Sunday, September 3, 2017

National Day Of Prayer


Prayer is the perfect solution to people who want to do nothing and yet still feel good about themselves.


"But Many Great Scientists Believed In God!"


Time for one quick counter-argument—

When debating the social effects of religion and atheism an inevitable argument coming from the religious will be something like, "But many great scientists were believers in God: Newton, Galileo, Faraday..."

OK. We atheists hear this a lot. Sometimes it's made by theists making the general claim that belief in god is compatible with science, sometimes it's made by theists making the specific claim that Christianity is compatible with science.


Regardless of the specifics here's my response:

Yes it is true that many great scientists have been believers in god, but it is also the case that prior to the late 1800s in Western culture you pretty much had to openly profess a belief in god. There were, for example, laws on the books in European countries that made it illegal to deny the existence of god or the truth of the Christian religion, and the penalties could be severe. Until the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Act 1677 the death penalty was applied for atheism in England. And throughout all of Europe, from the time the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as it's official religion, the Catholic Church (and then later the Protestant churches after the reformation) had a monopoly on academic institutions.

What all this means is that until fairly recently there were no secular institutions of higher learning in the West. And by law, you had to profess belief in god, usually the right version of god, in order to maintain your freedom, social status, and job — and in some cases your life. So to say that Newton and Gallileo were believers in god, or were Christians and were brilliant scientists ignores that point. During their time they had no ability to be otherwise. And even during the post-Enlightenment period when the punishments for disbelief and blasphemy stopped being enforced (even though in many cases they remained on the books into the 20th century) there was still a tremendous amount of social pressure to believe in the religious orthodoxy, just as there is now in the more religious parts of the US, and in the Islamic world.

It was not really until Darwin's time in the second half of the 1800s that we began to see the emergence of any sort of real social acceptability of agnosticism or atheism. It was only once you got past the turn of the 20th century to the time of Einstein, Popper, and Freud that atheism became acceptable in the sciences and philosophy. And once it became socially acceptable what did we see? We saw the floodgates open of atheists in the sciences, and today most of the best scientists are atheists or agnostics. In other words, once it became socially acceptable to be an atheist in the sciences, atheism quickly became the dominant view.

So the main reason why many great scientists (as well as philosophers, thinkers, and inventors) were believers in god, was because years ago you had to be, and religious institutions held a monopoly on higher learning.

Now of course today there are many great living scientists who are believers in god. Francis Collins, head of the human genome project, Don Page, physicist and cosmologist, Francisco Ayala, evolutionary biologist and philosopher, to name a few. But if you look at the many reasons why contemporary scientists and thinkers believe in god, it rarely, if ever, is inspired by their scientific views. It is usually based on some emotional epiphany or the popular notion that god is required to have morality. In Francis Collins's case for example, he was hiking in the Cascade mountains when he saw a frozen waterfall split in three and upon seeing this, dropped to his knees and accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior.

Yeah.

Furthermore, we humans are very good are compartmentalizing beliefs. We can hold contradictory beliefs quite easily. So just because a scientist is a Christian, a Muslim, or another religion, it doesn't mean science is compatible with those religions.

Thomism Can't Even Stay Consistent With Its Own Principles


I've been embroiled in several comment threads over at Strange Notions, a Catholic apologetic site, on a variety of issues related to metaphysical first principles and brute facts. There, I've tested out my argument that brute facts are unavoidable to the many Catholic apologists on the site, including Dr. Dennis Bonnette, a retired professor of philosophy who now teaches free classes at the Aquinas School of Philosophy, and is contributing author on the site.

As a reminder, that argument is:

  1. The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible.
  2. All of god's will and desires must exist timelessly and eternally in an unchanging, frozen state.
  3. That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe.
  4. Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn't have to exist, and god didn't have to create it.
  5. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to create our particular universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact.
  6. There is no way to answer this question, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
  7. Thus at least one brute fact must exist even if god exists.

I think my argument is irrefutable, but I'm not so cocky that I'm unwilling to debate it. In fact, debating it is exactly what I need. I wish to put it up against the best minds in Thomism to see how they respond. And after a week of debating the argument back and forth with Dr. Bonnette, I basically got him to tacitly admit that god's eternal desire to create our particular universe, and not any other universe, or no universe, is a brute fact. He didn't acknowledge it's a brute fact of course, and he denied that it was, but he had to ground his explanation in circular reasoning.

