[T]he force of sheer emotional experience will not equip teens to address the ideas they will encounter when they leave home and face the world on their own. Young people whose faith is mostly emotional are likely to retain it only as long as it is making them happy. As soon as a difficult crisis comes along, it will evaporate.
–Nancy Pearcy, Saving Leonardo, Kindle iPad Edition, p. 16 (emphasis added)
One of the things I love about atheists is their constant use of complete double standards. It’s why I can’t be an atheist: I’m way too consistent.
First some background:
Jennifer Fulwiler wrote a post about five Catholic beliefs that would make sense to atheists. The spirit in which she wrote it would be to show that Catholicism is intellectually honest, not that an atheist would actually agree that those beliefs as true. As only he can, PZ Myers wrote a response entitled “Jennifer Fulwiler: Vacant-eyed, Mindless Cluelessness Personified.” He essentially dismissed each point as supernatural nonsense, so no atheist would ever actually agree to any of them.
But that wasn’t Jennifer’s point. Her point:
I evidently did not make it clear enough that all of my examples were meant only to illustrate the intellectual consistency within Catholicism, and therefore assumed that you would be in a discussion with an atheist who would stipulate belief in God for the sake of argument. E.g. In the case of Purgatory, when I was an atheist I would have said, “All belief in the supernatural is crazy. But if you must believe in all that God and heaven mumbo jumbo, then, yeah, you need Purgatory in order not to contradict your own bizarre little belief system.” (source, emphasis added)
The first comment to that post, addressed to Jennifer, is the atheist double standard:
“intellectual consistency within Catholicism”
I would ask then if it is possible to get a blood born disease from the blood of christ when taking communion?
I read your original article, and as an atheist I did not agree with a single point (none of the teachings made “sense” to me”, and as PZ suggested, I am not convinced you had arrived at your previous atheism from an intellectual standpoint. It sounds as if you were just a theist in denial or in “thenial” – it happens all the time.
There it is: the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Basically, DKeane is saying that Jennifer wasn’t a true atheist, because true atheists would never convert to theism. She’s been a theist all along. Read the rest of this entry
I thought that an occasional short story might illustrate certain points better than a straight article. It’ll be good practice for that novel I’m hoping to write.
Rob dreads coming to work, but he has goals and ambitions. First, moving out of his dreary apartment into a house. Then, marrying Rachel. At some point, a nicer car would be great.
Wedding expenses and honeymoon expenses, as well as down payments for houses, require money. Unfortunately, they require more money than this pencil-pushing low-level administrator’s position pays, but that’s what Rob’s night classes are for.
It really wasn’t so much the repetitive job that gets to Rob as Terry. Every office has someone that is into something weird and puts it out there. Terry is the guy that does that here. His weird thing: atheism. Read the rest of this entry
When I was in eighth grade, we started learning algebra. The teacher told us that variables stand for numbers, and we either solve for the specific number the variable represents, or treat the letter as if could be any number.
When a particularly astute student noticed that x, y, and z were always used as variables, he asked if any other letters could be used.
The teacher said any letter would work, but told us to avoid i. We asked why, and he replied that it could be too easily confused with 1.
But, math wizards, that’s not really why we don’t use i, is it? It’s actually a mathematical constant, defined as the square root of -1.
Like a good teacher, my math teacher gave us what we could handle. Later, those of us that either read the sidebars in our algebra books (because we’re extra geeky) or took calculus learned the real reason why we don’t use i as a variable. Clearly, eighth grade students learning the basics of algebra wouldn’t have been ready to learn about imaginary numbers.
My eighth grade math teacher didn’t lie. He just didn’t give us information that we weren’t ready to have. Later, a fuller revelation of the facts would be realized.
This is the reason that God gave the Law. Not because he was lying or misleading us. And he didn’t “edit” things or change his mind later. He gave us the system that our feeble brains could handle, and now he has fully revealed the purpose and meaning of the Law, freeing us from its tyranny to live by grace in Christ Jesus.
