaging would violate the self-ownership of others and the social contract and bring upon you (or family and your community) a host of negative consequences leaving you open to the same or worse, then I’m not going to continue to beat my head on my keyboard to indulge you.
Mike
That meme is great Christian. Greg, yeah I’m relatively new. I started listening at #33 and have been working my way back through older podcasts as well as listening to the new ones each week. I agree but it’s not only the fear mongering but also the core belief/concept that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Forget about “age of accountability” or burning in hell forever and focus on what happens everyday throughout Christendom, teaching young children (either directly or indirectly) that no matter what they do they will never be good enough until they accept Jesus into their heart. WTF. That’s a psychological nightmare. As for church in general, yes come to the “sinner’s hospital”, we’ll help. Don’t forget the 10% surcharge.
Kenneth man, you are in #beastmode. It’s funny (sad?) how you incorrectly (intentionally?) characterize subjective theological philosophy for hard objective evidence and logic. The “evidence” you espouse is not generally taken seriously outside the biased circle (circlejerk) of “christian academia”. I’m not saying that there aren’t extremely smart Christian scientists, philosophers, thinkers. Just that most of them have spent their entire careers molding and fashioning justifications for a preconceived worldview without any room for adjustment revision. I just think that if they (and you) want to truly debate, you have to set aside your theological bias and conclusions and actually be willing to consider the fact that, hey we might be wrong (you know, like ever other scientist, cosmologist, historian and the majority of academic world does or at least tries to do). But that’s impossible.
As I said in a previous comment above, Christian apologetics is not to logically and reasonably defend Christianity and the existence of the Christian god on an even playing field, it’s to bolster Christians’ already preconceived worldview. You need us to engage you, Kenneth. In world where religion is increasingly become less important to people, it keeps you and your tribe relevant. Self preservation. I get it. As I also said before, you want to only play on your terms, your rules and when someone tries to turn the conversation to neutral objective observable terms you’re dismissive and condescending. I don’t have to prove a negative and as long as your espousing that the Christian god is the only “reasonable” alternative to everything, there will be that “impasse” that you and comradedread came to.
All of that being said, it’s a fascinating and I think good to talk through. The conversations are good and I’m sure you are just as frustrated with my side of the spectrum as I am with yours.
By the way, how are you guys quoting other posts to put in your own post. You know, with the big quotation marks and italicized? I’m an idiot and tech challenged.
Christopher Lake
Christian,
About your meme with Jesus knocking on the door– you don’t really like the God of the Bible, right? From what I can tell, you think he’s a jerk, or worse, a monster. A monster who probably doesn’t exist, in your view, but still, morally speaking, a monster. (I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to state your view accurately. Please let me know if I’m wrong about it.)
From the New Testament, and from the evidence of the early Church, it seems that Jesus at least *claimed* to be this God– the God of the Bible– in human form, as the Second Person of the Trinity who came to this world as the Incarnation. Now, maybe He was completely deluded about that, or maybe most of his followers, throughout the centuries have completely misunderstood Him on this point, but that did seem to be His claim– that He was God in human form.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the God of the Bible does exist, and that Jesus is the Incarnation of this God. Believing what you currently believe about the God of the Bible, would you actually *want* to be with Him for eternity? You think He’s a monster, right? Would you want to be in Heaven with Him?
As a Catholic, I do believe that Jesus is is God. I also believe that He is not going to *force* anyone to spend eternity with Him. If you don’t want to be with Him, I don’t think He will force you to do so. That is my understanding of Hell. It’s not pitchforks and demons physically torturing you for eternity. It’s God giving you what you seem to want (given that you don’t like Him and seem to think He’s a monster)– to be as far away from His presence as possible for eternity.
comradedread
Why not Zeus? Why a singular deity and not a pantheon? Why not an impersonal force? Why not dualism? Perhaps sociopaths were created by a malevolent deity with its own moral code? Perhaps Hitler was simply following the moral dictates written into his soul by this other deity.
Or, for that matter, why not simple naturalistic processes rewarding those early humans/apes who were more adept at cooperation and social behavior?
Unless I’ve misread you and you are using the term God to refer to some amorphous entity whose being and nature are unknown or barely known to us, then your argument, at the least, presupposed a Judeo-Christian/Islamic singular supreme deity with intelligence, personality, and benevolence.
comradedread
Mike,
(blockquote)(/blockquote), but with less than/greater than signs instead of parenthesis.
Lane
Mike,
With html tags. You can italicize, bold, underline, strike out, blockquote, and so forth with them. Here is some examples:
http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/formatting-blog-comments-using-html.html
comradedread
Speaking for myself, the God presented in the Old Testament is rather horrific in some passages. And if He was responsible for the Law of Moses, a deity of dubious morality. Now I think the Old Testament is written by Jewish nationalists who put a “God is on our side in everything we do” sort of spin on the oral tales of their history, so I’m not inclined to believe everything I read about Him in it.
Just to throw it out there, the discussion of the deity of Christ was debated for some time, but the church sort of ‘took care’ of any ‘heretics’ who disagreed with them in the long run.
Lane
Comrade,
Yes the argument is narrow. It’s just trying to establish the existence of a transcendent god on which objective morals, to actually be “objective”, are grounded.
As you go through each of the classical arguments, if they go through, you get a more and more detailed picture of that god. Which is the classical god of general theism; the god of the philosophers. Which isn’t much different than deism. However, you have a god that exists; moving forward you can assume this in later arguments. These later arguments, will be of a different sort, they will establish, or not, which god actually might be God. Again, the earlier arguments, which include the moral argument, don’t assume a god at all nor any specific god.
Mike
Christopher,
“So, is it accurate to say that, in your estimation, “true Christian apologists” are unable or unwilling to think outside of their worldview, while atheist apologists such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins are truly willing to consider Christian arguments *objectively* and consider that they might be wrong about God and Christianity?”
Essentially, yes. However, I do not think it is possible to view Christian arguments objectively because they are in and of themselves not objective. So I think Harris or Dawkins (maybe not Dawkins – he’s a wily ole atheist ain’t he?) would be willing to consider Christian apologist arguments if they would present arguments that are not founded on theological beliefs/philosophy. I don’t know if that’s really possible.
“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am willing to look at evidence from science and to consider the arguments of non-Christians and admit that I might be wrong about certain things.”
You are in the minority, sir, at least among fundamental evangelicals where I live. I do have a few Catholic friends that are extremely liberal (one believes that Jesus was actually married, gasp) so I’m starting to think you Catholics are alright. I was taught my whole life that yall really weren’t Christians. I applaud you for your openness.
