The Warfare Is Mental

Lyell Claims Earth Is 6,000 Years Old! or, False Argument #21: Bible Teaches Interfaith Love Is Sin

February 14, 2009

Alright, so I had stayed up until the morning yesterday writing and backlogging what I feel are three interesting and different posts for the upcoming week, on the decision that I was going to take a 10-day break from posting and blogging.

So what happened?

Well, I woke up this morning and after getting into the swing of things, popped over to DA where what I read in the first few sentences just happened to comprise perhaps the biggest example to date of an exegetical post of Ebonmuse's that completely misses the mark.
So I was overcome with an irresistable force to write, and barfed out the following.

All for the better, I suppose. It didn't take long, and I had been wondering what I would stumble across for #21 in the series. Although admittedly skewering a fish in a barrel, this fits the bill perfectly.

Anyone Know Of A Computer I Can Debate With?

February 13, 2009

I'm actually serious in asking that question. Besides skating the streets with zero cars on the road, another one of my fantasies is a supercomputer that can deduce the logical correctness of any argument. Don't get me wrong, I love debating with humans of any and all stripe. In fact, some who know me might say this is an understatement. Yet no endeavor is likely to persist in the absence of a worthwhile payoff, and every now and again I find myself getting really discouraged and sullen about debate.

Right now is one of those times and there is one simple reason for this discouragement: Humans are prone to motivations above and beyond the resolution of pure logic. Unlike computers, humans possess the peculiar ability to deny truth, and the reasons humans do this are as many as the stars in the night sky. If I ask a computer, "Is (X) = (~X)", I'm going to get a straight and honest answer. The computer can't stop to think, "Well, if I admit / deny that (X) = (~X), I'll look weak / wrong / unintelligent / contradictory."

More Lee-ky Responses To Strobel & Co.

February 11, 2009

For the past few days, I've been evaluating various responses to Lee Strobel's questions that were posted on FriendlyAtheist. My latest stop was at a blog whose title I liked, Life Before Death, and is hosted by "biology student, secular humanist, beekeeper and Swede," Felicia Gilljam.

Now, in all honesty, those of you expecting something new here might be let down, and that's where perhaps most people on all sides can agree on Strobel's questions. Many are admittedly the same old washed-up ontological arguments one has already heard, especially if they've been even remotely following philosophy, religion and/or science for the past few years.

But what also discourages me is how overconfident many on the atheist & skeptic side seem to be in the perceived validity of some responses. Most every skeptical response I've seen to these questions contains some degree of logic-leak from drip to wave, yet in threads, too many skeptic backpatters rally around their dead fish like Piggy and the archetypal boys on Goldman's Lord of the Flies, proud and gleeful that they've pulled such beauts out of the barrel and aptly skewered them!

But how skewered are they? Let's take a look at three more and find out.

Atheists & Skeptics Use God Of The Gaps Reasoning, Too!

February 8, 2009

This is something that's been rattling around inside my head for some time now, and I won't be surprised if people disagree. I've written on it before, and I've never been able to come up with a fancy name for a skeptic's argument from ignorance.

We have to admit, when skeptics accuse believers of claiming that a gap in scientific knowledge constitutes evidence for God (for example in the transition from non-life to life), it's called a God Of The Gaps (GOTG) argument. It is essentially an argument from ignorance, in particular, an argument that a set of claims is true because their competing set of claims lacks a particular element needed to justify their conclusion and is hence assumed false.

And We’re Back At Square One! or, My Response To “The Big Guns”

February 3, 2009

So atheist-turned-believer Lee Strobel apparently offered to answer questions from the thread over at FriendlyAtheist, and I think Hemant (the site owner) has a really cool thing going by having this little dialog.

However, if you want to stump atheists with tough questions, the first thing you don't do is dust off the same batch of washed-up ontological arguments and let them go extra rounds. Although we can agree on lots of other issues, Greta wrote a recent post whose subtitle was Greta Answers Some Theologians. I gotta admit, when I first saw the title in her email notice, I immediately wondered with awe and even a bit of fear: Uh-Oh! Who'd she talk to? I imagined her giving Ted Haggard or somebody similar a proper railing! At the very least I'd envisioned an actual dialog with a theologian, much like what Hemant and Strobel have done.

Qualifiers Are Important, Aren’t They? or, My Response To, “What’s So Bad About Religion?”

January 20, 2009

I was recently debating with the chaplain about the importance of qualifiers in logic and debate, when she decided to bring up some old stuff. About a year ago, I made my first visit to the chaplain's blog, pointed there from another blogger who suggested that I read chaplain's essay titled, What's So Bad About Religion?

So what's so bad about religion? Of course, different people are certainly going to answer this question differently, and any attempts to create hard-and-fast rules seem counterproductive to say the least. At any rate, let's take an in-depth look at some of the chaplain's answers to this question.

What Color Is Your Hair? or, Why Atheism Is 9/10 Religion

January 19, 2009

There's a fairly popular saying that many atheists seem particularly fond of quoting lately:

"Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."

I clearly understand why atheists object to their beliefs being encapsulated in the word religion. Of course, individual atheists will have different reasons for this objection, as we can't paint a large group of people with a broad stroke. Nonetheless, the alleged conclusion here is that atheism is not a religion, but I'm going to disagree and show several ways in which I feel this argument fails, albeit with a small amount of reservation. But first the disclaimer: This is largely a matter of semantics and definitions of words.

My Thoughts On The Olympia Fiasco

December 13, 2008

Last week in a government building in Olympia, Washington, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) installed a sign next to a Christmas nativity scene that read:

At this season of the winter solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

America has always been a place that ostensibly values religious freedom, and regarding holiday displays, the intent behind equality is that every faith should be free to celebrate their particular version of the holiday season we happen to be in. So if the tax-paying, American godless want to create a holiday for themselves based on their worship of reason or nature or whatever, that's fine, and even commendable. However, does this mean that those without faith retain the right to insult those with faith, in a government building, in a public context of seasonal celebration?

Is A Screwdriver Better Than A Ratchet? or, My Response To Evidence-Based Faith vs. Evidence-Free Faith

December 7, 2008

So I stumbled across this article in the blogosphere yesterday, which argued for the superiority of reason in formulating our worldviews. More specifically, the author was responding to claims that the validity of logic and reason have to be taken on faith. Apologists often criticize atheism as a faith-based worldview, which may be true in a trivial sense. However, such does not necessarily level the playing field and what the author of EBFVEFF correctly notes is that even in the restricted sense that atheism is a faith-based worldview, it's based on a different type of faith; faith that proceeds from empirical, observable evidence.

Even so, does this make evidence-based faith inherently superior to evidence-free faith?

PE/QS vs. O^3 God: On The Problem Of Evil

November 23, 2008

Also referred to as the Question of Suffering, the Problem of Evil (PE/QS) is an axiom in philosophical and religious circles which claims the fact of evil existing in our world is incompatible with God as described by most Christians: a God that is at least all-powerful, all-loving and all-knowing, also described as omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient (o^3). Also referred to as the Epicurean Dilemma, the argument itself has been around a few millenia, advanced 2400 years ago by Epicurus (341 – 270 bce). Epicurus offers three options:

“Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; Or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how come evil is in the world?”

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