Intro:

I think it's pretty clear the Bible teaches eternal torment for the unsaved and Jesus himself is the primary advocate of the doctrine.  In case anyone hasn't happened to peruse the verses, I've collected the most pertinent here.

This post is designed to supplement my forthcoming argument map on the injustice of the Christian doctrine of hell.  I couldn't fit all these verses with commentary on an argument map, so here we go...

Scripture Picture

Arguably there are a few different versions of the afterlife in the Bible especially in comparison from the Old Testament to the New Testament, but we aren’t talking about contradictions here (other than the Bible says God is good and he isn’t).  Everything in bold is "emphasis mine."

Isaiah 66:24

"And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind."

Daniel 12:2

Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.

Hebrews 6:1-2

Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.

Jude 7

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.

Revelation 14:9-11

A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: "If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.  And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever.  There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name."

Mark 3:29

But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

Mark 9:43

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.  And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell.  And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where " 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'  Everyone will be salted with fire.

Matthew 25:41-46

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Luke 16:19-31

The Rich Man and Lazarus

"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.  At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried.  In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.  So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.  And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'

Outro:

I'm sure there may very well be limited metaphors at work in these passages, but they must be limited as in god doesn't have to go into details of the physics of it, but you get the gist.  If you try to metaphoricalize it away, contextually it becomes gibberish.  Sure not every verse spells it out, but do they have to?  Not every connection directly relates to everlasting torment…but what other comparison would there be?  Why can’t those earthly finite connections be the limited metaphors instead?  That makes much more overall contextual sense.

So I needed two posts of Bible verses to spell out chunks of my next argument map.  There will be several other supplemental argument maps as well, since all of these debate link up with all the other debates...

Ben

Intro:

Previously, I posted some chunks of Christian apologist, Steve Hays', views on demons, skeptics, and UFology from "This Joyful Eastertide" (TJET), his ebook length response to the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave."  Today we're going to get into another example of how he attempts to apply that in debate (see also, "Christian demons vs. Muslim demons"). 

The original conversation started in another skeptical anthology, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" and the ebook length response to it called, "The Infidel Delusion" and then continued into the blog realm with Debunking Christianity and Triablogue "discussing" the issues further.

In his response to Loftus, "Scoring the Outsider Test," Hays says:

Hays is being a little superficial.  For example, in TJET, Hays had said:

*shrug*  It's not like Hays isn't known for the accusation (or the overt suggestion, in the case of Carrier).  And as I showed in a previous post, "Steve Hays' 'Demon-Haunted' Apologetics" it should be pretty clear that if Hays isn't saying it overtly, I don't see why we shouldn't assume he isn't thinking it.  Satan is behind everything!

In his third post to me, "Ne'er shaw yir teeth unless ye can bite!", Hays avoids the issue in favor of a personal attack as though this has something to do with me:

While I'm sure that a Christian like Hays has some lovely things to say about Obama, Stewart, Franken, and Weiner, Loftus' original point is that Hays is willing to think his opponents are demon-possessed (and ignores perfectly mundane explanations like "sleep paralysis hallucination").  Hays avoided the issue to attack Loftus personally and I demonstrated Loftus' inference about Hays was in fact perfectly reasonable. We're all just making perfectly innocent inferences around here, right?

Outro:

Hays doesn't like his inverse scarlet letter, but that's just too bad isn't it?  Maybe he should bother to prove that demons actually exist or that Loftus is actually wrong about something important.  There's a thought.

Ben

Intro:

Last time I posted some chunks of Christian apologist, Steve Hays' views on demons, skeptics, and UFology from "This Joyful Eastertide," his ebook length response to the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave."  Today we're going to get into how he attempts to apply that in debate. 

This conversation started in "The Infidel Delusion" (TID) which was an ebook length response to another skeptical anthology, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails," and from there it continued in blog posts from Debunking Christianity (DC) and Triablogue "discussing" the issues further.

Atheist, John Loftus, at DC says in response to TID:

It would have been nice if he would have said something like that in his chapter as an example of how to consistently apply the "outsider test for faith," but that didn't quite make it in.