“the ways in which Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens engage the Bible and central Christian claims don’t convince me of anything, other than that they think the only way to read the Bible and think about Christianity is in a fundamentalistic way which has little resemblance to my Catholic faith.”
This is interesting. I’m cool with everybody interpreting Christianity and the bible in their own special way. Just don’t tell me your interpretation is the only true way and everybody else is wrong. Honest question, how do you reconcile the divine authority of the Pope and your own version of Christianity?
“Also, when atheistic scientists, such as Dawkins, try to use science to argue against God, from the way that I view faith and science, they are making a category mistake.”
I totally agree man. But I think this mainly a reaction to “evidentiary” and “scientific” and “logical” claims by Christian apologist for the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus or the inerrancy of the bible, etc. I think boils down to, Christian apologist: “It’s logical and reasonable to believe the Christian God exists and Jesus rose from the dead and there’s no other possibility.” Atheist Scientist/historian/cosmologist: “No it’s not and yes there is.”
“Science can tell us about evolution, but it can’t tell us why human life should be protected, even when it may nor contribute to society in the ways that many people deem to be most important.”
I disagree here and I think it’s getting into comradedread’s points, but I don’t think Christianity does a very good job of it either. I think the variety of scientific disciplines can work interchangeably to helps understand the intricacies of human life and how to work together to to make *everybody’s* lives better. Science may not have all the answers but it is constantly evolving and changing for the betterment of our world here and now. Christianity purports to: have all the answers; if you question those answers you’re doing it wrong; that there is something inherently wrong with humans; and that if you aren’t with us you are against us. I’m obviously downplaying the many many philanthropic and caring things churches do across the world which in and of themselves is awesome. It’s just that non-religious nonprofits do that too just because it’s the decent thing to do and not in the interest of converting anyone.
Dude, don’t sell yourself short. Everybody contributes to society in their own way (except for Michele Bachmann, she should be banished to that island where they sent Napoleon).
comradedread
Okay, If you’re simply arguing for the existence of the Tao at this point, then that is more tenable. I still think the argument isn’t conclusive, but stripping the word “God” (which has a set of presuppositions attached to it) out of the argument makes it clearer.
Mike
thanks Lane and comrade! boom
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
It looks like Lane was able to bridge the miscommunication between us! I would only add that the competing creatures that you mentioned, even if we grant their existence, would not qualify as the kinds of being that could ground objective moral standards by their own definitions! The best way to explain this is with a video. Hope this helps!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQPRqHZRP68&w=560&h=315%5D
Kenneth Winsmann
Mike,
The premises of the moral argument, taken individually, can find support from many great thinkers that are not within “the circle”. People like Richard Taylor, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, etc. etc. Which is always the funny part about these kinds of silly allegations. The premises themselves are defended by all kinds of “respected” scientists and philosophers, yet when someone like Alvin Plantiga shows what the implications are, these arguments become “unserious” agenda driven nonsense. No one comes to the table without bias. This idea that the “majority of the academic world” are comprised of non-biased automatons searching for truth is the height of ignorance. Further, none of the arguments presented so far are fueled by bias. If they fail, please pick a premise and explain the failure to us all. So far you have only ignored the arguments and committed the ad hominem fallacy. To understand why your contribution so far has been a prime example of bad thinking, please click here….
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
As Bryan Cross would say… “table pounding is easy. Making an argument is more difficult”. Anyone can make an assertion. I would be happy to see if you could back up any of these statements. You begin with the moral argument that we have been discussing. Explain how the argument is not presented on a “even playing field”.
Kenneth Winsmann
One more note,
If it were true that Christian apologetics were not convincing, nor taken seriously by “real academics” we should expect to not find any respected academic converts to christianity that were formerly atheistic scientists or philosophers. Happily, there are MANY such converts and thus the charge is dead in the water. Further it is interesting that there have been literally THOUSANDS of peer reviewed articles examining the cosmological argument in the last few years. Seems strange that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge would encourage PhDs to waste so much ink examining arguments that “no one takes seriously” outside of the “circle jerk”
comradedread
Conversely, we also see many pastors and ministers deconverting from Christianity to agnosticism or atheism.
Christian
Christopher,
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the God of the Bible does exist, and that Jesus is the Incarnation of this God. Believing what you currently believe about the God of the Bible, would you actually *want* to be with Him for eternity?
If he exists and he really is a loving, just god, I’m sure he could show me pretty easily where I’ve lacked in understanding and change my mind. If he refuses to do so even though I have honestly sought the truth, then he’s just as bad as I thought he was.
Christian
Did anyone actually read the article comradedread posted about the Moral Argument?
http://casualentropy.blogspot.com/2012/05/debunking-moral-argument-for-existence_14.html
(As a side note, don’t ever make a site that is white text on black background. It gives some people (me) a headache.)
Christian
Kenneth,
If it were true that Christian apologetics were not convincing, nor taken seriously by “real academics” we should expect to not find any respected academic converts to christianity that were formerly atheistic scientists or philosophers.
Come on, man. So any philosophy that someone smart converts to means that the argument for that thing is valid? You’re going to end up with a lot of contradictory and yet valid philosophies.
Christopher Lake
Comrade,
I’m well aware that the deity of Christ was debated among early theologians. From the evidence that we have though, it wasn’t seriously debated by most professing Christians until the Arian controversy– which is why the Catholic Church called a council to address said heresy. You see this as a power move; I see it as God working within the Church to define and codify Christianity itself.
Many fundamentalist Protestants claim to accept the doctrine of the Trinity based on “the clear teaching of Scripture alone.” I accept the Trinity, partially based on what I see in Scripture, and partially based on the historic teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
When I was a Protestant, in a way, I did the same, but I did so without being conscious of it. All of my Protestant Christian friends and mentors seemed to be fully convinced that the Trinity is a “Christian essential.” However, given the fact in Protestantism, there is no finally authoritative way to *define and decide* what the “essentials of Christianity” even are, my Protestant friends and mentors were really agreeing with the historic Biblical interpretation, and teaching authority, of the Magisterium on the Trinity (while disagreeing with the Church on many other issues).
Kenneth Winsmann
Christian,
I was only responding to the idea that “no one takes these arguments seriously”. I wasn’t trying to say that if someone smart thinks it’s true, it must be valid.
