Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Does God Permit Natural Evils?


If I had the time or the will power, I'd refute every one of W.L. Craig's Question and Answer segments. A few weeks ago a theistic writer wrote in asking Dr. Craig whether god causes or permits natural evil. Craig's answer was that god permits natural evil, but "that God is not the sole cause of natural evil."

I beg to differ.

I came across this wonderful argument a while back that argues pretty decisively that if god existed, then he would indeed be the sole cause of natural disasters. The argument goes like this:

(1) God (an omnipotent, omniscience, omni-benevolent being) exists.
(2) Natural evil exists.
(3) God is the creator and designer of the physical universe, including the laws that govern it.
(4) Natural disasters, and the evil they cause, are a direct byproduct of the laws that govern our universe.

I don't think Craig would deny premises 1-3, although he might challenge premise 2. In the Q&A he wrote:

For what is bad about natural evils is not simply the occurrence of certain natural events themselves. There is nothing evil, for example, about one continental plate’s slipping under another, nor about the earth’s trembling as a result. Such natural events are themselves ethically neutral; morality doesn’t apply to rocks and rain and wind. Rather if there is something bad about such events, it’s that human beings get caught in them.

I would agree but go a step further that it is not just people getting caught up in natural disasters that make them evil under theism, but any conscious animal that can suffer as well. That would mean that the millions of years of non-human suffering as the result of natural disasters would be evil under a theistic worldview. So given Craig's response above, I don't think he would object to premise 2.

Premise 4 is actually what Craig would seem to object to, and his first option out of god being responsible for natural evil is an appeal to quantum indeterminacy. He writes:

...if quantum indeterminacy is ontic, God could not cause an earthquake to occur at a specific time and place just by setting up the natural laws and initial conditions of the universe. If an earthquake does occur, it is only because God did not intervene to stop it. That is to say, He permitted it. Problem solved.

But god would have designed the physical universe, including the laws that govern it and would have chosen to make the universe inherently random at a fundamental level. Furthermore, god's foreknowledge would allow him to know exactly when every natural disaster would occur, even with quantum indeterminacy. I'm simply not buying the case that god creates a universe and then is shocked at how much natural suffering it causes. And Craig doesn't seem to be making that case either. He seems to be trying to argue that if quantum indeterminacy is real, then god does not directly cause every natural disaster. The beauty of the above argument I'm defending is that is god would still ultimately be responsible for natural disasters, at least indirectly, because he is still the one calling the shots on how the universe will operate and he has foreknowledge. So the problem is not solved.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Further Thoughts On Brute Facts


I've been dry on material lately. I wanted to write a good blog post today but I don't think that's going to happen. There are a few issues on my list of topics to write about. If I could list a few of the political issues that come to mind that are most important to me, they would be church/state issues and secularism, income inequality, college affordability, climate change, and social justice. All of these issues are dear to my heart. I was considering a possible new direction for this blog, away from the emphasis on counter-apologetics and towards something more political, or perhaps more personal, whereby I'd be focusing a lot more on social/political issues as it relates to my life. This is a possibility, and by no means a certainty. The main problem with this is that I don't deal with people in my life that regularly oppose my viewpoints. I never encounter religious fundamentalists, and most of the people around where I live are liberal or left-leaning.

For now I want to refocus on the idea of brute facts once again. If you're an atheist, you take the position that the universe, multiverse, or existence itself, is pretty much a brute fact. Existence exists, and that's just the way it is. The universe just is. We just are. There is no further meaning or answer or purpose available. I can certainly see from the point of view of the philosopher, how this conclusion leaves one yearning for more. The "why is there something rather than nothing" question may be the greatest in all of philosophy, and believe me I don't come to the conclusion of brute facts lightly. I too feel the need to explain our existence with some greater exegetical power than we just are.

