Mere Moral Argument Part 2

Checkout this entry I submitted for the Christian Apologetics Alliance Newsletter:

Mere Moral Argument Part Two

The moral argument for God as laid out by C.S. Lewis in, Mere Christianity.

by: Samuel Ronicker November 2014

This is a continuation of a review of the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Of course it is recommended that you read along in the text as we move on to book two; “What Christians Believe.”  Without further introduction let us examine the next section of this great text.

Chapter six; The Rival Conceptions of God

Lewis continues his masterwork with a somewhat puzzling comment, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.”  Unfortunately, this is not a commonly held belief among many Christians.  Though it can be said of other religions as well, many seem to believe that they have a monopoly on the truth.  However, it is important that a Christian views other religions as wrong and that they are different from Christianity.  Here Lewis goes on to divide worldviews along the lines that are important in this ongoing discussion of the moral argument for God: the materialist vice the theist.  Then among theist views he divides those that believe god is somehow “beyond good and evil.”  The one that calls a cancer evil because it kills a man, but that person could just as easily say that a surgeon is evil because the surgeon kills the cancer.  In both the atheistic view and the pantheistic view, there really is no such thing as evil.  In the Christian view God is separate from creation and there are things in creation that work against God’s will.  Lewis finishes this chapter with a knock-down argument against any naturalist answer to the so-called “problem of evil.”

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.”

Chapter seven; The Invasion

Lewis takes this chapter to discuss two types of invasion, one of over-simplified Christianity.  Just as atheism is too simple in leaving so much out and having no explanation for too many things so too is watered-down Christianity.  This is a type of Christianity that “simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right--leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption.  Both these are boys’ philosophies.”  The goal is not simplicity; religion is never simple.  The world is not simple, why would we expect relationship to God to be simple?  Even a “simple” child’s prayer is not truly simple.  It’s enemies of Christianity that often set up this simple version in order to tear it down.

To read the full article click here: http://www.christianapologeticsalliance.com/2014/12/19/equipped-vol-1-no-2-the-word-became-flesh-and-dwelt-among-us/

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Mere Moral Argument

Checkout this entry I submitted for the Christian Apologetics Alliance Newsletter:

Mere Moral Argument

The moral argument for God as lain out by C.S. Lewis in, Mere Christianity.

by: Samuel Ronicker September 2014

This article will seek to set out the moral argument for God as C. S. Lewis presents it in the first “book” of his momentous work, Mere Christianity.  This text was first published in 1952 partly based on a series of radio lectures given from 1942 to 1944.  If you have never read it, you should add it to your reading list; it is considered by many to be one of the best apologetics works of the 20th century. Lewis’ style is powerful as he lays out an argument that points to the existence of God based on moral intuition.  Lewis was famous as an atheist who set out to disprove Christianity and ended up, as he describes his conversion in Surprised by Joy: “In … 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God … perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”  In order to cover as much of this work as possible this article will attempt to summarize each chapter of the first section in order, future editions of the Christian Apologetics Alliance newsletter will feature expositions of the rest of the text.  Also of note, because there are multiple editions page numbers will not be referenced rather chapter and section headings only as they haven’t changed much through the different revisions.  Without further introduction:

Book One; Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
Chapter One; The Law of Human Nature

This section contains the foundation for the rest of the arguments throughout the text.  Without a Law of Human Nature any dispute is empty.  Lewis uses the example of two people quarreling, and when two people argue, they generally do not dismiss the other person’s standards.  They actually agree on a standard that there is such a thing as right behavior.  In the typical quarrel, each person attempts to justify his or her actions within an accepted moral standard.  As Lewis puts it:

It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

So, if there’s no such thing as right, then there’s also no such thing as wrong.  Though this law is not like the Laws of Nature (i.e. gravity).  One important difference is that humans can disobey this law.  There can be exceptions to the Law of Human nature, just as there are occasionally people who are colorblind or tone-deaf.  Lewis handles one important objection right away here.  Some skeptics claim that morality is totally different in different cultures, but this is missing an important point.  Just because there are differences, does not dismiss that all cultures have a sense of right and wrong.  The clearest example is in this simple quote, “Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.”

