All attempts to begin with particulars and end with universal absolutes have failed. Mysticism, Rationalism, Humanism, Logical Positivism have all failed and ended up in relativism. In order to have absolutes, meaning and purpose we need a revelation from God, the infinite reference point. The good news is God has revealed the truth to us in the Bible. It says that in the beginning an all knowing all powerful God created the universe and made man in His image. Hence the Christian has a basis for assuming that there is order in the universe, he has a philosophical basis for assuming that man’s sense perception is reliable and that man is capable of meaningful thought. God’s laws are a clear basis for moral absolutes and it explains why humans can’t help but use words like good, evil, right, wrong, should, must etc… God has also revealed to us that we are morally depraved, (to be honest we all know this deep in our hearts anyways, we just don’t like to admit it). In fact the Bible says we are so morally depraved that we would want to suppress the obvious truth that God exists and will judge mankind by His standard.
Perhaps you realize that the whole atheism thing was just wishful thinking. Perhaps you wanted to believe it because you didn’t want to think about a God who knows your every thought and deed and will judge you for them. After all you realize that like everyone else you have lied, lusted, coveted and rebelled against God in many ways. God clearly has a reason to be angry with you. I could understand why you might want to pretend that God didn’t exist, after all it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God, whose laws you have broken. But denying a problem exists is not the same as solving it. Don’t be a gutless coward, face up to it we all deserve to burn in Hell. But there is good news; because God is merciful He has decided to redeem some undeserving sinners. That’s why Jesus who is God took for Himself a human body and died for the sins of those who would repent of their sins and put their trust in Him. .
Do you have the courage to take
The Atheist Challenge
If you are an atheists who has the courage to have your views challenged then this tract is for you.
WARNING: If you are one of those weak minded atheists who prefers laws suits and/or political attempts to silence opposing views because you realize that your belief system cannot stand any kind of scrutiny this tract may be very disturbing to you. The mere presence of someone handing you this literature may be more than your weak mind can handle, if that is the case we recommend you politely return the tract, give it to a stronger person, or discard it in a proper manner. Some weak minded atheists have felt so threatened by having their views challenged that they have responded by scoffing, cursing, tearing it up literature, breaking the law by throwing it on the ground, beginning a political crusade to abolish free speech, or some other kind of juvenile behavior which ultimately embarrasses not only them but also other atheists as well.
Ten Questions for the Atheist to answer
1) If your existence, including your thoughts, is the out growth of a random process then what basis do you have for presuming that your thoughts are rational? (if you don’t believe your thoughts are rational, please keep them to yourself! )
2) If you don’t have a philosophical basis for believing your thoughts are rational then why should anyone listen to anything you have to say?
3) If your sense perception is the result of a random process then on what basis do you believe that it reflects reality?
4) If there is no intelligence behind the formulation of the universe why would you expect to find any order in the universe?
5) If you don’t have any basis for expecting there to be order in the universe why would the atheist attempt to look for or find natural laws?
6) Darwinian atheists often speak of the “survival of the fittest” but if the fittest is defined as that which survives then you have not done anything except renamed the things which survive. Can they define fittest in a meaningful way?
7) If Darwinians define fittest as arrangements of matter which are more stable and durable then aren’t non-living arrangements of matter more stable and durable than what we refer to as living arrangements of matter?
8. If everything is an outgrowth of a random process then on what basis do atheists talk about Good, Bad, Evil, Right, Wrong, Better, Best, Worse, Worst, Works, Doesn’t Work etc.. Since all these words imply a universal value system which atheism has no basis for since in atheism there is only particulars and we know from logic you can never deduce universals from particulars?
9) Why do atheists tell people that they “should”, “ought”, “must”, or “need to” do anything? since all these words imply a universal value system that the atheist does not have a philosophical basis for?
10) Why do so many atheists insist that other people should be philosophically consistent while they go about making claims which are intrinsically inconsistent such as “There are no absolutes” (are you absolutely sure), “There is no right and wrong” (are you sure you are right)?
Perhaps you have read all these questions, and don’t have any good answers but want to remain an atheist. Fine at least don’t be a hypocrite, don’t tell anyone what they ought to do since you don’t have a intellectual basis for oughtness, don’t talk about anything being right, wrong, good, evil, bad, works or doesn’t work etc.. since you have no intellectual basis for those concepts. If you keep using terminology that reflects a belief system which is philosophically inconsistent with your own then you are a living refutation of your own atheistic philosophy.
Perhaps after reading this you realize that you have been duped into believing a bunch of non-sense by idiots who on one hand are claiming to be geniuses and on the other hand professed that their thoughts were the outgrowth of a random process. Perhaps you see that there are tremendous philosophical problems with the atheist position. For years I have listened to atheists scoff at those who believed in God but I have never met one of them who could defend their position intellectually. Many atheists are morally predisposed to believing the “moral absolute” that “there are no moral absolutes” because that makes them feel better about all the wicked things they have done, are doing, or want to do. (You might say atheism is the opiate of the immoral and self righteous). After looking at these questions some atheists have realized that they were ideological hypocrites who claimed to reject other belief systems because they were “not logically consistent” but refused to reject their own belief system when it was shown to be thoroughly inconsistent with the assumptions they were compelled to make in their day to day lives.
1) Easy. Natural selection favors organisms which can adapt to environmental changes. Well, you can certainly adapt with no knowledge of the environment. But organisms which can react to environmental stimuli on the fly certainly have an adaptive advantage. They can react in real time to environmental change, making their survival more tenable. If our brains couldn’t model the outside world with at least some accuracy, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t know to run from predators, or to avoid direct sunlight, or to recognize disease. So it seems logical that even if our brains don’t model the world perfectly, they at least model it in a very useful way. Hence, our observation of the world is extremely well-founded. We can say with some confidence that what we observe of the universe is somewhat like the way it actually works. That’s the basis of rational thought, then: our evolutionary-derived skills of observation.
2) I just described such a basis.
3) Also answered that.
4) The best any scientist can do is to say, in humility, “I don’t know.”
5) Just because we don’t know why there seems to be some order doesn’t mean we can’t expect order. In fact, we do expect order, precisely because we observe it, and we live in it.
6) See here.In essence, the phrase “survival of the fittest” is a colloquial phrase, not scientific terminology. In reality, “less fit” organisms survive all the time. For instance, a population of apes may evolve into a different kind of ape, and yet the old population may still survive contemporaneously with the new one. We see this all the time. The evolution of a species does not entail the extinction of its ancestors.
7) Fitness isn’t a function of molecular durability, so your question makes no sense.