In his response to Loftus, "Scoring the Outsider Test," Hays objects:

[Loftus] acts as if Islam and Christianity are symmetrical. Yet that’s obviously not the case. For instance, Muhammad treated the Bible as the standard of comparison. He invited doubters to ask Christians and Jews to vouch for his prophetic credentials. But that’s hardly reversible. It’s not as if Bible writers ever invited Mohammedans to judge the Bible by the Koran.

Just because some aspects are asymmetrical doesn't mean all of them are.  Duh.  Loftus appeals to a point of more substance, since if demons inspired Christianity or Islam, then they can make up any further "tests" or asymmetries that they like which will be superfluous.   
 
In his third post to me, "Ne'er shaw yir teeth unless ye can bite!," Hays objects again:

No, that’s not how Loftus framed the argument. Loftus said:

Muslims claim the same exact thing. They say the reason Christians believe is because demons are deceiving them.

Muslims are in no position to say that, for that would be self-refuting. The Koran claims to be a confirmation of Biblical revelation. If, however, Christians are demonically inspired rather than divinely inspired, then that undercuts the ostensible foundation for the Koran.

Wow.  Alright, well the illustrious all-mundane-things-knowing wikipedia says:

Muslims believe that those texts were neglected, corrupted (tahrif) or altered in time by the Jews and Christians and have been replaced by God's final and perfect revelation, which is the Qur'an.

Hence, it's not so self-refuting to claim that demons helped Christians corrupt the original revelation and inspires them to reject the updated version.

Outro:

Maybe Hays could try a little harder next time?  Christians have lots of epistemic problems like these.  See my argument map, "Could Jesus be lying about hell?" and my coverage of "2 Thessalonians 2:11 and Strong Delusion" for some more examples.

Ben

Intro:

The Bible does not portray salvation as trite and as easy as modern pop-culture Christianity would like us to believe. Many Christians are of course under no illusions that their afterlife plan entails "a difficult life," but they don't seem to recognize the implications of that when juxtaposed to what is at stake according to their own doctrine. 

This post is a supplemental post for my argument map on the injustice of the Christian doctrine of hell (which is forthcoming in a few days).

I've always complained I've never met any "real" Christians since none of them have all the cool magic powers the early Church had.  But even those "obvious" Christians can't be too confident:

Matthew 7:21-23

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?'  Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'

Let's not forget the religious moderates among us:

Revelation 3:16

So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

You guys should definitely stop being so not-Westboro-Baptist on us. 

And if you think this god will judge you fairly based on your own standards (I do mean you, Richard Carrier), consider:

Mark 4:24

"Consider carefully what you hear," he continued. "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more. [emphasis mine]

Wow...that seems a bit unnecessarily dishonest, but whatever.  Who are we to talk back to the Christian god?  Moving on...

And if you think this god is necessarily intimately cultivating your soul..chew on this:

Matthew 25:24

"Then the man who had received the one talent came. 'Master,' he said, 'I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed.

The "Master" is clearly meant to represent the Christian god in this salvation parable and that seems quite a haphazard "whatever happens happens" methodology.  That makes me feel extremely secure.   

And for you believing slackers out there:

1 Corinthians 9:24

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.

No wonder it says:

Philippians 2:12

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,

That sounds pretty tough.  This planet doesn't seem very geared towards generating the maximum number of saints any more than it seems set up to generate the maximum number of professional basketball players.  In case you thought only Hitler will end up in hell:

Matthew 7:14

But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. [emphasis mine]

The body count of hell has to come from somewhere, folks.  So it seems almost certain that many more Christians than not who will be reading this should have a great deal less confidence in their salvation, "realistically" speaking. 

I quote all this in order to make the Christians who say, "it's so easy, just believe" a little antsy.  Not quite feeling like an Olympic saint today?  Not so keen on 9 out of 10 people you know being royally screwed over for all eternity (or having to watch)?  Wondering why you have to play such a dangerous game without your consent that you didn't start?  Second guessing how meaningful it is to have this god's grace "on your team" when it's still pretty much dependent on you?  Thinking maybe that this god isn't such a great guy after all?  If you think everything is okay here...you seem quite mistaken to say the least.  You can quote verses that more uplifting things and yet they will not magically cancel out anything said here.

