The Warfare Is Mental

A Huge And Hitherto Undiscovered Cretacious Beast, Part I

March 27, 2009

Sorry, but the title's a little misleading. This post has nothing to do with evolution. Rather, I was on a thread recently when a commenter whose name I like and would enjoy hearing an explanation of (Mike aka MonolithTMA) made a passing comment that got me thinking:

I always wonder why theists bring up Ockham's Razor as it points about as far away from God as possible, (March 26, 2009 7:44 PM)

I thought that comment was interesting, but I didn't say anything at the moment, just tucked it into the "parsing" file. A few more Ockham's Razor -related comments were subsequently thrown out, the next from the blog owner, Karla:

Ockham's Razor to go with more simple answer that fits. . . To me it would appear that suggesting infinite un-caused universes is more complex than the answer of an eternal being.

Anonymous: And, you would be wrong, as I've explained. god is the most complex "answer" anyone can propose, because the level of complexity for a god would be far and away higher than any other explanation, not to mention all the additional questions it raises, the added layer of the supernatural over the natural universe, and the fact that it can't get off the ground scientifically. You can continue to ignore all of this and erroneously assert that "goddidit" is simple, but it clearly is not.

Does anyone else see the rational difficulties here?

On Full Disclosure & Knee Jerk Reactions

Enough with the whining about lack of full disclosure in (a)theist discussion. There are very logical reasons for not painting oneself into some silly little mental category that is both culturally fabricated and deduced via subjective experience. I believe it is ultimately foolish and non-productive for a group of people to assign themselves emotionally-charged and socially-conflated labels while attempting to have anything even remotely close to a rational discussion. FAR too often it's more of the same in the blogosphere: Consider your average internet (a)theist discussion: Believer A shows up on atheist website B and leaves some comment C that falls anywhere between Cro-magnon man and Einstein on the intelligence scale. Atheist commenters D – Z then proceed to accost believer A anywhere from Bill Cosby to Christopher Hitchens on the respect scale, each according to their own ideas of what A believes.

MiracleQuest Continues: On Post Hoc Reasoning & The Re-Captitated Man

March 17, 2009

So it appears Deacon Duncan has accused me of post hoc reasoning regarding an objection I made to his elaboration on my re-capitation example. I'd like to take a moment to discuss why I feel his complaints are based on an overly-charitable interpretation of my objection, and I'm curious to hear what you think. The linked post is part of a lengthy ongoing discussion, so a little backstory might be helpful.

For the past month or so at EvangelicalRealism, we've been discussing the amount of credibility we can reasonably assign to miracle stories. Now, everyone has different definitions of a miracle and different thresholds of skepticism through which they filter observed events. Phenomena like the Marian apparitions at Zeitoun are obviously sufficient to convince some people, yet others remain skeptical. So how might we define a miracle objectively, in a manner that anyone can apply to any observed event?

I entered the discussion attempting to establish a rigorous set of criteria one could apply to determine whether or not any event might be considered a miracle. That didn't work out very well, so in further attempts to determine the 'miracle switch' in everybody's brains, I introduced the re-capitated man as a hypothetical example, asking skeptics how they would parse such an event. That is, if we observed a man get decapitated, then an hour later we observe the man's head re-attach after which he goes into the bar for a drink, would we have grounds to say something "miraculous" had occurred?

Public Challenge To Anyone: Biblically Justify The Omni^4 Claim, And What Do You Mean By God?

March 12, 2009

I've been waiting for another opportunity to poke holes in the lavish presuppositions folks often bring to POE arguments and this recent banter was just what I needed to get motivated.

To review, the Omni^4 Claim is the idea that the God of the Bible simultaneously possesses the following four qualities: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipresence. IOW, that the God of the Bible is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and all-present. As an aside, many people disregard omnipresence as irrelevant to POE arguments, but I thought I'd throw it in there for historical accuracy if nothing else.

MiracleQuest Continues: On Deacon Duncan’s “Unapologetic”

March 11, 2009

So I was about to hit "post" when I took a break, and found myself randomly staring at a TV that was on. It was that History Channel show called MonsterQuest and now you probably see the significance of the title. The show begins with narration on the nature of different sorts of monsters, you know, Big Foot, the New Jersey Devil, Werewolves, et cetera: "Monsters. Are they real? Or imaginary? Join us as science tries to find out."

That's exactly what's been going on at EvangelicalRealism for the past few weeks now: we've been on a MiracleQuest. Except that MonsterQuest can at least define exactly or near-exactly what it is they're looking for. Despite my stodginess on the issue and the naysayers, I think we'll soon solve these problems of definition and criteria. The more we talk about it, the more ideas get tossed out, the bigger the pile of potentially good ideas grows, and sooner or later we're there.