First, we know how we got here. We have a great understanding of the cosmic and biological evolution that has resulted in our existence. But is it possible that there is an underlying reason why this process occurred? I'm not necessarily alluding to the classical gods of religion, but might there be an impersonal conscious force that can supply the why question with satisfaction? It seems to me that the answer to the ultimate of questions will be either that there is some kind of deistic god that exists, or there is no god or gods at all and that atheism is true. Theism to me is not on the table, because I feel that all notions of theism fail to make any logical sense, especially given the evidence we have available to us. So it seems to me that either deism or atheism is true. But it is possible that they're both wrong, and there is a third option that is not deism, atheism or theism, that would be in Donald Rumsfeld lingo, an "unknown unknown." That is to say, it is an option that we don't even know about that may or may not be right. That to me is definitely on the table, but it seems very likely that atheism or deism are our two most plausible candidates.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

What Would Make You Change Your Mind?


In the fall out of the recent Nye vs. Ham debate, the internet is abuzz with Ham's admission that nothing would change his mind to accept evolution. Ham's faith in the literal truth of the Bible supersedes all possible evidence to the contrary. You see, Ham is really a presuppositionalist pretending to be an evidentialist. He presupposes, on faith, that the Bible is the literal word of god as his starting point, and then he "reasons" from there. There is no hope of having a rational debate with someone who adopts this mentality, because evidence and reason ultimately mean nothing to them; their sacred text is really the only thing that matters.

I, on the other hand, arrived at my atheism through a careful examination of all the evidence for and against theism. So that brings up the question, what would it take for me to accept that there is a god? What evidence would persuade me? Well, it is a worthy enough question. So let me list in the order of strongest to weakest evidence that would convince me that a god existed.


1. If there was direct, verifiable, empirical, scientific evidence for god, I would accept that god is real. This would be fantastically easy for any omnipotent god to provide. Now a critic would say this is too much down the line of logical positivism, but there is no reason why, in principle, god wouldn't or couldn't give us verifiable evidence for his existence. Many would say that if we had proof god existed, then we wouldn't be able to voluntary reject god. I disagree. I can reject my parents or my friends even though I don't deny that they exist, and so I can do the same with god. Thus I feel that the objections against why god wouldn't/couldn't give us proof don't hold up.

2. If, for example, all of the scientific evidence pointed to an earth and universe that was less than 10,000 years old and there was no evidence for evolution (as many creationists believe), or, if all the scientific evidence pointed to a relatively small, geocentric-model of the universe with earth at the center and all the planets and stars revolving around it, then I would say that there would certainly have to be a god, or some kind of creator that made the world for human beings.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Christian Responses To The Problem Of Suffering


To me, one of the strongest pieces of evidence against theism is the fact that the evolution of life on earth involved millions of years of conscious suffering and numerous mass extinctions for no logically necessary reason, and looks like a haphazard, undirected process driven by chance, and not design. For the educated theist who rejects a literal interpretation of Genesis, reconciling the suffering required by the evolutionary process with the perfect god of Christianity is quite a challenge. Stepping up to the plate to try and make sense of this dilemma, the BioLogos foundation, which serves to encourage Christians to embrace evolution, has offered several answers which I will critique below.

The following is taken from a 4 part series of posts on the BioLogos site called Death and Pain in the Created Order by Keith Miller. In the series, Miller produces 5 common theodicies that Christians have came up with over the years to try and reconcile their faith in a divinely created universe with the millions of years of suffering required by evolution, and then he offers us his personal theodicy.



1. Creation Corrupted by an Angelic Fall

I've actually debated this theodicy once with a theist (see here). What this explanation of suffering tries to do is say that somehow an angel fell "before" god created the universe (which means before god "created" time) and rebelled against god and so god decided then to create a world with millions of years of suffering. It's utterly preposterous and even Miller admits this is an inadequate explanation. It can also lead to ludicrous conclusions. Within this theodicy some believe that the devil and his minions made the evolutionary process give rise to things like disease and predation which lead to much of the suffering. But mind you, it is this very process of death and suffering that lead to human evolution. If it didn't happen, we wouldn't have evolved. To take this position is to say that the devil caused our evolution and that we wouldn't have evolved without the devil's interference! It also flies in the face of standard Christian orthodoxy that god and god alone single handedly resided over creation. Thus this position is untenable to the Christian theist.