8) They imply a universal system to you, because that’s what your religion teaches. In reality, morality is a social system, not a universal truth. Look back several hundred years ago, and slavery was thought to be A-okay. For Incans living a thousand years ago, child sacrifice was considered moral. So you see, moral systems change depending on social situations. To think otherwise is a bit myopic.
9) Again, you say those words imply a universal truth only because your religion teaches that, not because it’s actually true. Atheists say we “ought to” do things in view of contemporary normative social ethics, which in turn is based upon knowledge of our history. So again, morality is based on society.
10) This is just a straw man argument. Atheists don’t claim there are no absolutes, and they don’t claim there is no right and wrong. The term you’re looking for is “nihilists” or “relativists”. There is a right and a wrong, it’s just based upon our society and our evolutionary history, and not some god.
Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism put your response to #1 in serious doubt, in addition to your response to #2 and #3.
if your response to #4 is don’t know, you have no foundation for an intelligble study of the world.
For your response to number 5, I suggest you consult David Hume of the dilemma you are in, for you are begging the question by assuming uniformity of Nature that there is order from your limited past experience and you are then prescribing it to something in the future that you do not know about.
You failed to define ‘fit’ as asked in #6 (you also mentioned fit in #7)
For response to #9, you stated, “Atheists say we ‘ought to’ do things in view of contemporary normative social ethics, which in turn is based upon knowledge of our history.”
HOw do you derive social ethics from the knowledge of history? You are making a categorical fallacy, where one is descriptive (history) and the other is normative (ethics).
Number 10 is not a straw man, various atheists have made these claims in history.
Really, I read Plantinga’s argument, and that is one awful bit of hand-waving. Tell me specifically what you think is convincing about it.
The expectation of order itself is the foundation for an intelligible study of the world, not why we have this expectation. Not knowing why there’s order doesn’t prevent us from utilizing that order, since it’s there whether we know why or not.
Richard Feynman answers this kind of silly philosophical argument brilliantly, I think:
In other words, you’re positing a criticism that sounds profound and serious, but it’s really just silly. Should we not do science because we don’t know whether in two seconds from now the world will still be orderly? Of course not.
That’s not what you asked. You asked for the definition of “fittest” as it relates to the phrase “survival of the fittest”. As I already said, that phrase is just a colloquial way of describing natural selection, which makes your question irrelevant. It’s like asking me to explain how the Earth can possibly be revolving around the sun when everyone says that the sun “rises”.
Various Christians have said those who have abortions should be murdered. Do all Christians have to answer for that stance, just because they’re Christian? Uh-uh.
Sorry, forgot to answer one of your other criticisms:
That’s a really naive definition. History is not just descriptive, it’s prescriptive too. We write down things we think are important and that we think people will want to know about.
As an analogy, you might take a math test and get a wrong answer. The corrected math test your teacher hands back to you is not just a description of how well you did. It gives you knowledge, too. It gives you the opportunity to correct your mistakes in the future.
1.)”Really, I read Plantinga’s argument, and that is one awful bit of hand-waving. Tell me specifically what you think is convincing about it.”
It does not necessarily follow that evolution would lead us to the reliability of your facualty to discover truth or for you to ‘know’ something. If you want to respond to this, bring forth an argument where, given evolution, it NECESSARILY FOLLOWS that we have the ability to *know* things.
2.) “The expectation of order itself is the foundation for an intelligible study of the world, not why we have this expectation. Not knowing why there’s order doesn’t prevent us from utilizing that order, since it’s there whether we know why or not.”
Atheism have no basis for one to expect order. MOreover, if you are going to respond with an appeal to your senses preception, again, if your sense perception is the result of a random process then on what basis do you believe that it reflects reality?
3.)”Richard Feynman answers this kind of silly philosophical argument brilliantly, I think”
In the quote you gave, Richard Feynman did not interacted with Hume’s perspective on the fallacy of appealing for uniformity for the future from past event.
4.)”In other words, you’re positing a criticism that sounds profound and serious, but it’s really just silly.”
That is descriptive of the comment you made in #3, if you want to use rhetorics.
5.)”Should we not do science because we don’t know whether in two seconds from now the world will still be orderly? Of course not.”
Given a world where in two seconds order would cease and that the law of science are no longer applicable, what is the basis of still endeavoring in a pursuit that assumes these things, when they are false?
6.) “Various Christians have said those who have abortions should be murdered. Do all Christians have to answer for that stance, just because they’re Christian? Uh-uh.”
You asserted earlier that a straw man was committed in question 10 in the Atheist Challenge. You still have no basis to giving this charge. The fact remain that there are atheists that do believe in moral realtivism.
7.)”You asked for the definition of “fittest” as it relates to the phrase “survival of the fittest”. As I already said, that phrase is just a colloquial way of describing natural selection, which makes your question irrelevant.”
You have again failed to define ‘fittest’; please define this term in a manner that is not tautological
8.)”It’s like asking me to explain how the Earth can possibly be revolving around the sun when everyone says that the sun “rises”.”
False Analogy.
9.)”That’s a really naive definition. History is not just descriptive, it’s prescriptive too. We write down things we think are important and that we think people will want to know about.”
Define history.
10.)”you might take a math test and get a wrong answer. The corrected math test your teacher hands back to you is not just a description of how well you did.
Interesting analogy.
How does history reveal to you that you got a wrong answer? Or is it that you are importing values and looking through your current ‘moral’ lens to judge the past?
In this analogy to history, who is the teacher who hands back the test?
11.)”It gives you knowledge, too. It gives you the opportunity to correct your mistakes in the future.”
History does not NECESSARILY give you the oppourtunity to correct your mistakes in the future. You do not know that.
That makes zero sense. Organisms live in environments, and in order to survive they need to cope with their environments. In order to cope with their environments, they need to have some reaction against changes in the environment. Those organisms with more accurate reactions will be more successful. Therefore accurate perception of the environment is adaptive.
And your invocation of knowledge and truth, as if we either have it or we don’t, is extremely naive. We have no knowledge and no truth, if that’s how you’re going to define it. We can model the world to a degree of accuracy, and that’s all we can ever hope for. But even one eye is better than no eyes. Even my grandmother’s eyes, burdened with cataracts as they are, are better than no eyes. Truth isn’t a question of whether or not you have it. It’s a question of how accurately you have it.
You just repeated the criticism I already responded to. You don’t need to know why something works to be able to use it. You’re using a computer right now. Do you know every detail about how it works? Do you have any reason to expect it should keep working? No, but you’re still using it.
Apparently you didn’t read it carefully enough.
Again, reread the Feynman quote. Assume your scenario, that science stopped working. Then how is it still producing results? If there is no order, science cannot work. And yet science continues to work. Therefore the order still must be there, mustn’t it?
