Presupposing that a Christian God exists

Before I stumbled across Deacon Duncan's review of the debate between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein, I'd started reading the debate (my prior comments are here and here), and was planning a more elaborate review. Since Duncan is doing this already, I'm relieved of that motivation, and can record my take-away for handy recall, should I ever need it. To re-establish the context of the Glasser-Feinstein debate, Glasser is an atheist, Feinstein is a presuppositionalist apologist, and the topic - which I never saw declared, but which I infer from Feinstein's opening post - is that a Christian worldview is correct.

Pastor Stephen Feinstein asserts that without the Christian God, intelligibility is not possible, thus atheism is impossible. By this last phrase, I believe he means that the lack of belief in a personal god - atheism - cannot be true. His words:

I affirm that the Christian worldview is the only worldview that is possible given the preconditions of intelligibility

In a nutshell, Feinstein's argument reduces to an unsupported assertion that the Christian God exists.

My summary - which draws on my own thoughts as well as Duncan's - is this:

Reality must present itself in a way that's capable of being comprehended by hypothetical observers if it is to be understood - it must be "self-consistent". Its features, their attributes, behaviors and relationships must be repeatable under repeatable conditions in order to be understood. From observations that we actual observers make, we can then make inferences about their attributes, behaviors and relationships that might pertain under varying conditions. From those inferences, we then can derive fundamental conventions ("laws" or "axioms") upon which other knowledge items are constructed. Introducing unobserved features into this framework makes the framework inconsistent and thus unintelligible. A god is just such an unobserved feature.

A god or other unobservable feature is not logically ruled out in this scheme, but is instead made unnecessary due to the principle of parsimony ("Occam's Razor"). All other things being equal, the simpler scheme is to be preferred.

It's that simple.

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 I happened to have a couple of unpublished posts backed up, so let's flush 'em out of our system!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's First Rebuttal

Today, I'll start on Dr. william Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?". The first thing I noticed is - as others have pointed out - Dr. Craig is frequently dishonest. That he continues this dishonesty, and is revered for it in the fundamentalist community, drives non-believers crazy. Incidentally, Luke Muehlhauser at the now-inactive website Common Sense Atheism ranked this debate as "ugly" - meaning that Dr. C's opponent got hammered. So I'll bet Dr. Pigliucci doesn't call him out on this.

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. P concludes his opening remarks

Dr. Craig begins his first rebuttal:

Second Question
Now Dr. Pigliucci presents in my count about five arguments that he thinks would falsify the hypothesis that God exists. Let's look at each of these and see if they're persuasive arguments.

I have to stop right here and point out that immediately Dr. Craig says something that is not true. He says "Dr. Pigliucci presents in my count about five arguments that he thinks would falsify the hypothesis that God exists". Dr. Pigliucci clearly stated that he would not and can not falsify the existence of God - so he's explicitly not refuting it.

It's worth reiterating here that in both organized debate and in science, the burden of proof falls to the claimant. Dr. Craig, in claimimg that atheists have not been able to falsify the existence of God, is ignoring conventions that are fundamental to intellectual and scientific progress. It is wholly unproductive to allow charlatans to make unsubstantiated claims and waste the time of the public, but this is one of Dr. Craig's favorite tactics.

In everyday life, You would call this "a lie".

Argument from Imperfections
(1) He says the universe is not perfect. For example, squids have better eyes than human beings. I don't think that this argument in any way disproves God's existence. Let me mention three reasons.

First, that objection assumes a static theory of creation--that God created each individual creature, which never changes. But even creationists typically hold to a dynamic theory of creation which allows micro-evolutionary change within certain types, so that God could create a certain primal type of being and then there would be micro-evolutionary change within that type, and you might look at these sorts of imperfections (as he calls them) as by-products of micro-evolutionary pressures which gradually emerge.

"Dynamic theory of creation"? Really? Google this, and you get a bunch of creationist references. Citing fringe theories that the claimants have never lifted a finger to test is hardly compelling.

