Just my two cents on this:  Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans: Hawking. 

Seems to me that if we are going with the human precedence of amoral colonialism, we'd have to admit that there are significant differences.  Being able to send people out on boats across the ocean requires a completely different cultural posture than sending spaceships across many many light years.  For our planet to get even slightly out and about into our own solar system even, is likely to require another hundred years or so of not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons and a whole lot of international cooperation.  Hence, we're not likely to be the pirates of space (as cool as that sounds).  Any intelligent species that is able and willing to get along with itself long enough to really scale all the improbabilities may well be more socially adjusted than we are. 

At least there's at least as good a chance they'll be nice aliens rather than evil ones.  That's all I'm saying.  And I think the probability (assuming there's even a chance in hell there are aliens regardless) might even favor morally benevolent aliens. 

But who knows.

Ben

Fellow St. Louis skeptic, Ziztur, had some fun with some photos she took of St. Gasoline and me:

 

Intro:

The following is my alternate opening statement for debate night the other day. While preparing the Christian side of the "problem of evil" it occurred to me how to construct an even tighter logical argument from evil than any I've seen before.

The ontological argument for God's existence allows us to prove a negative when it comes to closing all possible loop holes in regards to evading the logical problem of evil. If God can be defined in order to accommodate any evil of any kind, that God is by definition not the most excellent being the ontological argument seeks to establish. If the ontological argument succeeds, it must succeed in direct proportion to the success of the logical problem of evil.

Christians admit there is evil in the world. In fact they declare it. They have to or Jesus is out of a job. Hence, this is their internal coherency problem regardless of whether objective moral values exist in a non-theistic world. To pretend otherwise and contrive a problem of evil for atheism is a fatally flawed strategy as a result. Christians HAVE to clean house first. Whatever you do to the definition of God to make him compatible with evil necessarily diminishes his status as a morally perfect agent. It is unavoidable. Christians are often as skilled at finding 10 million unnecessary reasons why they fail to be morally perfect agents as they are at giving their morally perfect God a free pass on the most heinous of moral failings. They obviously know what their own standard ought to be, but then they don't apply it all the way around. Don't get me wrong. I am as supportive of their rights to psychologically abuse themselves as I am completely unable to fail to apply their own standards consistently at the necessary expense of their worldview.

If for any reason there is a logical reason why an all good God simply must create a situation that entails evil, then by definition that concept of God as a most excellent being is incoherent. Period. It is unremarkably easy to imagine better and the ontological argument by definition doesn't allow that. Heck, even if they don't buy the ontological argument, Christians are still forced to apply the ontological standard as an accurate description of the God they may be arguing for with other reasons.

Christians would have to argue at the very least (in order to explain the reality we do know of and Biblical doctrine) that God MUST create creatures who have the variety of free will that allows for perverse options (as opposed to say, being freely able to select from all good options like they expect to happen in their afterlife). Not only does this contradict the idea that God is complete in and of himself, not only does this contradict the idea that God has free will and the luxury of not creating anything at all if he has nothing nice to speak into existence, and not only is this a gross failure of imagination to suppose that a morally perfect creation is logically impossible, but by definition one cannot be a most excellent being who is FORCED for any reason to allow evil. That is a handicapped "most excellent being."

Hence the very nature of the ontological standard, again, by definition precludes it and ANYTHING like it, thus proving the negative and closing all possible loop holes. Even positing the additional existence of an all powerful evil deity that keeps the created world in gridlock between good and evil infringes on the definition of a "most excellent" good deity since obviously he's not so excellent if he can't beat up that guy. So there is no black swan here. Case closed.

Christians will be unable to simultaneously convince me to give up on what the most obvious definition of what a "most excellent being" would be or what a perfect moral agent would be like, and in addition to this convince me that there may be some unknown escape route from the logical problem of evil. They can't do both and they have to do both.

For this reason the existence of the Christian God is simply impossible to defend.