Did you not read my post? I’ve already responded to this.
Wrongo. You’re asking me to defend a term that *incorrectly* describes a natural process. That’s exactly like my analogy.
Use your noggin, and figure it out. It’s not difficult, I promise.
Well that’s a stupid criticism. The only time history wouldn’t give us an opportunity to correct our mistakes is if we’re all dead, in which case it won’t matter anymore whether or not we’re moral.
I think the atheist challenge has a good bite to it. I used to swallow all the atheist arguments against theism without thinking about how it would come back to attack my very own position.
An atheist would react defensively and condescendingly. They are never wrong.
Good luck conversing with the atheist in here.
Jon,
Have you listen to the debate between Greg Bahnsen vs Gordon Stein? If not, please listen to it here, there are 3 parts to it.
btw, this is the classic debate on the issue.
After you have finished listening perhaps we can discuss further on what is lacking in the atheist position. Particularly on the foundation of atheism and what are its justification.
1.)”That makes zero sense. Organisms live in environments, and in order to survive they need to cope with their environments. In order to cope with their environments, they need to have some reaction against changes in the environment. Those organisms with more accurate reactions will be more successful. Therefore accurate perception of the environment is adaptive.”
I”m curious, since you said you have read Plantinga’s argument, why you still keep on saying this still. Again, I am asking you to show that it necessarily follows (Validity) that evolution would give us accurate sense preception. FUrther the conclusion you gave in the above excerpt only lead us to your statement that “Therefore accurate perception of the environment is adaptive”. THis is not the same as the Claim as given evolution, we can *know* things. Adaptation and truth are not the same thing my friend. If you said you did read PLantinga’s EAAN, please read it again carefully.
2.) “And your invocation of knowledge and truth, as if we either have it or we don’t, is extremely naive. We have no knowledge and no truth, if that’s how you’re going to define it.”
Define knowing, knowledge and define truth.
Instead of just asserting that I am naive, please demonstrate to me that I have committed the fallacy of a false Dilemma where truth/knowledge is something “we either have it or we don’t”
3.) “We can model the world to a degree of accuracy, and that’s all we can ever hope for.”
Within an atheistic Evolutionary Worldview, you have no way of knowing whether a model is even accurate of reality because you can not even know reality. You are assuming that evolution provides you the mental facualties for you to *know* the world, something in dispute and you have not shown this is *necessarily* true in your worldview.
4.) “Truth isn’t a question of whether or not you have it. It’s a question of how accurately you have it.”
Again, define truth.
5.)”You don’t need to know why something works to be able to use it. ”
I am not talking about the mechanics or the telogical explanation for order, but the question of whether or not order can exist in an Atheist worldview and how you would even know it.
6.)”Apparently you didn’t read it carefully enough.”
I claim that “Richard Feynman did not interacted with Hume’s perspective on the fallacy of appealing for uniformity for the future from past event” and this is your response?
If you are going to repond, show me explicitly how Feynman’s quote you have provided dealt with Hume’s specific perspective that I mentioned.
Read Feynman’s excerpt again. He is talking about light and objects of sight, not uniformity and the future.
7.)”Did you not read my post? I’ve already responded to this.Did you not read my post? I’ve already responded to this.”
Show me where is your response to my question: “You have again failed to define ‘fittest’; please define this term in a manner that is not tautological”
Again,show me where there is the definition you have given for ‘fitest’ that is not tautological.
8.)”You’re asking me to defend a term that *incorrectly* describes a natural process.”
If ‘Survival of the fittest’ is inaccurate, is ‘survival of the fittest and those that are not the most fittest’ more accurate?
Moreover, even if that term *incorrectly* describes the natural processes, what is it about that term that is inaccurate? IN other words, in order for you to say that the term does not reflect the actual process, you have to know what ‘fittest’ is describing to begin with (which happen not to correspond to reality), but what I am trying to push for is, what does fittest mean to begin with anyways? Somehow you know what it is enough for you to reject it, whereas I see a tautology.
9.)”Use your noggin, and figure it out. It’s not difficult, I promise.”
This is your response to my question, “How does history reveal to you that you got a wrong answer?”
If you promise that its not difficult, and that its so easy, demonstrate to me how history reveal to you that you got a wrong answer.
Moreover, please define history.
10.)”Well that’s a stupid criticism. The only time history wouldn’t give us an opportunity to correct our mistakes is if we’re all dead, in which case it won’t matter anymore whether or not we’re moral.”
This is in response to my statement, “History does not NECESSARILY give you the oppourtunity to correct your mistakes in the future. You do not know that” which was originally a response to your statement that history “gives you the opportunity to correct your mistakes in the future.”
TO begin with, define history. I think you have a very interesting dilemma in your hand with how you are using the term history and what you attribute to history.
Secondly, you have shown your original claim that history “gives you the opportunity to correct your mistakes in the future” to be invalid. You showed that history does not necessarily give us an oppourtunity since you yourself believe that there is at least one exception: “The only time history wouldn’t give us an opportunity to correct our mistakes is if we’re all dead”.
Thirdly, since you are so adamant in insisting that history would give us an oppourtunity to correct our mistakes (with the exception that we are dead), show me that this is necessarily so.
Fourthly, are there brute historical facts?Or are you importing values and looking through history with your current ‘moral’ lens to judge the past?
And fifthly, in your analogy to history, who is the teacher who hands back the test?
I have a reply to what Jon said in response to #7 on December 1, 2007. I am not an atheist; I am only a man of little faith. It requires far more faith than what I have to even be a poor atheist. Jon referred to morality. He seems to imply that if my morality and the morality of society says that slavery, child sacrifice (abortion), or the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc. is okay, then it is okay. I believe I prefer the morality of even a poor Christian (based on the Bible) to the morality of a good atheist like Adolph, Joseph, or Mao.
There was another comment made that seem to imply that we have survived because we as a species have learned to flee danger as a result of natural selection and evolution. Every other species knows inately that a lion or tiger or bear will eat you. The birds of the air know who the predators are. The fish of the sea know and flee the predators. One would think that if man had evolved to this great level then we also would know instinctively who the predators are. Children have no fear of animals, or or traffic or fire, or any other danger. They have to be taught these dangers by their parents. That in itself defeats any faith in evolution.
Jon, On your comment of #9,
Contemporary normative social ethics? are you an idiot? what was before the contemporary consensus?
what if a certain society thinks it is ok to rape the women of the minority group in their society. would you think it is a normative social ethic? anyhow, normative to who?!!
do you think it is wrong? if so, who the hell are you to pass judgment on this society. if not, you are simply a low life garbage.