To read the full article click here: http://www.christianapologeticsalliance.com/2014/10/18/equipped-vol-1-no-1/

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An Atheist Answers “20 Short Arguments Against God’s Existence” (Reblog)

I don't usually do this, in fact it's my first time, but I'm reblogging an article I recently ran across from the atheist blogger Boxing Pythagoras. His piece "An Atheist Answers '20 Short Arguments Against God’s Existence'" is one of the best, most honest atheist pieces I've ever read. Without further ado:

This single-panel comic strip succinctly and adequately describes the bulk of my interaction with the other citizens of the Internet over the last couple of decades. If you think that this is an exaggeration, I’ll refer you to my wife, who will attest that we have had some version of this conversation many, many times. I simply have a strange attraction to correcting bad arguments and inane claims, whenever I see them. Now, since I am an avowed and outspoken atheist, one might think that this generally culminates in my conversing with the religious. However, I tend to spend just as much time correcting many of the lies, misconceptions, and really bad arguments that embedded themselves into the modern humanist/materialist/atheist subculture as I spend in debunking poor religious apologetics. The simple fact that someone’s end point-of-view agrees with mine does not make their claims right. Just like in High School math, it doesn’t matter if you stumbled upon the correct answer; you show your work because the process of finding that answer is more important than the answer itself.

To that end, when I saw a video called “20 Short Arguments Against God’s Existence,” by Hemant Mehta, posted on the Friendly Atheist blog, I knew I was going to have to respond.

1. There’s no evidence

This is actually quite untrue. There’s a good bit of evidence. Particularly anecdotal evidence from believers. This is a common mantra among atheists, but it’s a very bad one to utilize because it is blatantly untrue. When engaging in a persuasive dialogue with a believer, if one of your foundational arguments is as thoroughly untrue as this statement, it gives your audience a reason to immediately dismiss your position.

A better, more accurate claim would be, “I am not aware of any demonstrable evidence which is convincing.” This claim is honest, acknowledging that we don’t have complete knowledge and that there may exist something of which we are unaware. It also clarifies that we are referring to evidence which can be verified by outside parties, eliminating things like anonymous anecdotes and personal revelation from the mix. Finally, this statement acknowledges that some things which seem like good evidence to a believer are wholly unpersuasive to a non-believer– for example, the fine-tuning of the universe or current ignorance as to the process by which abiogenesis may have occurred.

2a. God doesn’t stop the evil in the world

Theodicy, or the Problem of Evil, has been a very common question in philosophy for more than two millennia. As such, it is a question which has been tackled by theistic philosophers and theologians for nearly as long. Unless you are familiar with this area of philosophy– particularly Alvin Plantinga’s work, which is extremely commonly cited by modern apologists– it’s quite likely that a believer will dismiss you as being uninformed on the subject.

2b. According to the Bible, God caused a lot of evil

and

3. Drowning everything alive is not a sign of love

and

4. The opening lines of the Bible are factually wrong

Firstly, arguing against the deity described by the Bible does not constitute a very convincing argument against theism, in general. At best, it might show that the Jewish or Christian conceptions of God are flawed. However, it says nothing at all about whether a God exists.

More importantly, however, is that most atheists tend to be wildly ignorant of the fields of hermeneutics and exegesis. They are so used to dealing with fundamentalist Christians who interpret the Bible literally that they are completely unaware that the majority of Judaism and Christianity has never thought this was the proper way to read the text. Atheists who are unfamiliar with hermeneutics are likely to be quickly dismissed by Christians with even a rudimentary knowledge of this process.

5. Prayer has never fixed anything physically impossible [to fix]

The follow-up question being, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” This is, again, an example of conflating a broad and general belief (“God exists”) with specific claims about that belief (“prayer to God can lead to miraculous healing”). Invalidating the latter does not necessarily invalidate the former. There are plenty of theists who do not believe in any miraculous healings.

Furthermore, the idea that the primary purpose of prayer is to request things for oneself from God is a common misconception on the part of atheists, and not one shared by the majority of theists. Yet again, displaying ignorance of someone’s beliefs often makes it very easy for them to dismiss your arguments, entirely.