At this stage of the debate, we can't know what Dr. P will say in response, or whether he even cares to address this. Regardless, Dr. Pigliucci is not creationist. He clearly asserted principles of evolution, which don't require "static" or "dynamic" theories of creation - it doesn't require "creation" (in Dr. Craig's sense) at all. Dr. Craig is thus putting words into Pigliucci's mouth - lying.

Secondly, the objection presumes to know what God would do if He were to design something, that we know that God would create the eye in a certain way if He existed or He would create the digestive system in this way if He existed. And I personally think that's simply presumptuous. We have no idea how to speculate about what God would create if He were to exist. Maybe it's not important to God that we be able to have eyes to see in exactly a certain way, maybe there are other off-setting reasons why God permits systems designed in this way to exist. In other words, the argument is enormously presumptuous in thinking that we know what God would create if He were to exist.

This argument is enormously vacuous, to turn a phrase. Dr. Craig is defending a so-far-imaginary being by attacking Dr. P's observation that the human eye is less capable than other eyes. If this debate is about whether God exists, then neither participant can really make claims based on what God might prefer, because the question of God isn't resolved. So Dr. P's criticism is warranted, and Dr. C's defense is not..

And thirdly, perfection is a relative term, after all. These supposedly imperfect organs like the human eye function extraordinarily well. I mean, think of what the human eye has done in terms of art, literature, architecture, and so forth! This is hardly persuasive evidence, I think, that it could not be the product of an intelligent designer.

...sigh... Dr. Craig is making a blatant argument for intelligent design. ...sigh... Teleological arguments rely on the claimant being unwilling or unable to 1) reason about other possible explanations; 2)reason about the plausibility of their preferred explanation. There are several logical errors here: 1) it's a false choice; 2) it privileges the hypothesis (after Chris Hallquist); 3) it's argumentum ad ignorantium

Do I need to mention that Dr. Craig attributes art, literature and architecture to the eye? Did he leave anything out? A brain, maybe. And hands, we need hands!

In fact, that leads me to his other argument, concerning biological evolution. And I'm going to suggest that the idea that evolution could have occurred without an intelligent Designer is so improbable as to be fantastic. This has been demonstrated by Barrowand Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. In this book, they list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which is so improbable that before it would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have burned up the earth. They estimate the odds of the evolution of the human genome by chance to be on the order of 4-360 (110,000), a number which is so huge that to call it astronomical would be a wild understatement. In other words, if evolution did occur, it would have been a miracle, so that evolution is actually evidence for the existence of God! And here the Christian can be much more open to where the evidence leads. He could say, "Well, God could have used evolution; He could have used special creation. I'm open to the evidence." But, you see, for the naturalist evolution is the only game in town! No matter how fantastic the odds, no matter how improbable the evidence, he's stuck with it because he hasn't got an intelligent Designer. So it seems to me that the Christian can be far more objective on this point. After all, if you were to find watch lying on the ground, and, say, it didn't function exactly perfectly, it lost one minute per hour, would you therefore conclude that the watch was not designed properly?

The Barrow and Tippler book has been around since the mid-eighties, and made a splash in the Intelligent Design community, but that appears to be it. A blanket rejection of general Anthropic Principle variations is "we must fit the universe, the universe doesn't care". There are many objections to the many anthropic principle variations - see the Anthropic Principle Wikipedia page for a survey of them. A concise one-line summary from that page is: "According to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the anthropic principle essentially just says that the conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 1."

Dr. Pigliucci against Fine Tuning

Today, Dr. Massimo Pigliucci continues his opening statement with two topics that are related to his prior "Argument from Design" segment - "God and Nature" & "Argument from Fine-Tuning". This is from the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?" I've previously discussed other portions of the opening statements starting here through Dr. P's argument against the Argument from Design.