And before anyone accuses me of conveniently defining God out of existence, remember it was the Christians who tried to conveniently define him into existence first. I just took their standards seriously.

Criticisms?

Ben

Intro:

Andrea had a great idea.   It's easy pick out the stupid.  But she also recommended that I give a shout out to the level headed.  I agreed.  So let's hop to it.  Here's a couple laughable tidbits and an honorable one.

James Hale says (link):

But why has man held to a seven day week? The only reason is the creation story.  It points to the story in the Bible.  But does Man listen? [emphasis mine]

Only...

Shotgun says (link):

I (as a Christian apologist) will not let you, or Richard Carrier, get away with alluding to other people without first proving that other people exist.

Yes, proving Richard Carrier exists is impossible.   But assuming God exists...priceless....

Freddy Davis says (link):

So wait...regurgitating endless bible verses isn't the surefire way to convince atheists?  No wai...

Fun?  Goood....

Ben

Intro:

I've been asked a few times how I thought the Health Care Summit went and the following video and links represent what I think are the most helpful in understanding that.

This video of Obama's closing remarks to the Health Care Summit is probably the most important thing to take away from it. It really helped me understand the President's perspective in opposition to the common criticisms I hear (like why can't we do this in smaller steps?) that sound at least somewhat reasonable.  Although I just found another video where another Democrat made the point even more clear.

For a wide range of general reactions to the Summit, I found that this link from The Week, Obama's health care summit: Live first reactions, was especially helpful. 

There was no epic take away from the event, but it seems there's a loose consensus (from what I've seen on cable news channels) that it at least helped everyone to understand exactly what the nature of our political problems are, even if they could not be resolved.  The following article from the Wall Street Journal, Differences Are Clear—and That's a Start, embodied that conclusion well.

Accordingly with my hypothesis that there is a lot of blame to put on the Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Reid, it seems the following article from Slate Magazine, GOP 1, Obama 1, Democrats 0:  Obama and Republicans seemed reasonable. That's bad news for Democrats., confirms that.    It was pretty obvious from watching their performance in contrast to Obama's, that they are no where near the diplomats of bipartisanship Obama needs them to be. 

Hope the video and those links were helpful.

Ben

Aspects of this post may assume you watch healthy doses of MSNBC, CNN, and FOX news.  Or unhealthy doses.  However you want to look at it. 

Intro:

In preparation for the outcome of the health care summit today, I was trying to garner in my mind a realistic overall assessment of what got us here.  Why has health care been such a big headache?  All the little reactionary factoids (and I use the root word "fact" loosely) floating around in the political part of  my head needed to be considered together in the same line of thought.  At first, like everyone else on my team, I blamed the GOP for being the party of "No."  But then there were those Blue Dog Democrats and that whole super majority that wasn't so super as a result.  The GOP could have been the party of "doesn't matter what they think" if not for the Blue Dog lack of rolling over.  But THEN...I started hearing little things like "Obama laid out a straight up bi-partisan stimulus bill from the get go and the Dems nixed it."  [Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe has been meaning that a lot lately.]  And supposedly it all went to shit from there. 

If what I laid out in the intro is true, that raises two questions.  Why did the Democrats do that and why did Obama let them do that?  Presuming that Democrats are politicians and not the saints  we'd be delusional to think they are, one imagines that if you have a super majority, they aren't  going to let that go to waste for the sake of their own special interests.  Why the hell do we have to have bipartisan bills feeding bipartisan special interests when we got elected into the majority?  Not fair!  Right?  So doing your own thing and trying to get a handful of Republican window dressings (by just trying to buy them off straight up, supposedly) to make it seem semi-bipartisan appears to have been the game plan (which is the theory the Sean Hannity's of the world are working with).  Perhaps it would have been a better compromise to lay out 2:1 ratio bipartisan bills to represent the honest majority.  All feelings could have been reasonably appeased with an affirmative action policy amendment style.  But that'd be like sharing.  Intentionally.   
 