Saturday, November 30, 2013

My Mother Is A Young Earth Creationist


It's Thanksgiving again and my mom is in town visiting me for the holidays. This means we will inevitably argue a little bit over religion and evolution. It happens every time I see her, which is usually about once a year. My mother is a young earth creationist. She literally believes the universe and earth were created less than 10,000 years ago, and that Noah literally put two of every "kind" of animal on a single boat. When I challenge my mother with how absurd these beliefs are in light of the evidence, she usually tries to change the subject. She's actually behind the Pope and the Catholic Church in this respect because even the Catholic Church officially embraced evolution as being compatible with god back in the 90s under Pope John Paul II. But my mother won't have any of it.

A few years ago when I became an antitheist my mother and I would clash constantly over our opposing worldviews. But no amount of evidence will ever convince her that evolution is a fact, because she believes scientists are mostly godless heathens who have an agenda to destroy god. Recently I've learned to simply just avoid the subject with her. It's no use arguing. Creationists don't care about evidence; they have faith. That's all they need. I still however, take the occasional jab at religion at my mother's expense and she just roles her eyes, but we have the kind of relationship where she's knows I'm a hardcore atheist and I'm never in the closet about my disdain for religion around her. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I don't know what happened to my mom over the past 15 years. I had a very liberal upbringing. She raised me in a secular home and never forced any religion onto me. As a kid my mother let me drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, watch porn and stay out as late as I wanted. I basically did whatever I felt like. I had every teenagers dream. Then when I was around 17-18 she started embracing her Catholicism and became very conservative, but by that time it was too late - I was already an adult. I moved out when I was 20 and I didn't have to deal with her anymore and I've fully retained that liberal ethos from my upbringing.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Could God Create The Best Of All Possible Worlds?


Let me run a popular argument against god through you and a common assessment and response that Christians will often give:

The argument:
If God is all-good he would choose to create the best possible world. So we could argue: 
(A) if God is omniscient, omnipotent and all-good, he would have created the best of all possible worlds, but... 
(B) it is unlikely or improbable that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds,  
so from (A) and (B) it follows that is unlikely or improbable that there is an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good God.
The theist assessment:
The first premise of this argument seems to presuppose that there is such a thing is the best of all possible worlds and we've already seen that this supposition is suspect just as there is no greatest prime number, so perhaps there is no best of all possible worlds. Perhaps for any world you mention replete with dancing girls and happy creatures, there's an even better world with even more dancing girls and even happier creatures.
If so, it seems reasonable to think the second possible world is better than the first, but then it follows that for any possible world W, there's an even better world W', in which case there just isn't any such thing as the best of all possible worlds. So this argument is not satisfactory.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Oh How I Love Documentaries


If I'm not careful I can spend hours watching documentaries on topdocumentaryfilms.com. Here are a few to check out.


Defeating the Hackers - a documentary about how we can use quantum physics to secure computers and digital communication.




First Out of Africa - a documentary about a tribe of people living in the Andaman islands who might have been the first people out of Africa:




Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Why Ted Haggard's Sexuality Is Symbolic Of The Relationship Between Christianity And Facts


Back in 2006, we all got to witness the spectacular decline of conservative anti-gay Christian pastor Ted Haggard, who it turned out was secretly paying a man for gay sex. I remember what a ride that one was to watch. Watching religious hypocrites fall from grace is first class entertainment for atheists. I mean, what atheist wouldn't want to hear about some ridiculous religious figure turning out to be doing the very thing they spent so much time railing against in the name of their god?

If Haggard's initial fall from grace wasn't enough, we were all further given an encore not long after when it was announced that he was declared "completely heterosexual" after being "cured" of his homosexuality through counseling. It was hilarious because any educated person knows that sexuality cannot be cured or repaired by mere counseling or therapy. Sexuality is innate. All ex-gay therapy can do is teach a gay person how to repress their desires and live in dissonance with themselves. That's all the evidence has ever shown it capable of doing. (See here.)

Ted Haggard's cognitive dissonance on his sexuality forced by his Christian belief that being gay is a sin is symbolic of the kind of cognitive dissonance Christians in general must endure in order to maintain their religious faith with the constant sting of the secular sciences and politics challenging them. Suppressing scientific facts and the moral atrocities of god in order to maintain the faith is a lot like gay Christians suppressing their sexuality. I debate with Christians all the time online and I'm always entertained by the kind of cognitive acrobatics they must deploy in order to maintain that the Bible is the word of god, and that their god is good. I've dealt with so many Christians for example who will deny the evidence for evolution at all costs to the point where they will compromise logic and sanity in order to do so.

