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.
Intro: This series is an atheist's review of an important anthology critical of Christian beliefs called, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD), that is likely to be popularly discussed across the web. I'll be reviewing the book in light of just about every other response to TCD on the web (pros and cons) and responding to new Christian objections as I find them. I think this will be the best that I personally can contribute to advancing our collective conversation about these important roadblocks to solidarity in our culture.
Chapter 2, "Christian Belief through the Lens of Cognitive Science," by Valerie Tarico:
Psychologist Valerie Tarico presents us with a look at Christian belief through the lens of cognitive science, showing that cognitive research provides a sufficient explanation for the phenomenon of belief. Indeed, in the past, many Christians argued that there was simply no explanation for the "born again" experience. Tarico claims: "We now now this is not the case. Humans are capable of having transcendent, transformative experience in the absence of any given dogma."
What can I say. This chapter is awesome. I'm sure many Christians will manage to find ways to misunderstand anyway, but I think for the most part this will end up being their own fault in this case. This post will focus on the misapprehensions that I can find around the internet in response to Valerie Tarico's chapter.
Jayman777 objects that Christians aren't supposed to be any more infallible than atheists, but Tarico's point is that humans can't really be trusted to evaluate far-reaching metaphysical claims.
Looney says he's familiar with how this kind of psychology works and asks why he should care?I explain that though his interpretation is possible, naturalism is a sufficient explanation and in any event there are many Christians who should probably at least be informed about what is attributable to psychology even if God may still be responsible in some way or some circumstances.
Um, given how much the authors of TID and other Christian reviewers didn't pay close attention the first time around, wasting their review on obnoxious misrepresentations and red herrings, they really don't have the right to complain.
For some reason two reviewers here seemed to think Tarico was only explaining one aspect of religious psychology. While she never claimed to be covering everything, there were several other factors covered in the chapter.
Jayman777 complains that skeptics tread dangerously close to being in denial that Christians have any religious experiences at all. I sympathize, but ultimately this is about interpretation of actual experiences and arguments to the better explanation in context of a vast and arbitrary religious landscape (plus all of the anomalous non-religious experiences, too), rather than denial.
I attempt to answer on Tarico's behalf (assuming evolution had much to do with religion at all) that atheism has no content and doesn't enable mental shortcuts for framing the human experience like theism tends to do.
Engwer complains that a hallucination doesn't account for all the evidence very well, but he ignores the lameness of the best evidence (Paul's own words) in favor of what isn't as credible on the same issue (Luke-Acts).
Most planets probably don't have life, most evolved organisms do not do a lot of thinking, we know most thinking organisms have faulty minds, and the idea that "maybe" none would if evolution is true is meaningless in the face of our direct experience with our own minds and the fact of evolution. And why wouldn't magic minds have perfect truth finding abilities like we know we don't have?
Paul says EVERYONE is without excuse for specifically knowing that God exists and that they are morally accountable to Him, not just that "most people seem to have a tendency towards some kind of religious thinking." Slight difference.
That qualia is anything special is probably a systemic illusion generated by the most sophisticated computing system we know of in the universe.Magic minds wouldn't even need a brain.
A zombie brain that could literally perform all the sophisticated interrelated functions of the mind would have to be analogous to our minds and would probably have the same qualia "problem."If qualia doesn't do anything, why does it even "exist?"
Humans lack a mental function that can translate information into the necessary physical perception transaction and therefore the example is meaningless.
Is it better to be somewhat ignorant and know when you are being bamboozled by sophistry, or is it better to act like a jerk and be flagrantly wrong like Manata?
Intro: This series is an atheist's review of an important anthology critical of Christian beliefs called, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD), that is likely to be popularly discussed across the web. I'll be reviewing the book in light of just about every other response to TCD on the web (pros and cons) and responding to new Christian objections as I find them. I think this will be the best that I personally can contribute to advancing our collective conversation about these important roadblocks to solidarity in our culture.
Chapter 1, "The Cultures of Christianities," by David Eller:
[note: Eller and Loftus' responses have been rolled into the post so you don't have to fish through all the comments] Unfortunately I have to agree with one reviewer, Greg Peterson, on Amazon about chapter 1:
It doesn't help that perhaps the book's weakest chapter is its first chapter. David Eller's sociological discussion didn't exactly start off the book with sparks a-flying. Just trading places with the second chapter, a very engaging and well-written piece by Valerie Tarico, would have helped matters in terms of pulling the reader in and getting her excited by the material that was to come.
That's actually good news, since I was a little disgruntled. I knew there were great chapters ahead, but I didn't know how many weak chapters there would be. Apparently it's all up and up from here (see chapter 2, for instance)!
Turns out, Eller declares premature victory over all Christian arguments and evidence with sentence twoof chapter one of TCD. Christians are not impressed.
Eller's chapter seems to be more about explaining to atheists why they fail to convince Christians with logic and evidence rather than about persuading Christians that they are delusional.
Atheists accuse Christians of being deluded for seeing demons behind every bush, and perhaps the same should apply to anthropologists who see Jesus behind every sneeze.
I use the arguments from Eller's chapter on the influence of enculturalization to show that atheists should be working on their own cultural paradigm.Eller might actually agree.
Eller says we shouldn't use the "religion is a crutch" metaphor, and I point out it doesn't have to be an insult. A wide range of "strong" and "weak" people are bound to be equally encultured by religion, so many people are simply unnecessarily letting religion rob them of things they could just as easily be doing themselves.
