Forward

If I were to write a book about myself, it might start with a forward like this:

Depending on where you were born, your parents, community and culture will instill in you a general set of beliefs and behaviors. In my childhood, along the Mason-Dixon Line, the politics were slightly capitalist and Republican, and the religion was Christianity. My dad was not a committed church-goer while my mom was, and outside of church, God and Christ were rarely discussed. I didn’t get much of that from neighbors or school mates either. This afforded me room to be myself and think for myself, something I’m thankful for to this day. I had the chance to observe the world, compare and reflect on candidate explanations for these observations, and understand to a small degree why some explanations fit the data better than others, and should therefore be trusted more than others. I didn’t think of it in those terms, but that’s what was happening.

I remember a friend in high school who relayed to me that “Bible scholars” thought that Jesus was going to return in 1975 (am I dating myself?) I found it interesting, but it didn’t spur me into a religious fervor. I just watched and went on with my life.

That attitude - that religion is interesting but not essential - has more-or-less stuck with me my whole adult life. With the exception of one brief 6 or 8 month immersion in a Pentecostal church, I was one of the spiritual-but-not-religious types.

I’ve said elsewhere that a verse-by-verse reading of the Old Testament is what disabused me of the belief that the Bible was literally true. And if it’s not literally true, then a believer is left trying to understand the metaphors and allegories that it presents, or eventually comes to understand it as a culturally valuable myth. So after setting the Bible down and walking away, I retained a vague suspicion that there was an underlying supernatural basis for things that the Bible tried to convey. I started to understand religions of any sort as attempts to get down to underlying truths about reality. Maybe God was less a person and more a spirit, or he/she/it was the universe itself, or it didn’t exist at all, but a unifying substrate to apparent reality did. I gently glided across all those currents for over two decades without falling out of the boat and drowning in any one of them.

Soon after 9/11, I began a serious look at how people use language to change people’s opinions about topics. At first - predictably - it was the war with the terrorists and the invasion or Iraq. Then it turned to general political matters, THEN to religion. So it hasn’t been more than 8 or 10 years since I’ve developed a more rigorous intellectual approach to the existence of gods, the costs and benefits of religions, a general world view of what reality is, and whether there’s anything beyond it that’s worth spending time thinking about.

On this journey, I’ve come to realize that people are a varying combination of intelligence, knowledge, education, independence, disposition, confidence and a whole lot of other factors that - before taking into account external influences - would lead them to believe or disbelieve in the existence of the supernatural. And I suspect that the combination of characteristics that create fertile ground for skepticism and non-belief, is rarer than not. When faced with conventional beliefs in god(s) that have been carried down by societies over the millennia, I understand how and why belief is more common than non-belief. But I'd like to help that change.

Notes on Craig's Cosmological Argument

While discussing William Lane Craig’s five arguments to believe in God (here and here ... originally at Faux News ), I said:

...you can’t conclude that god is the best explanation for any of the proposed “mysteries” that Craig lists, because God does not exist independently of his arguments.

I’ve always felt that the argument from first cause was the single most interesting approach for a believer to claim the existence of God, simply because the questions of existence - Why? For what purpose? How? - are unsettling in their enormity and implication. Not knowing is scary. It is a great human endeavor - individually and as a species - to overcome that fear, and replace ignorance with knowledge. Where we can’t obtain knowledge, we can at least try to identify what qualifies as “not knowledge” so that we don’t clutter up our heads unnecessarily. Thus this post.

My personal summary of the argument from first cause is that it can conclude that there was a cause to the universe, but that’s all. The argument **as stated** does not even attempt to support the claim that God exists or of how God might create a universe. It doesn’t add to our knowledge, thus we can’t make judgements about what the possible cause could be. We don’t have the tools and techniques to address it yet. It could be that it’s the wrong question, we just don’t know.

Assuming it is the right question, then the argument is laid out in either of the following forms:

• Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
• A causal loop cannot exist.
• A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
• Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.

According to the argument, the existence of the Universe requires an explanation, and the creation of the Universe by a First Cause, generally assumed to be God, is that explanation.

In light of the Big Bang theory, a stylized version of argument has emerged (sometimes called the Kalam cosmological argument, the following form of which was created by Al-Ghazali and then strongly supported by William Lane Craig):

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• The Universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the Universe had a cause.

There is, of course, lots of discussion to be had about both forms of this argument, some of it to the effect that

1. our concept of causation is incomplete or incorrect;
2. the idea that the universe is “contingent” may be wrong - it may be impossible for the universe to not exist;
3. what we call “the universe” may just be part of a larger (or even infinite) ensemble;
4. the claims about causal loops and actual infinities might be wrong;
5. it could be chance - the ways that things could exist are nearly infinitely more numerous that the way that things wouldn’t exist;

There are probably other lines of discussion to follow, as well. Regardless, let’s compare what Craig said in his article to the second form of the argument listed at Wikipedia (and also often attributed to Craig).

Craig most recently said (I paraphrase for clarity):

1. The universe cannot be uncaused.
2. The cause must come from a transcendent reality
3. There is an entity (assumed to exist in that transcendent reality) that is enormously powerful (assumed that it can create universes)
4. The entity is an unembodied mind
5. (assumed) this entity is God
6. (assumed) this God is the Christian God.

If we grant premise 1, what reason do we have to believe that premises 2 through 6 are true?

None.

He gives no reason to accept any of what he says.

As many folks have pointed out over the years, Craig is not attempting to persuade non-believers, he’s really just giving a pep talk to believers.

Just for the fun of it, though, we can annotate Craig’s argument a bit, for future reference.

1. The universe cannot be uncaused.
   • as I stated in an earlier paragraph, our concept of causation could be incomplete or incorrect ...or...
   • the idea that the universe is “contingent” may be wrong - it may be impossible for the universe to not exist;
   • what we call “the universe” may just be part of a larger (or even infinite) ensemble;
   • the claims about causal loops and actual infinities might be wrong;
   • it could be chance - the ways that things could exist are nearly infinitely more numerous that the way that things wouldn’t exist;
2. The cause must come from a transcendent reality.
   • this is a bare assertion. There is no reason to believe such a claim.
   • If we assent to this claim, then we must ask “how can this reality exist prior to our reality?”
   • And “doesn’t this insert an infinite regression into the argument?”
   • And “if this transcendent reality can exist without being created, then what’s to say this reality couldn’t exist without being created?” (a.k.a. “Special Pleading”)
3. There is an entity (assumed to exist in that transcendent reality) that is enormously powerful (assumed that it can create universes)
   • Who created this entity?
4. The entity is an unembodied mind
   • This is another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?
5. (assumed) this entity is God
   • This is yet another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?
6. (assumed) this God is the Christian God.
   • This is still another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?

If you have any doubt as to how Craig’s argument fails, you might bookmark this.