6. There are thousands of gods you don’t believe in

Followed by, “What makes yours any different?” Given half an opportunity, a great many theists would absolutely love to tell you about why their god or gods are different from those claimed by others. This is especially true for anyone with even a modicum of apologetics training.

7. Where you are born determines what you believe

This is a particularly egregious fallacy. Noting that people in similar geographic areas tend to have similar beliefs says nothing at all about the veracity of any of those beliefs. This is a version of the argumentum ad populum fallacy, and we should strive to avoid fallacious arguments whenever possible, if our aim is to convince others of the rationality of our own beliefs.

8. Who created God? And how does your answer make any sense?

Once again, displaying one’s ignorance of the millennia of philosophy and theology regarding this question is not very likely to be convincing to anyone with even a modicum of experience in these fields. If you are not familiar with the concepts of non-contingency and eternity, or with the manner in which these concepts are applied to deity in classical theology, you really should not be asking this question. And if you are familiar with these things, you would not be asking this question.

9. Pediatric cancer

This goes right back to 2a and the discussion of the Problem of Evil. Again, if you are not familiar with the philosophy which has been done in this field, you are not going to be convincing to anyone, let alone strong believers.

10. Unconditional love shouldn’t come with a list of conditions

Similar to 5, Mehta is again conflating the general claim over God’s existence with specific claims about God’s nature. Commenting on the latter says nothing at all about the former.

11. Every single supposed miracle gets debunked

There are actually quite a few “supposed miracles” which have not been debunked. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches tend to be particularly adept at listing such events. Amongst Catholic apologists, the Incorruptibles and Our Lady of Fatima are particularly popular. While it is far from convincing, to a non-believer, that these anomalous events were supernatural in origin, neither can it be claimed that these things have been clearly shown to be falsely portrayed (which is the meaning of “debunked”).

12. The 10 Commandments left off “Don’t rape” and “Slavery is bad”

Another instance of conflating the general and the specific, as well as another instance of objectionable interpretation of someone else’s beliefs. Generally, “your god doesn’t behave the way non-believers want a god to behave” is not the most convincing argument.

13. The movies and music that honor God are just awful

While there are some fairly prominent examples of bad Christian art, today, this claim is preposterously overbroad. Even as an atheist, I can absolutely proclaim that much of the best and most beautiful art ever produced has been religious in nature. If we are talking about music, it’s incredibly easy to find extremely good pieces which were written to honor God– Gregorian chants, classical and baroque pieces, choir music, gospel music, and much more. In film, focusing on a terrible movie like “God’s Not Dead” without acknowledging the magnificence of a movie like “The Ten Commandments” is simply willful ignorance.

14. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike

and

15. No hide-and-seek game lasts this long

Radio waves. Gravity. Dark matter and dark energy. We don’t have to go far to acknowledge a number of invisible things which are almost certainly extant. It’d be better to compare the entirely undetectable with the non-existent, but I wouldn’t even recommend that unless two conditions are first met: your opposition has made the claim that God is entirely undetectable, and you are at least somewhat familiar with the arguments for and against Verificationist philosophy.

16. Science explains so much of what we used to attribute to a god

and

17. The more we learn, the less reason we have to believe in God

Scientific understanding of a phenomenon is not mutually exclusive with the attribution of that phenomenon’s explanation to a god. For example, the people over at the BioLogos foundation will completely agree with all of mainstream biology that the complexity of life can be understood through a combination of the blind processes of genetic variance and natural selection. Understanding the way in which it works does not preclude one from attributing the way in which it works to a god.

18. Explaining your mythology makes you sound crazy

Explaining that the Earth moves around the Sun to someone who has never heard it before sounds pretty crazy, too. Explaining that Time shifts and bends in accordance with an observer’s acceleration or velocity sounds crazy. Explaining that there is an infinite quantity of real numbers that are greater than 1 and less than 2 sounds crazy. “That sounds crazy” is not a particularly good epistemological qualifier.