Dr. Pigliucci resumes:

God and Nature

Furthermore, it seems to me that the more we know about the mechanisms of the world, that is, the more we understand the world, the more the realm of God is being pushed back. The reason for that is, if you think about it, that in ancient times people used to evoke God as an explanation for almost everything. There was a thunder or lightning striking--well, that was Zeus that got upset with someone. That's because they didn't know where lightning was coming from. Now we know better, and we don't fault God for that kind of thing. We can now seclude him and confine him to only those things that we don't understand, the big questions that we are still answering in science, like the origin of the universe or the origin of life. But otherwise we understand better and better how things are going. After all, science has been around only a couple of hundred years. Give us some time! The more we understand, the less room there seems to be for God to exist. Now if you extrapolate just a little bit, you'll see that you have no reason for God.

In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace, "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.

Dr. Pigliucci points out the God of the Gaps strategy being implicitly employed by Dr. Craig. I can imagine a more economical and well-sequenced presentation of this, which I'll suggest at the end of the post. As I read through this, I can see how my own (irrelevant-but-good-exercise) "Opening Statement" might unfold. I can also see that I'd have to do a little research on whether to stick strictly to my own positive construction, or to present it and a preliminary rebuttal in the opening statement, which raises the question of what order these should be presented for the best effect.

Here, Dr. P addresses the more specific Fine-tuning Argument:

Argument from Fine-Tuning

Now the current frontier of the design argument is, as Dr. Craig mentioned, the idea that the physical universe is highly improbable. The current physical universe, the one that supports life as we know it, is highly improbable. I will get into the specifics of Dr. Craig's argument probably during the my rebuttal because I want to make a few other points; but some of the main points that come to mind in responding to that kind of argument is: first of all, the fact that we don't know how something works, like we don't know how physical constants originated, is by no means a positive evidence for the existence of God. There is a non sequitur here; there is a leap in logic. The fact that we acknowledge that there are some things we don't understand does not imply at all that there was a creator. It just means that we don't know, and that's the position that any honest scientist should actually maintain.

Furthermore, how likely is the universe? Well, we don't know because this is the only universe that we have. We can speculate, it's very hard to come up with numbers--actually, it's very easy to come up with numbers, but it's hard to come up with reasonable numbers. We don't have experiments; we can't experiment with different kinds of universes that easily. So, for example, I made some calculations: I'm assuming that there are a little more than a thousand people here tonight, and I made some calculation on what was the probability that each one of these persons was going to be here tonight. Since there are about five billion people on Earth at this point, the probability is 1 in 10 raised to 1000 raised to 5 billion. That's a humongous number! So by that reasoning either somebody really conspired from the origin of our lives to get us here tonight or this event is so improbable that, I'm sorry, you have the illusion that we're here, but we're not. You see where I'm going with this.

Dr. P resumes attacking the God of the Gaps analogy, and points out the false dilemma inherent in assuming when we don't know something, the only answer is that Goddidit.

I'll admit right here that today's post and the prior one addressing the Argument from Design should have been combined. The section headings in the debate transcript were misleading, even though I'd read Dr. P's opening statement in its entirety prior to breaking it down here. Given that, let me remark that, as a hypothetical audience member, I would appreciate the following outline:

• A positive construction for Dr. Pigliucci's case
  
• A description of the fallacies and rhetorical tricks used by the opponent in his opener (bare assertion, false dilemma, cherry picking, conflation)
  
• the beginnings of a point-by-point rebuttal of the opponent's positive construction
  
• Close the segment with a recap of the positive case

A from-the-ground-up positive construction, followed by a from-the-ground-up deconstruction of the opponent's style and substance would make it coherent and potentially compelling for me.

It should be noted that a 20 minute opening statement - as is usually allowed in Dr. Craig's debates - gives a speaker 1200 seconds to say his piece. Dr. Pigliucci's opener is about 3600 words, so that's a pretty good clip. Dr. Craig spent 2600 words or so on his opener. That's a good target to use. It will be interesting - and probably humbling - to see what I can come up with in a few weeks.