Scripture seems keen on painting a very grim picture and when apologists and evangelists would like to spin that in a way that is not really representative of the contents of their holy book, non-believers such as myself wonder where the intellectual honesty of the defenders of Christianity wandered off to.  Because this is what I see:  

It's like apologists manage to see "Buddy Jesus" despite the obvious "Jigsaw Jesus" architecture of the situation.  In the Saw horror movies, Jigsaw defends himself as not a murderer, because apparently even though his victims were put in some overtly panic inducing environment...they could have immediately seen Jigsaw's perspective, followed all the rules and saved themselves.  This is the moral equivalent of saying, "I'm not a hit man...there was a 10% chance my sniper bullet could have been blown off course by the wind."  Similarly, it seems the Christian god might try to say, "I'm not an evil god...there was a ten percent chance you could have been saved given the convoluted circumstances I let you be born in."  Jesus did seem to call the final score there in case you thought all of this might turn out all right in the end.

You decide.

Outro:

The next supplementary post to my forthcoming argument map will be, "Does the Bible teach eternal suffering for the unsaved?" since there are apparently many Christians in denial of that in some form. 

Ben

Intro:

It is not hard to point out the hypocrisy of Christian apologist, Steve Hays.  Hays will often be found to turn on a dime within a sentence or two of a vicious denouncement to commit the very same intellectual crime without any justification whatsoever.  For example, in "This Joyful Eastertide," which is a book length response to the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave," Hays calls conspiracy theories, "the refuge of all intellectual scoundrels."  It doesn't take him long to outdo any skeptic out there.

Hays says:

i) Ufology is the delinquent child of modern science. An ufologist is often a smart, sophisticated individual, deeply committed to secular science. His worldview is the same as [atheist, Richard Carrier’s]. And while it’s easy to make fun of ufology, an astute ufologist has a well-lubricated answer to all the stock objections.

The very existence of ufology undercuts Carrier’s Humean analysis of Christian faith as a throwback to the retrograde outlook of primitive superstition and ignorance. For an ufologist can be a very bright and highly educated individual—indoctrinated in the very fields, and professing the same presuppositions, which Carrier regards as the antidote to Christian faith. Once gain, Carrier is trying to ride two different horses.

ii) Actually, if you do some research on ufology, you find a striking connection between “alien abductions” and Old Hag Syndrome (also called ASP). Since Old Hag Syndrome appears to be a cultural universal, this would suggest that there is a core experience which underlies ufology. In prescientific times, this “encounter” was construed in occultic categories of possession and the like. But in the space age, with the popularity of science fiction, this is reinterpreted in terms of alien encounters rather than demonic encounters.

So, in my opinion, ufology should not be dismissed out of hand, but understood for what it really is, at least some of the time, as an essentially occultic phenomenon with a pseudoscientific overlay.

iii) The Roswell legend is, of course, just one thread in the fabric of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are the snare of bright minds. They have just enough suggestive, tantalizing evidence to be appealing, but never enough evidence to be compelling. On the face of it, it does seem as though things are often a little too coincidental to be…well…to be coincidental.

And yet we know that such a grand conspiracy is far too large and complicated to be orchestrated and kept under wraps by human ingenuity alone.

But there is an explanation for this. There is, indeed, a conspiracy. A very well kept conspiracy. So well kept that it’s even a secret to the coconspirators. They are not in on the plot.

For the mastermind is the “god of this world.” Satan is the one who, behind-the-scenes, is pulling the strings of human pride—pride in our tolerance and utopian cloud castles.

Inside the Devil’s sleeper cell, you can be under deep cover without ever knowing so. You can do his bidding without any apprehension of the diabolical choreography. Most of the devil’s militia are unwitting draftees, conscripted in the trippy state of sin.
 
So the conspiracy theorist is half-right and half-wrong. Indeed, the conspiracy theorist is often a dupe of the Devil himself—chasing after Jewish bankers and flying saucers. The Devil lays just enough crumbs in his path to keep him on the scent, but never enough to lead him to the infernal hideout and hellish headquarters of the movement.
 
Conspiracies are ultimately concentric: if a human conspiracy lies within the wider circle of a diabolical conspiracy, then the diabolical conspiracy lies within the wider circle of a divine conspiracy. In the end, the Devil is only God’s useful idiot.
 