19. If God didn’t exist, the world would look exactly the same

This is just blatant question-begging. Mehta assumes God is not necessary to the world in order to argue that God does not exist. One cannot claim to be supporting a more rational view than his opposition while supporting that view with logical fallacies.

20. If God existed, he would smite me right now

This is one of the most juvenile, ignorant, and fallacious of all the arguments which could be made against God’s existence. Making this claim is like declaring to your audience, “I have absolutely no intention of addressing my opposition’s beliefs in a fair and rational manner.” You might as well just stick your fingers in your ears and scream, “Nuh-uh!”

The Real Problem

My contention against Hemant Mehta’s “20 Short Arguments” is more than just the sum of its fallacious parts. The real problem is that even attempting to formulate arguments against the existence of God unnecessarily assumes a burden of proof which does not naturally belong to the skeptic. I do not believe in the existence of gods. If someone wants to convince me that some deity exists, the onus is on that person to support their claim. If I want to address the problems in a person’s specific case for the existence of deity, I will do so. However, the minute I try to extend that response into a more general claim about the ontology of deity, I am stepping beyond the role of a skeptic and into the role of a claimant. This is why I tend to steer clear of anti-theist religious antagonism. Why should I take the theist’s burden upon myself?

I do not burden myself with attempting to find arguments against the existence of unicorns or fairies or elves or ghosts or UFO’s. There’s no reason I should do so with God, either.

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I have one point I'd like to bring up about "arguments" 2b and 3.

This is a fairly common thing I've read from internet atheists and is a common theme in Dawkins' book The God Delusion. There's a serious problem with critiques like that. If one claims that the God of the Bible did some evil, then one must appeal to some authoritative morality by which one can claim that God did something wrong. If one has no authoritative objective source of morality, then the claim that God has done something wrong rings hollow. It's as powerful as saying, "boo, I don't like that." Your feelings about what I (or anyone else) do or do not do, have no weight. They're just your opinion, and as they say, everyone has an opinion just like everyone has a butthole, and some of them stink. I have every right to dismiss your opinion about what God has or has not done without recourse because so what, you don't like it. If you try to claim some higher authority then what higher authority exists by which you can appeal to judge God?

The God Delusion Book Review Part 2 Ch. 4-6

Sorry for the delay in getting to this next section of my review of The God Delusion but I've been busy editing a new book by the author of Notes from Afghanistan.

Back to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  If you're interested part one is here.

First off, in my review of the first three chapters I talked about how there's no real argument given, or at least not much of an argument given.  Mostly just blustering and casually brushing aside arguments for god, well, in chapter four Dawkins finally gives his argument for "why there almost certainly is no god."  He attacks the "Ultimate Boeing 747" concept as fallacious, citing Natural Selection as NOT blind chance, rather a step-by-step ascent of "mount improbable."  He also, rightfully attacks the concept of "god of the gaps."

I don't hold to Dawkins' intimation that theists/religious people are afraid of or somehow all have enmity towards science.  He says again and again that theist love these gaps in scientific knowledge and that theists cling to things that science cannot (yet) explain.  Again, bad logic in over-generalization/stereotyping.  Just because there have been instances of people that feel that way and their foolishness has been put on display doesn't mean that theists are all foolish when it comes to science.  I don't claim any special knowledge when it comes to science/mathematics I've never had an interest in them (above a cursory curiosity).  I prefer philosophy, logic, language, linguistics, etc.  Just because I have faith doesn't mean that I'm afraid of a scientific explanation, but that's not what Dawkins gives.  He doesn't give "scientific" explanations for these "gaps" he gives atheistic speculations.  The gaps that even Dawkins admits science cannot bridge are the formation of life, the formation of the eukaryotic nature of cells, and the emergence of consciousness.  But, in answer to all these gaps, his argument is the Anthropic Principle.