Monday, October 21, 2013

No, Christianity Didn't Give Us Science


Many Christians loudly proclaim that Christianity made possible the modern scientific revolution and that other religions or beliefs would have made it impossible for science to flourish. They'll point to key figures in science who were Christian and use it to make the claim that faith and science are perfectly compatible. A Christian I was debating with made a post over on his blog arguing that faith and science are indeed compatible, and he quoted the Christian philosopher of science John Lennox to make the point. I just had to respond, given Lennox's failure to make a convincing argument. From Lennox's book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? he quotes:


C. S. Lewis’ . . . view is worth noting: ‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.’ It was this conviction that led Francis Bacon, regarded by many as the father of modern science, to teach that God has provided us with two books — the book of Nature and the Bible — and that to be really properly educated, one should give one’s mind to studying both.
Many of the towering figures of science agreed. Men such as Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Babbage, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Clerk Maxwell were theists; most of them, in fact, were Christians. Their belief in God, far from being a hindrance to their science, was often the main inspiration for it and they were not shy of saying so. The driving force behind Galileo’s questing mind, for example, was his deep inner conviction that the Creator who had ‘endowed us with senses, reason and intellect’ intended us not to ‘forgo their use and by some other means give us knowledge which we can attain by them.’ Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.’


First, I’m not a huge fan of Lennox, but at least he is not, from what I understand, a creationist who denies evolution. So he gets a point for that. Second, it might be important to know that in Galileo’s day, you had to profess Christian faith. This was back when the Church was the State. If you publicly denied Christ or god you’d be burned at the stake. Galileo spent the last decade of his life under house arrest because he dared challenge the orthodoxy of the day that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe. And in 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned alive for saying the same thing and for believing there might be other forms of life out in space. Galileo was aware of this and it silenced him. Thus it took many centuries and hurdles to get scientific facts accepted because Christianity held them back.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

J.P. Moreland's Attack On "Scientific Atheism" Part 4


With Moreland's case for dualism already crumbling under the weight of compelling scientific evidence to the contrary, the powerhouse of his last three "recalcitrant facts" losses traction. The next "fact" against naturalism he unleashes is rationality. Apparently to him, rationality can only exist if a rational god made us in his image.

3. Rationality

Moreland describes the Christian god as being fundamental and rational who "created his image-bearers with the mental equipment to exhibit rationality and be apt for truth gathering in their various environments." (p. 41) He quotes Christian philosopher Victor Reppert saying, "The necessary conditions for rationality cannot exist in a naturalistic universe." [1] Moreland offers two reasons why naturalism precludes rationality: (1) the necessity of the enduring, rational self and (2) the need for room for teleological (goal-directed) factors to play a role in the thought processes. (p. 41) He backs up (1) with a quote from British philosopher A.C. Ewing about how enduring states of "I" are required to process things like propositions and their different constituents:

to compare two things the same being must, at least in memory, be aware of them simultaneously; and since all these processes take some time the continuous existence of the same entity is required. In these cases an event which consisted in the contemplating of A followed by another event which consisted in the contemplating of B is not sufficient. They must be events of contemplating that occur in the same being. [2]

This notion of there being no enduring self under naturalism underpins this argument. Subatomically, the atoms that make up our bodies are jumping from position to position following the laws of quantum mechanics, but those atoms that make up your body existed for billions of years, and were forged in the hearts of stars that have long since died. Who says the information carried by your atoms of your mental states and identity cannot endure? Moreland is assuming that with each nanosecond, we should be a completely different person unless we have a soul to ground our sense of memory and identity. But if memory is physical, at least in part, then brain states would preserve that memory from moment to moment, and physical damage to the brain would erase it. That's basically what we see with people who've experienced brain trauma.