The Law was but a shadow of the perfect reality to come (Heb 10:1). Now that the perfect reality is here, we may rejoice in him (Jesus Christ) rather than having to follow the Law.
Hard as this may be to believe, there are actually people who don’t believe that there was ever a real, historical Jesus Christ. Their arguments are on par with people who deny Shakespeare wrote his plays, Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers, and Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory series.
But they won’t go away. Worse, probably 95% of the Internet atheist movement counts themselves among those who deny a man named Jesus of Nazareth, described by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and many others ever walked this planet and performed miracles before being sentenced to die on a Roman cross.
I’ve decided that I won’t debate the question of the existence of Jesus anymore. It’s really not an open question. No serious scholar of history or of the New Testament, Christian or not, actually questions this issue. Even scholars of comparative mythology question whether or not Jesus’ stories had their origin in pagan mythology! In fact, it may be the other way around.
Well, Christians, historians, and non-Christian comparative religious scholars aren’t the only ones who think that the idea Jesus never existed is preposterous. Of all people, Bart Ehrman, thinks the idea and the arguments supporting it are terrible. And he tells the Infidel Guy so during an interview:
Finally, an atheist is as irritated as I am over the consistent use of faith to mean, as Dawkins uses it, “belief in the absence of (or in the teeth of) evidence.” Or, as Mark Twain famously put it, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t true.”
Dr. Simon Kolstoe wrote to the editors of Philosophy Now accusing them of using the pejorative definition of faith forwarded by Dawkins et. al. to make fun of religious believers. Dr. Kolstoe points out that even the wildest conspiracy theory rests at least on bad evidence. We may not always agree to where the evidence points, he reasons, but let’s agree at least that there is some.
[Faith] is taking the leap from tentatively believing a theory, to using that theory as a working principle. It is not belief in the absence of logic or evidence; it is a belief based upon ‘good enough’ evidence. Such a definition seems far more useful than the impossible definition of ‘ a belief without evidence’, or the rhetorical use as ‘a belief I do not agree with’.
What is biblical faith? Loyalty and trust based on past performance.
Robert Kunda has an excellent post on the futility of atheist arguments. Excerpt:
I was [an atheist]. I joined in all the thoughtless rhetoric. I’ve since grown up (at least in some measure). And I still hear the same nonsensical rants spouted off that I used to, as if Christians have never heard the bumper-sticky slogans before. (It’s worth noting that in many of the debates mentioned, like the overwhelming majority of Christian critics, the Christianity that’s being argued against generally bears little or no resemblance to biblical Christianity. These guys put all this effort into rebutting beliefs no one holds. I believe Christendom as a whole warrants a large portion of the blame for failing to present a cogent description and defense of their faith to the population as a whole.)
Why isn’t atheism very dangerous to Christians with a firm foundation in their faith? Because “[i]t’s hard to convince someone that someone that they actually know doesn’t actually exist.”
The real threat comes from inside the church!
I have completed two new proofs on my slow-going re-write of God is NOT Imaginary, a reply to that unfortunate spectacle of a website allegedly authored by Marshall Brain. The newbies:
As always, enjoy!
I have a confession to make.
I hate answering comments. Seriously. I hate it with an unparalleled passion. That’s why I procrastinate doing it forever. I keep hoping, one day, that my blog will be large enough that I can let my Christian readers defend my points, while I continue to write new posts and articles. But, alas, my readership tends to be atheists who are reading me to disagree with me.
Which might be better, in a way. At least I know that the Gospel message is getting out there. If my readership was entirely Christian, I’d just be preaching to the choir rather than defending the faith.
And so, now I shall wade into the comment sections and pick up the neglected comments.