Fine-tuned putdown

I enjoy a good put down as much as anyone. Pharyngula commenter drl2 made me smile with a goodie this morning as I continued to read through the comments on PZ’s takedown of WLC Craig’s tired old list of arguments for the existence of God at Faux News.

In an exchange on why the fine-tuning argument is a sham, he summarizes with this zinger:

So while it’s true that there are probably an infinite number of universes in which we couldn’t exist, there’s a good chance there’s also an infinity of possible worlds where WLC could still be a slick-talking moron.

Nice!

What's Wrong With Arguments for God?

Those non-believers that came to their non-belief by observing what’s wrong with the world - as compared against the conjecture that it was created by God - or analyzed the arguments for God and found them fallacious, absurd, or otherwise double-plus-ungood, can probably guess what’s wrong with all of Dr. William Lane Craig's reasons to believe in God, but it doesn’t hurt to re-state it occasionally.

In a nutshell, you can’t conclude that god is the best explanation for any of the proposed “mysteries” that Craig lists, because God does not exist independently of his arguments. He can't be found by looking for him directly. He can only be imagined. If he can only be imagined, what good is he as an explanation?

Say, for instance, if Galileo had peered into the heavens and seen God staring back, you might consider that evidence that god exists. If every astronomer since Galileo peers into the heavens and sees God staring back, you might say that God most probably exists.

If Darwin had set sail on the Beagle and found that every species of plant and animal sprang into existence within the last few thousand years, you might infer that they where created simultaneously. If every biologist and botanist since Darwin found only evidence of recent creation, this might lend further credence to that inference. When the DNA of all animals is eventually found to be perfect, containing no junk and no mutations, you might further infer creation by something perfect that knew what it was doing. It could be the same entity that Galileo observed. It might be God, and that might bolster the argument further.

I could go on, but I don’t really need to - the examples become repetitive very quickly. Everything that every branch of science observes leads us to believe that our patch of existence expanded into its present form about 13.7 billion years ago. No where has a God hypothesis - any God - risen to become even a remote contender as an explanation. The imperfect - and predictable - way that the universe evolves and that life evolves indicates wholly natural origins.

God may be used as an explanation for mysteries when people like Dr. Craig speak, but he never appears independently from Craig's (or anyone else's) arguments. It’s as if apologists can’t think of plausible explanations to life's complicated questions, but the most fantastical explanation imaginable is perfectly acceptable.

It’s a mystery that believers don’t see this

An Early Christmas Present from William Lane Craig

It really is a Christmas present, this re-cycling of the same 5 arguments for the existence of God that Dr. William Lane Craig trots out for anyone who will pay him - this time at the Fox News website . What makes it a great present? Well, many of my favorite bloggers took it down, each of them in their own unique style:

• PZ Myers gives it a faux-innocent third degree at Freethought Blogs.
  
• Avicenna - also at FTB - looks at it from the cultural Hindu point of view
  
• Richard Carrier - at FTB as well - does his usual extensive deconstruction (not for the light reader!)
  
• Hank Fox at Patheos takes a swipe at the Objective Moral Values portion of the program
  
• JT Eberhard - also at Patheos - has a go at all five of Craig’s tired old arguments.

They all - and their commenters - seem to recognize that Craig continues to preach to the choir, and continues to make a darned good living at it.

In my now-dusty “Another Imaginary Debate”, I used one of Dr. Craig’s debates from 1998 as the foil for my contrived rebuttal. His schtick has not changed one bit in the 15 years since. If you’re sporting an even average bullshit detection kit, you can see right though this stuff. That doesn’t seem to stop him. As Hank Fox sez - it’s ”slippery arguments, subtle misdirection, and blatant lies.”

So bring a hot drink, a blankie, your favorite web-browsing device, and settle down for a warm read on a cold winter night.

Happy Yule y’all!

Munchhausen Trilemma

The Munchhausen Trilemma serves as a criticism of justifying knowledge that goes like this:

If we ask of any knowledge: "How do I know that it's true?", we may provide proof; yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:

1. The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
   
2. The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
   
3. The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)
   

As a layman, the Trilemma is helpful in summarizing the ways we can justify knowledge, but does what it says represent a declaration that knowledge is ultimately impossible? For me, the answer is no.

First, i’ll acknowledge the ways the term “knowledge” can be used:

1. ”knowledge that” - comprehension of concrete facts or abstract concepts that can be demonstrated in the real world.
   
2. ”knowledge how” - comprehension of approaches or techniques in accomplishing simple tasks or complex endeavors.
   
3. ”knowledge of” - acquaintance with people

I also have to declare my belief that absolute knowledge of anything is unattainable. When I say this, I mean that with regard to any of the three ways the term “knowledge” can be used, I can never be genuinely 100% certain that I know something is true. I may be certain to a reasonable doubt, or certain beyond conceivable doubt, even certain that my belief will never be falsified in human history - but I have to acknowledge that there could be a 1-in-a-centillion chance that I could be wrong about it.

Given my skepticism about absolute knowledge, the Trilemma sorts itself for me in the following way:

1. circularity is unacceptable - I won’t knowingly go there.
   
2. Infinite regression will get me closer to the truth, but never fully reach absolute truth. There’s a point of diminishing returns in this approach.
   
3. Axioms are useful when regression has proceeded to an absurdly detailed level. This serves as a practical substitute for 2).

This becomes part of my toolbox for thinking.

My work here is done.

Objective Moral Values - a conclusion

This summer, I started a personal evaluation of whether objective morals existed (here and at the links contained therein), by focusing first on what objectivity meant. In my sloth, I left that endeavor incomplete, and the world was left poorer for it. :-)

Let me tie up the loose ends. I started to realize that the word “objectivity” can be defined differently depending on what we are claiming to be objective about.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

It might be helpful to ask questions like a reporter would. Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?. Since the point of this disquisition is to sort out my thoughts on “objective moral values”, I’ll append a “what ought to be done?” to the list during the essay. How are these questions used, and when can we be objective about the answers we obtain?

When considering physical things - space-time, matter, energy and their behaviors and relationships - human beings can usually agree on what objects look like, sound like, behave like, consist of, etc. Given the right tools and techniques, we can observe and measure to a very high degree of accuracy. It may be that some approaches - powerful telescopes, particle colliders, radiometric dating - are available only to qualified experts, but those experts will usually agree on the results of the observations when the observations repeat to a very high degree. We can refer to these as being objective physical facts, because they will be the same for all observers, given a specified accuracy and the required tools and techniques. We can be objective about questions we’re interested in once we’ve reached a level of repeatability that is recognized as significant. (For LHC/Higgs fans, that figure was 5 Sigma, or a one in 3.5 million chance that the measurements obtained were erroneous).