Moreland defends (2) with another logical argument (p. 42):

(1) If naturalism is true, there is no irreducible teleology.
(2) Rational deliberation exhibits irreducible teleology.
(3) Therefore, naturalism is false.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

J.P. Moreland's Attack On "Scientific Atheism" Part 2


At the heart of Moreland's attack on atheism is his thesis that consciousness cannot be adequately explained without recourse to substance dualism, that is, that human beings are body + soul composites. In the part of his chapter entitled, THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM, Moreland outlines that naturalism includes

  • rejection of "first philosophy" and an acceptance of either weak or strong scientism.
  • an etiology bereft of all supernatural causes for all things that came to be, central in cosmology and biology
  • a general ontology which only includes (a) things that are similar to what can be described in physics, or (b) are contingent or determined by the laws of physics

This is not all that inaccurate, but since naturalists approach epistemology diversely, let me explain how I approach knowledge within my naturalistic framework. I would embrace a form of weak scientism as it is sometimes described, in that I privilege empiricism and verification over all other epistemologies, especially when it comes to ontology. The reason why is that empiricism, especially scientific empiricism, is the most reliable methodology, by far, for determining what exists and what doesn't. But I do not embrace a strong scientism that says scientific empiricism is the only way to know ontological truths. Logic can work, but it can only take you so far. And religious faith, like revelation, is inadequate and demonstrably unreliable as an epistemology. And that's just a fact.

Moreland speaks of this methodological naturalism and its conclusions as the "Grand Story." It has 3 key features according to him. (1) It means "that causal explanations are central to the (alleged) explanatory superiority of the Grand Story"; (2) it "expresses a scientistic philosophical monism according to which everything that exists or happens in the world is susceptible to explanations by natural scientific methods"; and (3) "the history of the universe is a story of unfolding chains of events in which small particles constantly rearrange to form larger and more complicated wholes (for example, atoms, molecules, organisms, planets)." (p. 36)

Friday, October 11, 2013

J.P. Moreland's Attack On "Scientific Atheism" Part 1


I did a Google Books search for William Lane Craig recently to find material from him that I can use to criticize. Craig's authored or co-authored quite a large number of books. All of them are about defending Christianity and/or attacking atheism. This guy has spent so much time trying to lay waste to atheism it's not even funny. Since one of my goals with this blog is to defend the naturalistic worldview against attacks against it, I feel obligated to respond to the best criticisms against it. So I came across a book entitled, God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and ResponsibleIt's written by a series of theologians and philosophers of religion and is designed to defend Christianity and theism against the recent wave of attacks by the New Atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris.

I was going to focus on Craig's chapter that critiques Dawkins' seminal work The God Delusion, but since I already wrote two back to back posts critiquing Craig's nauseating attempts to defend biblical genocide and his defense of the cosmological arguments, I will focus here on J.P. Moreland's chapter entitled, The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism.

J.P Moreland is another one of these contemporary apologists like Craig, who has written many books defending his Christian faith and attacking atheism/secularism. In his chapter critiquing what he calls "scientific atheism" he focuses on undermining the atheistic, or naturalistic worldview, as being inadequate to explain the "facts of reality."

Moreland starts off the chapter by explaining what a worldview is:

It is incumbent on a worldview that it explain what does and does not exist in ways that follow naturally from the core explanatory commitments of that worldview. In this sense, we can call a worldview an explanatory hypothesis. (p. 32)

I don't have any major objections to this explanation and pretty much agree. Moreland mentions though, that there are pesky things he calls "recalcitrant facts." And these dastardly disobedient facts provide "falsifying evidence for the theory and some degree of confirmation for its rivals." (p. 33) At this point the reader can expect that he's going to offer us some "recalcitrant facts" that seek to undermine atheistic worldview.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Presuppositionalism, Again


Where do I even begin?

Presuppositionalists have got to be the most annoying kind of Christian that exists. I spend most of my time debating evidentialists because they're at least willing to start from a neutral standpoint and build a case for god using the same evidence that we all have access to. But when you put the evidence and arguments for god under the microscope for a detailed analysis, it often doesn't end well for god. And presuppositionalists are weary of this. So what they do is they dismiss the evidence altogether, and simply presuppose that Christianity is true and that the Bible is god's infallible word, and any evidence or argument that contradicts the "truth" of Christianity must be wrong by definition. This shields them from having to deal with any counter evidence - they will simply conclude that all the evidence against their religion is a delusion through their presuppositions.