Obviously the idea that the delineation of time is arbitrary makes perfect sense, but after a painful chapter, one does not wish to see things stated so badly in "philosopherese."
Intro: This series is an atheist's review of an important anthology critical of Christian beliefs called, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD), that is likely to be popularly discussed across the web. I'll be reviewing the book in light of just about every other response to TCD on the web (pros and cons) and responding to new Christian objections as I find them. I think this will be the best that I personally can contribute to advancing our collective conversation about these important roadblocks to solidarity in our culture.
Introduction, by John Loftus:
[note: Loftus' responses have been rolled into the post so you don't have to fish through all the comments]
I would tolerate a sensational title if the authors took more responsibility for the internal presentation of the information and arguments. Unfortunately that didn't happen enough.
Presumably Loftus is attempting to counter the claim that Christianity always persists despite its most ardent critics, but that doesn't mean it does so because it is true.
Loftus imagines that Christianity will mutate into yet another form because of the contents of TCD. No offense, and I hope the book has impact, but I doubt that'll be the case to a significant enough degree to warrant Loftus' claim.
Loftus could potentially save his point if he could show just how significant the demographics of arbitrarily rational Christian groups really are. He doesn't do this.
Short answer: Yes. Plantinga is making an implausible exception when we compare theistic properly basic beliefs to the intimate checks and balances we place on other properly basic beliefs.
Loftus demonstrates his failure of imagination since there is plenty of reason to fear non-existence if you have the chance to live in bliss for eternity. It would also be especially humiliating to be singled out on Judgment Day, and there be a brief period where you are burned up into non-existence in front of everyone else who is on their way to heaven.
Loftus tries to play different Christian exegetical conclusions against each other, but fails to give good examples.
Outro: Not rated.
The introduction amounts to sloppy, educated sh*t talk. Loftus wants to intimidate and overwhelm average Christian readers, but is probably going to cause himself more problems than it's worth.Continue reading →
Intro: This series is an atheist review of an important anti-Christian apologetics book, "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD), that is likely to be popularly discussed across the web. My review will tend to explicitly focus on the weaknesses of the esteemed skeptical anthology (unless the given chapter is just awesome, then I'll focus on Christian arguments) and should be seen as supplementing the positive reviews from folks like Ken Pulliam, Jim Walker and the many 5 star reviews on Amazon. With all the hype there needs to be a range of internet contributions and sober assessment.
How is the substance of the book framed? Is the polemical strategy a success? Have the most typical Christian objections to certain skeptical themes been addressed or ignored and amplified carelessly? Have well known inflammatory hot spots in the debate been dealt with tactfully? Have common atheist biases and prejudices been checked or are they overwhelming the actual arguments? Have the same standards that apply to Christians equally applied to the authors? Are the arguments in the book persuasive to outsiders or do they merely reinforce atheist group-think? Are weaker arguments distractingly in the mix with stronger arguments? Has an adult conversation been started/continued or have the age-old, ugly political cycles been perpetuated? Are mainstream Christian readers treated with respect as though they could be smart, informed people who think their worldview stands a chance in the debate? Would I recommend this book to a Christian friend or family member without having to apologize for its contents? Etc. Those are some of the important questions I'll be addressing.
I may briefly summarize the strong points of each chapter and add my comments if that helps readers understand whatever issues come up. Occasionally I'll point out things that I just think are interesting in their own right (or things I don't understand and need help with). Also, I'll be reviewing the book in light of just about every other response to TCD on the web (as sort of informal post-market research) and responding to new Christian objections as I find them. I think this will be the best that I personally can contribute to advancing our collective conversation about these important roadblocks to solidarity in our culture.
Foreword, by Dan Barker:
[note: Editor, John Loftus' responses have been rolled into the post so you don't have to fish through all the comments.]
In a contentious context, no one listens when you tell them what to think. You have to show them why they should think it. Barker goes way overboard trying to tell us just how desperately interested in the facts the contributors of this book are.
Christian reviewer, James McGrath gives me some confidence that perhaps Christians won't be terribly offended by the contents of TCD. Although he's an overly tolerant guy.
Barker bothers to bring up mythicism (the idea that Jesus never existed as a historical person) in a book that does not defend mythicism. I demonstrate what a horrible misstep this is in terms of our Christian audience.
Barker sets a fairly bad precedent that is unfortunately continued so far throughout TCD (I'm only on chapter 5 at this point) of "telling" instead of "showing." Ultimately that means an underlying tone of the book is "us vs. them" when we could have been all in the same boat reasoning together. Continue reading →
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.
Here goes:
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.
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.
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]
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....
All I meant was that most people who want to pick a fight with Christians are not going to come to this site if they are not prepared to deal with people who are going to give them good answers. Your answers are not "wrong" based on a Christian worldview, but you are not dealing with someone who accepts a Christian worldview. My only point is that there are other ways to give an answer which makes sense to someone who is attacking from a different worldview perspective.
So wait...regurgitating endless bible verses isn't the surefire way to convince atheists? No wai...
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.
You can also see the President's take on the Summit in retrospect and moving forward in his Weekly Address.
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.
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.
So who is REALLY to blame?
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?
All of what I discussed above may well be true. But apparently it's mainly responsible for making things extra ugly. It's not what ultimately makes the process nearly impossible.
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