Christopher Lake
Mike,
You mentioned that I’m very different from the evangelical fundamentalists where you are. Catholic Christianity and “evangelical fundamentalism” (to the extent that it can really be defined) do agree on certain doctrines and teachings, but they differ so much in their overall approach to Scripture and to the matter of faith itself, that I’m not surprised to hear that I differ with E.F.! 🙂
For me, there is no issue about reconciling the Pope’s teaching authority with my own version of Christianity, because I gave up trying to define and decide the latter when I left Protestantism. The New Testament came from the Church, not the other way around. This is one reason that I accept the Church’s teaching authority. I’ll explain.
Historically speaking, the Catholic Church collected the books of the New Testament into the canon that we have today– and which we have had, thanks to them, since 382 A.D. when the NT canon was decided at a Church council. The Catholic Church also still accepts the same canon of the Old Testament which Christians generally accepted until Martin Luther threw out seven books with the Reformation, making the 66-book-canon which Protestants have generally accepted since Luther’s time. Catholics still accept the 73-book-canon which was the first one.
Given that it was the the Church which actually *wrote, defined, and codified* the books of the New Testament, I submit to the Church in matters of Biblical interpretation. An effect cannot be greater than its cause. Now, the Church doesn’t say that there is only one interpretation of every Biblical verse or passage— far from it! What the Church does do is to provide guardrails, so that we can know if our interpretations are wandering into heresy. This is why the “Prosperity Gospel” of some Protestant evangelicals does not, and probably, will never, exist in any significant way in the Catholic Church! The Church has taught so long against such heresies that Catholics who *know and care about the teaching authority* will never fall for it!
I am not a “liberal” or “conservative” Catholic. I’m just Catholic. I would never say that Jesus was married, because the Church settled that issue a long, long time ago. If a Catholic believes that Jesus married, then consciously or not, he/she has stepped outside of Catholicism on that quite important question.
Some American Catholics, particularly, seem to think that the term “Catholic” is simply a matter of self-definition, and that one can be a faithful Catholic while not believing in the Trinity, or while supporting legalized abortion. These people are thinking as contemporary egalitarian Americans first, and as Catholics, very much second, if at all. I’m Catholic first, and American decidedly second.
On the matter of whether it is logical and reasonable to believe in the Christian God and the Resurrection, by definition, most atheists are likely going to say “No.” However, among many other questions, I have to wonder if most atheists have spent much serious time looking into the Catholic view of faith and reason as natural friends, rather than enemies. Pope John Paul II dedicated one of his most significant writings, “Fide et Ratio,” to that exact subject, but I have never seen, nor heard, a contemporary atheist even *attempt* to address that thoughtful document: http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html
On the question of whether purely naturalistic, atheistic evolution *alone* is able to effectively address ethical questions, such as whether to care for unborn human lives, or legally allow them to be destroyed, I don’t know how a person who believes that we are simply more sophisticated (i.e. “highly evolved”) animals would convincing argue that we have *any* intrinsic human rights, including the right to life. More and more modern secularists believe that the “decent” thing to do with a physically disabled person such as myself is to kill him/her in the womb. I strongly disagree with this position, but I do so because I believe that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to life. Human beings can’t give the right to life, and they can’t take it away. They can, however, *violate* it, which, sadly, happens all the time, with both the born and unborn.
Mildly Buzzed Current Pastor
I can get you a toe.
#KeepUpTheLebowskiTalk
Christopher Lake
Christian,
You write that if the God of the Bible does exist, and if He is truly a loving, just God, then He can fairly easily show you where you are wrong and change your mind. I agree with this statement in part. God is all-powerful. He overcame my atheism, which was far more vociferous than your agnosticism! 🙂 However, I had to be willing to admit that given the fact that I am finite, and God is infinite, there may well be times when I don’t like, or even understand, all of His ways.
*Only* going by what I’ve heard from you on the episodes of the podcast that I’ve listened to (and please do tell me if I’m really off here– I mean that, seriously, not just saying it!), it seems that, at this point, at every specific turn in which your “likes” and “understandings” conflict with God’s ways in the Bible, that is a reason for you to conclude that the God of the Bible either does not exist, or, that if He does exist, He is worth hating and rejecting, rather than loving.
We all have the data that we have of God and His ways in the Bible. I have that data, you have it, anyone who has a Bible has it. In your view, if He does exist, how is He going to convince you that He is not a moral monster and should be loved and worshiped?
Mike
Really? What do you mean by taken individually? It seems to be a favorite pastime of Christian apologists to cherry pick a quote out of context from someone from an opposing view then use to say, “See [fill in the blank] agrees with us!”
This is amazing. Just so I’m clear here, there are all kinds of respected scientists and philosophers outside the “circle” that are out there defending the Moral Argument based on objective reasoning but when someone comes along and pulls back the curtain to reveal the “true” implications of the MA based, of course, on real objective evidence, they all scoff and completely reject everything they were just defending? Is that it?
That may be, but I would like to think people would be open to changing their bias/point of view if they are presented with objective facts and evidence.
I never said they were necessarily searching for truth, but that they are willing to adjust their currently held positions when objective evidence calls them to do so, regardless of what their preconceived theological views may be. Those in the “circle” cannot and will not do that, which, to borrow your words, is the “height of ignorance” and has no place in thoughtful and legitimate academia.
Throwin down the gauntlet. I like it. How do you say out of one side of your mouth (one end of your keyboard) everybody comes to the table with a bias, then say nothing that you have said is fueled by bias? To be fair, it may not be bias, but theological belief which can never be objective reasoning or fact. Maybe you consider bias and theological beliefs two different things. I don’t know. Did you read the link comradedread posted about debunking the Moral Argument? I think it makes some good points.
This is cute. Who did I personally attack? For what it’s worth, I was “attacking” Christian apologetics, not the individual characters of apologists. I understand that you think my contribution is “bad thinking” but please do not arbitrarily and incorrectly trot out a logical fallacy to support your opinion.
Back up the idea that Christian apologetics is nothing more than a feel good exercise for Christians to suppress any doubts they might have? I guess it’s more of an anecdotal observation than an assertion. I don’t know what you want me to say. I just don’t get how apologetics meshes with passages like 1 Corinthians 1:18-21:
Powerful stuff. Why not embrace the “foolishness of the cross”? Why try to convince those of us that are perishing that you’re right? Our eyes are not opened and hearts are closed anyway, right? It’s to convince yourself you are right. Doubt is scary. But if you can go out and debate somebody and walk away thinking you’ve won, you maintain that status quo. Get thee back Satan or whatever, I’m tired.