I've been debating with this presuppositionalist lately to sharpen my skills in that area. His argument is basically this: We all assume a metaphysic on faith. He assumes Christianity is true on faith, and then he interprets all the evidence for it and against it under the metaphysic that Christianity is true. Therefore, it's impossible for him to be argued out of his position that Christianity is true because any evidence or argument you use against him is either dismissed a priori, or "interpreted" under the metaphysic that Christianity is true. It's a firewall of sorts. But think about it - if you have to presuppose a metaphysic that excludes even the possibility that you're wrong and that your religion may be false, that shows the inherent weakness of your religion. If Christianity is indeed true and the Bible is its god's infallible word, there should be plenty of evidence from the natural world corroborating its narrative and its claims. And on top of that, he accuses atheists of presupposing naturalism to interpret the evidence for and against god and Christianity. It's the most annoying thing ever.

This is what presuppositionalism gives you. If you don't assume the metaphysic that Christianity is true, then you'll be accused of assuming another metaphysic, either a naturalistic one or one presupposing another religion, in order to interpret the evidence for and against Christianity. In other words, no one can come from a neutral playing field, we all, according to the presuppositionalist, come to the table with our worldview already presupposed. This is because the presuppositionalist knows he can't win without presupposing his religion to be true. If going just by the evidence, and a debate over whether evidence bests fits his Christian worldview, or the naturalists worldview, the naturalist will do better.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Hitler Was NOT An Atheist



“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”


[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]





Let us never forget that Adolph Hitler was no atheist. He believed in god, and an Aryan Jesus, and he thought god had appointed him to cleanse the European continent once and for all of the Jews. And yet, despite these facts being easily obtainable, theists still today have the nerve to try to pull a fat lie and say that Hitler was an atheist who was motivated by Darwinism to exterminate the Jews. They say that if you tell a lie enough times it starts to become the truth. That Hitler and Nazis were all atheists seems to have become a "truth" to many theists who have bought into this lie.


Let's start with a few facts about Hitler and the Nazis:

  • Nearly every German soldier during World War II wore a belt buckle that had inscribed on it, "GOTT MIT UNS" (God with us)
  • Every member of the German armed forces took an oath that started with: "I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath."
  • Hitler's birthday (April 20th) was celebrated from the Catholic Church every year from 1939 to the very end of the Nazi regime in 1945
  • The first diplomatic accord by Hitler once he rose to power in 1933 was with the Vatican 
  • The Catholic Church opened its genealogical records to the Nazis so that they could trace a person's Jewish ancestry, aiding in the holocaust 
  • Antisemitism existed in Europe for hundreds of years before Darwin, and one of the primary influences on Hitler was the German Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who wrote the treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), in which he argued among other things, that European Jews should be forbidden to practice their religion, that they should have their synagogues burned and razed, and that they should be forced into servitude 
  • Nearly half of the Nazis were members of the Catholic Church, as was Hitler 
  • The only Nazi ever to be formally excommunicated by the Catholic Church was Joseph Goebbels –  not for war crimes, but for marrying a divorced Protestant 

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Is God A Consequentialist?


Whenever I come up dry for material for this blog I can always turn to William Lane Craig bashing for inspiration. I get such great pleasure from deflating his dubious arguments. His new Q and A has him arguing that god isn't a consequentialist, when the record clearly indicates that he is. You can see the question here, I will focus on his answer below.

Craig starts out making a point he often makes in his writings and in his debates:

... on my view God has no moral duties to fulfill. Moral duties arise in response to imperatives issued by God. Since God does not issue commands to Himself, God has no moral duties. Rather God’s acts must simply be consistent with His perfectly good nature. So consequentialism cannot apply to God, having as He does no moral duties. His actions, such as permitting some evils in view of overriding goods, must simply be consistent with His being all-loving, punishing evil, etc.

If god's actions must be "
consistent with His perfectly good nature," and god's nature is perfect goodness, then why is god admittedly jealous and wrathful? Why can he essentially do what he wants and cause suffering and take life as he pleases? It seems to me that theists like Craig admit that their god is a god who can do whatever he wants because he "does not issue commands to Himself." In that case, if god's actions can violate his own commandments to us - commandments which are supposed to reflect his "perfectly good nature," then god cannot logically be perfectly good and all-loving. In other words, if my commandments are perfect, and I violate my own commandments, I cannot be perfect.