First, one of the metaphysical first principles that Thomists like Dr. Bonnette argue cannot be denied is the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground for its existence. Furthermore, this reason will either have to be contingent or necessary. That is, it's either going to be dependent on something else for its explanation, or its explanation will be contained within itself, meaning, it's logically necessary.

Dr. Bonnette's view is that god's substance is identical to his will. This means that a god with a different will is a god with a different substance, and in effect, is a different god. So god with eternal desire A is a different god than god with eternal desire B. For simplicity I said let's just call them god A and god B.

There is no logically necessary reason why god A exists, rather than god B, since both are logically possible and neither is logically impossible (assuming god is not incoherent). So Dr. Bonnette's metaphysics (if granted) only covers one aspect of this: that there needs to be a god. But it doesn't demonstrate why there needs to be god A vs god B, or any other god with a different eternal and unchanging will (which again, will be a different god).

Since there is no logically necessary reason why god A has to exist, the reason why god A exists and not god B/C/D/E... etc, cannot be based on a logically necessary reason. Hence his metaphysics fails to explain why we have the particular god we have. Given this, only non-necessary, contingent reasons can explain why. They will all necessarily be reasons that could have been otherwise, and ultimately when drilling down to why any particular answer explains a non-necessary aspect of god's will (and therefore his substance) he must terminate in a brute fact at some point since there is no logically necessary reason available to him.

A few comments later he says,

The reason why God A exists and not God B is because God A does exist and God B never did. God B was never a real possibility because the only God that exists is God A. You are again trying to go back in time and think of two possibilities. God is outside of time and there never was an actual possibility of any God but him.

The explanation in his first sentence isn't a logically necessary one, and so he's admitting god A is not logically necessary. And saying that god A exists simply because god A does, can be applied to the eternal universe: The reason why our eternal universe exists and not another eternal universe is because our eternal universe does exist and another eternal universe never did.

It makes the logical grounding of god A no more justified than the atheist's grounding for the universe. The Thomistic theist in this sense has no edge over the atheist.

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Black Lives Matter: A Brief Critique


In the past few years the Black Lives Matter (or BLM) movement has become a prominent fixture on the issue of police killings, particularly towards African Americans. Here I want to offer a short critique of the movement and it's ideology on some areas where I think criticism is much needed.

First, I want to say that I of course think the lives of black people are just as valuable as any other race, and I'm aware that black lives matter really means black lives matter too. Meaning, that black lives matter in addition to other lives, they are of equal worth and value. The way I see it, the BLM movement should ideally be seen as black people raising their hands in the face of racist mistreatment saying, "Hey, our lives matter too and our worth as individuals should be treated as equal to others."


On that very basic point, I agree. Black lives matter too. But I've noticed that quite a few BLM advocates have to clarify this distinction often enough that it makes me think, why not just change the name of the movement and hashtag to #BLMT or #BlackLivesMatterToo? It's just three extra letters and it would clear up an enormous amount of confusion by people who think the BLM movement is to say that only black lives matter, or that black lives are more important to other lives, and that's not what it stands for.

So that's my first critique. My second critique makes use of an analogy. If there is a population of people affected by two diseases that are killing them, disease A and disease B, and disease A kills 96% of this population, and disease B kills only 4% of this population, and if my life goal was to care for the lives of this population, which disease should I be focused on, disease A or disease B? Obviously, any logical person would say I should focus on disease A since it's killing a far greater percentage of the population. And yet, the BLM movement is a movement focused almost entirely on the 4% of deaths of black Americans attributed the police officers, regardless of the race of the officer. If the BLM movement seeks to promote the lives and worth of black Americans, why not focus primarily on the homicide rate in the black community that overwhelmingly involves black on black homicide? For every black person killed by a police officer in the US, there are about 23 cases of black on black homicide. If it was my life passion to care about black lives, I'd be focused on that, because that's what's killing the vast, vast majority of black people in the US who die by violence. So I think the BLM movement needs to reconsider its priorities.