When considering qualitative things - for example, what the meaning is of a particular set of observations - we run into divergence on interpretations. We then find objectivity - the ability to obtain the same interpretation by all observers - more difficult - even in the scientific arena. This leads to more hypotheses, more tests, and hopefully more knowledge.

Segue into the area of human affairs, and the need to do more interpretation and less physical measurement dictates that we get less consensus on what happened and why. We can be objective about many of the facts of what human beings have done, but not always. We begin to ask more qualitative questions - why and how - and we eventually get into the area of ethics and morals - what ought to be done. It is here that objectivity is often hardest to come by.

Ought

In the case of human affairs, the word “objective” starts to look like more of a consensus that groups of people hold about a topic. For example, I might think that I’m emotionally detached and non-judgemental about what should have been done in a situation, and can claim - without warrant, so far - to be objective. If I present that claim to a few people for scrutiny - the neighborhood, for instance - I might discover that my opinions coincide with theirs, thus the neighborhood might claim objectivity about that situation. If I subject my claim to a larger group, then that larger group can potentially achieve broader consensus, and thereby stake a larger claim to objectivity. There is no guarantee, however, that my neighborhood and a neighborhood half-way around the world will agree on that situation, therefore we can’t say that there is global objectivity about it.

The point above is that there will be differences among individuals and groups as to the affairs of humans. And what has been done, and what ought to be done, are subject to debate, consensus or disagreement, and any consensus will shift over time and context. That leads me to conclude that the term “objective” is a fluid concept when used about human affairs. Thus “objective morals” - although not completely absent in the world - are a very small subset of the morals that might exist across all people and all contexts. In the absence of any natural or supernatural agents actually specifying and enforcing morals that must be adhered to, I have to conclude that moral values are largely relative. I can see attempting to identify commonalities across legal, social and religious contexts, but I’d expect that very few ethical questions are unconditionally resolved in the same way in all contexts.

Objective moral values that all humans can agree to, then, seem limited to a very few topics. My interest in whether the existence of objective moral values is evidence that God exists is attenuated further by the fact that, until you and your interlocutor agree specifically on examples, you probably don’t know whether you’re talking about the same thing. Until these terms are stipulated, any argument that uses “objective moral values” in a premise is pretty useless.

Murky no more

I had a follow-up to my prior post all ready to publish, then decided it might be worth changing tack to focus less on Alethian Worldview commenter “murk” personally, and more on the presuppositional argument he and others use. Mind you, murk still gets held up as an exemplar of “not very good apologetics”, but I’ve realized he’s not that much at fault, given what little that presuppositionalism supplies in the way of material.

I skimmed over the Bahnsen Procedure earlier this year - here, here and here - and concluded that it still suffers the same flaws that all apologetic efforts do:

1. it asserts the existence of God without evidence or justification
   
2. it claims that God is the reason that (insert your mysterious phenomenon here) exists without warrant as to how God could be that reason
   
3. it doesn’t account for how the apologist can know these things

It is really no better than any other flavor of apologetics. The main twist is a crafty maneuver called the “Transcendental Argument” that hopes to inoculate against the first flaw by concluding God’s existence is a necessary precondition for some phenomenon. This is a classic bare assertion fallacy, thus invalid reasoning. Only apologists take this seriously.

From Wikipedia, here’s how it attempts to succeed:

(transcendental arguments) are also distinct from standard deductive and inductive forms of reasoning. Where a standard deductive argument looks for what we can deduce from the fact of X, and a standard inductive argument looks for what we can infer from experience of X, a transcendental argument looks for the necessary prior conditions to both the fact and experience of X.

You can guess that the “looks for the necessary prior conditions to both the fact and experience of X“ activity is less than intellectually rigorous (see my “three flaws” above). Murk doesn’t patch this up to make it effective, and experienced apologists don’t patch this up to make it effective. You see he and they claim that God is necessary, but never demonstrate why this might be true.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

Apologists like murk, whether they’re novices or masters at debate, are using a defective strategy. The novice probably doesn’t even know these flaws exist, thus they repeat them - over, and over, and over. That might explain why presuppositional arguments seem like filibusters.

You might think that apologists would see these flaws and either correct them, or abandon this approach because the flaws cannot be corrected, but they don’t. It keeps coming up, and it keeps getting knocked down because no one should get the mistaken impression that it presents even a minimally compelling argument. It just doesn’t.

Murky Apologetics

Presuppositional apologetics is fun because it’s just so weird. Recently, Russell Glasser did a post-mortem on one of his recent Atheist Experience shows to review his performance against a presupp caller, because he felt he hadn’t gotten his point across effectively. He had, of course, done just fine, but the presuppositional script drives even experienced counter-apologists to distraction. To quote AXP commenter somnus:

“I half suspect that people have such a hard time responding to it the first time they hear it because they’re flabbergasted by the breathtaking nerve it takes to assert it.“

As Russell said when summarizing his debate with Pastor Stephen Feinstein , it’s “impenetrable quasi-philosophical wankery”. Nonetheless, it has entertainment value.

Another candidate for the looney tunes hall of fame is Deacon Duncan’s occasional foil “murk” at Alethian Worldview. Starting with DD's blog post “The subjective choices of religion“ we’re treated to some industrial-grade presuppositional babble. Almost immediately murk imparts this little pearl of wisdom:

“science is good i agree – but it cannot function apart from comprehensive universal metaphysical commitments:
which science itself cannot demonstrate – it rests on them – if they were not science would be impossible... “

...followed by a laundry list of topics that we are supposed to assume are killer problems for non-Christians - but for which he provides no good reason to take seriously. Since we’re fun-loving sorts, let’s try to unknot some of this.

Specific claim #1:

“(Science) cannot function apart from comprehensive universal metaphysical commitments such as uniformity of nature“

As a software developer, I may not be the best choice to address what appear to be philosophical issues, but this is worth taking a poke at. First, a definition: “uniformity of nature is the principle that the course of nature continues uniformly the same”

An example of what murk probably means is given by this snippet on uniformitarianism in Wikipedia:

“The assumption of spatial and temporal invariance of natural laws is by no means unique to geology since it amounts to a warrant for inductive inference which, as Bacon showed nearly four hundred years ago, is the basic mode of reasoning in empirical science. Without assuming this spatial and temporal invariance, we have no basis for extrapolating from the known to the unknown and, therefore, no way of reaching general conclusions from a finite number of observations. (Since the assumption is itself vindicated by induction, it can in no way "prove" the validity of induction - an endeavor virtually abandoned after Hume demonstrated its futility two centuries ago).“

The implication being that Hume’s formulation of the problem of induction

“calls into question all empirical claims made in everyday life or through the scientific method “

In the same article, Karl Popper:

“argued that science does not use induction, and induction is in fact a myth. Instead, knowledge is created by conjecture and criticism. The main role of observations and experiments in science, he argued, is in attempts to criticize and refute existing theories.“

We laypeople can simplify this to "science attempts to falsify hypotheses". Those hypotheses that withstand attempts to be falsified are more likely to be an accurate model of reality, thus more likely to be true.

