The Warfare Is Mental

A Trip To The Hypothetical Fish Farm: Proof of God’s Existence, I

January 2, 2010

jim at RvA has blessed us with a new series titled Proof of God’s Existence, and I intend to respond to each installment of his series, which seems designed to corral the believer’s claims into the confines of what jim calls “common sense inquiry.” I suppose we’ll see just what that means as time unfolds.

He begins with words likely all too familiar to veterans in this game, centered around the question of what constitutes adequate proof of God’s existence:

It’s a common question on the tip of many a Christian’s tongue when confronted with skepticism regarding their theistic worldview, yes? Responses from skeptics generally revolve around some kind of convincing display(s) of ‘miraculous’ interventions, or other manifestations i.e. events beyond the generally accepted, deterministic norms of the most current naturalistic paradigm, and supported by scientific methodology such as observation, controlled testing, repeatability and the like. –jim, reason vs. apologetics

Hey Atheists, It’s Right Here

December 11, 2009

As we mentioned yesterday, Greta Christina – an atheist blogger whom I actually admire – has written another post garnering strong support from the aetheosphere. The post is titled, "Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence?" As you might expect, it's both a challenge to believers to "show Greta the money" as well as an armchair psychoanalysis of the subset of believers who fail to rise to her challenge.

The Chaplain has taken me to task for what she feels is an incomplete critique of Greta's post, so today I intend to discuss it more thoroughly.

TWIM / RvA Dialog III

November 29, 2009

jim at RvA has responded to Reason, Intellect, Religion, & Belief. Per the usual format, my response follows, but we should address some tangential things which don’t relate to jim’s actual criticism of my post, first. I suspect that jim composed his response either drunk, or buzzed, because of the way it “went off.” I emailed jim and asked him to distill his criticisms into concise, clearly-stated objections. He refused, and hit me with the surprise of posting that email, instead. Well! It’s like that, eh?

A Precognitive Reality: Anomalous Mental Phenomena, II

November 25, 2009

I typically don’t keep jobs too long. At last count I’d worked over 50 jobs by the time I was 30. I was 19 when the following incident happened, and it was my fourth job.

I’d been working for a few months at a private club atop the county’s most prominent skyscraper. It was really a fun gig, to say the least. The day shift basically consisted of lunch for the elite. I was an upscale busboy, complete with a suit, a “crumber” and the whole kit. The clientele consisted of everybody from real estate moguls to business tycoons to sports team owners. Even some Hollywood types. There was a private gym up there where some of these types would congregate for various non-athletic activities, if you catch my drift. The club and the gym took up the entire top floor and you could see out over the Pacific or out over the mountains. Sunsets in wintertime were amazing. The whole setup was just so high-class and… just weird.
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The Tripartite Model Of Consciousness

November 24, 2009

Last Thursday we made what I felt were some necessary emendations to the cerebro-centric consciousness hypothesis (CCH). Today we’ll do the same for its primary competitor.

By consciousness I refer to a base set of abilities, including but not limited to expression, intuition, volition, emotion, and intellect. Here we introduced the CCH’s primary competitor as the immaterial consciousness hypothesis, with the basic premise being that consciousness can exist outside of a physical body. After much thought, I’ve decided to do away with that name in favor of the tripartite model of consciousness (TMC), with the basic premise being that consciousness is not an exclusively biological or cerebro-centric phenomenon. Under the TMC, three distinct yet overlapping elements merge to create human consciousness: spirit, soul, and body.

Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means” Pt. III

November 13, 2009

This is my third response to DD's "What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means."

Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means” Pt. II

November 7, 2009

I've reread DD's arguments a few more times, and I'd like to give them more thorough address, mostly to show why I think they are not justified by a solid foundation of logic, or historical fact. As we noted yesterday, DD's first objection to Jesus' response to the Sadducees as described in Matthew 22 was that,

..Jesus tells the Sadducees that they are wrong because they do not know the Scriptures… then proceeds to “correct” them by declaring that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”—which is not written anywhere in the Old Testament Scriptures!

In that post, DD also introduced the unsupported claim that,

..the Sadducees believed in the idea that the dead continued to exist as disembodied spirits…

I'd like to stop here and see if perhaps DD's claims contain any assumed premises or historical inaccuracies. I believe they do.

Competing Models Of Consciousness

November 6, 2009

For lack of a better word, the existence of “the supernatural” is perhaps the second most foundational claim behind nearly every religion. From the monotheistic, patriarchal religions such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity, to the more esoteric Eastern mysticism, to Hinduism to today’s modern Aquarianism, the idea that existence extends beyond the physical plane is a key undercurrent. Each of these religions — and many more — claim that something akin to a supernatural realm exists. Very plainly one can see that without this “other world,” the foundational claims of many religions unravel from the core and reduce to metaphor at best. So, if I want to establish the plausibility of the MGH, establishing the plausibility of this “other world” seems a good place to start.
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Response To DD’s “What Biblical Inerrancy Really Means”

November 5, 2009

So Deacon Duncan of Evangelical Realism wrote a recent post in which he attempts to justify his opinion that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. This time, his strategy consists of objecting to Jesus' answers to the Sadducees when asked about marriage and the resurrection as recorded in Matthew 22. For those prone to reading source material, you might want to also absorb Exodus 3:6.

The MGH Revisited

October 24, 2009

A few months back we introduced what was referred to as the Masoretic-Greek Hypothesis (MGH), the purpose of which was,

..both to avoid the pitfalls of doctrinal quibbling and to cover all the ground DD has missed, [and] finally prove my case that DD's Evidence Against Christianity relates only peripherally to Christianity.

M represents the work of the Masoretes, Jewish scribes and scripture scholars living roughly 3,000 years ago in what today would be Jerusalem, Tiberius or even what we would consider modern-day Iraq (then Babylon, Babylonia). M represents the Hebrew rendition of the Tanakh, and many if not most Protestant and Catholic Bibles sample from M, as does the Septuagint (39 books of the OT + select Apocrypha) from which the New Testament writers sampled. G is the New Testament derived as described.

This way, we arguably start as close to the actual events and oral traditions as possible, then apply our collective powers of reason to ascertain the set of reasonably permissible predictions – thus hopefully avoiding doctrinal pitfalls like DD intended – but with the added bonus of a positive hypothesis we can have the courage to call Christianity.

For newer readers who might not have the full context, many of us were involved in an ongoing discussion at Deacon Duncan's blog, Evangelical Realism. This MGH of mine has a twofold purpose. The first is obviously to function as an adequate response to DD's so-called Evidence Against Christianity, a post-series based on the idea of crafting hypotheses entailing predictions of what the world might look like if either the "Gospel Hypothesis" or the "Myth Hypothesis" were true. I also intend the MGH to stand on its own as a structured set of systematic proofs for theism in general, some version of biblical Christianity in particular. This does not entail the idea that "all other religions are false," because the situation is quite simply more complex than that. Note that we're going to begin by throwing out all presumptions, theologies, dogmas, etc., starting (hopefully) from a shared set of premises eventually building to a crescendo.

So, where do we go from here?

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