As for the “even playing field” in relation to the Moral Argument, I’ll refer you to a post by James A. Lindsay who is far more intelligent and eloquent than I could ever be. http://goddoesnt.blogspot.com/2014/07/christian-apologist-and-theologian.html
Greg (@greghao)
Part of the problem of is the fact that as I mentioned above, there are a million different flavours of atheism. How famous “atheists” like Dawkins or Hitchens behave and belief applies only to themselves and those who say those views represent them. That’s it. Atheism isn’t a religion, it’s really a catch all term. However, such is, or rather should, not the case with christians. Christians have a Bible that is supposedly handed to them by god which lays out a pattern of behaviour and thought.
Christopher Lake
Many of the criticisms that I’m seeing of Christian thinking on morality here (and at the “Casual Entropy” blog link which Christian posted) seem to be based on the concept of Divine Command Theory. DCT is the view of many Protestants, fundamentalist and otherwise, but it is not the teaching of the Catholic Church.
This is very frustrating, because most commenters here are simply shooting down fundamentalistic Protestant thinking with seemingly little awareness that most of historic Christianity comes from a different sensibility and approach. See more on this here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/05/wilson-vs-hitchens-a-catholic-perspective/
Kenneth Winsmann
Mike,
I mean that each of the two premesis have been articulated and defended by people who are not christian. For example the first premise was held by Nietche. The second, that objective moral values and duties exist, is held by many people, although they struggle to explain how without a deity. It’s only when these are put together to form an argument that people start balking.
Maybe the atheists that agree with 1 disagree with 2. Or maybe the people that hold to 2 disagree with 1, but it’s not like christians are pulling these things out of their ass. It’s also not true that we are taking them out of context. Someone can obviously supply evidence for one of the premesis without buying into the whole argument.
I’m happy to have amazed you. I think I already answered this question in my above comments.
Well of course! I have done that myself in converting from Lutheran to RC.
You keep on repeating this, but it’s not true. People change their minds all the time. People convert from one religion to another or else abandon religion altogether. Anthony Flew changed from atheist to deist. Dan Barker from minister to atheist. It happens every year all over the world.
I readily admit that I PERSONALLY have a theistic bias. However, I do not think that the argument presented suffers from biased premises. If you disagree feel free to show where and how……
The particular fallacy you were/are commiting does not have to be against specific persons per se. It can be an attack on an organization, group, race, nation, gender, whatever. The fact is you are questioning the intellectual honesty of apologists and avoiding any engagement with their actual arguments. You are trying to undermine the argument by questioning the reliability of said arguments source. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the very definition of an ad hominem fallacy.
I don’t have to backup anything. YOU are the person making the claim. The burden of proof is yours. Deliver the agnostic goods. We are all waiting….
just don’t get how apologetics meshes with passages like 1 Corinthians 1:18-21:
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
1. You put way too much stock in this guy. He is a B teamer at best.
2. He is upset because Craig says that his personal experience with God trumps certain evidences that call into question God’s existence. That seems perfectly reasonable. The only way that WOULD be reasonable is if you are willing to call Dr. Craig a liar.
Imagine you were like Russell Crowe on “a beautiful mind”. You had all these imaginary friends and intense hallucinations. Think about how much evidence it would take for you to begin doubting your own experiences. It wouldn’t be enough to cast some doubt on the imaginary friends…. there would need to be VERY compelling evidence for you to start doubting your own experience. That’s all craig is saying. Perhaps the “playing field” isn’t level when it comes to conversion, but that doesn’t mean the arguments are slanted in favor of the theist. Only that they may be reluctant to give them up.
Mike
Christopher,
I appreciate the brief Catholic history lesson (I honestly do)! I think it’s very sad that your fellow Christian fundamentalist brethren think you all are going to rot in hell. I honestly don’t really know the Catholic perspective on faith and reason and am interested in reading “Fide et Ratio”. My ignorance on Catholic teachings and perspective is a direct result of being raised in the Bible Belt, USA.
Lane
Christian,
On an aside, you asked the Christian phrase for conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. As you know, “swim the Tiber” (to Rome) means to convert to Catholicism. “Swim the Bosphoru” (to Constantinople) means to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. “Walking on the Canterbury Trail” means to convert to Anglicanism. And “swim the Mississippi” is to Lutheranism. There you go!
Lane
Comrade,
Amen.
Kenneth Winsmann
Christian and Mike,
Which part of the link from Comrade did you find most compelling? I read the entire thing, it was well done.
Christopher Lake
Lane,
I add my Amen to yours, re: Comrade’s beautiful comment! The kingdom of Heaven begins in this world, as Christians (and all people of good will) work to make things better!
Christopher Lake
Mike,
Thank you for your gracious and humble reply. I really do appreciate it– and I hear you about growing up in the Bible Belt!! I was born, raised, and lived the first 26 years of my life, in a small town in Alabama. There was only one Catholic parish in the *entire county* where I lived. I initially came into the Catholic Church through that very parish.
I live in Maryland now, just outside of D.C., and it’s a very different world here from the world of my youth. There are Catholics everywhere– some practicing, many not, many somewhere in the middle– but not nearly as many Protestant fundamentalists. The latter do exist here, but they don’t dominate the “Christian narrative” nearly as much in this part of the U.S. as they still do in the deep South.
Christian
Lane,
Thanks for the proper phraseology on converting! Did you guys make those up, because “Swim the Tiber” clearly has the best ring to it. 🙂
Christian
Christopher,
…it seems that, at this point, at every specific turn in which your “likes” and “understandings” conflict with God’s ways in the Bible, that is a reason for you to conclude that the God of the Bible either does not exist, or, that if He does exist, He is worth hating and rejecting, rather than loving.
Certainly “God” is capable of appealing to our understanding. Most people I know aren’t able to understand many of the things god is claimed to have done or said. Even most Christians will say he’s beyond understanding and you have to have faith where understanding fails. To me, that sounds a lot like “it doesn’t make sense but it fulfills some need, so just believe.” Along with may people, I’m unwilling to make that leap. If I do have to make a leap that conflicts with my understanding, why Christianity? Why not another religion?
It really wouldn’t be that difficult for god to convince me if I was standing before him and he explained a few things. According to most Christians, he’s not really willing to do that though. If I die not believing in everything written in some old book that makes little sense to my understanding, then he’ll just send me to hell forever. I can’t even explain to you how silly that sounds to me, and to many others, but then again the Bible takes care of that by saying it’s “foolishness to those who are perishing,” right? That’s a very convenient verse for a religion that teaches some seemingly foolish things to have in its arsenal.