Given that induction is not universally accepted as the path to knowledge, murk's first claim about science resting on induction does nothing to undermine our confidence the knowledge can be obtained.

What does this mean to the casual observer? I’d “concluded” decades ago that absolute knowledge was not obtainable, and the best that we could hope for was to be more confident that what we think we know is in fact probably true. Nowadays, I think of personal knowledge in terms of the Sunrise Problem when attempting an off-the-cuff explanation of my certainty about a topic. (Trust me - I’m RARELY prompted to do this in practice). So ... does the problem of induction cause me to worry? No. I am, and probably have been for most of my adult life, more empiricist than anything, so arriving at knowledge purely by means of thinking about it wouldn’t be my preferred approach, given that resources were available to test it out.

My conclusion: murk uses the phrase “uniformity of nature” as a buzzword meant to impress the uninformed and divert the informed from the real issue being discussed: the existence of God. If he could produce a compelling argument for God, he wouldn’t need to blow smoke about vaguely tangential topics.

The Large God Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (“LHC”) was able to detect what many physicists understand to be the (or “a”) Higgs Boson. It determined to a 5-sigma probability that its mass resides in the 126 GeV area. Thousands of people, billions of dollars and decades have been expended in this search for one of the building blocks of reality.


The Large God Collider (“LGC”) has not yielded any results - because it hasn’t been built. Theists and the organizations they belong to - religions, if we must - have not seen fit to employ thousands of people, billions of dollars and decades in the search for a god. I’m personally disappointed by this. I think the spectacle of smashing less powerful supernatural entities together - maybe some garden gnomes - to produce an indication of a higher-powered supernatural entity - say an invisible pink dragon - would be fun for the whole family.




What could be the reason the LGC hasn’t been built?




Anyone?




Bueller?

Sense and Goodness without God

I have to ’fess up to lacking motivation lately. The general arguments against theism - or the supernatural in any form that I’m aware of - are too strong for me to take theism seriously right now. And lesser baloney just hardly seems interesting - at least this month. That’s not to say that there isn’t good larnin’ to be had out thar in the internetz.


Case in point: Richard Carrier recently took the Objective Moral Values topic to new heights in his posts “What Exactly Is Objective Moral Truth?”i & “The Moral Truth Debate: Babinski & Shook”. Therein, it becomes clear that Carrier expects commenters to be at least familiar with his relevant other writings, so I took the bait and purchased Sense and Goodness Without God.


I like Carrier’s writing. It’s scholarly and extraordinarily well organized. It is essentially a thesis that defines “worldview”, then goes about in fine detail how to construct a rational one without resorting to God. I’m only a third of the way through it, because I tend to stop and reflect often and at length when reading works of this nature, but I’ll go out on a limb (not very far) and recommend it. At the very least, the clear and logical layout is a template for most of us to follow - but I’ll bet the content will be enjoyable and instructive to most free thinkers as well.


Buy it!


 

Burden of proof - another take

If you and I have a disagreement on whether something exists or not, we can resolve it in the following way:



Assume we each have the same amount of knowledge about the world, i.e. we have the same background information.



Assume that you feel that "X" exists.



Assume that I have never experienced anything that leads me to believe that "X" exists.



We can conclude that only you have a motive to present a case for the truth of your belief that "X" exists, because I, not having this belief, have no motive to develop a case about “X”, one way or another.



The responsibility resides with you to make your case about “X”.



It’s that simple.

The KCA continues to fail

I keep seeing debates on the existence of God that contain the Kalam Cosmological Argument as support for the contention that God exists. In case you forgot, it takes this general form:



1 – Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2 – The universe began to exist.

3 – Therefore, the universe had a cause.



Over and over, the glaring, fatal defect in the KCA is that, unless God's existence is independently proven, and he/she/it can be independently established as that cause, the conclusion can only be 3, "Therefore, the universe had a cause" - nothing else. The KCA does neither of those things. It only takes you a third of the way. All of the lip-flapping and arm-waving about actual infinities being impossible, and actual things popping into existence uncaused also being impossible, are irrelevant. They're irrelevant because God's existence has always been hypothetical, and no real ability to cause actual things can even begin to be confirmed until he stops being hypothetical.



So STOP ALREADY! The Kalam Cosmological Argumen just doesn't work as an argument for the existence of God!

Show Me The Money

Doug claims he has a one hundred dollar bill in his pocket. What is my reaction? It may be a number of things, but if we characterize it along the “interest axis”, then I might be anywhere from wholly disinterested to obsessively interested. If I sincerely don’t care, then the fact of Doug having or not having a $100 bill in his pocket means nothing to me, although it may mean quite a lot to Doug. You might characterize me as apathetic with regards to Doug’s claim. I believe it can be known whether Doug has $100 in his pocket, but I don’t care.

You can see the parallel to religious belief shaping up here, can’t you?

At the one end of the “interest axis”, I do not want nor need to know the answer of whether Doug has that bill in his pocket. No problem exists for me here, but it may be that Doug expected me to express some interest. I won't go into what Doug’s motivations are for this expectation - because I cannot know without some honest and heart-felt conversation with Doug. My absence of interest does not present a problem for me, with regards to Doug’s potential ownership of a $100 bill. But if Doug had a motive in claiming ownership of this bill, he might have some disappointment that I don't have the same interest as he does in sharing the view that Doug has $100 dollars in his pocket.

If I _am_ interested, then I might ask that Doug show the $100 bill to me. If he can show me the bill, then I know that he indeed has what he claims to have. However, if he doesn’t show me the bill, then what am I to think?

WHAT. AM. I. TO. THINK?

This is where people who believe in God are. They do not show the $100 bill to me, consequently, I am unable to be sure that the claimed $100 bill exists. As far as Doug and the money goes, I am equally justified in believing that there is no bill in Doug's pocket, as I am believing that there is, given that I have no bias towards Doug’s veracity. One major difference between Doug and a God-believer is that I know for a fact that $100 bills exist, and it is possible for Doug to obtain one. The God-believer, however, can make the claim that God exists, but they will not produce this God for my inspection. It may be possible for a person to demonstrate God’s existence in the way that Doug can produce a $100 bill for my inspection, but it has never been done. That implies that the probability that a God - in the sense that Christians claim - can be physically demonstrated to exist is very low. It may be possible that a deist conception of God exists, but the underlying assumption of deism is that the deist God does not interact with the world, thus a physical demonstration of its existence is highly unlikely. Similarly, the pantheist conception of God - that we and all of reality are part of God, is unlikely to be demonstrable, although it might be more likely than the other two conceptions.

Where does this all lead?