Re: “Children have no fear of animals, or or traffic or fire, or any other danger. They have to be taught these dangers by their parents. That in itself defeats any faith in evolution.”
Um, rational instincts doesn’t imply omniscience from birth. Children are helpless in part because they can afford to be, since the rest of us are here to take care of them. The ignorance of which you speak is only found in species with children who don’t immediately have to fend for themselves. Compare to those species of shark whose mothers actually chase their newly born children, getting them gone from the get-go.
The helplessness of children could very well be the single greatest reason why society evolved — because if it takes all the time until adolescence for a person to be ready to make other people, you need some pretty complex institutions to raise them for all that time (and even to take care of them into full-blown adulthood). And anyway, I would deny that children have no fear of these things — fires, very loud noises and snarling dogs cause fear for almost all children, and many adults as well. This is a situation I might very well throw right back atcha 😉 — why would an intelligent creator make the world such a terrifying and confusing place for the young ones?
Speaking of fear, I gotta say that the weirdness of ethics makes it kinda scary stuff too. Sure, it’s real, but at what point does its “oughtness” transform into “isness,” other than by the hard work of people and our ideas and laws and such? How does anything, or anyone, “make” an action good or bad? In my opinion, no 100% satisfactory answer to this can be given. By your terms, I have failed the challenge. The BLT I’ve brought is just a BT because we’re all out of lettuce. Sorry.
But why must absolute certainty be required for us to do good things? You’ve said it yourself that universals can’t be derived from particulars. I couldn’t agree more, and I have to point out that even belief in God is just another particular. Why do I say so? Because true absolutes don’t require faith — they’re just there for us all, zero revelation required. There’s really scarce few such things — maybe *cogito ergo sum* counts. Maybe.
According to you, anything short of absolutism crumbles into relativism. I can see your point; I’ve even held it at some times in my life. Here’s the thing, however: relativism, in the “everything is equally right” sense, is really another absolute in disguise. See what I mean?
My own position, somewhere between absolutism and relativism, is that we don’t know everything but we don’t know nothing either, and we should behave with the ethical knowledge we do have without lamenting our lack of Total Infinite Knowledge. If someone were to say, “Life seems to lack tangible absolutes, so I’m going to kill myself,” I would respond, “But you’re making such an emphatic decision that you obviously do care, a great deal. You’re essentially saying you have absolute knowledge that life is meaningless.”
It seems to me that some theists think that atheists, if internally consistent, are in the position of this hypothetical suicide. But my worldview dances between the absolutes, always self-confident but never self-satisfied. If you continue to demand that I swing it into the realm of the absolute in order for it to have meaning, then we just aren’t speaking the same language.
The only solid leap of faith one needs is that other people’s existence is equal to one’s own. How do we empirically confirm this? We don’t. How do we empirically confirm that their existence *isn’t* real? We don’t. We simply find the balance which says, “The likelihood of other people’s realness is great enough that it would be silly to act otherwise.” This might sound a bit like Pascal’s Wager, except that it doesn’t seem to have an equivalent to the Problem of Many Hells.
That’s all I have to say for now… 🙂
I’m not sure what to say, because I gave the reasoning. Accurately perceiving your environment is more evolutionary adaptive than inaccurately perceiving your environment. Species who can more accurately perceive their environment have a competitive edge over those who perceive it less accurately. Therefore the accuracy of sense perception will tend to improve over time in the population, as long as the increase is still adaptive.
I thought I did that, but okay. Knowledge is any proposition that describes reality with some positive degree of accuracy. For instance, Newton’s laws of motion, technically, are false; they don’t describe the motion of light-velocity particles. Nonetheless, they DO describe velocities much lower than the speed of light with a rather large degree of accuracy. In other words, they’re true within a statistically insignificant margin of error (as long as you aren’t talking about light velocities).
It’s inaccurate for two reasons. One, it implies that fitness is some kind of universal quality, that there’s a “least fit” configuration and a “most fit” configuration. That’s false. Fitness depends on the environment. A polar bear is more fit in an Arctic environment than in a tropical environment. You can’t speak about fitness without talking about the environment.
Secondly, the “fittest” DON’T always survive. Suppose species A and species B occupy an island, and species A lives, arbitrarily, on the north side. Suppose A is more fit than B, but that a tidal wave randomly comes and wipes out the north side of the island. In that case, A’s fitness was irrelevant; B survived by sheer luck. There are other such random processes that can influence evolution drastically.
By the realization that in-group/out-group differences are largely arbitrary and imagined.
For instance, slavery survived as an ideology precisely because people thought blacks to be inferior to Europeans, sub-human. Once people started to realize, in fact, that they were fully human, what happened? Abolition. Why? Essentially, the golden rule. There’s a lot of interesting scholarship (mostly game theoretic, but some experimental too) describing how a “golden rule”-type morality can survive as a selfish, evolutionary strategy.
Firstly, I didn’t claim history to be the sole source of contemporary morality Reread my posts; I never claimed it. Secondly, the objection itself is trivial and irrelevant. If everyone’s dead, then there’s no one to even study history, let alone learn from it.
If we don’t learn from our history, then it’s likely to repeat itself, in which case someone else will write it down. If it doesn’t repeat itself, then problem solved. If no one writes it down ever, then no one really cared about it, in which case we had no need to learn from it.
No, it’s not okay. But by whose standards are you judging? By modern standards. Historically, people who lived in societies which condoned slavery thought slavery was absolutely moral. The United States, a predominantly Christian country, practiced slavery. That’s because our contemporary ethics during that period saw blacks as sub-human.
In other words, your position, that God dictates morality, is not any better of an answer. You ask, in mock horror, “If a society condones murder, is murder okay?” Well, I would ask, “If your god condones murder, is murder okay?” It’s the same argument, reversed. You want to insinuate that religious moral judgments are somehow absolute. And that’s historically incorrect. Religious moral judgments change along with society, because it’s apart of society. If that weren’t true, then how could the United States, Christian as it is, condone slavery?
In other words, yes, societies can get to a point where they find everything permissible. But frankly, so does every ideology and every belief system and every creed, including religious ones. That doesn’t mean such a thing should happen, just that, historically, it does happen. It’s a descriptive, not a normative, statement to say that societies determine their own moralities. Should they? Maybe, maybe not. But they do, anyway.
Each of these people were not atheists, at least not in the modern sense. You’re conflating fascist atheism with secular atheism. Secular atheism subscribes to humanism, libertarianism, and democracy. Just like there are different kinds of Christian philosophies, there are also different kinds of atheistic philosophies. Your purposeful simplification allows you to dismiss an intellectual idea you dislike.