This upends the core of divine command theory since according to Craig, "it grounds objective moral values in God as the paradigm and source of moral goodness." If this supposed source of all moral goodness can act in ways contrary to his own commands of perfect moral goodness, the source cannot be perfectly good. Hence god plays a sort of "do as I say, not as I do" ethic. 

But it seems Craig fails to get this. He says:

God’s having no moral duties does not imply that He can do just anything; rather His actions must be consistent with His own nature.

Let's see what god can do. He can command child sacrifice, genocide, slavery, the killing of adulterers, witches and homosexuals, and he can take his anger out on people for not worshiping him properly and for offering inadequate sacrifices. Sounds to me like god can pretty much "do just anything." If all those things I mentioned above are consistent with "good nature," then I'd hate to see what bad nature is.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Evolution For Creationists


Meme time! I came across this on the internets. It outlines some basics about evolution that so many creatards and theists never seem to get.




Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Irreducible Stupidity


If you've been in several debates with creationists over the existence of god or whether evolution is true you will undoubtedly have come across the same tired old argument again and again: Dr. Michael Behe's "Irreducible Complexity" argument.

The irreducible complexity (IR) argument was defined by Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box as:


A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.


IR has become the poster child of the intelligent design movement and played a leading role in the Dover PA trial on whether intelligent design was actual science, which the trial determined it wasn't.

But intelligent design advocates like Behe and the folks at the creationist thinktank the Discovery Institute never seem to stop touting IR as an argument against evolution, despite it having been repeatedly refuted over and over again, most famously by Christian biologist Ken Miller (see here).

So I came up with a term to describe such people who use refuted arguments over and over:


Irreducible Stupidity: Using the same refuted argument again and again and failing to learn from it

It's short and easy to remember. So if you come across a creationist who brandishing IR as a "knock down" argument against evolution, tell them we have numerous examples of biological systems whose parts can be removed that function for other things, including the often cited example of the bacterial flagellum itself. And if necessary, kindly remind them that using the same refuted argument again and again and failing to learn from it is textbook example for irreducible stupidity.


Friday, August 2, 2013

Secularism & The City: Dispatches From The Wall Of Separation



I've been wanting to write a bit more about secularism recently because debates with theists always seem to come down to the roles between religion and government. At any given time I may be engaged in 1 or more simultaneous debates with different theists on various websites, forums and blogs. I was on a Christian website recently and found myself in a debate with a fairly conservative Christian Baptist over the separation of church and state. Our disagreements fell along familiar lines where we felt religion's place in public society should be. And I have to say that once again I had all of my stereotypes confirmed: people who are devoutly religious, almost always think that it is perfectly alright to impose their religiously based morals onto other people.

So let me address some of our disagreements and outline some of my views on secularism because in practical terms, the debate over church and state has serious real world impacts, and is not to be taken jokingly.

Freedom of religion

I think I speak for most atheists when I say that a secular society should protect the rights of those of religious faith to believe what they want without undue persecution and for them to have the right to be open about it. But those of religious faith must realize that freedom of religion cannot exist unless there also exists the freedom from religion. I don't have the right to prevent you from worshiping your chosen deity in your private life, and you don't have the right to impose your religious morals on me in my private life.

Now where this gets complicated is in government. Your right to freely practice your religion must encounter some reasonable restrictions if you're employed by the government. This means that as a public school teacher you cannot lead prayer services while on the job, and as an elected official who crafts public policy, you cannot pass legislation that is favorable to any one religion, or religion in general. This is where I notice that many devoutly religious Christians favor a bias for their religion. For example, some Christians will say that it is OK for a Christian teacher to lead a Christian prayer service in a public school, but they're adamantly opposed to the idea of a Muslim school teacher praising Islam in the classroom and leading Muslim prayers. They'll also support the 10 Commandments perched on government property, but would also adamantly oppose the 5 Pillars of Islam on government property. Clear religious bias and religious discrimination against others. If your religious views force you to adopt a stance where you're for openly discriminating against other religions, while favoring yours, then my main thesis as an atheist that religion is divisive and harmful to society is vindicated.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

William Lane Craig: Evolution Is Evidence For The Existence Of God!


