March 5, 2009
"How might we reasonably define a miracle?" asks cl.
"Regrow a limb on video, empty out a cancer ward, levitate a bunch of Christians out of a burning church and I'll be on the road to belief," says cl's opponent.
"I don't mean give me your own particular examples of a miracle," cl says.
"Oh, well what a disputationist and sophist you are!" quips cl's opponent only a little irrationally.
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.
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.
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?
February 16, 2009
In the past few months, via several discussions with a variety of learned skeptics and religious people, I've come to better understand the disparities in our concepts of miracles, and specifically, I've been thinking about how falsifiability and confounders diminish the extent to which an alleged miracle can be considered authentic. It may very well be that proving a miracle is impossible, and on this matter I haven't quite decided yet, but I've certainly concluded that there is a wide range of skeptical positions one might take concerning the concept of miracles, and what we can justifiedly say about them, if and when they do occur.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome regarding alleged healing miracles is developing a reliable method for excluding confounders of spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. Hitherto unexplained, either of these mysterious phenomena would provide good confounding cover for a genuine miracle, and that's not to say that all instances of spontaneous remission and placebo effect are intrinsically miraculous, either. Some skeptics are fond of claiming that only repeatable, observable, systematic instances of miracles would be sufficient to convince them that they were unjustified in their skepticism. This is sounds more like magic than miracle.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.