That’s false. This is something neonates learn from their parents through observation. Ever raised an abandoned baby bird? If it’s young enough, it will learn that whatever feeds it is its mother. And by the way, not all species exhibit the behaviors you described. Darwin was amazed to find that when he went to the Galapagos that very few of the animals there were scared of him. That’s because they have no experience of five feet tall predators.
I’ve already addressed this above.
And U R KANT SPEL ANGLISH VARY GUD. See? I can be immature and irrelevant, too.
Lack of imagination. I can think of dozens of other reasons why we do good things. Practicality, for instance. Our society values economic production. A society that maximizes the survival and happiness of its people also maximizes economic production. Slavery, on the other hand, is not only costly and limited, it’s also unstable. Slaves rebel. Why would we value economic production? Because it leads to science and technology, which (by and large) betters our survival and our happiness.
Jon, you have not answered anything. The problem still remains. What if a particular culture deems it good for them to rape the minority women. Their children learned it from their parents and it goes on into the next generation. That has become a practice for their culture.
As to your reply, I gave two alternatives to who you are in regards to the problem.
Jon,
Have you listened to the debate between Bahnsen vs Stein that I have linked? I think it is important that you first listen to it and we can discuss both our presuppositions. Particularly our foundations for reasoning, what constitutes as proofs and epistemology.
[…] guys over at The Domain for Truth have an atheist challenge going on. Some interesting interaction in the […]
Jon,
My response to comment 15:
1.)”I’m not sure what to say, because I gave the reasoning.”
This is your response to my earlier demand: “Again, I am asking you to show that it necessarily follows (Validity) that evolution would give us accurate sense preception.”
It’s not a dispute that you had said something, but the issue is that you have failed to show that what you have to say is valid.
2.)”Accurately perceiving your environment is more evolutionary adaptive than inaccurately perceiving your environment. Species who can more accurately perceive their environment have a competitive edge over those who perceive it less accurately.”
This assume sense preception. If your sense perception is the result of a random process then you have no basis to believe that it reflects reality. Random process is blind to veracity.
YOu also stated in Comment #3 that “I read Plantinga’s argument”, yet you fail to see EAAN. Here is a question that I would like you to answer to test if you have read or comprehended Plantinga’s argument: What was the defeater that he provided for reliability of your senses and your mental facualties?
3.) “Therefore the accuracy of sense perception will tend to improve over time in the population, as long as the increase is still adaptive.”
Again, you are assuming reliable sense preception in an evolutionary worldview. See response #2 of this comment.
4.)”I thought I did that, but okay.”
This is your response to my earlier comment: “Define knowing, knowledge and define truth”.
Where did you previously define knowing, knowledge and truth (please provide me the comment number)?
In this response of yours, you said okay but only went on to define knowledge only and not the other two: knowing and truth.
5.)”It’s inaccurate for two reasons”
This is your response to Comment 9, response # 8, “Moreover, even if that term *incorrectly* describes the natural processes, what is it about that term that is inaccurate?”
Did you go on to read my explanation of this question in it’s context? Your response does not even address the challenge I am raising.
If you read just the next sentence after the one you quoted from me, it would reveal what explanation I was seeking from you: “IN other words, in order for you to say that the term does not reflect the actual process, you have to know what ‘fittest’ is describing to begin with (which happen not to correspond to reality), but what I am trying to push for is, what does fittest mean to begin with anyways?”
You keep on talking about how you reject “survival of the fittest”, but what is the definition of the term fittest?
You assume that “survival of the fittest” is a meaningful statement enough to have a truth value (which happens to be false), but in order for this statement to be meaningful, what is the meaning of fittest?
If you are going to respond to this comment, define ‘fittest’. Anymore more references to ‘fittest’ from you is meaningless until you define it.
And again whereas you believe you know what fittest is (in order to reject it), I see a tautology.
6.) “By the realization that in-group/out-group differences are largely arbitrary and imagined.”
This is your response to Comment 9, REsponse 9: “If you promise that its not difficult, and that its so easy, demonstrate to me how history reveal to you that you got a wrong answer.”
I do not understand how the arbitrariness of in-group/out-group differences would answer the question of how does history per se would reveal to you that you got a “wrong answer”
Again, you have failed to define history.
Please define history, since you have a rather strange idea of what history can and can not do
7.) “Once people started to realize, in fact, that they were fully human, what happened? Abolition. Why? Essentially, the golden rule. ”
This is your response to Comment 9, REsponse 9: “If you promise that its not difficult, and that its so easy, demonstrate to me how history reveal to you that you got a wrong answer.”
Please give us your working definition of history.
YOu explain that why abolition occured was because of the golden rule. But is the golden rule “history”? I see the golden rule as a philosophy of ethics, not history. Philosophically, brute historical facts does not give us norms, but historical facts can be interepreted in light of one’s moral’s and values.
If you want to dismiss my claim that you are making a categorical fallacy, there are two things you have to do: (1) Offer your definition of history and/or show how brute historical facts give us norms (rather than historical facts being interepted by our norms)
8.) “Firstly, I didn’t claim history to be the sole source of contemporary morality Reread my posts; I never claimed it.”
This is in response to my comment 9, response 10: “You showed that history does not necessarily give us an oppourtunity since you yourself believe that there is at least one exception”
I agree, I do not believe you ever claimed that history is the sole source of contemporary morality. But did I claim that this is what you believed and if so, show me where did I say this? The comment of mine’s that you responded to does not suggest that you claim this.
Furthermore, this statement does not directly address my statment that “you showed that history does not necessarily give us an oppourtunity since you yourself believe that there is at least one exception”
9.)”Secondly, the objection itself is trivial and irrelevant. If everyone’s dead, then there’s no one to even study history, let alone learn from it.”
How is my earlier claim irrevelent when I have demonstrated that your argument is invalid (not logically necessary)?
10.) “If we don’t learn from our history, then it’s likely to repeat itself, in which case someone else will write it down. If it doesn’t repeat itself, then problem solved.”
This your response to comment 9, response 10: “Thirdly, since you are so adamant in insisting that history would give us an oppourtunity to correct our mistakes (with the exception that we are dead), show me that this is necessarily so.”
Again, you have not shown history would indeed always offer us this oppourtunity. You just assume it in your response.
jon, why do you have to lie if you did not read alvin plantinga’s paper?
if you think his arguments against your position is not credible, where is the argument? where is the beef!? do you even know who he is?
Right and Wrong (moral and immoral) is immutable. It has always been wrong to murder, rape, own slaves etc. Just because a society accepts or allows something does not mean it is moral. According to an atheist, slavery was moral in 1860 and immoral in 1865. What a bunch of hogwash!