If you ever find yourself in a debate with William Lane Craig and try to use evolution as evidence for naturalism, you can expect him to make the following counter argument below. He's made it in several debates now and it's become one of his all-too-often repeated talking points. This one is transcribed from his debate with Peter Atkins from way back in the 90s:

In their book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Barrow and Tipler lay out 10 steps necessary to the course of human evolution, each of which, each of which is so improbable, that before it would occur the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have burned up the earth. Now it seems to me that if evolution did occur, then it would have had to been a miracle. In other words evolution is literally evidence for the existence of god!

That's right creationists, evolution now is evidence for the existence of god, so stop denying it and embrace full on macroevolution. (Sigh) Craig wants to be able to deny Darwinian evolution and instead support a sort of hybrid old earth creationism/theistic evolution, but just in case that becomes too much of an untenable position, he's carefully made naturalistic macroevolution safe for Christians because it's a "miracle."

So I wonder, is Craig blissfully unaware that everything that happens in our universe is improbable? Every single person born is improbable if we were to try to calculate the mathematical odds of any of us being born. For example, the average man will make about 4.3 trillion sperm cells in his life (200 million per day on average for ~60 years). The only way you could have been born is by a single sperm cell from your father, and a single egg from your mother. Right there the odds of you being born are at least 4.3 trillion to one, or 1 in 4.3 x 1012.

But according to Robin Baker, who wrote the 1996 book, Sperm Wars, only about 1 percent of the sperm cells a man produces actually are involved in fertilizing eggs. These are what he calls, "egg-getters." Most of the other 99 percent of sperm cells are designed to kill off sperm from other men. So if we recalculate, 1 percent of 4.3 trillion is 43 billion. That leaves the odds of you being born from your father at 1 in 43 billion. Not exactly odds you'd want to bet your money on.

For most men the rate of sperm production decreases with age, so let's round that down to about 36 billion egg-getter sperm cells over the average man's lifetime. The average man will have about 2-3 surviving offspring during his lifetime, if we round up to 3, the average chances of you being born are 3 x 1 / 3.6 x 1010  or 1 / 1.2 x 1010.  That's 1 in 12 billion, slightly better than before but remember we're only going back one generation.

If you include two generations, your dad and his dad, the odds of you being born will be 1 /12,000,000,000  x  1 / 12,000,000,000 = 1 / 144,000,000,000,000,000,000  or 1 in 144,000,000,000,000,000,000  or  1 / 1.44 x 1020. That's 1 in 144 quintillion in just two generations.

To calculate the odds for 10 generations that would get you (1 / 1.2 x 1010)10 = 1 / 6 x 10100. That's a 6 with one hundred zeros after it. And we've only gone back 10 generations! To give you a sense of how large that number is, the total number of atoms in the universe is estimated at just 1080 which is far lower that the odds of just you being born going back only 10 generations.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Doubletalk On Verificationism


I recently tweeted:



Think about it. What kind of evidence would a theist need to be shown that contradicts their theology? For most, if not all theists, they'd have to be shown empirical evidence. That's right. Theists raise the bar to the level of empirical evidence when it comes to any science that contradicts their beliefs. But they all make exceptions when it comes to the supernatural claims which skeptics reject due to the fact that they cannot be verified.

This is a clear contradiction.

Take the soul for example. We have no evidence that we can use to verify its existence. The soul must be believed on faith. Every theist knows this, and yet, the theist will accuse the skeptic of being a verificationist, or a positivist, if he demands empirical scientific evidence for the soul.

But then the theist will demand that same level of empirical scientific evidence for anything that goes against their theology. For example, with evolution most creationists demand to see with their own eyes one species evolving into another; only then can evolution be true. And when it comes to cosmology, many theists demand to see the multiverse with their own eyes in order for them to believe it - mathematical descriptions are just not enough.

I'm just saying that if the theist wants to be a bit skeptical about things that we cannot directly see, then why not be consistent and apply that to angels, demons, the soul and to god himself?

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