It leads us to demand that the God-believer show us the money. If Doug can show us the money, then so should they. If the God-believer claims that God can interact with the world, then it’s reasonable to expect that they can physically demonstrate it's existence.

SHOW. ME. THE. MONEY!

Absolutes and uncertainty

I tried several times to add a comment to Deacon Duncan’s post “The Gypsy Curse” at Evangelical Realism this morning - but was thwarted by the iPad/JavaScript conspiracy. Or maybe he’s blocking me. :-).

Deacon is deconstructing Pastor Stephen Feinstein’s impenetrable quasi-philosophical wankery (Russell’s characterization) from the Feinstein-Glasser debate last summer, and I can't wait for each week’s new installment.

Here’s what I wrote:

On a serious note, I have to ask about logic, and how much of it is axiom and how much of it is demonstrable **to a high degree of certainty**.

First, I assume most of what we learn is by exploration. A hot stove burns you, you learn not to touch it. From there we build up a library of rules of thumb that guide us through life. As society grows, people agree that some of these rules of thumb are universally valuable, and thoughtful people reverse engineer them into more formal statements.

It seems like a very few axioms are required (identity, non-contradiction), and that other components of our logic library can be exercised to a high degree of certainty (one error in a million, billion, or more).

Isn't the Pastor's (presuppositionalist's) line of attack here just based on a desire to have more absolutes in the world, as opposed to a willingness to accept uncertainty?

Comments?
Ridicule?

There are two trains of thought above that can be explored further. One, that some things require base assumptions (“axioms” or “presuppositions”, to use the debater’s parlance). Two, that the desire (or need?) for absolutes distinguishes the theist personality from the non-theist.

The second thought may have the broader implication, in that the need to have some (imagined or real) organization in one’s life - including clear answers to life’s burning questions - might be driving the attack on the first thought - “axioms”.

I don't know how long I’ve been able to deal with uncertainty - many decades, for sure. I don't have this burning need for an externally directed purpose (I’ve made my own), or an answer to the questions “where did everything come from” and “where will I go when I die”. We can talk about all of those for a lifetime, but it ceases being interesting to me when people act as if an absolute answer is *required*. I therefore tend to see this need for absolutes to be a common characteristic of the firm believer. Like it or not, I’m finding it harder to not be dismissive of this character trait.

As for absolute truths, such as axioms, I'm interested in how far down we can go before relying on mutually-agreed-upon axioms that we can’t “prove”.

Food for future thoughts.

God should be measurable

If God can affect humans, then there is a context in which God and humans coexist.

If this context exists, then humans should be able to access God.

If God can be accessed, then he can be observed and measured, thus proving the existence of God.

The fact that no theist has embarked on a successful quest to find this shared context and to access God for observation and measurement admits to one or more possible explanations. They may be too lazy. They may be afraid of what they'll find (which admits to a number of possible conclusions itself). The may not be capable of doing so. It may not exist. There are probably others that I've missed, but all of this leads us to a conclusion that God is not very probable, given that the people having the vested interest in proving the existence of God haven't done so.

That also leads to another possible conclusion - that they have a vested interest in not proving the existence of God, which allows them to define God for their own mysterious purposes.

Debate Post-Mortem 1 - What have we learned?

I've been done with the Craig-Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist" for over a week now.

My initial goal was just to get a general sense of how Dr. Craig orchestrates his debate performance.

I wasn't originally out to rebut Dr. Craig's arguments for the existence of God - most of them are well-known, and have long been rebutted. What I did want to do was to really get a feel for the offensive and defensive tactics that an allegedly top-notch theist would take during an organized debate - and prepare myself for the same at an informal, street-level setting. What I was able to discern about his performance is obvious to most observers: He carries himself well, he appears serious, knowledgeable, and occasionally light-hearted; he speaks clearly and confidently, he's organized and economical with his arguments, he's well-rehearsed and sticks to his talking points, he is familiar with the opponent's objections and with the opponent's own positive case; he frames the debate effectively.

I also noticed that he does a lot of other shit, as well.

Prior to reading this debate transcript, I had watched his debates against Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss on YouTube. From those, I got the impression that he was masterful at controlling the flow of the debate and assertion-bombing the opponent in order to diffuse the opponent's effectiveness, and obscuring the weak arguments he (Craig) has to give. Several blog posts from Luke Muehlhauser at Common Sense Atheism* and Andrew at Evaluating Christianity* lead me to believe that the guy was an unstoppable debating machine. That may well be, but now I see why. Beyond having a solid debating style, he's really reprehensible in his tactics and rhetoric. It's hard to tell if he's being dishonest, but it comes off that way. You can't make all these factual and logical mistakes and not be accused of being incompetent, dishonest, or well-paid. Maybe all three.

The following sections provide a sampling of errors in reasoning that he employs. Note that all these examples are from his twenty minute opening statement alone. That's as far as I had to look. Note also that in some cases, the examples shown demonstrate more than one fallacy or misuse of words and ideas. It would be hard for you and I to cram so many errors into such a short talk, but Dr. Craig does it with "style".

He misleads the audience by asserting that the proposition being defended ("Does God Exist?") must be falsified by his opponent (this is also called shifting the burden of proof):

...we need to ask ourselves two questions with respect to this hypothesis [the hypothesis that God exists]: (1) What evidence is there that serves to verify this hypothesis? and (2) What evidence is there that serves to falsify this hypothesis?

This is wrong - the affirmative must present the positive case. Period. Craig uses this tactic of shifting the burden of proof to claim that the opponent has failed to make the case against the proposition - and we saw that he came back to this again and again.

He misleads the audience into thinking his arguments will follow the rules of logic (this is also called lying)

If our goal is to determine rationally whether or not this hypothesis is true, we must conduct our inquiry according to the basic rules of logic

Of course, we see just in this brief listing, how frequently his logic fails. It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham. It's a travashammockery.

He makes use of bare assertions

...this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe

This always cracks me up, because it's such hogwash. By the way, we could say that this phrase is also a false choice (the possible cause is not limited to Craig's preferred explanation)and possibly, an appeal to ignorance (I don't know what did it, therefore God). You can't get this kind of entertainment just anywhere!

He appeals to authority - often using authorities that are not qualified for the subject matter, or of unknown quality

For as Anthony Kenny of Oxford University urges, "A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the . . . universe came from nothing and by nothing."

Anthony Kenny is a nobody to most of the world, so this is curious use of an authority. Dr. Craig chose a philosopher to provide a quote about what an atheist "must believe" if he believes the big bang theory. What research supports this? Of course, we're not treated to any! There's not a shred of evidence that an atheist "must believe" any specific thing, let alone something that somehow supports the point that Dr. Craig is attempting to make.

He uses circular arguments

His whole Argument from the Existence of Objective Moral Values is circular.

He cherry picks quotes and quotes out of context.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great atheist of the last century who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

What Nietzsche said, in context, was

"I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!"