Mike
Kenneth,
This really is news to me and I’m honestly not being snarky here, but can you show me some examples of skeptics or atheists defending any of the premises of the Moral Argument?
Maybe we are talking past each other. I don’t disagree with you. I was just trying to make the distinction between insisting you are absolutely right based on subjective theological beliefs without any consideration for an alternative when reasonable evidence is presented to you and staunchly holding a point of view but changing it when presented with an objectively viable alternative. I guess I just don’t understand the all or nothing approach. What is wrong with saying “you don’t know” or “we’re workin on it”?
I’m not sure how, in your case or any other apologist’s case, you can separate your theological bias from the arguments you present. I’ll pull some quotes from your convo with comradedread:
I’m curious to hear how YOU know what God is like. What or who gives YOU the authority to determine the nature of a being that has never been objectively observed in our world/universe? What is your basis for objectively determining that the “grown up” God is any different that the old man or is the product of man’s attempt to make sense of the world? Also, I only real difference I see between “crayon christianity” and “grown up” (?) sophisticated? christianity are a bunch of fancy words and pseudo-intellectual babble. At least the simpleton christians aren’t trying to fool themselves. Embrace the foolishness of the cross.
Another Kenneth quote:
More reasonable than their negations? How so? I’m curious how objective moral values exist for you when apparently there is a God commanding you on what those moral values are, and since you know what the nature of the “grown up” God is, those moral values that have been commanded are objective, right? Your subjective theological bias is showing.
Dude, I wasn’t questioning anyone’s intellectual honesty. I think apologists 100% believe everything they say and was not implying that the work they do is in any way intellectually inferior. I was simply pointing out the issues that come up when you mistakenly and inappropriately use theological beliefs for hard objective evidence. It’s hard (I think impossible) to reconcile those two. I think it’s great for discussion “in the public square” so to speak, but I think it is inappropriate and impossible to include such biased beliefs in any legitimate scientific study where observable evidence and checking and rechecking results is the name of the game.
Sorry man, I probably wasn’t clear there. I was just repeating the question and I guess I did a poor job of doing it. All I was saying that, based on anecdotal experience with Christian fundamentalist apologists (shout to Christopher for making the distinction from you RC’ers), the end game hasn’t been about making anyone “see the light”, it’s been more about being right. I’ll leave this part of the comment with a quote from Bart Ehrman who was responding to a bizarre blog post directed at him by an apologist he had recently debated (Kyle Butt):
Link to full response: http://ehrmanblog.org/on-debating-a-fundamentalist/
Oh so you are familiar with Lindsay and his work? I guess they all can’t be in the big leagues with WLC.
Of course it’s reasonable for someone to believe that his or her personal experience with God trumps evidence that God doesn’t exist as long as that belief is not espoused and claimed to be hard scientific evidence FOR the existence of God. I don’t care what WLC believes and whatever he believes may be what is right for him and has brought him much success in his life, but please don’t confuse it with objective evidence and proof of anything other than what is in his own head or the Bible or what his preacher said last Sunday.
Wait, so is Craig the genius schizophrenic in your analogy?
I don’t think it’s that the evidence is not compelling enough for Craig it’s just he doesn’t want to hear it. Kind of like my “heart has been hardened” to the gospel.
Please forgive an typos and grammatical errors. I’m too lazy to go back and re-read this
Greg (@greghao)
Precisely! One of my best friends, a devout fundamentalist christian, told me about a come to jesus moment that a former muslim friend of his had. Basically, according to the convert friend, god appeared to him in a miracle and as a result he became a christian. After laughing for a few minutes, I told my friend if god appeared before me and told me that he was real, of course i’d convert to christianity right then and there. I’m not (usually) an idiot and if god took the time out to appear in front of me to let me know that he was real, why would I not become a christian?
Sadly, god is too busy doing other things so an agnostic I remain.
Mike
Christopher,
Oh nice. My wife (before we were married) used live in Birmingham and I would go visit here. Cool city. I’m from a little further west. It’s telling how something as simple as geography can shape your worldview. Here in Texas we have the pleasure of dealing with this guy…
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2015/04/first_baptist_dallas_jeffress_abortion_911.php
Mike
Kenneth,
<Christian and Mike,
Which part of the link from Comrade did you find most compelling? I read the entire thing, it was well done.
Yeah I think whole thing was pretty well thought out. But the following excerpt really stuck out to me:
Christopher Lake
Christian,
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to interact with the podcast listeners here.
Of course, God is capable of appealing to our understanding. However, the issue of understanding, between an infinite God and finite beings, is not a matter of *reasoning between equals*. I once heard the Catholic author, Peter Kreeft, talking about having to take his three-year-old son to the ER because of a dog bite. Dr. Kreeft didn’t want his son to contract rabies, so he and the nurses physically down the kid, while the doctor gave him a rabies shot. Did the three-year-old understand why his dad was holding him down? No. Did he like it? No way! However, it had to be done, for reasons that Dr. Kreeft understood but that were unfathomable to his three-year-old son. To me, this is a bit similar to the question of some of God’s harder-to-understand ways with us.
Now, you will almost certainly say that is a weak “explanation,” but here’s the thing that confuses me– for many, many years, you were a Christian, and I would guess (I could be wrong) that you accepted explanations very much like this one for God’s ways being higher than ours. You ridicule and put down the arguments of Christian apologists, and even just well-known passages from the Bible, *now* (from what I have heard from you on the podcast), but for years, it seems that you accepted such passages and arguments and didn’t seem them as being weak and illogical. In your own estimation, looking back, were you, as a Christian, just willing to accept anything in order to continue believing in God, even if it the Biblical argument or passage seemed completely weak and irrational to you?
To be brutally honest about myself, when I was an atheist, I implicitly, kind of semi-consciously, accepted many ideas that seem completely ridiculous to me now. I did so, because when I was an atheist, my mind was often ruled by my emotions, and I thought and “reasoned” (if you could even call it that) based largely on my emotions– without really considering the deeper *logical and philosophical* implications of my atheist arguments. Becoming a Christian helped me to think and reason based more on logic. Of course, my emotions still play a part in my thinking; I’m not a heartless sociopath! 🙂 However, even though it might seem strange to someone who sees the claims of Christianity as irrational, Christianity led me to logic and rationality (more so than I had been preciously), rather than away from them.
