Munchhausen's Trilemma — What Every Atheist Should Know

So you're an atheist and you find yourself in a debate with a theist or an agnostic on some issue relevant to being godless. It could be about morality, or why the universe exists, or how did we all get here, or why our universe happens to be the particular way it is, or a similarly related issue. Perhaps the other person is even another atheist who's just curious and asking questions.

And as witty and as intelligent as you are, for every question of theirs that you answer, they keep asking "Why?" until you've eventually exhausted your explanatory capability, much to your chagrin. This is inevitable, even if you're the world's authority in every field of science and philosophy. At that point, they express doubt that atheism is a coherent position. After all, to them it can't ground the most basic questions about reality in an all-encompassing explanatory framework. Atheism as an explainer just seems to lead to a dead end.

But here's where the clever atheist, who's learned in philosophy comes back. If this were me in such a predicament, I would remind my interlocutor that it is logically impossible to have an all-encompassing explanatory framework. And that's because of a little known trilemma in epistemology known as Munchhausen's trilemma:

"Socialized Medicine" Vs Free Market Healthcare: A Critique — Part 2

This is part 2 of a critique of Chuck Braman's argument for pro-capitalist healthcare, The Real Right to Medical Care vs. Socialized Medicine. To read part 1 click here.


About halfway through the section of his blog post entitled The Right to Medical Care and the Causes of the Medical Crisis, he turns on Medicare and Medicaid:

These programs were instituted to make the increasingly expensive medical care more affordable to the poor and the elderly. However, since such programs represent an even further collectivization of costs than collectivized insurance, drawing their funding as they do from the entire body of taxpayers rather than from a smaller body of insurance holders, they have lead to the pricing of medical care beyond the reach of the uninsured middle class. As a result, their implementation has lead to the current call for complete socialized medicine.

As per the investopedia article I cited in part 1, it is not Medicaid and Medicare that are primarily driving up the cost of healthcare, it's other factors that are the result of a for-profit system. There are arguments however, that Medicaid and Medicare contribute to rising healthcare costs by settings prices too high for services which the private market then is influenced by. Chuck's view is that this is what makes many people think the solution is to have the government pay for all insurance. I argue that this misses the point.

Private healthcare costs are going up because of price gouging by the hospitals and medical equipment providers mainly because with healthcare—especially emergency healthcare—you don't have the option of shopping around. You don't know what tests are needed or how much they will cost. You're in a state of panic, pain, fear, and ignorance. You're not a doctor. You're not in a position to be negotiating the cost of things with doctors and nurses. You're not in a position to be shopping around for the best deal. This is a completely different kind of market from buying shoes or a new TV. And people like Chuck do not realize that. Or if they do, they foolishly think it doesn't make a difference.

Chuck then machine guns through eight different reasons why he thinks socialized medicine fails and why past implementations of socialized medicine are the reasons why the existing system is failing. Let's break them down one by one.

First, of course, is the increase in prices which necessarily follows when one is able to bid on a limited supply of goods and then pass the expense off to an anonymous group. Such bidding on government-supplied goods leads inevitably to government-imposed price controls and rationing as the only possible means of controlling costs, followed thereafter by the government's further refusal to allow anyone to bid the price up any further even using their own money.

Limited supply of goods? Are we talking about the limited supply of doctors due to medical licensing? There will always be a limited supply of goods. Does Chuck think that the supply is artificially limited due to licensing? Would it be fixed by allowing anyone to practice medicine? Chuck doesn't define socialized medicine, and he makes no acknowledgment that it's different from single payer. On single payer, the doctors, nurses, hospitals, device and drug makers are still privatized. But without cost controls in place, they can jack up the prices to as high as can be. That's why in the US you see cases of $629 band aids. And this is why the cost of prescription drugs, as well as almost every kind of test costs more in the US than other counties, and this makes healthcare costs about twice that of all other developed countries as a percentage of GDP.

Source: Mother Jones

"Socialized Medicine" Vs Free Market Healthcare: A Critique — Part 1

I really, really love debunking viewpoints and arguments that I think are wrong. I mean like really love it. I'd write critiques of views all day long if I could and had the time, but I have this pesky thing called a job which sucks out the day's prime hours.

But on par with my love of critique, here I want to begin a series of posts critiquing a free-market libertarian's defense of market based healthcare. This will also be a learning experience for me. I use critique as a way to better familiarize myself with opposing viewpoints, and I'd highly recommend others strongly consider debate as a form of learning as well.