He misrepresents the opponents position.

Atheists have tried for centuries to disprove the existence of God, but no one has ever been able to come up with a successful argument.

Technically, atheism is just a lack of belief in a theistic deity - so there's no inherent stance about hypotheticals such as God. And **technically**, Craig could be correct if he's just referring to two or more atheists - but he makes it sound as if it's **many** atheists trying to do the falsifying. I suspect using atheism as the foil here - as opposed to other forms of non-belief - is convenient in order to gin up the tribal "wagon-circling" that will help believers defend their cherished views against those who don't share them.

He misrepresents current scientific and mathematical thinking

...mathematicians recognize that the idea of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions

For a correction of Dr. Craig's erroneous thinking, see the Wikipedia page on infinity for an overview. I'm sure you've noticed that he makes an unsupported generalization - claiming "...mathematicians recognize..." as if the broad class of professionals identified as mathematicians say such a thing. Again, we are shared no data that supports this. It's fascinating, his ability to make two or more errors in one phrase!

He uses false choice

The fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design

Here, we see Dr. Craig confine the choices, which he's not qualified to do, nor are his cited authorities. The initial conditions are the result of something that we're not near to discovering, so Dr. Craig has fabricated talking points that have no meaning to the scientific world.

Unwinding this one further, we see that it is WE that have adapted to the universe. So the false choice, in a sense, masks a more fundamental error in reasoning.

He uses appeals to ignorance

The answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable

Actually, this also demonstrates a misunderstanding (or purposeful misuse) of probabilistic-like terms. If he takes into account the evidence that we do, in fact, exist, then prior probability is useless to his argument.

He uses appeals to emotion

For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives

In fact, his whole "Fifth Argument - The immediate experience of God" - is a non argument, which he acknowledges while delivering it.

All-in-all, he's really reprehensible.

I can't take away much positive to say about Dr. Craig as a person, nor his arguments for the existence of God, after poring over this debate rather closely.

Although I may have missed other errors of language, reasoning and what we often refer to as facts, I feel completely justified in dismissing Dr. Craig as a credible commenter on the spiritual, the supernatural or the natural world, such as they may be.

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*Sadly, both sites are not being actively updated, although you can still get to the links I provide below:

• Reviews of William Lane Craig's Debates at Common Sense Atheism
• Mapping the Kalam: Introduction the first of many posts
• How to Debate William Lane Craig at Common Sense Atheism
• Advice for Debating William Lane Craig at Evaluating Christianity
• Advice for Debating William Lane Craig - part 2
• Advice for Debating William Lane Craig - part 3
• Advice for Debating William Lane Craig - part 4
• Advice for Debating William Lane Craig - part 5

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More recently, Chris Hallquist has written a series of posts at The Uncredible Hallq that give WLC a good working-over:

• You can get to them all from this page
• Here's a Google Docs page that offers a chapter on Dr. Craig from Chris's upcoming book
  
• ...and here's a Google Docs page that offers a chapter on why there are no good arguments for God from that same upcoming book

...and Deacon Duncan at Evangelical Realism and Alethian WorldView did a lengthy review of Craig's book On Guard that is well worth reading! It's many installments, so be patient - start here and read through the end here.

Dr. Pigliucci's Closing Statement

The final closing statement for the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?" comes from Dr. Massimo Pigliucci:

Second Question

First of all, Dr. Craig said that I'm asking for the burden of proof on his side but that at the same time I'm suggesting I can falsify God. Let's be more precise here. I did say two different things: I said that the burden of proof for entities, energies, or kinds of events that we have no idea and no visible proof they exist is on the side of the person that suggests that these things are actually real. At the same time, I was referring to falsifiability and the possibility to deny some specific arguments. I referred to specific descriptions of God's interference with the universe. If you tell me God did this, like Noah's flood, which Dr. Craig conceded must have been either non-existent or a local event, well, then, I can falsify that. So the two things are very distinct.

I get what he's saying, but he could have been clearer. Maybe something like:

Dr. Craig claims I said "x". What I said was "y".

Dr. P appears to mix falsifiability into the burden of proof question. A clearer definition is required. I'm guilty of this as well ... I can read the concept, and it makes sense, but conveying it to someone else extemporaneously is not something I do well.

First Question

First Argument

Dr. Craig said that it follows from his premises that the ultimate cause of the universe must be timeless and personal, and he claims that this is a logical statement that follows with irrefutability. Why? Have you ever stopped and thought why is it that the cause of the universe should be timeless and personal? Just because a philosopher tells you that that is the case? What do we know about the ultimate cause of the universe? Well, I can conceive of causes of the universe that are not timeless or are not personal. I have no problem whatsoever with that! So you have to be careful in distinguishing what is actually, really, totally logically consistent and what in fact is an assumption.

Makes sense ... I have no quibble with this last paragraph.

And speaking of internal consistency, Dr. Craig said that his positions are internally consistent. They probably are. You can come up with a lot of internally consistent logical systems that nevertheless have nothing to do with reality. You do it all the time when you play a computer game. You create an entire universe that is logically consistent, that has rules, and has behaviors that are predictable, and you can play with it­but it doesn't exist in the physical world. So the fact that something is logically consistent does not mean that it is real. The two are completely different things. "That something that is logical must, therefore, exist" is a fallacious argument.

I think this is very well said. We amateur counter-apologists should make note of the phrases: "the fact that something is logically consistent does not mean that it is real. The two are completely different things. That something that is logical must, therefore, exist is a fallacious argument."

Third Argument

We keep going on this thing of morality; is it objective or is it not objective? Dr. Craig says that I'm waffling and I'm going back and forth on my positions. I'm not going back and forth on anything. All I'm saying is that morality can change, and, in fact, I'm arguing that morality better change because human beings, the needs of human beings, and what we must decide, do change. So why would you want a system that is completely fixed and is impossible to change? Why would you follow the morality or the rules that were laid down by people that lived 2,000 years or 3,000 years ago? Let me give you a simple example that doesn't have anything to do with Christianity. As you know, most strict Muslim people don't eat pork meat. The reason not to eat pork meat is very good; indeed, before the invention of refrigeration it was a really bad idea to eat meat in the desert, which is where Mohammed was preaching. Today that's no longer true because of things called refrigerators, freezers, and things of that sort. Of course, occasionally you still have E. coli which is going to get you, but most of the time that doesn't happen. That rule doesn't make any sense anymore. So people that are following that rule do it out of tradition, which is a perfectly respectable reason to do it, of course; you can follow all the traditions you like. But it is not an objective value, an invariant way of constructing a morality.

Again, I agree. I think Dr. P's example is good, but for me, the argument that "without God there can be no objective moral values" as an argument in the cumulative case for God is circular on it's face. It assumes that which your attempting to prove. Since I've been reading this transcript, I realize that it can be rejected because of its circularity, and it can be neutralized with the observation that objective moral values do not exist - only the "feeling" that they exist is an actor in the world.