So, if you're not familiar let me sum up the anthropic principle as Dawkins describes it, though he calls the principle to action in all the cases where science cannot give an answer.  It's something like this, given the number of stars we know exist, even with a one in a billion chance for life to evolve on a planet (though I've read the odds are actually in the trillions), given the estimate of a billion-billion planets in the universe it had to happen, not once but many times.  There are several problems with this idea.  I'm not a mathematician so I could be wrong on this, the issue is probability.  Take a coin toss.  If you flip a coin 100 times you should get 50 heads/50 tails.  However, you could flip a coin 1,000 times and get heads every time.  Odds don't mean that if you do something enough times all the options will present themselves, just that they should or are like to present themselves.  So, it holds that even with a billion-billion possibly earth-like planets, life could have only happened one time and only here on this planet.  Philosophically the anthropic principle is even more fallacious.

The anthropic principle set out as a philosophical idea sounds something like this:

1) It is highly improbable that life could exist without outside intervention
2) We're here, alive, thinking about that probability
∴/therefore
3) It must have happened

Really?  Putting it another way: life could exist without god, we're alive, therefore it did.  The amazing thing to me is that he doesn't just use this principle for the alignment of planets to set up a planet on which life might evolve (the so-called, Goldilocks zone).  He applies this principle to all the mysteries of science!  Like the Big Bang, why are the cosmological constants in perfect setting to allow for a universe that is capable of producing planets that are capable of producing life?  As a side note I watched an interesting (banned) TED talk that claims they might not be constant after all.  There's no need to ask "why" because we're here, therefore it must have happened.  This particular use of the principle might strike people as odd, because think about it, to apply the principle there must be millions to billions of options, or at least enough that the odds are overcome; this means that there must be millions upon millions of universes, either in the past, or multiverses/parallel universes.

Moving on to chapter five about the roots of religion Dawkins again displays his prejudice: "...it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false" (pg. 168).  He then tries to give his Darwinian evolutionary explanation of how religion could have come about.  He starts off with the idea that we've evolved in such a way that obedience of one's elders is a good thing.  The older people obviously know how to survive and if one listens to the elders' advice one will (presumably) survive better but here's how religion comes into play from that notion.  "The child cannot know that 'Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo,' is good advice but 'You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail,' is at best a waste of time and goats" (pg. 176).  One of the many problems with this theory, is where did the elder get that idea?  There cannot be an infinite regress.  Someone accidentally sacrifices a goat on the full moon and the rains came, or someone didn't happen to have a goat on a full moon and there was a drought?  How could a primitive mind, that can't recall enough data to make even basic tools be asked to recall and relate one day with a whole season wherein the person probably would have died.  How does that lead to survival?  Someone who accidentally sacrificed a goat and then lived through a season with rain survives and passes down this superstition?  I have serious doubts in all these kinds of speculative answers because I see this kind of statement all the time, not just in Dawkins' writing.

The problem in this whole bit about the evolutionary source for religion, which he gives similar guesses in later portions of the text for other questions, but I'll deal with the idea in general here.  All these guesses or theories about evolutionary processes bringing about X result, boil down to this type of argument: 1) this is how X trait could have been passed on through evolutionary natural selection ∴/therefore 2) it was passed on through natural selection.  Basically, if I can explain how something could have happened without god, that's how it must have happened.  I saw this in two different YouTube (two links "You" and "Tube") videos about the beginnings of the universe (though neither mentioned god).  They basically laid out how the universe could have expanded from a subatomic particle that popped into existence from nothing with such and such characteristics, then ballooned out to become the entire universe.  They (both videos) seemed to be speaking authoritatively about these theories, like, this is a possible explanation of how it could have happened without citing god, therefore it must be correct.

The same fallacious thinking is apparent in Dawkins' writing, here's how it might have happened without god, therefore that's what happened.  I like the original Ockham's Razor argument as it was explained to me many years ago: you walk into a room and the window is open, you ask yourself why the window is open.  There could have been a microburst of wind that happened to blow at just the right angle to open the window, or there might have been an earthquake that shook in just the right manner to rattle the window open, or on and on, but the most basic answer, that is someone left it open, is the correct answer.  So, I ask you, in all this theorizing, if such and such variables might have come aligned at just the right way to bring about X trait is the more simple answer, or is it more simple to say, Someone put them that way?  Not that postulating a Supreme Being is more simple in every instance, but in this particular argument, it seems to be straightforward.