NT Notes - Mark 1 - 10

In November 2010, I set out to re-read the Bible from start to finish, from Genesis to Revelation. By the end of the year, I stumbled upon Project: The King and I - a blog by Bruce that also attempted to re-read the Bible, except in an open "book club" format. It was great fun, especially the first several months of the OT, which brought out believers and non believers in many digressions of apologia. Over all, it was civil and worthwhile, but a frequent grind. It heightened my interested in Christian apologetics - there were some elementary attempts by a few specific believers (who shall remain nameless) at defending the faith that were maddeningly inane.

That blog appears to be on hiatus now. Can't blame Bruce - this is tedious stuff. The end of the OT is a dreadful bore, and for most ex-Christians, the NT is old ground - nothing new to see. I still want to get through it, though, so I'll unearth my notes and slog through the New Testament on an infrequent basis here.

Today, a quick look at a few chapters from the Book of Matthew.

First, it should be noted that many NT scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel written, followed by Matthew and Luke, then by John. Wikipedia, speaking about those scholars, states:

Their conclusion is largely based upon an analysis of the language and content relationship between the various books.

I believe a shallow summary would be that the "Markan Priority" view holds that Mark was written first because its verses appear in both Matthew and Luke so that it appears to be the common ancestor of both texts. Because Mark, Matthew and Luke share many points about Jesus, they are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels. John looks like it is written from an entirely different viewpoint, and for an largely different purpose and audience.

Second, there is a school of thought that places Matthew as the first Gospel written. This is called the "Matthean Priority" view, as opposed to Markan Priority. The Matthean view seeks to include the birth narrative and resurrection as fundamental, which Mark does not provide. Note that Mark 9-20 are widely believed to be later additions to the original texts, and thus make it appear that the oldest gospel says nothing of Jesus' virgin birth or resurrection - major components of the Christ mythology.

This minority view, aka "The Augustinian hypothesis":

... addresses certain fundamental points of contention surrounding the synoptic problem, such as how reliable the early Christian tradition is...

Third, and the point that jumped out at me many years ago during my escape from Christianity, is that the earliest texts written that refer to Jesus are from Paul, usually considered to be Thessalonians c. 49-51 CE:

• First Thessalonians (ca. 51 AD)
  
• Philippians (ca. 52-54 AD)
  
• Philemon (ca. 52-54 AD)
  
• First Corinthians (ca. 53-54 AD)
  
• Galatians (ca. 55 AD)
  
• Second Corinthians (ca. 55-56 AD)
  
• Romans (ca. 55-58 AD)

Some scholars believe that Galatians should be dated at 49 C.E. - which is worth noting. Regardless, Paul's works appear to be a good 19-20 years before the gospels. His references to Jesus are (in my understanding, which I'll confirm upon re-reading) the product of word of mouth and/ or revelation, not personal experience with Jesus. This makes the Gospels, in my view, more decoupled from reality than I originally perceived them as a young, fervent Christian.

and now...

Matthew

---

This will be a light, superficial treatment that highlights the action without attempting to glean any deeper meaning.

Chapter: 1: the generations from Abraham to Joseph (through King David) are enumerated. Wonder why Joseph is included, since he's not the dad! Mary's found to be with child, an angel appears and tells Joe to chill, it's cool, Jesus is born of a virgin, just like the prophecy said. Remember to look hard for the prophecy in the OT ... It's pretty vague, as all prophecies necessarily are.

Chapter 2: explains that JC was born in Bethlehem, that Herod wants to kill the new born messiah, and that JC has to be hidden (ala Moses). There are also wise men, angels, and they move to Nazareth. Never mind that a historical Nazareth doesn't exist at that time:

In 1620 the Catholic Church purchased an area in the Nazareth basin ... This "Venerated Area" underwent extensive excavation in 1955 ... the settlement apparently came to an abrupt end about 720 BC...