Carrier goes on to compare the NT writers with snake-handling charismatics.

And how dare he make such a comparison!  Really!

Hays says:

Because the average atheist suffers from a persecution-complex, he is prone to crackpot theories of church history. This sort of cosmic paranoia is both understandable and irrational.

In fact, there’s an ironic sense in which he’s right: God really is out to get him! I don’t suppose, though, that Richard Carrier would readily avail himself of this particular explanation.

Hays says:

Carrier then relates a personal anecdote:

In addition to a vivid Taoist mystical experience of an obviously hallucinatory nature, there was a night when I fought with a demon trying to crush my chest—the experience felt absolutely real, and I was certainly awake, probably in a hypnagogic state. I could see and feel the demon sitting on me, preventing me from breathing, but when I “punched” it, it vanished. It is all the more remarkable that I have never believed in demons, and the creature I saw did not resemble anything I have ever seen or imagined before. So what was it? Supernatural encounter or hallucination? You decide.

i) This is a classic case of “Old Hag Syndrome” or ASP, which is a widely attested phenomenon. Here we see the power of ideology to trump evidence. Here he recounts a personal experience of an especially immediate kind—equivalent to a self-presenting state. And yet his secular philosophy, which is based, at best, on secondhand information worked into a worldview with various interpolations and extrapolations, takes precedence over his own direct awareness.

ii) Notice that he expects the reader to believe this story without benefit of any multiple-attestation. He holds himself to one standard, and Scripture to another.

iii) Speaking for myself, I find it more than plausible that a man who was dabbling in the occult (Taoism) would leave himself wide open to the demonic—especially in the case of an apostate like Carrier. Those that pray to false gods become the devil’s prey."

Please ignore the "sleep paralysis hallucination" theory.  That one is just too crazy for Hays.  Also note that Christian apologist, J. P. Holding, also felt free to pounce on Carrier's dogmatic skepticism (see: "J. P. Holding's "Leaning Tower of Preterism"), yet dismissed the eyewitness testimony himself because he's a Preterist.

Hays says:

One effect of the gospel is to exorcise the land. The more Christians you have, the fewer demoniacs you have. The more Christians you have, the less occult activity you have. If there is less evidence of occult phenomena at present than in the past, that is evidence, not of secularism, but of the success of the gospel. And it is no coincidence that the decline of the faith in modern-day Europe has corresponded with a rise of the occult.

Hays says:

Carrier’s Freudian psychobabble is on the same evidentiary plane as repressed memories of Satanic ritual mass murder. It’s pretty interesting that a man who, just two pages before, was appealing to neuroscience, which claims to be a hard science, can, in the very next breath, go Freudian on us—even though this is regarded as pseudoscience by scientifically trained critics.

Outro:

I didn't think this needed much comment.

Ben

Intro:

This is part of my review series on the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (ET).  Basically I've lifted this little bit from my material on chapter 4 of that book, which is the essay, "Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation" written by Robert Price (which can actually be found many places online).

The reason I'm bumping this up is because J. P. Holding and Richard Carrier recently debated in person on the related topic of the textual reliability of the New Testament and I hope to build on what's gone before between skeptics and Christians.  I wanted to split my massive posts on the material into readable blog nuggets anyway rather than leaving them as book length posts.

Steve Hays from Triablogue (in the ebook, "This Joyful Eastertide") and Stephen Davis (his criticisms are in a philosophy paper you'd have to pay for) are addressing Price's arguments.  I've tried to play all their points against each other to see what the arguments amount to from an outsider perspective.

In this case, Hays tries to pit Robert Price against agnostic scholar, Bart Ehrman:

Ehrman, however, makes his case on the basis of comparative textual criticism, based on different kinds of textual variants.  But that would constitute external rather than internal evidence. So Price is citing Ehrman to support a position to which Ehrman does not subscribe.

So Hays honestly thinks Ehrman believes there are NO interpolations before the time period where manuscript comparisons are viable and that ONLY comparative manuscript evidence is viable in finding early interpolations?  That's just plain silly.  Ehrman recites the Bible Skeptics Creed just like the rest of us anti-Jesus drones (and pay no attention to his most recent book, "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are").  It is as though Hays didn't read Price's note:

Ibid., 614; cf. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 277: "this study has reinforced the notion that theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to the development of a recognized creed and an authoritative and (theoretically) inviolable canon of Scripture." See also pages 55 and 97.