Sorry for the length but I only have one more chapter to cover!

In chapter six Dawkins seeks to provide an answer to the idea of mankind being good without God.  As such, he starts off with pointing out the evil in the letters that he and fellow atheists have received from religious people.  Don't get me wrong I hate seeing things like this and I wish I could have worked with those people on how to rewrite their grievances without insults.  Nevertheless, they're out there.  I'm not going to argue that religious people are all civilized that's clearly not true.  I'm not even going to try to narrow the definition of "true religion" that's just a no-true-scotsman fallacy.  The only thing I have to say is to not judge religion by the outspoken few that give it a bad name.

There is one letter that Dawkins attempts to address that claims that evolutionary theory leads to nihilism.  He rebuffs the claim by throwing out there that natural selection is not random.  I think he's missing the point of the issue.  It's not whether the evolutionary process is random (which by the way it requires at least random mutations, so there is an element of randomness in the whole theory) or not; the issue is whether it's a guided process or unguided.  It's about purpose, meaning, and goals.  Not about randomness.  Natural selection has no goal, no guiding principle other than basic survival.  As such it is hopeless despite how Dawkins brushes that claim aside.

Dawkins offers a guess about how natural selection could lead to kindness to one's kin, but then kills his goal of giving meaning within the natural selection schema by likening any altruism outside one's own kin to an accident.  I ca't that one could accept this kind of argument.  Basically, he's saying that while we're not produced via random processes our kindness to anyone other than kin (which is logical), is accidental.  Tell me how this doesn't have a nihilistic conclusion?  "We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) that we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce).  Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes" (pg. 221).  Tell me how a mistake is better than random when it comes to showing purposefulness.

On thing occurred to me as I was reading his claim about determining that we all have a shared moral compass because of the evolutionary process, I thought of the "famous violinist" argument for abortion.  Based on simple moral tests, we see that everyone agrees one should submit to helping the helpless.  The analogy holds absolutely no weight in the argument about abortion, but it does point to the idea that people often agree on ethical dilemmas.  I love the mention of Harvard biologist Marc Hauser mentioned on page 222 and following.  It's proving C.S. Lewis' arguments from Mere Christianity one survey respondent at a time.  Again Dawkins shows prejudice and dogmatic thinking and shows why he and most of those he references should not be trusted: "For Kant it was a moral absolute.  For Hauser it is built into us by our evolution" (pg. 224).  If one starts off with the dogmatism that there must be no god and that everything is explicable by evolution/natural selection, of course your conclusion is going to agree.

Plantinga calls this sophomoric philosophy (I didn't read that review in full before starting my reading/review, I'll probably read it when I'm done with the book), but here's another example from the latter portion of ch. six: "The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements.  This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good - or evil" (pg. 226).  So many problems with this and I've taken up way too much of your time so I'll try to be brief.  First, attacking religion is a strawman.  The issue isn't religious faith, it's the existence or non-existence of a deity.  So, saying that either side of the issue is good or bad has nothing to do with the actual question.  Secondly, and he attempts to make some response to this, is that the question isn't about the ethical or unethical behaviour of people.  The issue is moral objective standards.  He takes a stab at that question, but more or less brushes it away as not really at stake here.  He claims to answer it in the following chapter but after a small sneak peak, he's more or less going to stay on the track that religious people do bad things therefore religious belief is actually negative towards being good.  He's already hinted at that conclusion by pulling out statistics relating the conservative states in the US versus the liberal states in crime statistics.  Wow, talk about twisting statistics to suit one's needs.  Basically, his argument was something like, there is a higher crime rate in certain cities within predominantly contain Republican Party voters, therefore religious people are actually more evil than atheists.  As to the concept of absolutist morality, he basically brushes it aside because he's believes in a consequentialist view of morality, so seeking a moral absolute is unnecessary.

Discovering the Philosopher in You: Part 13: God: My Response

In my last entry I said that would respond to Prof McGinn's attempts at tearing down three prominent arguments for the existence of God.  I'm not certain how I want to organize this response so I apologize if this seems illogically arranged.  So here goes.