Chapter 3: John the baptist, JC gets baptized - (KJV) Matthew 3:17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

Chapter 4: JC is tempted by the devil - repels him with aphorisms, starts his ministry, gathers apostles to be "fishers of men"

Chapter 5: more famous aphorisms! ... very memorable chapter. Worth being familiar with!

Chapter 6: still more of Jesus speaking. I noted that his words start at 5:3 and end at 7:28.

Chapter 7: finishes Jesus' teachings.

Chapter 8: Jesus comes down off the mountain, heals a leper, tells him to tell no one. In Capernaum, he heals a centurion's servant. He then cures Peter's mom, then casts some demons into the sea - all in all, a magicky good time was had by all.

Chapter 9: more healing and good sayings and a declaration by JC that he has the power to forgive sins. He picks up Matthew as a follower - which raises the question of which Matthew this is. If it's supposed to be the gospel-writer, then this doesn't make sense! He then raises a ruler's daughter from the dead; heals a dumb man by driving out a demon, and continues to teach and to be followed by multitudes. Then we have 2 verses that, although sounding innocuous enough, may be the beginning of the most sinister scam foisted upon the human race:

• (KJV) Matthew 9:37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly [is] plenteous, but the labourers [are] few;
  
• (KJV) Matthew 9:38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.

He's gloating about all the of the uneducated rubes that are about to throw away their independence and reason. Do I read that right? ;-D

Chapter 10: JC confers powers onto the 12 apostles and sends them out to do work, telling them all manner of magicky stuff to do. He shows that he's a jealous twit, just like his dad:

• (KJV) Matthew 10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

All said, Jesus does some good, but shows some of the same traits that make daddy such a dick in the Old Testament. You can see that the cracks are already there.

Dr. Pigliucci's Opening Statement

Today we start a review of Dr. Massimo Pigliucci's opening statement from the 1995 debate with Dr. William Lane Craig on "Does God Exist?" I've previously discussed Dr. Craig's opening statement starting here through here.

As always, my "analyses" are that of an amateur, biased skeptic. Also as always, I recognize that this debate is 17 years old, but I wanted this precise topic, and I wanted a written transcript. This one provides both.

Dr. Pigliucci:

Thank you. First of all, let me thank a few people: the Issues Committee for inviting me here to carry out this enviable task, and the Rationalists of East Tennessee which are scattered around the room and over there at one of the tables, providing me with great support, and, of course, Dr. Craig, who has offered very valuable arguments on his count, and to all of you for coming. I realize that this is a minority position that I will explain in the next few minutes. I hope that my statements tonight and my suggestions will help you in your personal intellectual journey a little as they helped me in the past.

Let me start first of all with a disclaimer of some sort. This is a disclaimer by a philosopher named Baruch Spinoza; he used to say: "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." This is my position tonight. I'm not here to make fun of anybody. I'm not here to ridicule anybody. I'm simply here to state what I think is a logically self-consistent and incredibly enlightening position. I would like also to make clear tonight that my positions are actually provisional. I'm not married to any particular faith. I'm going to be married in a couple of months to a wonderful woman, but that's a different matter!

Nice opening - non-controversial - conversational - the reference to his personal life is a nice touch. Dr. Pigliucci is in front of an audience that is largely Christian, so the personal, conversational tone is probably an effective strategy. You'll notice that I'm commenting on style as well as substance. That's really the point here, since Dr. Craig's substance is non-existent, he wins debates by rhetorical tricks and, as far as I can tell, playing pretty loose with citations of scientific facts and by scientists.

Clarification of the Term "God"

So let me start by clarifying what is it that we are actually talking about tonight and what my position is, and therefore we need to talk about the ways of science and its limits. About the limits of science: science cannot investigate negative statements, and you cannot prove negative statements, so no matter what whoever will tell you. There is no way you can prove the inexistence of something, unless you define that something by positive statements. So, for example, you can't ask me to come up with a proof of the inexistence of God without clarifying what you mean by God--it's completely impossible. That is why the atheistic position is not a position--the extreme atheistic position if you want--it's not the position that I am supporting . If you read the program, I'm defined here as a non-theistic naturalist, which, I hope , it will be clear in a minute what that means.