Clearly Bart and Bob are on the same page here, despite Hays' shallow attempt to pit them against each other.  

But Hays adds:

In addition, Ehrman admits that “by far the vast majority [of textual variants] are purely ‘accidental,’ readily explained as resulting from scribal ineptitude, carelessness, or fatigue.”

If only the tug of war here in this chapter weren't over one wittle passage, that might mean something.  Hays goes on to quote Ehrman's critics and I agree with them.  Ehrman often oversells his case.  But, as I just said, this is just over one wittle passage that happens to be vastly important to conservative scholarship (truly a thin thread to hang your explanatory hat on).  And petty human politics behind some overly convenient inserted verses is more probable than something supporting a genuine historical supernatural core any day of the week (as I've explained before).   Further the "appearance" claims of 1 Corinthians 15 aren't particularly strong anyway in any event.  So it's a lot of fuss over nothing.

Stephen Davis definitely read Price's Ehrman footnote and says:

Price sympathetically quotes Bart D. Ehrman, who says: "theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to The development of a recognized creed..." If we were talking about the church's theology of the incarnation or the Trinity, this claim might have some plausibility. But when we are talking about the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead, Ehrman's argument is hardly convincing. I would have thought that everyone recognizes that this claim was bedrock in the Christian movement from the very beginning. At that point, there was a recognized creed.

But "...the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead..." is what the entire rest of 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is about.  The premise doesn't vanish from the argument without verses 3-11.  A later Christian group may have had an interest in re-characterizing the nature of that core assertion just as Price has been arguing.  If it is just a recharacterization that doesn't destroy the argument, then there's no reason that Ehrman's argument can't apply.

Further, Price challenges Davis to defend that the resurrection really was the core assertion of the original Christian movement:

Was the resurrection of Jesus the bedrock teaching of Christianity from the hour anybody first believed? We cannot assume that. (And by the way, my argument does not suppose that Christians had a loose grasp on Jesus’ resurrection, only that the list of appearances is an interpolation.) I guess Davis owes us, for the sake of the argument, an explanation of why he rejects Burton L. Mack’s rejection of the Big Bang model, held by Bultmann as well as by Calvin and Luther, i.e., that some Easter morning experience is the singularity from which all Christianity expanded. What if, instead, there were many types of Jesus or Christ belief, and that some developed resurrection faith to answer certain needs, while others (e.g., the Q community) did not? It’s at least an open question whether the resurrection doctrine was the beginning of Christianity.

Haven't seen a response to this anywhere and I'm not qualified to take this any further.

Outro:

Hays just doesn't seem to pay too close attention to the arguments he's addressing.  He was covering a lot of ground with "This Joyful Eastertide," but it seems his book length review greatly suffered for that on numerous counts as I will be demonstrating again and again (so stay tuned).  And Davis just gets things wrong in no particular pattern it seems (at least not one that I've discerned yet).

Ben

Intro:

Christians who saw the debate between Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, and atheist, Sam Harris, are baffled.  Why didn't Craig's amazing arguments work?  Isn't it obvious that Harris didn't even begin to provide an objective ontological account of morality and wasted all his time throwing red herrings at Abrahamic religions? 

Wintery Knight blog says:

I really think that what is behind atheism’s philosophical flirtations with the language of morality is an effort to put a respectable smokescreen around a worldview adopted by those who simply cannot be bothered with any moral obligation that might act as a speed bump on their pursuit of happy feelings and pleasures here and now. They want to be happy, and being good gets in their way.

What kind of "being good" is Wintery Knight talking about?  Did he listen to the same debate I did?  I thought Craig said that he probably agreed with Harris generally on applied ethics.

Steve Hays, from Triablogue, says:

To judge by how infidels handicap the Craig debates, Craig is caught in a hopeless dilemma. No matter how often he wins, it never counts. The usual excuse is that when he wins a debate with an atheist, that’s just because he’s a better debater. Not because he was right. Not because he had the best of the argument. Had the facts on his side. No, couldn’t be that. Never that.