First up, Boz weighs in on my much derided post on philosophical ignorance. The post was with regard to Monica (@Monicks on Twitter) making a tweet that confuses methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Atheists, who are metaphysical naturalists, often thought there was no difference (or shouldn’t be). That was completely unexpected. And by completely unexpected, I mean completely expected!
He told me to stop insulting Monica by calling her ignorant. I told him I wasn’t; I proved she was ignorant. To which he replied:
Alexander Johannesen asserted that you were ignorant in the comments of another thread, and you responded that it was an ad hominem/personal insult.
Wrong-o. What Alex said was:
Your surprising ignorance of other religions are quite astounding considering you make such big and bold assertions about them, and right now you stand as a prime example of the arrogance the outside world see when we look in on people like you.
The bolded portion is the ad hominem, and (I thought) quite rude. Alex (in that thread) also thought that I meant the ignorant comment was the ad hominem. But Christians are the shallow thinkers who forgo science and just say that God did it solely because we don’t understand it and don’t want to. Riiiiight.
Next, Alex responds on the same thread to J.W. Wartick and I talking about how metaphysical naturalism defeats itself by providing no way to actually prove itself:
May I remind you both that none of you two can step outside of the natural world to confirm any of your claims? And that, in fact, you don’t need go outside the boundaries of scientific epistemology in order for *any* philosophy to be correct. And who in their right mind could claim a model of thought for correct, anyway?
And this is the type of thinking that led me to post this. I’m claiming that something aside from the material world exists. Alex is claiming otherwise, since he says that we don’t have to look any further than science to find out what is happening here. I’m also understanding him to mean that one cannot claim a thought model correct, since he’s saying no one in his right mind would try. So it seems that since he actually can’t step outside of the natural world either (per J.W.), he’s going to point out that no one can, then say that there’s no way to know who is correct.
If that’s true, then all of us are fighting for nothing. If we can’t know, why bother? But here is postmodernism rearing its ugly head: all opinions are equally valid, and what’s true for you might not be true for me. Sorry, no. Truth is such because it’s true. It corresponds exactly to reality.
That’s the lazy man’s way out–just claim you can’t know it.
All right, now for a couple of quickies on this post. First up, Boz, who links to this category in Wikipedia and then challenges:
Maybe you could response to the slogan: “You’re an atheist to literally thousands of CREATOR gods. I’m only an atheist to one more CREATOR god than you!” ?
Sure, and I’ll respond via link as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/Jesus. He claimed to be the Son of God and backed it up with a Resurrection from the dead, in fulfillment of Scriptures written hundreds of years before his life. I’d say that trumps the other creator gods.
Then, Brian Westley:
Yes, people make up all kinds of gods, some more powerful than others. This doesn’t make your god more likely; in fact, the reverse is true.
So, when more people think of a similar idea, that makes it less true? Your philosophy of language must be really interesting.
In philosophy, however, we should always interpret terrible arguments in the most charitable way possible. So I’ll assume that’s probably not really what you meant. You might have meant (and this is by far the more intriguing argument), that because a plethora of creator gods exist, that makes it a lot harder to know which is the actual creator god. And you have a point. But, it makes your default position of atheism look very apathetic.
For why, let’s assume that everyone in the world has a soul mate (I don’t actually believe this; I think that people choose a mate and then work really hard to build a solid marriage). If you’re single, then somewhere out there is your soul mate, and it is up to you to seek her and then marry her.
If your position were applied consistently, then you’d conclude that because a plethora of women exist, that overwhelms the odds of finding your soul mate. So, you’ll just stop searching. Apathetic.
So, how would I know which creator god is the correct entity? That’s tough to argue subjectively, since Muslims know Allah is the only one, while others are just as convinced (including Christians) that some other entity created this universe. As I answered above, Jesus of Nazareth would be objective confirmation of “my” God.
Okay, join me next time for more from the comment bag. I’ve got to stop letting these pile up!