Here's my first criticism - he didn't address Dr. Craig's "2nd Question" by name, even though that's exactly what he's doing. I wish he would have said something like "Dr. Craig says 'What evidence is there that serves to falsify this hypothesis?'. That's a nice rhetorical question, but not a substantive one. Science doesn't answer rhetorical questions, it answers questions that are anchored in reality by observation". That would have made the connection unmistakeable.

He continues:

So what kind of God can we talk about? First of all, there are three kinds of Gods I can think of. There is a metaphysical kind of God. That's the kind of God that doesn't have any attributes, that doesn't interfere with the regular everyday life of the world. He may have created the world, but then after that he retired. That kind of God is completely unfalsifiable; science doesn't have anything to do with it, and rationalism doesn't have anything to do with it. There is no way to deny that kind of God. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that not many people here actually believe in that kind God because it's not particularly satisfying. It doesn't do anything for us.
A second kind of God is called the imperfect anthropomorphic God. He is a God that has human attributes, or human-like attributes, but is he imperfect; he makes mistakes. The ancient Greeks were the first ones to describe this kind of God, and they even didn't believe that much about this kind of entity, simply because again if he is fallible, then he is not much better than a human being. You can think of him as a very powerful human being, but he is still a person. So we will set aside that kind of God also.

What we are talking about tonight is what we call a perfect anthropomorphic God, that is, a God that does have something to do with the everyday working of the universe, but he is perfect, he doesn't make mistakes, he's always good, he's all over the place. That is the kind of God that I think can in fact be falsified to some extent. In other words, if you believe in that kind of God, you are making positive statements about what should happen in the universe; and if you make positive statements about what could happen in the universe, then science and rational thinking can have something say about it.

This was a little chatty - he could have stuck to specifying the third kind of god only, and made the point. It might have been useful in pointing out how man has these different conceptions over the millennia, but he didn't do that. I'd look for something like "Dr. Craig claims that there is a supernatural omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator of the universe and observer or supervisor of all events here and in the afterlife for all eternity, and that this being is the Christian God. Not the Jewish God Yahweh, but the Christian God Yahweh as seen through Dr. Craig's own belief in Jesus". That would have: put him in clear juxtaposition with Dr. Craig, implied the implausibility of Dr. Craig's formulation; and left him free to focus on that implausible formulation.

Overall, Dr. Pigliucci's first few opening paragraphs begin well. He's on solid, if unspectacular ground so far. If I can get a video or audio of this, I'll have to listen, because I'd love to compare his verbal and physical presentation to Dr. Craig's .

Next time, Dr. Pigliucci takes on Dr. Craig's Argument from Design.

Intermission Time

As a brief intermission between my "analysis" of the opening statements of Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci (the first one here and the most recent one (so far) here), I thought I'd point out where others have piled on ... errrrr ... offered thoughtful criticism of Dr. Craig's arguments and tactics. These are not isolated cases, the web is full of this stuff, but I read both of these blogs frequently, thus their significance to me.

The Uncredible Hallq - Chris Hallquist at FreeThought Blogs has a couple of things that caught my eye:

First, a gentle chiding of another blogger that (Hallquist thinks) is over-complicating why Dr. Craig arrives at a misunderstanding of the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's always worth hearing criticisms from differing viewpoints.

Second, today he posts a link to his review of Dr. Craig's book "Reasonable Faith"

The original is posted at The Secular Web (Infidels.org), and is lengthy, as is most of the stuff at Infidels. That's why it's good reading - a little more depth than you get in the average blog post - Richard Carrier not withstanding. I haven't read Hallquists' review yet, but hope to in the next day or two.

Third, the blogger A is for Atheist has a post at Debunking Christianity that dissects the kalam and moral arguments for god. Since that's what I just did a few posts ago, I'm interested in the different take.

Good times!