One wonders that even if an atheist said that a theist provided better arguments than an atheist in a particular debate if that would "count" for Hays.  *coughCommonSenseAtheismcough*  In reality, Hays just doesn't like being disagreed with at all and his words that seem to be about something else really aren't.  I've seen him move the goal-post soooooo many times, it's not even funny.

William Lane Craig himself says:

So how can some atheists fail to see [that Craig's arguments are better], I ask myself.  One reason, I think, is that some people don't know how to judge a debate.  They think that the winner is the person who delivers the one line zinger like "Senator, you're no John Kennedy."  [...]  But my friend Dennis has pointed out something else to me:  there are cheerleaders and there are analysts.  The role of a cheerleader is to support the team, no matter how badly it is losing.  If a team is getting drubbed, the cheerleaders don’t lay down their pom-poms and give up.  They keep cheering to the end.  That’s their role.

All those years of experience and this is what Craig comes up with?  Okay...  That's actually called just not empathizing with the diverse landscape of where tons of different people are coming from.  Natural human epistemology is wwaaaaaayyyy more complicated than that.  If Craig doesn't want to be portrayed as a dishonest hack as he often is by equally unsympathetic atheists, and knows that he is an honest person that believes in his own arguments, he can shut up. 

Dr.Craigvideos on youtube makes much the same point as Craig.

Bnonn says:

In fact, the most annoying thing about Harris is how he can say the most outrageously illogical or irrelevant things, and make them sound utterly reasonable and topical with his soft-spoken earnestness.

As though it's clear Harris believes in what he says...

So the consensus is that a bunch of monkeys are miffed that not everyone in the world agrees with them.  Join the club.

Why atheists remain unconvinced:

I'll reiterate and elaborate on what I said in my original review of the debate (Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig on Moral Realism).  It's pretty simple actually (as others like Wes Morriston pointed out a long time ago).   If Harris isn't allowed to "redefine" good and evil conveniently to bridge the fact/value divide (as Craig claims), then Craig can't do the same thing with his god's "good" nature (as Harris pointed out, ftw).  Craig meaninglessly tried to spear-head this objection in his opening statement with an argument from boldness.  He said..."far from being arbitrary...," and then changed the subject from god's commands to god's arbitrary nature.  So no, it's still arbitrary.  We're just not fooled, Craig.  You can't point to "god's nature" when we attack the arbitrary "commands" any more than it makes sense to point to the commands when we the arbitrariness of his nature.   "Good" has to actually be defined at some point.  Craig is playing a moving cups game with only two cups that both have the very same problem underneath.  Somehow, as usual, it's always opposite day in religulous land and losing either way still turns into winning over all in the minds of indignant Christians everywhere. 

Craig wants us to merely appreciate his definition of the Christian god and go from there with moral facts.  But Harris just wants us to appreciate his definition of the worst misery for everyone and go from there with moral facts.  Both propositions depend on the appreciation factor that is ultimately coming from our human nature (as Harris says, we're "smuggling" in well being either way).  It's the only way we understand either proposition which is actually the same continuum in concept.  In either event we're simply able to recognize the gist of good and bad when we see it (just as Harris says we can recognize fuzzy concepts like health vs. being dead). 

Incidentally, Harris' side of things has two significant advantages:

1.  The Christians have no reason for their god's nature to be the way it is.  Metaphysically speaking, it's just a huge fluke of reality.  Why are we not supposed to abuse children...because god's arbitrary nature happens to be against that.  Kinda weird, huh?  On the other hand, if we evolved as social creatures in the context of the need for group cooperation and survival, there's a very obvious ontological reason for our brains to be wired the way they are (as even Craig explains). 

2.  The facts of human nature (as opposed to god's hidden nature) are much more immediately evident and verifiable to all.  We may be confused on how best to define the good derived from our natures, but at least it's pretty obvious we definitely have that to work with. 

The scandalous thing about Harris' position is that it isn't even an argument.  It's an observation.  The argument part of that observation is to show to any and all contenders that in fact his observation matches reality and where they err, but also that it matches the inherent realities of their own moral perspective and they just have yet to recognize it.  Harris did this more than sufficiently for Craig and I've noted how superficial the summations of Harris' position have to be in many Christian blogs in order to avoid this (especially Wintery Knight's conveniently trite overview). 