Fifth Argument

We touched briefly on the personal experience thing. Well, of course, personal experiences are very important. We do a lot of things by personal experience. All of the daily decisions in our lives are personal experiences. We fall in love; that's a personal experience. There's no logic behind it most of the times. The problem is, we are talking here about admissible evidence. Well, I'm sorry, but admissible evidence doesn't include personal experiences because personal experience can be good for you, but it's hardly communicable to everybody else. People that are on drugs have all sorts of personal experiences which I'm sure you wouldn't confuse for reality.

Although I agree that this is true, and should be points for Dr. P from a technical standpoint, if the goal is to persuade audience members, I can see where this might put some people off.

Let me close by saying that I hope that tonight we have all really learned something. I certainly have learned a lot from Dr. Craig, and I want to thank you and thank him for this. I hope that there is going to be some more understanding and some more thinking among all of us on this very important question we have addressed tonight.

Conclusion for this speech:
I knew in advance that the First Cause and Fine Tuning /Design arguments for the existence of God were full of holes. Several years ago, I picked up the Philosophy of Religion CD from The Teaching Company. Prof. James Hall laid out there how each is said to fail. This debate did not change my understanding of the fundamental arguments, but aided me in identifying the sophistry and smoke-blowing that someone like WLC can slather on top to make it look like a cake.

The argument to Objective Moral Values is one that I was less familiar with. It suffers from the two main defects already mentioned - It is "circular on it's face", and that objective moral values don't exist. Makes it hard to take seriously.

Craig's last two arguments are the weakest, but maybe the two that most believers identify with. Jesus' resurrection is still just hearsay at best, utter fabrication at worst. I tend to think that it's a legend that was constructed to give Jesus - a great local teacher - the same status as other recent - and competing - deities. Personal experience is, as mentioned, extraordinarily weak as support for the cumulative case for God.

Pigliucci's arguments for naturalism are in the right ballpark - let me see if I can summarize. He makes a case for naturalism - fair enough. He cites problems of evil, in theism (believing that something beyond matter and energy exist); of morality and of Christianity in general; as well as rebuts Design and Fine Tuning.

Comparing the two styles, by reviewing the written transcripts only, it seems like Craig's five arguments are neatly arranged and well rehearsed. Pigliucci's positive arguments for a naturalistic world view were not neatly organized or ordered, making the first couple of segments indirect and less effective. I thought his second rebuttal and his closing remarks were both good. This may have been due to necessity, but it was more effective.

I still don't think this was a blowout for Dr. Craig. If I were scoring it like a boxing match, then the first two rounds go to Craig, and the last two go to Pigliucci. Now, the first two rounds contain the vast majority of the content, and they were first, so there are extra points for overall quality and first impression. Make this a 38-36 win for Craig.

Dr. Craig concludes his First Rebuttal

I'm whizzing through Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?". I happened to have a couple of unpublished posts backed up, so let's flush 'em out of our system!

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

First Question

Now what about my arguments to show that God does exist? Dr. Pigliucci uses a general argument against this to say that God is not explanatory. But notice he fails to understand the structure of my arguments. My arguments are deductive arguments, that is to say, if the premises are true, then by the laws of logic the conclusion follows inescapably. Whether you like the conclusion, whether you think it's explanatory, is irrelevant: as long as the premises are true, it follows by deductive logic that the conclusion is true.

Craig's rebuttal that Dr. P does not understand the structure of Dr. C's arguments is some technical mumbo-jumbo that only debate practitioners, logicians and philosophers will "get" easily. The rest of us will drool.

Via The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "A deductive argument is an argument in which it is thought that the premises provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion." This is as Craig says it is. What Craig is slipping by the unsuspecting audience is that his premisses are not necessarily true. In the next paragraph, Dr. Craig concludes that "A transcendent cause of the universe exists." . He keeps asserting that transcendent cause without an ounce of evidence or rational support. It would be correct to say that if premisses 1 & 2 are true, then "A cause of the universe exists", but he does not say this. I can even quibble over whether either premiss 1 or premiss 2 is true, but that would divert us too much from the structure and style of this debate. You may refer back to my discussion of Uncredible Hallq commenter MNbo's criticisms of my article on Craig's cosmological argument - or see the Wikipedia page on The Big Bang - the section Speculative Physics Beyond the Big Bang to see other ideas related to the Big Bang that make the idea of "a beginning" irrelevant.

More Dr. Craig:

First Argument

So what he is going to deny? In my first argument I argued: (1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Will he deny that? (2) The universe began to exist.According to Steven Hawking in his book The Nature of Space and Time (1996), "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang."{2} Will he deny that, the paradigm held by most cosmologists today? If he will not deny either of those two premises, then he cannot deny the conclusion, that A transcendent cause of the universe exists.

He says, but where did God come from? Very easily I can answer this question. The argument proves that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Therefore, there must be a first cause which never came into being. Whatever begins to exist has to have a cause; but a being which exists timelessly, spacelessly, and necessarily is uncaused. This is what the atheist has always said the universe is. But that is now untenable in light of the philosophical arguments I gave and the cosmological evidence for the beginning of the universe.

In other words, neither of my two premises of my first argument were refuted by Dr. Pigliucci, and therefore I think we have good grounds for thinking a transcendent Creator exists.

Notice that Craig cites Stephen Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." as a warrant for his assertion that the universe began at the Big Bang. At the risk of being really really really repetitive, the Big Bang Model holds that the universe was once in an incredibly small hot dense state - and nothing else. Hawking is saying "(people) believe", and Craig weaves the two together in (probably) his usual authoritative fashion. But Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." is not the same as "It is established that ...". And since the Big Bang does not posit a beginning in the literal sense, then Craig's argument is entirely empty.

Second Argument

My second argument was based on the complex order of the universe. And here he had three objections.

(1) You cannot look for a Creator from what we don't know. I am not arguing on the basis of what we don't know. What I'm suggesting is that we do know that the initial conditions of the universe cannot be explained by law because they are initial conditions. They cannot be explained by chance because it is just too fantastically improbable. And therefore being neither explicable by chance nor by law, design is the only alternative. What is his answer? I would like to know.

(2) He says, "Well, your argument doesn't work because there's only one universe." Let me explain the theory of probability behind this. Imagine a blue dot on a piece of a paper, and let that be our universe. Slightly alter some of these constants and quantities. That makes a new universe. If it's life-permitting, make another blue dot. If it's life- prohibiting, make a red dot. Then do it again, and then again, and again, and again. What you wind up with is a sea of red with only a few pinpoints of blue here and there. That's what I mean when I say that life-permitting universes are incalculably improbable.