Christopher Lake
Mike,
When I was a teenager, I used to love hanging out in Birmingham with my heavy metal, punk rock, and goth friends, hehe! We definitely scared some people! I still have some of the same friends today, but we’ve calmed down a good bit from those days. 🙂 It’s funny– only a few years later, I was still going to Birmingham with a good friend and hanging out there, but it was such a different experience of the city, because *this* friend was pretty conservative and listened to almost only classical music!
About that pastor from Texas that you linked to… wow. Wow. God brought about 9/11 because of abortion??? And Liberty University let this guy speak there?? (Then again, Jerry Falwell *did* found the place, so….) I have serious problems with abortion (I don’t really like it when the brains are sucked out the skulls of fetuses), but 9/11 was not God’s doing.
Christopher Lake
On the link from James A. Lindsay which Comrade posted– William Lane Craig is not as fiedistic as some Protestant apologists, such as Douglas Wilson, but Craig’s argumentation still has an unfortunate way of pitting faith *against* reason. I believe that he subscribes to Divine Command Theory-type thinking about God and His ways (and about faith and reason)– which is, as I wrote earlier, *not* the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Bryan Cross explains the Catholic view of the *goodness of reason*, as opposed to Divine Command Theory, here (the footnotes are almost as helpful as the actual article too!): http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/05/wilson-vs-hitchens-a-catholic-perspective/
comradedread
Speaking for myself, I have been told from my youth that this was the truth. That people who disagreed were too blind or dishonest to see it. That evolution was a lie. That we had the bible, we knew what it said, and it was without a doubt the word of God, and it was our calling to study God’s word and do what He said.
There was no exposure to counter-ideologies. No exposure to philosophy. No exposure to other branches of Christian thought. (Liberal and Mainline Protestant Christians weren’t really Christians at all in this line of thought.) There was the church bubble.
Getting exposed to ideas outside of the bubble have convinced me that I was wrong. That I was sold a bill of goods by well-meaning people, but it was a bill of goods nonetheless.
Lane
Christian,
Well, I guess they are all made up. “Swim the Tiber” is the definitely the one you hear the most. It is the one most feared and threatening to Protestants. No one cares if a Baptist becomes non-denominational or episcopal; that’s just a personal choice. But if you convert to Catholicism, it means that that person thinks all of Protestantism was a mistake, a 500 year tragic mistake. Going back the Catholicism is viewed nearly as bad becoming atheist, probably worse!
comradedread
Some Protestants think your church is the Whore of Babylon in Revelations and see it as a false religion based on paganism and worship of Mary or Astarte the mother of God, if I recall my “Crazy Southern Baptist” propaganda correctly.
Kenneth Winsmann
Mike,
Unfortunately I don’t have the time to give you a proper response at the moment. However, if you want to read atheists agreeing with the two premesis see here
http://www.bethinking.org/morality/can-moral-objectivism-do-without-god
Lane
Mike,
Looking at the section of the article you quoted:
This is probably the most common mistake in what is being claimed. What is being claimed is the basis of the objective morals’ ontology (their existence), not their epistemology (how one may come to know them).
Catholics base their understanding on morals on reasoning human nature, teasing out the Natural Law. That Natural Law is informed by special revelation (Scripture), which gives us knowledge of our past, our purpose, our problems in the present, and our future. Here is J. Budziszewski defines Natural Law:
See http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2010/jbudziszewski_intervw_mar2010.asp
This is significantly different than the way Protestants do ethics typically. Since most hold to the principal, Sola Scriptura, they believe everything that need to know about morals can be found explicitly in the Bible. That’s why you see Protestants quoting 3000 year old texts from ancient Israel, trying their darndest to strain out every drop of information from the grammar to get to why something is wrong. Which I think is a fundamentally misuse of those scriptures.
I don’t think anything, except the 10 commandments, from the Old Testament are binding on us today. The laws in OT gives us insights into a lot of principals for ethics, but the laws themselves aren’t binding us. The Mosaic Laws in the OT were for Israel, to guide and protect them; to tutor them in preparation of the coming Christ. It allowed them to recognize Him when He came, and to help understand what He did. The OT symbols, shadows, and prophecies find their revelation and fulfillment in the NT person and life of Christ. Once He came, the OT was done; it has been fulfilled.
However, there was always an Eternal Law. The moral aspects of the Eternal Law has always been, and will always be binding. They were binding for Adam and all the people before Moses, they were binding during OT Israel, and they are binding today. The study of the Natural Law helps to discern them.
Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) talks of the Natural Moral Law:
For more from the CCC on the moral law see: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c3a1.htm
Lane
Comrade,
You mentioned, that you would reason out morals even if you found that there was no God. I agree, but the reason we CAN reason them out, and that most people come to the same conclusions, AND that they are universally binding (you can hold other accountable for them), IS because God exists. The Catholic Church agrees that morals are definitely attainable by reason. Reason informed by God’s revelation of human purpose and nature, but reason all the same.
Lane
Comrade,
Yes, you are correct. And if you think about it, completely understandable. If they thought Catholicism was a Church, then all of Protestantism is committing the sin of schism. That they have, and are currently breaking the visible unity of the Body of Christ! A most unimaginably terrible crime. It is much easier for them to cover their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and accuse the 2000 year old church, that Christ directly founded, as the Whore of Babylon! Anything else would be admitting their mistake.
Mike
Christopher,
That’s quite the eclectic group. Damn teenagers.
As for Jeffress, he’s something else man. The 9/11-abortion thing is only the tip of the iceberg with this dude. Yet, he has a 12,000 member congregation. Go figure.
Mike
Thanks Kenneth!
Lane,
This is really interesting and I look forward to diving in to the info you provided. As I have said before, I am admittedly not familiar with the Catholic point of view on all of this that we have been discussing due to my upbringing in a fundy evangelical environment. I probably should have made that apparent from the beginning.
Lane
Christian,
Hopefully this doesn’t sound too trite nor condescending to you. If it does, I apologize up front! I know you know, and have heard most, if not all, of this before… but I’ll take the risk all the same…
Catholics believe that you must cooperate with Grace – it’s not faith alone. Sin is a turning from God, the more you sin, the further you pull from God. At some point God just cuts you loose, because that is what you really wanted all along.