That the probability that perceptions are true, given that naturalism and evolution are true, is low, or that assigning probabilities to specific evolutionary adaptations a priori is without warrant.
Fitness relates to how well you can propagate your genes. Right? So fittest means that you’re the best at propagating genes.
. In other words, there are different strategies which produce different metrics of successful gene propagation. “Fittest” is an inaccurate term because it implies that there’s only one best strategy.
Since no one’s offering specific arguments that Plantinga makes, I’ll just give my general opinion.
Plantinga mentions four “jointly exhaustive” and mutually exclusive relationships between behavior and belief. Unfortunately, he doesn’t consider the possibility that multiple of these are true at the same time, that some beliefs aren’t causal, but others are, and that there’s a dynamic and complex interaction between different types of beliefs. Plantinga gives no argument against this, except to wave it away in a footnote. Why might the semantics and syntax of a belief coincide?
One reason might be social behavior. Humans don’t exist in isolation. The beliefs of one person affect the beliefs of another, when they’re expressed. We can use this idea to show how one of Plantinga’s analogies fails. He mentions a man who believes that getting eaten is a good thing, but when he sees a tiger he runs thinking the tiger hasn’t seen him. But what if this man tells someone else about his belief? What if the man insists vehemently to his village, or some other village if you think his in-group will hold the same type of belief, that he wants to get eaten by a tiger? If he really believed he wanted to get eaten, then not getting eaten would surely cause him anguish. If we assume basic evolutionary altruism, the village will likely react by just feeding him to a tiger (especially if they’re neutral with regards to getting eaten, which is a possibility according to Plantinga); that’s what he wanted, after all. Well, this suggests that arbitrary beliefs can only be at the least neutral, adaptively, and still be successful beliefs. If the social expression of beliefs weeds out nonsensical ones, sort of like a memetic selection, then
Plantinga’s defeater argument is irrelevant. Our senses are reliable, or at least useful, and our beliefs are at least selectively neutral.
Another problem with the defeater argument, if you don’t agree with the above, is that it applies equally to theism. What’s the probability that our senses are true given that theism and evolution are true? That probability is also inscrutable. There are an infinite number of gods which could implant false beliefs. The only way you counter that is by saying, “No, because I assert that there’s a specific god, and he doesn’t do what you say.” But that defeater is defeated by just saying, “Well, that belief itself is just a false one, implanted by an evil god” Blah, blah, blah, long story, short, Plantinga’s argument isn’t profound or even new. It’s just wrapped in modern language with some probabilities thrown in.
I’m just curious as to whether anyone reading this blog is genuinely unsure about their own belief in God or whether everyone reading this already is firmly in an Atheist or Christian or ‘other’ camp ?
If you are in an ‘other’ camp I would be interested to find out which point of view you think has been expressed in the most compelling way. ie are you now drawn more to Christianity or Atheism ?
Jon,
I have a few questions for you.
If their really is no God, why did all the millions of people over the centuries need to die then?
Were they just morally wrong for believing in God?
So they needed to be severly tortured and killed because they were morally wrong for believing in God?
A belief that harmed no one, that caused them to be morally wrong?
So Porno, alcohol, rape, child molestation,
drugs, murder, theft, lies that do harm a person is just morals.
So shouldn’t those people be severly tortured and killed for their beliefs that do harm?
Or is it just for people with morals that do no harm?
Someone help me here with this answer.
Otherwise we had a whole lot of deaths that did not need to be. If there is no God then why kill all of those believers? Must be something to it if so many should die for Him.
Then if so many should die becaused they believed in God, shouldn’t equally as many die because they did not believe in God?
It seems a little one sided.
There does seem to be an absolute here.
Either these people that were tortured and murdered were absolutely wrong in their beliefs or not.
Why did not their natures just automatically stay away from such controversy, like staying out of the sun.
Because it may be harmful to you.
Perhaps you can shed some light on these questions for me.
Jon,
My response to Comment 23:
1.) “So fittest means that you’re the best at propagating genes.”
In your first comment you gave a link and have been arguing ever since that “Survival of the fittest” is a false statement as your response to the ATheist Challenge Question Six. Question Six of the Atheist Challenge was intended to demonstrate how the phrase is a tautological. You stated in regards to “Survival of the Fittest”, that “It’s inaccurate” and “That’s false” with the implication of the phrase, but that is not the same thing as addressing whether “Survival of the Fittest” is or is not tautological.
You have defined ‘fittest’ as “the [one] best at propagating genes”, since it “relates to how well you can propagate your genes”.
Survival of the fittest then, means “Survival of “the [one] best at propagating genes”
But what does survival mean?
The same website that you linked in your first comment gave the following definition: “survival can be defined not in terms of the individual’s life span, but in terms of leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation”. Survival thus means “Leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation”.
So what “Survival of the fittest”, or “Survival of the [one] best at propagating genes” really should mean is the following: “Leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation of the [one] best at propagating genes”.
In case this gets over looked, when everything is properly defined one discover that what “Survival of the fittest” really does mean is “Leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation of the [one] best at propagating genes”
THis is tautological. A tautological phrase have no truth value (such as true or false) simply because it is meaningless(Example: Blark is Blark is neither true nor false, its just meaningless).
Therefore, your entire discussion about the accuracy or lack of accuracy of ‘survival of the fittest’ is futile and meaningless because the phrase is tautological, meaningless and unintelligble to begin with.
2.) “Unfortunately, he doesn’t consider the possibility that multiple of these are true at the same time, that some beliefs aren’t causal, but others are, and that there’s a dynamic and complex interaction between different types of beliefs.”
Tell me more about these new possibilities, its complex interaction and also why you believe it.
3.) “Plantinga gives no argument against this, except to wave it away in a footnote. ”
In a footnote? Where is this sole footnote? Which book or essay?
4.) “Why might the semantics and syntax of a belief coincide?”
That is your problem in an Evolutionary worldview.
The bottom line in evolution would be for syntax to determine your behavior in such a way as to allow the organism to be more likely to be successful in natural selection. If the syntax already makes one more adapt to survive, then its have already arrive at its end, but why MUST IT NECESSARILY be then that there must also be correct semantics as well?
5.) “One reason might be social behavior. Humans don’t exist in isolation. The beliefs of one person affect the beliefs of another, when they’re expressed.”
This is one reason you offer to the question, “Why might the semantics and syntax of a belief coincide?”