First, lets focus these arguments, Prof McGinn says at least a couple times in the lecture that these arguments are not intended to give cast-iron epistemological certainty that there is such a thing as God, just that the point is to test to see if the concept of god is logical.  One other key hole in his arguments is this, he says that the whole point of the discussion is to attempt to show if the concept of god is logical.  However, throughout his lecture he keep referencing the religious definitions of God.  Here's the way I see it, Prof McGinn is setting up a straw man in attacking each argument separately then offering red herrings in trying to make us chase after the traditional religious concepts of god rather than the basics of the argument.

Here's a recap of the arguments, the argument from design, the cosmological argument, and the ontological argument.  I'd like to take these and turn them around like Ravi Zacharias does in The End of Reason; A Response to the New Atheists as he borrows from Prof Dallas Willard (now passed on, May 2013) and use a more complete and powerful argument for the existence of God than this strawman Prof McGinn has torn down.

First, comes the what is commonly referred to as the cosmological argument; the way Mr. Zacharias words the argument, "no physical entity explains its own existence."  Now, that could be confusing because I'm a physical entity and I can sit here and explain my existence.  Obviously that's not the way those terms are intended to be used, it's along the lines of, no physical entity contains a complete explanation for its own existence.  It makes sense to also word this part of the argument as, no physical entity can create itself.  Biological life can reproduce, but that's not itself, that's a copy of itself.  In the Google+ conversation about the last entry +James Hooks said it this way, "everything in the universe has a cause, or everything that begins to exist has a cause."  Those kinds of statements are backed up by empirical observation.  These theories of something from nothing are so wildly speculative it's laughable.  Again, this is NOT 100% mathematical proof of an uncreated creator (UCC), just a rational statement about the plausibility.  Here's another thing Prof McGinn does throughout his lecture, after he presents the cosmological argument he claims that it doesn't logically follow that this UCC somehow has the attributes often claimed in religion, namely omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.  Prof McGinn is implying that those qualities are a non sequitur, and he'd be right if  the argument was solely based on cosmological cause.

The actual best answer is to follow the cosmological cause argument with another powerful argument for a god.  That is the argument from design.  In that aforementioned Google+ argument +Andreas Geisler asked if one could recognize the undesigned.  A valid question but one that seems obvious from common sense.  There are so many examples of design in the universe that for all of them to come together in exactly the right way would take odds that are beyond astronomical.  I've read that the odds were calculated somewhere around 10,000,000,000^2,000+. That's ten billion to the two-thousandth plus power!  So, design is evident all around us and yet Prof McGinn throws evolution at the concept like it's the silver bullet that will slay this argument.  What he's failing to see is the most basic form of biological design, the DNA/RNA structure cannot be explained by evolutionary process.  So, the red herring Prof McGinn expects the creationist apologist to chase after in this argument is the design of life as it is right now.  That's not the basic design that we're looking at, though a committed Young Earth Christian would say that the literal six days of creation show God's handiwork in the complexities of life as we study it.  But, again... that's not the argument in question.  The question is, is there design evident in life as we see it?  It seems obvious that the resounding answer must be, YES.  Again, this does not get us to the Christian God, as Prof McGinn seems to want us to make that leap, though we do have some characteristics that fit, namely powerful omnipotence, that is powerful beyond all imagination the ability to will the material into existence.  It would require that kind of power to bring all the universe into existence and then order it into a coherent design and put together the incredible complexity that is life (even the most basic forms of life).  Which leads us to another characteristic of God, omniscience, that is all knowing.  A God that exists outside the influences and rules of this universe and orders the entire universe must have knowledge beyond all human imagination.