If you actually want to experience God again: repent, turn from sin, and love. After all, love fulfills the Law. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. As you know, this is only possible with the Grace of God, which must be cooperated with – which is also by Grace. I would say that even if you are unable at the moment to love God, then love your neighbor; really love your neighbor. I believe that the more you love, the closer you are to God – since God is Love. Along with that, repent of your sins – the ones that your conscience is aware of. Be repentful, avoid further sin (as identified by your conscience), and truly love. If your conscience tells you not to do something, don’t do it! If it tells you to do something, do it! Do not grieve your conscience any further; stop listening to your own excuses. But most importantly, love. If not the Christian God, fine; if not any god, fine. Do what you can. Cooperate with whatever Grace you are currently being given. Maybe God will appear, maybe he won’t. I just don’t see a merciful loving God ignoring the repentful cries for mercy from one of His children.
If someone doesn’t want to repent; if someone doesn’t want to turn from sin; if someone doesn’t want to love; then I think they already have what they want.
As for judgement and hell. I believe that when people come face-to-face with their Creator after this life, they will be judged – judged by themselves. Standing before the perfectly Holy God, you will not be able to lie, not even to yourself. A person will see what they truly wanted deep down. If that is to be separated from God, God will not stop you from sending yourself to hell – whatever that ends up being. Whatever happens will be Just, because God is Justice itself.
Lane
Mike,
No problem! I grew up with no bias towards Catholicism at all. That’s probably why it didn’t take too long for me to make the “swim” (2 years of nearly obsessive study). 🙂
Christian
Lane, first off you’re begging the question, as Jason likes to say. My understanding tells me that this god described in the bible is not real. Why should I cooperate with someone/something that my mind tells me is not real? If I did that on a regular basis, I’d be locked away. Second, you’re assuming that my unrepentant heart is the problem, that I’m not a Christian because I like sin too much. I hope you don’t think that the only reason people don’t accept Christianity is because even though they know it to be true, they just love sin more.
Lane
Christian,
Obviously I’m begging the question! You mentioned a subjective/personal experience. If Christianity is true, that is what you do; that is how you approach God. If you feel you have and currently are doing those things, then great – you have nothing to worry about, I guess. I can’t make you believe something you can’t believe.
Christopher Lake
Comrade,
I hear where you’re coming from, and I think I understand at least some of it. I was born and raised in the Bible Belt, and almost all of the Christian thinking that I was surrounded by in my youth (at school, among Christian friends, and during the few times that I went to church in those days) was of the anti-philosophy, anti-reason, “stay away from heathens and their dangerous thinking” kind of mindset.
However, my parents raised me and my sister with a very different mentality. First of all, we weren’t really even raised as Christians. We were taught to say “say our prayers” at night, but Bible reading simply didn’t happen at home, and the few times that God and the Bible were even brought up in conversations between me and my parents, I remember their ideas being of a questioning, and even sometimes, skeptical, bent. My mother encouraged me to read and learn widely. This was partially because that was just how she wanted me to be and partially because she knew that, with my physical disability, if I were ever going to get a good job and “succeed in life,” by her fairly secular standards, I was going to have to use my mind much more than sheer physical brawn (of which I had little).
The rigid, fundamentalistic mindset of most of the Christians from my youth helped to turn me off to Christianity for many years. It was one of the things that kept me an agnostic, and later, an atheist. Bluntly, I thought that most, if not all, Christians were weak-minded and fearful of engaging of the outside world in any substantive way, and I thought that this was how most of them were able to continue being Christians.
It wasn’t until I left the small town where I was born and raised, and went away to college, that I was confronted with Christians who were more intelligent, thoughtful people who didn’t simply demonize non-Christian thinking. I’m sure that such Christians *existed* in my hometown, but I don’t remember coming into contact with them.
Kenneth Winsmann
Mike,
I’m sure we will have all kinds of fun stuff to talk about by tomorrow, but I thought your last comments deserved a response, and Ive only just found some free time.
1. I do not think that theological beliefs are merely subjective. I think that theological truth exists, and that we should pursue it.
2. I don’t think anything is wrong with saying “I dont know” if you have studied and can not reach a conclusion.
LOL Well I certainly don’t claim to have any special divine appointment in telling you what God is like. (I would say that the Catholic Church does though) I have been speaking with Comrade for a few weeks now, and I was only pointing out that his knowledge in this area appears to be very elementary. It’s not meant as an insult. If a person really thinks that the God of orthodox, classical Christianity is anything at all like the Greek conception of Zeus, such a person simply has no freaking idea what they are talking about. Richard Dawkins is one such person. He is a pretty smart guy, and a decent scientist, but his conception and understanding of the Christian God is awful. I was happy that you commented on “fancy words and pseudo-intellectual babble”. If you do not have a grasp of philosophical concepts and terminology that is precisely what these words will seem like to you.
I’ll tell you a story. The first time I ever watched a christian atheist debate was around 2012. It was the Hitchens vs william lane craig debate. I watched it at the recommendation of a christian buddy of mine. By the end of the debate I was totally devastated. I felt that Hitchens had nailed each and every one of my insecurities on the head. My faith was seriously in question. The thing that kept me coming back was the look on Dr. Craigs face. It seemed like everytime Hitch said something that made me squirm on the inside, Craig would come back with this big giant smile on his face as if Hitchens had said absolutely nothing of relevance. It wasn’t until i took the time to read Dr. Craigs books that I understood that smile. The problem wasn’t that Craig lost the debate (he crushed hitchens) it was that I didn’t understand the Christian response. I vaguely grasped the gist of what was being communicated, but mostly I only heard “fancy words and pseudo intellectual babble”.
Reading pop-level apologetics will only get you so far. For these arguments to come to life you really need to understand what is being said. It’s the same thing with divine aseity (attributes of God). Once someone understands what classical theism means by “God”, there is no way you could ever make a comparison to a flying spaggheti monster, or zeus.
The divine commands flow from Gods nature. The moral values were “objectively true” BEFORE God expressed them in the form of commands. The commands merely communicate Gods nature, they do not arbitrarily determine what is right or wrong.
I was simply pointing out the issues that come up when you mistakenly and inappropriately use theological beliefs for hard objective evidence. It’s hard (I think impossible) to reconcile those two. I think it’s great for discussion “in the public square” so to speak, but I think it is inappropriate and impossible to include such biased beliefs in any legitimate scientific study where observable evidence and checking and rechecking results is the name of the game.
This gets into a much deeper and much more serious discussion. Namely, what counts as science, and how can we come to know “objective truths”. You seem to be under the delusion that the scientific method is the only legitimate way of learning facts about our world. I disagree. I think that we can learn objective truths about our world through philosophy and theology too.