Apart from this, I started realizing the Democrats were likely the main problem since it had been common knowledge Obama had left Congress to sort itself out on health care.  This crystallized for me as I watched Obama kindly trounce the GOP at their retreat.  Why hadn't this conversation already happened a year ago?  Who's been in charge of these jokers?  Oh right...Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Bastards!  Just because Obama is awesome doesn't mean a single other Dem has somehow improved their game any.  I figured it might be peace and love in the epic speeches from Obama, but then the same old crap down in the trenches with the rest of the Democrats leading to a certain level of embitterment.  I just didn't realize it was more than just flavor. 

So, what I'd like to know is, is it true that Obama laid out a truly bi-partisan stimulus plan?  Is it true that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (or whatever upper level Democrats) nixed it?  What  exactly was the rationale?  And why did Obama let that happen?  Perhaps it was a panic that a stimulus was urgently needed and he didn't have time to fight for bi-partisanship right out of the gate?  Could be.  Apparently, depending on whether this is all correct and there aren't compelling excuses, all this really could be Obama's fault.  And I'm going to feel less sorry for him as he tries to sort out his mess. 

Most of the stimulus money hasn't been spent yet.  Albeit the common FOX news talking point is to just stop the stimulus where it is.  Obviously that's idiotic sideline "do whatever it is that you aren't doing" talk.  [Don't defend the ideology that you "can't spend your way out of a recession" versus "emergency CPR to the economy".  Don't present a viable alternative.  Leave the obvious problems we face up in the air, while you repeat the same objection a thousand times over the course of a year. etc.]  Given that it seems the stimulus is where most of Obama's political problems stem from, it might behoove him to renegotiate the rest of the stimulus money with ideas from his original plan.  I'm sure there are problems with that idea, but it's just a thought.  If he's actually interested rebuilding bridges for realz. 

Apparently there was a much more bi-partisan jobs bill as well, that got nixed, too.  The talking point floating around that factietoid was that it was going to hurt the Democrats for some  unspecified reason [I think that's another Joe Scarborough talking point.  He routinely says these things without challenge on MSNBC where he could be easily challenged on his facts so I'm inclined to believe him.  Although, the regular co-hosts aren't exactly on their game in opposition necessarily, so there is some room for doubt.].  So a lot of this conspiracy is filtering through ideologically hostile sources and may not be entirely true (or may lack relevant truth components).  Also granted, is that the GOP still doesn't seem to have any viable solutions and is playing lots of bs games (rather than out-adulting the Democrats:  Here's our objectively better alternative plan posted online for all to see that isn't just a placeholder to be able to claim ((yay for political theater!)) we have a good plan that is being arbitrarily rejected.), but there may well have been a somewhat honest reason for them to not simply play along at first that royally complicated things. 

Any thoughts?  What am I missing?  What am I getting wrong? 

Ben

Intro:

I've recently seen two interesting debates on cable news.  In the first we have Bill O'Reilly hosting a debate on climate change (global warming) between Bill Nye the Science Guy and a meteorologist named Joe (didn't catch his last name).  In the second we have Joe Scarborough hosting a debate between Daniel Freedman and Marc Thiessen debating about whether enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) are actually effective at producing reliable intelligence (aside from moral issues).

What I don't like is how frantic these debates are and how it doesn't seem like we have a clean up crew to carefully sort out the facts and arguments being disputed for everyone who is not an expert and can't hope to follow along.  Here's the list of facts both parties agree on.  Here's the few facts they disagree on.  Now let's have an even more focused debate on each of those contested facts.  If you don't do something like that, it seems to me people will leave with the same prejudices they walked in with.  Even O'Reilly says at the conclusion of the climate change debate, "I'd flunk both your classes." 

If it were up to me, we'd actually have a straight up national debate channel rather than these hit and runs to consistently sort out the facts and arguments of every important national issue.  

Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to embed a video from FOX news.  However the MSNBC setup is incredibly easy to figure out and even has a beginning and end point setter built right in the coding for you. 

Oh, and if you'd like to see atheist, John Loftus lose to Dinesh D'Souza, that debate is now on youtube.  I was there in person.  *facepalm*  To be fair, D'Souza probably lost in terms of drops.  You can't just smear the opening statement and then pretend like it didn't address anything you were about to talk about.  Fortunately later that week, Richard Carrier clobbered Mike Licona yet again (click here for their first debate).  I'm not sure if that was recorded or not (I was in person there, too), but if I find it, I'll be sure to post it.

Ben

The FOX news methodology of dismissing non-torture interrogation success (after a suspect has been read their Miranda rights) is as follows:  If interrogator uses weakness x (to get reliable intelligence), we'd   better hope all terrorists have weakness x.  If they exploit weakness y, we'd better hope they all have weakness y.  If z, then all have to have z.  In other words, we "just got lucky" that time and didn't need to be hardcore.  However, they never compare the structure of their predictable excuse for the sake of lifting an overall pattern.  Hence the idiotic question, "What about terrorists impervious to all human weaknesses?" never arises to be laughed off the television screen.  Granted, if they said something that obviously idiotic, it hasn't proved to hurt their ratings any.  *sigh*  On the other hand, it does help the ratings of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. 

Ben

Intro:

I like debating weird hypothetical arguments.  One gets tired of the same old normal arguments that (while necessary, culturally) get really really boring after a while.  I've recently tested out my "Does God Lie?" argument in a public debate with some success. 

I'm brainstorming ideas for how to argue the case that if we accept the scenario of Jesus being tempted in the desert by Satan, the balance of evidence seems to be in favor of Jesus giving in. 

The evidence indicates that he did fail and decide to worship Satan.

Presumably God the Father would abandon the earthly Jesus in that event.

Jesus was a failed prophet who predicted he would return shortly.  He didn't.  (It's been a LONG time, too)  Perhaps he knew this was how it was supposed to be, but God the Father was no longer with him.

The NT promises that the Church would be accompanied by the Holy Spirit to lead them in all truth.  Today the Church is splintered into hundreds and thousands of denominations.  It would seem God has abandoned the Church. 

The NT promises there would be miracles to accompany the gospel message.  This is not the case.  God is not on their team.

Jesus seems to start to lose it near the end of his ministry, becoming angry and overturning tables in the Temple. 

He is overly slanderous towards his opponents, the Pharisees, indicating he'd lost patience with his earthly ministry. 

He doesn't seem to have access to all knowledge, indicating God was no longer with him.

It seems Jesus was unable to accept failure, and continued on, getting himself executed in a pompous rivalry with earthly authorities.  On the cross, Jesus says, "Oh God, why have you forsaken me?" seeming to admit they had parted ways. 

Hence it would make sense that God didn't raise him from the dead.  Presumably the body went missing for whatever reason, and his followers moved along with a false conception of events via hallucination and group think, and started their own religion.  In their writings they tried to smooth things over as best they could.   

Perhaps the success of Christianity despite God's withdrawn investment was because God had prepared the way ahead of time in terms of what would have happened in history. 

It would seem salvation for humanity is not available after all. 

All I've tried to do here is take the basic Christian supernatural premises for granted and make a better shitty argument than a Christian.  The moral of the story is that if we open the Pandora's box of religious epistemology, anything goes.  And anything an apologist can contrive to support a laundry list of unverifiable doctrines and supernatural propositions is really them talking out of their hindquarters.

Eventually I'll be sure to look up all the relevant verses and go searching for the apologetic responses to them in order to familiarize myself with the curve balls which would be coming my way (and to make sure my arguments actually work of course).  This is just my rough outline.  I'm not really even sure if I'd bother using this argument for anything other than practice in public debate since it's really just a mental exercise in lateral thinking. 

Any suggestions?

Ben