There are two incredibly powerful arguments that Prof McGinn has neglected that will flesh out the rest of the characteristics of God.  The first comes from one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis.  In Mere Christianity Lewis makes a powerful argument from morality that shows how just the idea that all cultures throughout the entire history of mankind have had a shared concept of morality.  That isn't to say that all cultures agree with what is right or wrong, but at least they all agree that there is such a thing as right and wrong.  In response to the Euthyphro problem, which is often thrown at this argument, I've answered it before twice, but this writeup puts it quite well, "Thus the dilemma can be shown to be a false one.  God indeed commands things which are good, but the reason they are good is because they reflect God’s own nature.  So the goodness does not come ultimately from God’s commandments, but from His nature, which then results in good commandments.  As Steve Lovell concluded in ‘C.S. Lewis and the Euthyphro Dilemma’ (2002)."  So, we have more attributes of God, on top of omnipotence and omniscience, we have goodness.

Last but certainly not least is the argument presented in the life of Jesus Christ himself.  There are some that claim the life of Jesus is a myth.  People that claim that are intentionally turning a blind eye to more than enough evidence that Jesus really did live when the Bible claims He did, and the Bible itself has more than enough textual evidence to verify its trustworthiness.  Jesus' claim of divinity is unique among all religions, though I've seen arguments that say Jesus doesn't claim to be God, but I don't think they hold water.  I don't have time to go into that all right now, but suffice it to say, that Christianity is unique.  Our Lord is also our servant, and our sacrifice.  We cannot do anything to earn God's forgiveness or favor, all other religions have some form of working or doing something to gain forgiveness.  Not so with biblical Christianity; there are certain groups of people claiming to follow Jesus' teachings but they teach that you have to do this or do that contrary to biblical teaching, that's not the Christianity that Jesus died and rose again to create in us.

A word on Prof McGinn's use of the problem of evil as a counter argument to the existence of God.  First, it's a false pretence.  He claims to be arguing against the logical possibility of God, but in reality he's only arguing about one particular characteristic of a being that he doesn't believe exists.  As he's so fond of using to describe other philosophical ideas, now he's the one that's "putting the cart before the horse," and arguing about characteristics of a being that he hasn't shown to exist at all.  His argument about the existence of evil has been responded to in many ways but the best way I see to respond, is to call into the argument the idea that morality in general shows that we're designed by a moral being.  In the atheist purview there's no sanctity of life.  According to evolution and natural selection the weak are meant to die so that the strong can survive.  According to Peter Singer a pig is worth more than a disabled child; does that sound like morality can be found in science?  According to mathematics the world would be a much better place to live if there were about fifty percent less humans living here, according to that logic, we should initiate and promote holocausts to eliminate the weak, sickly humans.  The argument of the existence of evil doesn't work with purely scientific logic, because logic and science cannot tell you what is good/bad, right/wrong, good/evil, science just tells what is.

A word on Pascal's wager, I've never liked the idea, but Ravi Zacharias in the book I've already mentioned, puts it backwards from the typical reading of the wager.  It's not, you should believe because in the end if you're wrong what's the harm and if you're right you stand to gain tremendously.  I agree that's a hollow, relationally empty way to approach God.  Instead one should look at it like this, I believe and it enriches my life, if in the end I'm wrong and there is no God, what have I lost?  Nothing.

Lastly, I must say something about the ontological argument because that seemed to be Prof McGinn's favorite argument.  This seems odd to me, because though I can't point to any specific fallacy or flaw in the ontological argument, it seems like just wordplay.  A tautology of sorts, to say that the perfect conceivable being must exist because existence is more perfect than non-existence.  I don't think the argument is wrong to come to the conclusion that God exists, I just don't think it goes about it in a logical manner.

To sum up this incredibly long post (sorry about that):  I don't think this was Prof McGinn's intent but listening to this lecture actually made me more secure in my belief in God.  His futile attempts at breaking down these arguments only made me more sure that he's wrong and that it is logical to believe in a creator.  As it stands, his attacks at each argument doesn't really show anything, just that each argument has counter-arguments.  There isn't an argument out there that doesn't have a counter-argument (like that double negation?), there are skeptics for everything.  With the combination of all the arguments together it is easy to conclude that it is logical to believe that God created and cares for us, His creation.  Though that wasn't the original goal of the argument, all we wanted to prove was that it is indeed logical to believe that some form of creator being exists, and we've gotten so much farther than that when it's all said and done.

Another shot from Cape Zanpa