As an observation, of course everyone agrees from there (as Craig clearly did) that science can play out the facts of maximizing well being.  That was all Harris was aiming for and clearly pretty much everything I've said can easily be derived from what Harris said on stage. 

Outro:

We'll get around to fishing out the myopic Christian attempts to save Craig from his hypocritical circularity as well as addressing similar double standards when it comes to Craig's supposed "knock down" argument against Harris' position.  Stay tuned.

Ben

Intro:

Previously I went over the dialog between Christians and skeptics over the possibility that the early Christian churches conveniently adjusted their sacred writings for religious and/or political ends.  That was a sort of a warm up to getting into the Richard Carrier vs. J. P. Holding debate.  And...we're still warming up here (see my last post on expectations) with the organizer of the event's preliminary remarks on the basic cases that each party laid out.

Cameron says:

Throughout his presentation Carrier focused on the period 50-120 A.D. This is when the NT was initially written and copied; it's also the period we know the least about because we have no surviving manuscripts from this early in the NT's transmission. This is significant, according to Carrier, because the copies of the text we do have were made to agree with each other (harmonized) where they originally disagreed, contain interpolations (later additions not found in the original text) and spelling errors, some of which have serious implications. 

Carrier is not completely wrong in his analysis. The text was edited in hundreds of places as it was copied, and he provided several examples for each of three kinds of changes he mentioned. But the important question is one of significance. And despite illustrating that changes were made, I think this is where Carrier failed to make his case that we can't know what was originally written.  I'll look at some of these examples in the next couple of days

Significance?  We'll have to see the details of course, but generally speaking there is already significance.  For those of you that read apologetic rebuttals like I do, the "significance" is that skeptical explanations of the evidence do not have to take seriously every little detail of every account. When all is said and done, the "evidentialists" want to take the Bible at face value like "The Bible tells me so" is a reasonable position.  Perhaps secretly they are advocating for Biblical inerrancy even when they attempt a "minimal facts" approach, or their subjective level of trust in the New Testament documents simply shines through no matter what.  They may just not process reasonable doubt and this is an important level of ambiguity to point the skeptical stick at.  Skeptical explanations often get portrayed as "magic bullet" explanations just because the apologist isn't willing to own up to how ridiculous it is that they won't doubt a single detail from the texts.  Skeptical explanations of the naturalistic variety are necessarily more general, because we don't trust what we have for many reasons.  Carrier's case here contributes to that end (or at least, is meant to).

I attempted to explain where I thought an informed skeptic is typically coming from when engaging the historical claims of Christianity on this topic and it would be a shame if Christians ignored the basic principles of the infamous "outsider test for faith" expecting a massive amount of evidence to drop out of the sky (or emerge from history in this case) and push back on their level of Christian-encultured incredulity.  In any other similar circumstances, we probably wouldn't be that trusting of the origins of a religious or political movement if that movement had ample opportunity to fudge the data in various ways even if we had no definitive reason to believe they did.  If these were ancients Democrats and Republicans making their case, and you were on either opposite side of that fence, would you just believe the one side of the story?  Would you take their factual claims at face value?  Would you believe in their assertions of sincerity?  What would you make of the silence or absence of their opposition from the historical record?  Etc. 

Their credibility may not be guilty until proven innocent, but it won't be compelling until thoroughly scrutinized and heavily proven, either.  Any historical assertions are allowed to fly otherwise as long as history just so happens not to directly bust the claims in some definitive way.

Outro:

Note, that David Fitzgerald had a pretty good comment on that post. 

Video and/or audio on the debate is still unavailable, but apparently it is forthcoming. 

Ben

Intro:

In the debate with William Lane Craig on the ontology of moral realism, Sam Harris seemed to ignore the issue of free will and how that relates to coherent concepts of moral responsibility.  He even seemed to go as far as to say that Craig misquoted him in his book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."  I've listened to Harris' book as an audiobook on my ipod and Harris does indeed cover the topic.  I couldn't pick out from memory a misquote, though Harris seemed to say that Craig was quoting Harris quote others or maybe he wasn't saying that about these quotes on this topic...  Not really sure what's going on there.  Perhaps it was a debate tactic to not have to deal with the subject and move on to what he wanted to emphasis or perhaps he mashed Craig's derived argument with those quotes in a defensive brain fart kind of way.  Not sure.  