Thirdly, since the BLM movement has no official membership, anyone taking up a BLM banner and marching in the streets suddenly becomes a representative of BLM. This allows bad actors to tarnish the name of BLM and there seems to be no process by which this can be eliminated. BLM officials need to better distinguish themselves from hooligans who commit violence in their name.

BLM Activists blocking a highway in Baltimore
Fourthly, the BLM leadership, to the extent there is any, doesn't seem interested in weeding out activists in its ranks who make absurd demands or use questionable tactics in raising the group's awareness. Blocking highway traffic is not a good way to make people realize that black lives matter. What if you or your loved one was dying of a heart attack and needed to get to the hospital and couldn't make it in time due to BLM protesters blocking traffic and they died as a result? Rushing the stage at a Bernie Sanders rally and grabbing the microphone before a liberal white crowd and telling everyone that they're proponents of "white supremacist liberalism" is not a good way to make people realize that black lives matter.

In fact, tactics like this will do more to hurt the movement than help it. It will make people think the BLM movement has been hijacked by a bunch of thugs who are going to use violence and intimidation to obtain their ever growing list of demands. The BLM movement needs an serious infusion of critical thinking and analysis among its ranks, and I don't see that happening.

Because of this I can't be a part of BLM. I can't march in their protests. I can stand by and support policies that help the problems many black people disproportionately face, but I cannot be a part of the BLM movement because of its flaws. And no, I'm not a white supremacist or a Nazi sympathizer because of this. You can hate Nazis and white supremacists and still be critical of BLM.

Nuance people, nuance.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Time To Walk The Walk: Hurricane Harvey Donation


If you want to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, and if you're a humanist or an atheist who wants to show the world that atheists can do what the religious can do — but even better, then donate to help the recent hurricane victims through the Foundation Beyond Belief. I just gave $10.

Foundation Beyond Belief

Sunday, August 27, 2017

David Smalley - Eating Our Own: How You Can Save the Movement


Recently at the Gateway to Reason conference in Missouri, podcaster David Smalley of Dogma Debate gave an excellent speech on the divisions in the atheist community that are tearing us apart. The Atheist Conference we're doing in New York City is specifically about atheist unity and rebuilding our community so that together we're stronger and more able to fight for what we stand for.

Our agreements far outweigh our disagreements. We all need to stop freaking out when someone disagrees with us on one thing, especially when they agree with us on ten things. Nuance is a word we must all become familiar with and practice.

Listen to the valuable points he makes in this talk.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Back From AACon2017


So earlier this week I got back from the American Atheist 2017 convention down in Charleston South Carolina. I had to take a 13 hour bus ride there because flights were insanely expensive due to the solar eclipse, and hotels were also completely booked so I also had to stay with some friends.



This was my first atheist convention and so I had few expectations. The only other atheist event I went to was last year's Reason Rally, which was fun, but a bit of a dud. We were there primarily to make connections with leaders in the atheist community for our upcoming conference in New York City to have them support or speak there. And so far that goal seems to be successful.

Every conference needs good speakers — speakers that motivate you to buy tickets and come out to the event. It also has to be fun. We need to bring the young atheists out. The average age of this conference was about 50. There were a lot of silver haired seniors. Many of them were heads of the secular and atheist organizations that partner with American Atheists, and those roles usually require skill sets that take many years to acquire. There really needed to be a lot more 20 and 30 somethings in the crowd.

Seth Andrews of the Thinking Atheist

We want The Atheist Conference to be full of young atheists, motivated to atheist with a cause. That's why we want to get the YouTube atheists on board. They bring the young atheists out. So we have our eyes set on prominent YouTube atheists for speakers, panel discussions, and perhaps, a debate. I will be hosting a panel discussion on debating atheism that I will be designing soon with two highly knowledgeable atheists thinkers and debaters. This is right up my alley, and should be a big hit (I hope) if not really interesting and informative.

So my primary take away is that we need to be more entertaining than AACon was and that will be partly because our goal with TAC will be different. We need more young people, and we need to make it much more fun for the attendants. We need more drinking, more socializing, less awkwardness. We're working to make this happen and I will have a lot more information in the coming months leading up to the conference.


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