Public Challenge To Atheists: Why Believe In What Can Only Prove False?

March 8, 2009

Every now and again I meditate on the fact that the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. By atheist / naturalist / materialist position, I mean the Epicurean idea that death entails the complete and final cessation of consciousness – that after we die, there will be no more thought, no more experience, no more anything.

One of the many disadvantages of this world view is that no other option can potentially befall it other than falsification. That is to say, even if this position is correct, we can never prove it, for how could we ever be conscious of the cessation of consciousness to prove that such was indeed the case? You need consciousness to prove anything, and indeed, the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. It can only prove false, because if even one iota of consciousness continues in any form after death, the idea is effectively bunk.

And so the challenge is for any atheist, naturalist or materialist to satiate my curiosity by reasonably or at least politely answering the following questions: Why believe in an idea whose only possible empirical verification is disproof? What of the hypocrisy in committing yourself to a position that claims to rely on proof as the highest measure of truth when the position itself cannot possibly be proven?

Authority Effectively Undermined

March 7, 2009

I was cruising around the blogosphere this morning when I found this post at DaylightAtheism. Although I don’t necessarily share all of Haught’s conclusions as expressed in the source material, I felt Ebonmuse’s response was fraught with inconsistencies.

First on the list is the following peculiarity:

…Haught presumes for himself the right to judge which atheists are or are not sufficiently “serious”

Why should that be any sort of problem? After all, Ebonmuse certainly presumes which theists are sufficiently serious, for example, he says all that believe in demons are ignorant regardless of actual intelligence and should be unilaterally mocked. This makes Occam’s razor look more like a guillotine! As my heart goes out to the closet GLBT kid with a sternly homophobic and closed-minded dad, similar for the otherwise rational person who’s had experiences reasonably interpretable as psychic (‘psychic’ as in the Jungian sense of archetypal), spiritual or biblical in their ultimate nature. Such hasty generalization and harsh criticism in this regard can only effect cognitive dissonance, which is of little use in uncovering the truth.

Trilobytes Don’t Deny Evolution Because Humans Weren’t Around In The Cambrian

March 2, 2009

The title will make sense later and this post has nothing to do with evolution.

Last month I got involved in a thread which has turned out to be quite productive in my opinion. Although I can't speak for the others involved, I've gained considerable insights into a variety of epistemological arguments and ideas. Miracles have been the topic that have underscored our debate, and we've bantered about the amount of credibility one can reasonably assign to episodes like Zeitoun and Bernadette McKenzie for example. The blog's host, Deacon Duncan (DD), also made a claim he calls the Undeniable Fact, and commenters both here and there have agreed and disagreed with that.

DD devotes considerable thought to the comments which keeps the discussion going and for that he gets good mention. It also helps that he's a good writer. If you have good logic, you don't get good writing for free, so people that have both are fortunate. This related post of DD's is among the better I've read in terms of writing that succinctly and persuasively portrays the inherent dilemmas in miracle claims and the amount of credibility we can assign to them.

False Argument #22: The Unicorns, Leprechauns & Flying Spaghetti Monster Trope

February 24, 2009

I don't know why I didn't peg this one as a false argument much earlier.

You can often tell when there's an amateur skeptic lurking around some random debate, because at some point they're bound to upchuck their own particular version of the unoriginal and silly Unicorns, Leprechauns and Flying Spaghetti Monster (ULFSM) arguments made prevalent by the New Atheists among others. Dawkins did it with the Gospel and the Knights of the Round Table in TGD, and if you're at all into these types of debates, you've likely seen it go down for yourself:

"I've got legitimate reasons for what I believe," proclaims some reasonable believer.

"No you don't," quips a flippant atheist. "Do you have legitimate reasons to believe in Unicorns, Leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster?" (Hehehe I the atheist outsmarted you the God-dummy! is the usual subtext).

Just for fun, let's take a look at this idea that ULFSM are accurately comparable to God in an intellectually honest discussion of things.

Why Aren’t Less Science Students Atheist?

February 18, 2009

After all, the general trend of science has been to reveal that things are exponentially bigger, infinitesimally smaller and vastly more complex than what was once beyond our weirdest and wildest dreams, right? I mean come on, beer galaxies? Really? Point is, there's always been far more to reality than we imagine. Instead of producing insurmountable discontinuities, the horizons of human knowledge and objective reality tend to expand astronomically. We used to think this world was all there was. We were wrong. We used to think this solar system was all there was. We were wrong. Some of us think that this universe and this existence are all there is. Especially in light of emerging evidence combined with past tradition, isn't there a reasonable chance that they, too, are wrong?

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