I thought I'd take a moment to address the issue directly.

1: First off, it doesn't matter if determinism negates moral responsibility.  One has to actually address the arguments for and against determinism that Harris presents in his book or else in any event theistic or not, certain conceptions of moral responsibility are negated.  Plenty of popular theistic worldviews are deterministic anyway and pretty much the same concepts have to be worked out to attempt to absolve the morally perfect god from the responsibility of everything that transpires if he is the ultimate cause of everything.  (Naturally, I think even if successful, it still fails:  see argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil.")

2: Secondly Craig, with his framing, attempted to blow off the responsibilities of his entire worldview.  He wanted to frame things so narrowly as to not have to deal with the existence of the Christian god or the problem of evil, or any of the practical epistemic problems that stick us in the same boat in any event when it comes to trying to figure out what moral facts are actually facts.  A difficult-to-process-abstraction in terms of "well being" (as Harris conceives of it @ 11:55) is just as difficult to deal with as a god's invisible nature with divine mandates recorded under layers of "cultural context" which even theologians of all stripes struggle to pin down.  If Craig is allowed to disown this wing of the debate, then why can't Harris disown the free will issue as I've argued above and just point to his book (as Craig specifically did with Paul Copan's apologetics for evil, which liberal Christian scholar, Thom Stark, takes quite to task)?

3A: Third, there are two things about moral responsibility that matter and one that does not.  There is the type of responsibility that is merely a matter of cause.  And in a brute sense we say that a tidal wave is "responsible" for killing lots of Japanese people (incidentally, see Craig's, um, "interesting" take on it in terms of his worldview).  But that's not a moral claim right?  But it does matter, since sometimes evil comes from moral agents who couldn't have done otherwise at the time.  We still need to describe accurately the picture of how things go down and often mere cause is a necessary piece of any moral picture at some level to some degree no matter what you think philosophically. 

3B: The second element of moral responsibility is the ability to be literally "response" + "able" in the future.  We can't go reason with that water that made up the tidal wave and tell it why it shouldn't kill Japanese people in the future.  But, no matter which conception of moral philosophy is true, everyone knows we can in fact do this with human moral agents (through reason/praise/shame/etc.).  It may be in fact the case that in hindsight, in that first sense, that person could not have even hoped to do otherwise.  Their activities were predetermined by physics to play out just as they did.  But that doesn't stop physics from striking again and allowing for a mental conversion of persuasion any more than it stops us from reprogramming computers (or from computers installing software on each other).  Hindsight can merely be a hypothetical framework that is productive and healthy for understanding future scenarios that may play out similarly.  And it simply doesn't matter if the past can never have been otherwise. 

Before I get into the final aspect (the imaginary one), it is important to note that even if we know for a fact that determinism is true, that doesn't mean we know what the response to moral persuasion will be for any given moral agent.  As biological computers, we simply aren't capable of judging each other to that precise degree.  We may guess at levels of particular stubbornness or credulity, but we never really know for sure.  That doesn't make it magic and unpredictable in principle (like some sort of libertarian free will tourettes), but it does make us ignorant and the objection to determinism meaningless, practically speaking.

3C: The third element is that element of entitlement.  People often feel overly morally entitled to be able to always reign down judgment on others even if that person couldn't have known any better or couldn't have done otherwise.  We don't like it as victims when it seems like the criminal has some kind of metaphysical excuse.  It seems undermining if determinism blocks some of our judgie-ness, but upon careful consideration, it isn't taking away anything that we actually need (see 3A and 3B).  The past doesn't change for anyone or any philosophy.  The obligation to be consistent as determinists just prevents us from being sloppy with our moral claims and relinquish what was never within our control to begin with. 

Outro:

Overall, I think Harris made some pretty good debate/presentation choices and that the misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and accusations of having not established his case are the fault of the listeners.  I will continue to show this as I review more reactions to the debate.  Harris was sensitive to the idea (@9:42) that many people would be particularly let down if he blew the debate with Craig, and I have to say, imo, Harris did great.

Ben