The reason you have given does not show how these two coincide. Rather, you have only talked about how an individual’s semantics affect another individual’s semantics. Again, you have not shown how these two coincide. Furthermore, you just assume that when one express something, it is semantical information that the other individual is interacting with the semantics and not the syntax. But what if all the utterance and expression affect the other individual in a syntax sense only (His neurons just fire a certain way to noises in his enviornment, regardless of what these expression mean at all)? Talking about social interaction does not show us anything of how syntax and semantics coincide.
6.) ” He mentions a man who believes that getting eaten is a good thing, but when he sees a tiger he runs thinking the tiger hasn’t seen him.”
This is the first time I heard this particular version of his various similiar scenario. Just curious, where is the source for this one? It appears weaker than the scenario I have to offer.
I think a better example of a scenario would be the following: Human could have evolved and believe that tigers and human are always playing a religious game of hide and go seek; upon seeing any tigers, humans drops everything he is doing and flee.
But assuming the scenario you given, if the man or his group believed that the two things that it is (a)good to be eaten by the tiger and (b) one ought to always run from the tiger, this would still promote survival and the behavior of fleeing. You might believe that these two beliefs are irrational and incoherent with one another, but it still allows for him or his group to behave in a way that allows him/her/them to more likely survive than not survive.
7.) “But what if this man tells someone else about his belief?”
If others start subscribing to his beliefs, it just mean that there are more people participating in the game that allows them to behave in an appropriate manner where they are more likely to survive than not survive by fleeing.
8.) “What if the man insists vehemently to his village, or some other village if you think his in-group will hold the same type of belief, that he wants to get eaten by a tiger?”
Do not conveniently drop the other belief of his, that one ought to run from the tiger.
9.) “If he really believed he wanted to get eaten, then not getting eaten would surely cause him anguish.”
He might be in anguish but he still survives. Maybe natural selection in time would allow those who do not have the mechanism of anguish in this particular belief to survive and the dilemma of anguish ceases to be a problem.
10.) “If we assume basic evolutionary altruism, the village will likely react by just feeding him to a tiger (especially if they’re neutral with regards to getting eaten, which is a possibility according to Plantinga)”
To begin with, if there was an isolated village where all of them subscribe to those beliefs mentioned, they still flee the tiger despite the truth of the manner. Without the ‘others’, this scenario stands. Of course, interacting with outsiders with different beliefs and values can be dangerous to one’s survival, and there are more scenarioes I can give as well.
While adding other communities with contrary beliefs bring out possible problems, let us analyze what does it mean if a scenario without the “others” did withstand under scrutinity: I am trying to show that your line of reasoning for your claim “Accurately perceiving your environment is more evolutionary adaptive than inaccurately perceiving your environment”, is INVALID. To demonstrate this, I have to offer a possibility of an exception that “Accurately perceiving your environment is more evolutionary adaptive than inaccurately perceiving your environment”. Certain false beliefs which inaccurately precieve the actual reality of one’s enviornment and circumstances can be equally evolutionary adaptive, so long it triggers the appropriate behavior.
Even assuming the twist in your secenario, you have yet to show that it necessarily demonstrate that evolution would give us the foundation for rationality and the precondition for true beliefs. I am not disputing with you that their are circumstances where false beliefs is bad for natural selection. I am disputing whether this is true all the time. If individuals/species with the cognitive tools that produce false beliefs are able to survive, then natural selection does not provide us the precondition for intelligibility and rationality. Something that is useful for survival does not mean it will give be useful in giving us true beliefs.
11.)”If the social expression of beliefs weeds out nonsensical ones, sort of like a memetic selection, then
Plantinga’s defeater argument is irrelevant”
Social expression of belief does not always weed out nonsensical ones.
Religious expression (a form of social expression) occur does it not? Yet it has not weed out what you would probably deem as nonsense.
12.) “Another problem with the defeater argument, if you don’t agree with the above, is that it applies equally to theism.”
Which theism are you talking about? WHose theism was it that you described in your paragraph?
13.) “Plantinga’s argument isn’t profound or even new. It’s just wrapped in modern language with some probabilities thrown in.”
So if the EAAN is just Plantinga re-presenting and updating the argument in modern language with probabilities, show me EAAN before Plantinaga….who was the author, what is the text it was put forth in, etc.
You just love dancing around everything, don’t you?
Quoting you:
The premise is false, therefore so is the conclusion. Modern evolutionary theory does not subscribe to “survival of the fittest” as a technical description, therefore modern evolutionary theory doesn’t have to answer for it. Why is this so difficult for you to get?
Here’s an interesting example I recently read about. It’s very common for amputees to have “phantom limbs”. That is, their arm gets cut off, for instance, but they still feel that it’s there; they say they can even move it, feel objects with it, etc. That’s not to say that they don’t know there’s nothing there. They know perfectly well that their arm is gone. A neuroscientist in California, Ramachandran I think, did an interesting thing with these patients. He built this little contraption out of mirrors that reflects their other arm onto their missing arm’s side; so when they’re using this contraption, it looks to them like their arm is back. Ramachandran discovered that through repeated practice with this mirror box, amputees could eliminate their phantom limbs. This shows that beliefs and behaviors are tied in very complex ways, in the brain.
My only argument with this is that Plantinga shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of our brains. I highly doubt that his four categories are even remotely exhaustive.
Plantinga issued a response essay to criticisms of his argument. In that essay is a footnote which mentions the idea.
It isn’t necessary for there to be correct semantics. But that’s how it turned out. The question is WHY it turned out that way, not IF it turned out that way. This is the whole problem with Plantinga’s argument. He says, “Well, it could’ve turned out some other way.” Well, it DIDN’T turn out that way. Just admit the serendipity of our situation, and stop making up stories.
That’s not what Plantinga argued. Plantinga argued that the man would run because of behavior, not because of his belief, that the man simply rationalized the running in order to satisfy his belief.
Nope. The tiger argument was under the “beliefs do not effect behavior” heading. But now you’re arguing that beliefs do effect behavior, that the anguish from not fulfilling the belief is selected against.
Many studies have shown that religion does not correlate with life span. Some studies show a very weak correlation between religion and happiness. A lot of studies show strong correlation between religiosity and number of children. I could easily argue, then, that religion is at least selectively neutral and at most beneficial (evolutionarily speaking). In which case, per my previous argument, it’s very easy to see how religious ideas might pervade, despite their falsity.
All of them.
Descartes, C.S. Lewis, and almost every other dualist philosopher has tried to make the argument that naturalism is self-defeating without some god. The only main difference is that Plantinga integrates evolution into it.
[…] Atheism, Humanism, Philosophy Calling all atheists for the Atheist Challenge Part 2 (Part 1), the late Greg Bahnsen would like to make a challenge to you. Using the Great Debate with Gordon […]
Jon,
This is my response to Comment 27.