Recently, on Twitter, I got into a discussion with two users (@LifesPoser and @JoeUnseen) about the existence of God. As usual, they were crowing about how I need to prove that God exists before they’ll listen to me.
https://twitter.com/#!/LifesPoser/status/89019071726759937
So I responded with links to three YouTube videos from Dr. Roland Nash:
https://twitter.com/#!/tucholskic/status/89187665408299008
First of all, I doubt that these guys watched all of the videos. The discussion centered around the first video, where Dr. Nash explains that we as humans take for granted a number of propositions that we are unable to prove. Two such examples are the existence of an external world and the existence of other minds (known as solipsism; and one user even ridiculed my entire argument by saying that when the theist resorts to solipsism, that means he’s beat).
The shallow reasoning in question:
https://twitter.com/#!/JoeUnseen/status/89655045062266880
Not correct, not even a little bit. Just because I’m experiencing the external world, I can’t call that evidence of the existence of the external world. All such evidence–picking up a crayon off my basement floor, sitting in a chair, talking to my wife–is part of the very thing I’m trying to prove.
Consider trying to prove a murder in court. We’re trying to prove that the act itself occurred. We can’t see the act itself, only the evidence produced by the act. Security footage (not the actual act, mind you, but a recording of it–the actual act happened in the past and is not accessible to us). A knife with the defendant’s fingerprints on the handle and the victim’s blood on the blade. Footprints matching the defendant’s shoes in blood fleeing the crime scene. These things are incidental to the act itself, they exist as a record of the act.
With trying to prove the external world, everything that you can point to is part of the external world, not a record of its existence. This is akin to my fellow theists saying that the Bible is God’s word because it says so. You can’t do that; it’s begging the question.
There are equally plausible metaphysical explanations for an outside world. Look at The Matrix. You can’t prove that isn’t what’s happening right now.
So, what?
The take away point is that you are rational for believing in the existence of an external world. Moreover, you are rational for believing that the people you encounter have minds. And, you are rational for believing that there is a shared experience with that other person when we’re standing in the same room. We see the same lamp. We sit together at the same table.
You can’t prove it. But, you’d be irrational to consider The Matrix scenario. You’d be locked up if you came to believe that. That’s how good The Matrix is at detecting and punishing dissent from it. (Ooops! Is that Agent Smith knocking at my door?)
So Alvin Plantinga argues that we are rational for believing in the existence of God without having to provide empirical evidence for it. I’m not proving the existence of God any more than I’m proving the external world. I’m providing rational reasons for my belief in God. These I’ve detailed before:
Multiple lines of reasoning (not really evidence or proof) coalesce to make the existence of God much more likely than not. Each of those items by itself makes God very likely, but the cumulative case becomes much, much stronger. Pretty tough to shake, in my own estimation.
Now, I know it’s fashionable among atheists to say that I bear 100% of the burden of proof since I’m the “prosecution” making the positive claim (“The defendant committed the crime, your honor!”). But that’s just American imperialism. Other justice systems make the defendant bear the burden of proof (“I did not commit the crime, your honor!”). Given all this, I’d say the atheist (at minimum) has at least one burden of proof, though he’s not going to like hearing me say it.
He owes me reasons why non-belief is rational. Note that I’m not asking him to prove a negative. I’m asking for what I just gave here–multiple lines of evidence and argument that make the nonexistence of God more likely than not. Given the usual squawking about theistic burden of proof, I’m not holding my breath for these reasons.
Guess who had an adulterous affair, divorced, remarried !
The sheer arrogance of you guys is stunning, as is your lack of self awareness. You didn’t go lookin
Regarding "Antar," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarah_ibn_Shaddad. Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov based
Muchas gracias. ?Como puedo iniciar sesion?
Your rebuttal does not make any sense. They are nothing more than preaching. How about trying little
This is a fairly obnoxious comic, especially when red herrings are the favourite fish of the religio
I couldn't refrain from commenting. Exceptionally well written!
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