Craig doesnt mean for the witness of the Holy Spirit to be something that is offered to others as “proof” of Gods existence. He is saying (along with Plantiga) that a person would have warrant for faith even if there was not ANY evidence for the existence of God. This warrant comes from personal experience. We are reasonable in trusting our experiences until someone can give us good reasons why that experience didnt actually happen. Generally speaking, agnostics and atheists are not able to provide such reasoning.
You would have no way of knowing that either way.
Kenneth Winsmann
Mike,
In regards to your quotations of Lindsay.
1. It doesnt matter how God communicates morals to us. How we come to know something, and something existing, are two different questions.
2. Lindsay is horrible misrepresenting the argument. Look at what he says here:
Neither natural selection, intuition, or self interest a grounds for OBJECTIVE moral values and duties. The first premise is does not say “If God does not exist, self interest, intuition, and conscience do not exist.” It says that if God does not exist objective moral values and duties do not exist.
comradedread
The Classical Judeo-Christian God was likely an early cultural adaptation of El, the Canaanite supreme deity El. Complete with his own references to the ancient combat myth that was common in the region.
(Psalm 85 and Psalm 74.)
So you’re right. Zeus came much later. 🙂
Lane
Kenneth,
You said to Mike:
Exactly. I’m reminded of the conversion story of Edward Feser – an atheist turn Catholic philosophy professor. The story is on the longish side, but worth reading. He admits, even as trained philosopher, that he just didn’t understand Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics enough to really understand his proofs (ways) for God. He just took for granted the modern philosopher’s dismissals. As he started to understand the metaphysics, the proofs became more and more persuasive.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
There you go with that acme box of liberal scholarship again. The Canaanite conception of El is (once again) absolutely nothing like the classical theist God.
http://evidenceforchristianity.org/is-the-hebrew-god-el-just-borrowed-from-canaanite-deities-is-yahweh-derived-from-the-caananite-god-el/
Lane
Kenneth,
You linked earlier to a video explaining the Ontological Argument. When I first came across that one, It took me a while to see how this one worked, but I really like it now.
Each of the classical arguments comes with a cost for the nonbeliever when they reject premises. For the ontological argument, you have to say that the classically defined god of theism’s existence is impossible; none of this maybe business of some agnostics. If God is possible, then he must exist by the argument. The moral argument usually causes atheists who reject it to admit that morals are just subjective preferences like their favorite color. Rejecting Cosmological arguments tend to cause atheists to say that things can just have no cause, thus rejecting principles of causality – which is fundamental to doing science!
Next time you get into a long running discussion with a slick atheist in which you present different proofs for God’s existence, keep track of the premises rejected in each argument. At the end, present them with the list of all the premises they have rejected from all the arguments. Then have a frank discussion about the intellectual consequences of now having to incorporate those rejected premises into their worldview to maintain that God doesn’t exist. It should be interesting.
comradedread
Ha. Yeah, how dare I refer to the work of scholars.
That article basically says “Lots of people in that region used similar names for their gods, it means nothing. NOTHING! I TELLS YA!”
And from what the Hebrews wrote, at least some of the oral traditions of Jehovah were very much focused on Him being more of a tribal deity, where God was exclusively on the Hebrew’s side, represented in warfare by the ark, demanded exclusion from intermarriage from Gentiles, and was seen in competition with other people’s tribal gods (hence the tale of the ark in the Philistine’s temple.
You can chock that up to the limited revelation they had, or you can chock it up to different writers having different views of God. (The authors of Jonah and Ruth being responsive to the anti-Gentile position of the priestly caste that gave us Ezra and Nehemiah, or you can chalk it up to bad interpretation because their supreme leader with the funny hat wasn’t as tight with God as your supreme leader with the funny hat. 😉
Kenneth Winsmann
Comrade,
God having a chosen people has nothing to do with anything so far as I can tell…. lol
Kenneth Winsmann
Lane,
Great point! I’ll keep that in mind
Mike
Kenneth,
Hah, I’m sure we will man. Thanks for the response. We could go back and forth forever. I guess my overall concern with xtian apologetics is the arrogance. Regardless how you frame it and whatever philosophical language is used, all that people like Craig are doing, in my own humble opinion, are trying to prove something that cannot be proven and espouse that not only what they cannot prove is absolute truth but is the only absolute truth. Is it not?
Lane
Mike,
“I guess my overall concern with xtian apologetics is the arrogance.”
Actually, this is a concern I have also at times. Apologetics is more about providing answers to a non-believer because they deserve answers to their questions; and less about just showing off.
“Regardless how you frame it and whatever philosophical language is used, all that people like Craig are doing, in my own humble opinion, are trying to prove something that cannot be proven and espouse that not only what they cannot prove is absolute truth but is the only absolute truth. Is it not?”
It depends on what you mean by “prove”. If you mean in an ironclad way, like a mathematical proof where the proof itself forces others to agree. Note that even the hard sciences do not require, nor have, this level of certainty. However, I think you can make very compelling cases for: the existence of God, the truth of Christianity, and the truth of Catholicism (in that order, of course). I actually believe that the cases for God are so strong that being anything less than a Deist is irrational. (but maybe I’m being too arrogant? 🙂 )
Lane
Didn’t complete the sentence: “If you mean in an ironclad way, like a mathematical proof where the proof itself forces others to agree [, then no].”
Mike
Kenneth,
Did you read “Part 4: Married Bachelors” of the post?
http://casualentropy.blogspot.com/2012/05/debunking-moral-argument-for-existence_14.html
Endre Whosoever
Christian! 🙂
Since i LOOOOVE beating a dead horse (no, actually not :D)
here is a beautiful story with happy ending about a caring father and his family:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11594289/Man-confesses-on-Facebook-to-killing-his-wife-daughter-and-sister.html
Lane
Endre,
The father is quoted as saying:
He noted her pain as a driving reason, a pain she shouldn’t have to live with. I don’t blame Christianity for what he did. I blame the left’s insistence that life is meaningless in the face of pain and suffering, and that killing is an acceptable answer. This is part of the thought process that leads to advocacy for legalized euthanasia (and abortion).
Another example of someone taking it upon themselves to put another out of their perceived misery (which I believe was scarier because it was done by force of law, not by a lunatic), happen recently in Holland. Holland, who has no death penalty at all, ordered the execution… I mean… euthanization of an elderly person with dementia based on perceived suffering of another.
http://www.christian.org.uk/news/dutch-judge-rules-dementia-patient-must-be-euthanised/
Larry
You two talking about a gyrocopter reminds me of this http://www.cartalk.com/content/andy-scale-0 I love the podcast!