1.) “You just love dancing around everything, don’t you?”
This is your response to my statement from Comment 26, statement 1: “Therefore, your entire discussion about the accuracy or lack of accuracy of ’survival of the fittest’ is futile and meaningless because the phrase is tautological, meaningless and unintelligble to begin with.”
I am not ‘dancing’ around anything but my statement was the conclusion of my argument that you cannot even discuss ‘survival of the fittest’ meaningfully or to state whether it is inaccurate or accurate (or any truth value for that manner), because “Survival of the fittest” is a tautology and therefore a meaningless phrase to begin with.
Again, the foundation for your entire discussion about survival of the fittest is futile because that phrase is a tautology.
2.) “Quoting you: ‘Darwinian atheists often speak of the “survival of the fittest” ‘ ”
I did not say this. Prove that I said it by referencing my comment box number and the response number where I stated this.
3.) “Modern evolutionary theory does not subscribe to “survival of the fittest” as a technical description, therefore modern evolutionary theory doesn’t have to answer for it.”
It might not be a popular phrase in technical journal, but it is used in a meaningful and not assumed to be false by evolutionists:
Richard Dawkins: “survival of the fittest is at the heart of natural selection” (http://tiny.cc/pINfa)
Richard Dawkins: “I believe in the survival of the fittest as an explanation for the evolution of life” (http://tiny.cc/7yiqA)
Stephen J. Freeland: “”Although natural selection is about the survival of the fittest, what’s fittest changes with the specific circumstance”
Michael S. Gazzaniga: “Evolutionary theory suggests that if we are smart enough to invent technology that can increase our brain capacity, we should be able to use that advantage. It is the next step in the survival of the fittest”. (http://tiny.cc/1F5zF)
Yet, “survival of the fittest” is a tautological phrase void of meaning.
4.) “This shows that beliefs and behaviors are tied in very complex ways, in the brain.”
That’s fascinating what you have shared. But your story failed to prove that Plantinga missed an explanation of the relationship between beliefs and behavior. What exactly is the complex relationship between beliefs and behavior in this scenario, and is this relation something different than the four possible relationships Plantinga described previously?
5.)”My only argument with this is that Plantinga shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of our brains”
He did not.
6.)”Plantinga issued a response essay to criticisms of his argument. In that essay is a footnote which mentions the idea. ”
This is your response to comment response to Comment 26, Response 3, where I asked “In a footnote? Where is this sole footnote? Which book or essay?” to
your original claim in Comment 23 that “Plantinga gives no argument against this, except to wave it away in a footnote”
You failed to answer the question so I ask again: which essay is this sole footnote?
Here’s a little homework: Find out the essay’s title, and the footnote number/letter, and what the quote specifically stated. Don’t just say it in a footnote in some essay when someone is asking for it.
7.) It isn’t necessary for there to be correct semantics. But that’s how it turned out.
I have been pressing for you to show that it logically follows that natural selection will provide us the ability to acquire accurate content for our beliefs.
Your attempts failed.
Then you stated “But that’s how it turned out”
You committed the informal fallacy of begging the question, something that you do not look highly upon.
8.) “The question is WHY it turned out that way, not IF it turned out that way. This is the whole problem with Plantinga’s argument.”
His argument is not about “IF” we have correct semantics.
You are committing the logical fallacy of straw man.
9.) “Plantinga argued that the man would run because of behavior, not because of his belief, that the man simply rationalized the running in order to satisfy his belief.”
You added to your twist of the story the factor of the ‘other’.
If you are doing an internal critique of this scenario with Plantinga’s assumption, the villagers’ knowledge of the runner’s beliefs can not cause them to help him out by feeding him to the tiger in the first place.
10.) “But now you’re arguing that beliefs do effect behavior”
This is your response to Comment 26, Response 10: “Maybe natural selection in time would allow those who do not have the mechanism of anguish in this particular belief to survive and the dilemma of anguish ceases to be a problem.”
There is no argument in what I wrote there that is arguing that beliefs effect behavior.
11.) “Many studies have shown that religion does not correlate with life span. Some studies show a very weak correlation between religion and happiness. A lot of studies show strong correlation between religiosity and number of children”
What does lifespan, happiness and children have to do with my original statement: “Religious expression (a form of social expression) occur does it not? Yet it has not weed out what you would probably deem as nonsense”?
This commits the logical fallacy of red herring.
12.) “In which case, per my previous argument, it’s very easy to see how religious ideas might pervade, despite their falsity.”
This refutes your statement that “the social expression of beliefs weeds out nonsensical ones”, since your worldview dictates that religious ideas are false.
13.) “All of them.”
Prove to me that all theism have the religious doctrine that “an infinite number of gods which could implant false beliefs” that would provide the specific theism’s self-defeater.
14.) “Descartes, C.S. Lewis, and almost every other dualist philosopher has tried to make the argument that naturalism is self-defeating without some god. The only main difference is that Plantinga integrates evolution into it.”
THe main difference is EAAN is about evolution, where others were not, which mean it is something new, and you were wrong to say falsely that it “isn’t new”.
First of all I am very thankful for this website and for your work to the Lord.
I´d like just to add something that I found at Answers in Genesis website that I thought would share here:
“Consider the quote by fellow evolutionist Lewontin:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”5
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2007/05/30/responding-to-propaganda
Let´s disect it a bit:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,…”
“,…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”
“,…Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”5
Atheists, what is your defense given these quotes by one of yours?
Thank you.
“Atheists, what is your defense given these quotes by one of yours?”
Shoot, I forgot! Let’s go to the cabinet and see… allergy meds… painkiller… band-aids… Ah, yes, here it is! The drug I was going to inject into all of my fellow atheists to keep them in lock-step on every philosophical and scientific question! Darn it! We must be eons behind, now that you’ve gone and erased all those pesky inconsistent Christian sects.
Sarcasm aside, I imagine that the people who said those things are absolutely wonderful in every way, and I happen to disagree with what they have to say about science and materialism. I do agree with the absurdity bit, however — everything true is a little bit absurd, don’t you think? The particle-wave duality, the irony of learning from mistakes, the word “zyzzyva”…
It’s a real shame that I stumbled this so late in the game. Still, three cheers for Jon as he is soundly trouncing Mr. SLIMJIM’s evasive attempts at debate. It reminds me of my own experiences in the past dealing with believers that need to redefine simple terms in order to conceal the weakness of their arguments. I’m beginning to think Answers in Genesis is distributing a DVD course with these tactics. 🙂
Nisam ni znao koliko predivnih lokacija ima u Hrvatskoj, hvala na clanku!