There's a lengthy blog post called The Real Right to Medical Care vs. Socialized Medicine by Chuck Braman, who's a giant fan of Ayn Rand's views on markets and economics. In it he tries to argue that socialized medicine leads to a crisis and that the best way to fix this ailing problem is "pro-capitalist reform" in the healthcare industry. I'm going to be breaking this down in a series of posts section by section where ever I think it's incorrect (which will be most of it). So here it goes.

Chuck starts out:

For decades the cost of health care, unlike the cost of other economic goods, has risen relative to prices in general and to people's incomes. The cost of health care is now so high that a radical reform is necessary. The current type of reform being advanced by the Clinton administration, however, is an anachronism. It is, to be exact, the enactment of a full system of socialized medicine, a system based on the mistaken and discredited tenets of Marxism, which will aim to reduce the cost of our partially socialized medical system by means of its full socialization accompanied by price controls and rationing.

It's definitely true that the cost of healthcare has gone up far faster than inflation and the cost of other services. But according to an article on investopedia, healthcare costs are going up rapidly because of six primary reasons: (1) skyrocketing administration costs, which by the way "socialized medicine" wouldn't require, (2) not negotiating drug costs, which would save hundreds of billions and which every other developed country does, (3) defensive medicine whereby doctors order unnecessary tests even when they know the diagnosis so they won't get sued, (4) using expensive mix of treatments like mammograms, MRIs and Caesarean sections more often than other developed countries plus an over reliance on more expensive specialists instead of primary care physicians, (5) the wages and work rules that enable high pay-commanding specialists, and (6) branding, which results in an industry where the prices are made up and set as high as they can be.

Having universal healthcare can solve many of these problems because they're caused by for-profit incentives.

Image via halbertwealth.com

"God: Eternity, Free Will, and the World" Refuted — Part 5

A few months ago over at the Catholic apologist's site Strange Notions, where I sometimes debate theists (but am now banned from), a post was written by Catholic philosopher Dr. Dennis Bonnette that was almost entirely addressed at some criticisms I've made on the site in the past year.

This is the final response of my series of that rebuts his post. For parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 click here, here, here, and here.

How God's Eternity Relates to the Temporal World

In the final section of Dr Bonnette's post he attempts to logically reconcile the existence of an unchanging, timeless god with a changing dynamic universe, and as before we will see his attempts fail at nearly every step. He writes,

Some argue that every change in the temporal world requires a change in God to initiate that new causation that changes the world. For, how can one thing initiate new motion in another without itself changing in the very act of “sending forth” its causal influence to the world?

Such reasoning may make perfect sense to a mentality mired in philosophical materialism. But, it makes no sense at all in existential metaphysics. Physical agents change as they cause effects. But to think that this also applies to spiritual agents is absurd and illogical.

This is flat out wrong. In my criticisms of the impossibility of an unchanging being doing things that require time (which requires change) I pressed its logical impossibility. That is to say, nothing in my view depends on materialism being true. The theist has a logical problem, not a material problem. When I argue that:

P1. It is logically impossible to do something without doing something.
P2. It is logically impossible to do something without change (even if everything is immaterial).
P3. It is logically impossible for change to exist without time.
C. As such, a timeless, changeless being cannot do anything.

I am stressing the fact that logical impossibilities hold true regardless of metaphysical materialism or immaterialism. No amount of hand-waving can wiggle you out of this, as we will see. He continues,

Since whatever is in motion or is changed must be moved or changed by another, maintaining that a cause cannot cause change without itself changing would entail an infinite regress among simultaneous caused causes and make impossible an Uncaused First Cause. This is because it would mean that every cause would be an intermediate cause in need of a prior proper cause. If every cause has a prior cause, any causal regress among proper causes would have to regress to infinity. But, I have shown elsewhere that an infinite regress among simultaneous proper causes is metaphysically impossible. For one thing, the sufficient reason for the final effect would never be fulfilled. Therefore, it is manifestly false to claim that every cause must itself change in order to cause a change in another.

Regarding the infinite regress issue, his argument presupposes the principle of sufficient reason, which I've argued is self-contradictory on the Scholastic view. Without the PSR, Bonnette's argument cannot be made plausible. It's assuming a first principle that can easily be challenged, which is a recurring theme in most if not all the arguments made in his post. Bonnette's assuming the PSR, showing a supposed problem that an infinite regress of causes entails given the PSR, and then is deducing from this that there must be an unchanging cause. If your conclusion is incoherent, it cannot be true, and so something must be wrong with your premises or assumptions, or both. And that's exactly what we have here. Bonnette makes no attempt to actually demonstrate the logical coherency of a timeless god who does things which would require change and therefore time. He just assumes such a being must exist given a deduction from the first principles he adheres to.