Where Is Credit Due?Those familiar with (a)theist discussion might have come across some variation of the statement,
If believers want to give God credit for changes in their life, if they are going to maintain any semblance of consistency, they must also ascribe the horrible atrocities around the world to God’s hand as well.
I still can’t figure out where the logic is. The statement seems wedded to the mistaken assumption that God is the only one with a hand in reality. Why should we ascribe the holocaust to God’s hand? “Because God could’ve stopped it and didn’t,” is the likely atheist response.
Study Suggests Atheists Suppress The TruthThere’s been a lot of hubbub over this “Atheists and Asperger’s” study that recently surfaced at the Scientific American blog. For me, this was the interesting line:
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
The PZ Myers Memorial Debate, Round Two: And The Winner Is…The interlocutors submitted their second round of arguments and this time, they limited themselves to one piece each. You can read both pieces in their entirety over at VoxWorld. If you don’t read their arguments first, my judgment won’t make as much sense.
The Evidential Problem Of EvilAn evidential POE argument from Peter Hurford of Greatplay.net:
1. Needless suffering, by definition, is any suffering that doesn’t exist because of a higher good.
2. Needless suffering, by definition, could be eliminated with no consequences.
3. Any all-good entity desires to eliminate all needless suffering.
4. Any all-knowing entity would know of all needless suffering, if any needless suffering exists.
5. Any all-powerful entity would be capable of eliminating all needless suffering.
6. Our world contains needless suffering.
7. Therefore from 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and 6, an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing entity cannot exist.
8. God, as described by the major religions is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing.
9. Therefore from 7 and 8, God as described by the major religions does not exist.
I recently said that all the POE arguments I’ve heard reduce to arguments from incredulity, and this argument is no different. Inability to conceive of a higher good is the only thing grounding the claim that any given instance of suffering is needless. 6 is a naked assertion sustained only by incredulity. That alone invalidates the argument in my opinion, but I can make a stronger case.
Isn’t Richard Carrier Putting The Cart Before The Horse?So you might have heard that the Loftus put out a new book pompously titled, The End of Christianity, which includes a chapter from self-proclaimed infidel Richard Carrier, titled, Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them). Can we agree that this is an empirical claim? If so, can you imagine the consternation that might ensue if a reputable physics journal published a paper titled: The Higgs Boson Exists, And Science Could Find It?
The POE Drama Continues: Can It Get More Naïve?Along the lines of what we’ve been talking about, I’d like to highlight a selection from the blogosphere that I think is typical of the atheist position. To a commenter who challenged the Muehlhauserian use of emotional imagery to score rhetorical points in the POE, an atheist blogger who’s name is not worth repeating recently wrote,
The problem with your logic is that you fail to acknowledge the assumed premise. In this case, the assumed premise is that God is good. No. Better than good. He’s perfect. He is goodness exemplified. He is omni-benevolent. He is who all goodness tries to emulate. A good god insures that there is only goodness in the world. etc. etc. blather blather, etc. IOW, with a benevolent god there should be no evil.
The Problem Of Evil: Where I’m At TodayWhile I’ll still gladly engage anybody on the issue, these days, I’m leaning towards the conclusion that the atheist’s problem of evil arguments are fatally flawed. In the end, all variants I’ve encountered reduce to incredulity: reasoning from premises derived at via conceptual analysis and intuition, the atheist disbelieves that a morally sufficient reason can exist: “There’s no way a good God would allow this much evil in the world.” That’s it. I’ve not seen a single POE argument that doesn’t reduce thus, and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether disbelief is sufficient to warrant skepticism in this regard. I say no. I mean, people said the same thing about QM and all sorts of other stuff: “There’s no way light can act as both particle and wave!” “There’s no way an airplane can fly!” “There’s no way man will walk on the moon!” Etc. This is why I like what they attribute to Archimedes: with a long enough lever, one could move the Earth.
Is anybody aware of a POE argument that doesn’t reduce thus?
Religion Contorts Morality? Oh Please!So Greta Christina has a post titled How Religion Contorts Morality, and I think that’s nonsense. First off, we have a category error: “religion” is not an agent such that it can contort anything. Only people can contort morality, if such a thing called “morality” actually maps to the real-world in the first place. You might be tempted to think this is just semantics, but it’s not. Speaking precisely minimizes error and misunderstanding. Of course, “Why I Think Religious Person X Is Wrong About Morality” is nowhere near as provocative a title, so I guess I see where she’s coming from there.
Anyways, I’ve seen some pretty contorted “morality” from atheists, too. For example, Tommykey, who apparently thinks it’s wrong to torture terrorists for information, but okay for a woman to kill her unborn child simply because the father possesses unsavory characteristics, or because she thinks she might have a tough time coping with the burdens of parenthood.
In my opinion, that’s about as contorted as can be – but it has nothing to do with atheism, because atheism can’t contort anything.
The God Delusion: Low Hanging Fruit Indeed!This morning, I stumbled across The God Delusion while deciding which books weren’t worth keeping on my shelf. I was about to simply toss it on the logic that plenty of people have dissected the book for the kitzche that it is, but then something from page 249 caught my attention, even inspiring me to post! Of course, one can pretty much flip to any page at random and find something that’s either outright false or at least fallacious. In reference to the “religious zealots” responsible for “burying” Mecca, Dawkins writes:
The Atheist Afterlife: p57-80This installment covers four short chapters comprising the final section of Part One: The Fourth Dimension of Space [7]; The Second Dimension of Time [8]; When Separate Things Merge [9]; and, But Wait… There’s More [10].