(3) He says, "But the probability of all these people being here tonight, these specific people, is highly improbable, and yet we are here!" That's a failure to understand the argument. Any universe you pick is equally probable, yes, but it is highly, highly improbable that the universe you pick will be life-permitting. That's the point. It's like a lottery in which there's a billion, billion, billion black marbles and one white marble. Any marble you pick is equally improbable, but the probability that the marble you do pick will be black is vastly more probable than that it will be white. Similarly, given the improbability of the initial conditions of the universe, the universe ought to be dead; there shouldn't be any life in the universe. The fact that it cannot be explained on the basis of chance or law leaves us with design as the best explanation for why the universe is finely tuned for our existence.

In point (1), Dr. Craig says that the parameters of the universe are too fantastically improbable to believe they are that way by chance. This is 1) a bare assertion, an argument from ignorance, a false choice, and privileging the hypothesis.

In point (2), Dr. Craig constructs a vague probability argument, while ignoring the overwhelming fact that we are here. The a priori probability is now irrelevant because it is now a fact (probability 1) that we are here.

In point (3), he doubles down on the probability chip, continuing to ignore that we are in fact here.

Third Argument

What about objective moral values? He agrees there are no objective moral values, but he says values are things that work or society will collapse. That is not at all true. Look at Nazi Germany. In his book,Morality after Auschwitz, Peter Haas asks how an entire society who have existed in which the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies went on for a decade with hardly a protest being offered. He says the reason is because a new ethic was in place in Germany which did not define the holocaust as evil, but as good. And he points out that that ethic cannot be criticized from within because it was internally consistent. It can only be criticized if you have a transcendent vantage point and anchor for moral values. On Dr. Pigliucci's view rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia are all morally indifferent because there is no objective right and wrong. And I submit that is simply untenable. Objective moral values do exist, from which it follows logically that God exists.

I hoped to get my other arguments on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the rebuttal; but I'm out of time, so I shall quit.

Dr. Craig takes one of his weaker arguments and bolsters it with appeals to emotion. Yes, we all abhor "rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia". What we object to is the warrant that this sense of abhorrence signals Objective Morals, and that this somehow is proof of God. Dr. Craig didn't make his case in his opening statement, and continues to not make the case here.

All in all, this is becoming tiresome. I started out as a grudging admirer of his, and am now convinced that he's an unscrupulous douche hydrant.

Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Continuing Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?".

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig's first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

The Regression Argument

(2) What about the regression argument, that the more we know the less we think God intervenes in the universe? Well, notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. It doesn't even prove that God doesn't often intervene in the universe. All that follows from that argument is the sociological factor that we don't think God often intervenes in the universe. And that conclusion is perfectly compatible with the idea that God often in fact does intervene in the universe. But, moreover, even if it were true that God doesn't often intervene in the universe in miraculous ways, that's not incompatible with Christianity. After all, miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways. So the argument is simply inconclusive.

Dr. Craig serves up a world-class vacuity: "notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist". Ummm ... haven't we established a number of times that the burden of proof is on the claimant, and Dr. Craig - taking the affirmative position on the question "Does God Exist" - has that burden? And aren't we still waiting to hear rational argument that the affirmative position is superior to the negative one? And shouldn't we expect that the negative position won't waste any time on trying to prove a negative? The answers are yes, yes, yes and yes. Dr. Craig is not living up to his responsibility in the debate so far.

Pragmatic Argument for Naturalism

(3) What about the argument that naturalism works? Not at all! What works are scientific hypotheses. But those do not test naturalism because on the hypothesis that there is a Creator God who has designed the universe to operate according to certain natural laws, that could also work. So the fact that scientific theories work is in no sense a proof of naturalism.

What would you call this - a "Me Too" argument? Dr. Craig makes it sound as if naturalism is unproven, except if it is, couldn't it also be that God made it that way, thus proving the existence of God.

If Dr. Craig were interested in proving the existence of God, he would come up with at least one hypothesis that can be tested and whose only explanation would be the existence of God. Throughout human history, such a thing has never been done. It ***could*** be done, but isn't. The universe of possible answers to the question "why hasn't an attempt to prove the existence of God been made" ever been performed has many possible alternatives, including "it can't be done", "there's too much money to be made" and "we need to keep the unwashed masses guessing so that we can retain power". Other answers are possible as well, but these come to mind at the drop of a hat.

By the way, I don't know what tactic Dr. Craig is pursuing in his Me Too argument, but it speaks to believers because they already assume that God is behind it all. Never mind that the point of the debate is "Does God Exist?", and that using God as a term in a premiss is circular, thus invalid. Oh well.

Problem of Evil

(4) He says, "What about the problem of evil?" Well, let me make two responses here.
First, no atheist has ever been able to show a logical inconsistency between the propositions "God exists" and "Evil exists." They tried, but no one has ever been able to show that those two are contradictory. In fact, you can actually show that they are consistent by adding a third proposition, namely, "God has morally sufficient reasons to permit evil." As long as that third proposition is even possibly true, it shows that God's existence and evil's existence are logically compatible. The atheist seems to assume that if God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, we have to be privy to them. But there's absolutely no reason to think that that is true.
In fact, secondly, evil is actually proof that God exists. My argument would go like this:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. (Dr. Pigliucci agrees.)
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, objective values exist. (Some things are really evil.)
4. Therefore, God exists.
And thus evil only calls into question God's existence on a superficial level. On a deeper philosophical level evil actually demonstrates the existence of God because evil as such could not exist without God.

Dr. Craigs first "refutation" of the argument from evil puts him in the position of arguing for a God that permits evil. This is strange, since Christianity makes a big deal about God's goodness. Maybe God can't do anything about it. Maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he's evil. Maybe he doesn't exist. The possibilities are endless. If God exists and evil exists, why worship the fucker?

Notwithstanding my bad attitude about religion, arguing that the coexistence of God and Evil is not inconsistent is no argument for a Christian God. The negative position should press this, as all we get out of this particular argument is a God that humans would be distrustful of.

Noah's Ark

(5) The fifth argument he raised was the problem of Noah's Ark. I would simply just dismiss this by saying: First, it doesn't disprove the existence of God. Secondly, I would take Noah's flood to be a local flood, not a universal flood, in any case.
So all of these arguments, I think, are either invalid or based on false premises and hardly present any good reason to think that atheism is true.

Noah's Ark is a physical impossibility, and Dr. Craig knows it - he squirms his way out of the discussion without providing a rejoinder. A strong point for the non-theist position.

These rebuttals reviewed today are pretty shallow. Both the Problem of Evil and the Noah's Ark interlude raise the question of Bible inerrancy. Obviously Noah's Ark is easy to attack, but so are Yahweh's incompetence, petulance and immoral behavior. Add to that the inconsistencies that abound, and a Christian God becomes an obvious implausibility.