Poke #6 - Dr. Craigs argument from the immediate experience of God

This the fifth and final opening argument that Dr. William Lane Craig presents in the 1995 debate with Dr. Massimo Pigliucci on "Does God Exist?" I discuss other segments at: Dr. Craig's opening words, "The origin of the universe", "The complex order in the universe", "The existence of objective moral values" and "The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus".

Remember that I'm a firm non-believer - so I have that going for me. I've watched enough of Dr. Craig's debates on YouTube to be already skeptical.

It is interesting to look at the written transcript line-by-line, because I can take the time and attempt to understand what the words mean and whether the argument is valid and true. So far, the written words are not compelling. Dr. Craig will, I believe, win because of his knowledge of the material, the very nature of debate as opposed to the establishment of facts, and his command of the debate format and useful techniques within that format.

Here's the whole final argument:

Fifth Argument

5. The immediate experience of God. This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing Him. If you're sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident to you. The Bible promises, "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you."{18}We mustn't so concentrate on the proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God to our heart. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives.

In conclusion, then, we've yet to see any arguments to show that God does not exist, and we have seen five reasons to think that God does exist. Together these reasons constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God.

This is brief & easy to rebut. The trap lies in - when debating a believer - not wanting to offend or otherwise elicit negative feelings that will turn an opponent or the audience off to the simple reasoning and evidence otherwise available to them

Dr. Craig states that "the immediate experience of God" is not really an argument - so what he may be doing in these closing lines is signaling to the audience that "it's ok to believe". I won't dissect this in detail because it seems trite - but look at each sentence in the first paragraph and observe that there is no argument nor evidence. It's simply exhortation to the believer.

His final paragraph - a summation - starts out by declaring "we've yet to see any arguments to show that God does not exist". I'm sure Dr. Craig knows that the responsibility of arguing for a proposition falls to the party asserting the proposition. He intentionally discards this very fundamental principle of discourse in order to make it seem like all non-believers everywhere have failed to disprove the existence of God, therefore God Exists. This little spin is effective - it detracts from the absence of evidence or sound argument that might otherwise support the contention that God exists.

His final sentence "Together these reasons constitute a powerful cumulative case...", is just marketing hype. We didn't see powerful evidence. We didn't even see powerful argument. As you'd expect, I don't see anything in his five opening arguments that made me pause in the slightest.

I think it's fair at this point to say that in the 17 years that have passed since this debate, Dr. Craig's arguments have no doubt gotten better. They are not bad to begin with - trust me, I would never survive 20 minutes with him, even at this 1995 standard. As a complete layman, non-debater, non-philosopher, non-scientist, I just look for "does the argument make me pause, does it lead me to rethink my position, does it show me where I'm wrong?" In this case, it did none of those things.

My final thoughts on Dr. Craig's Opening Statement:

Before we ever start listening to the debate, we must have asked ourselves a fundamental question: "Why are we debating this topic?" The answer is that the topic is worth questioning - i.e. it is not established fact. We assume that people have differing opinions that they wish to convince others are a superior view of the topic. If God existed and cared to manifest itself, the topic of this debate would be established fact, and no debate would be necessary. It hasn't manifested itself, however, so we can debate God's existence.

Similarly foundational is the fact that - as I just stated earlier in the post - It is always the responsibility of the party asserting a claim to justify it if they wish it to be taken seriously. Otherwise, any outlandish claim could be made, and humanity would slog to a halt in a quagmire of nonsense. I can assert that the universe is the creamy filling of a tasty golden brown snack cake, but I need to provide argument and/or evidence before my view begins to be taken seriously. The question "Does God Exist?" implies that someone, somewhere, once asserted that there was a "God", that this God has some characteristics and behaviors, that overall this God was worthy of worship, and then the idea that "God Exists" took hold in the minds of mankind sufficiently to be considered plausible, thus worthy of debate. Dr. Craig is, by proxy, asserting that proposition.

Dr. William Lane Craig's four arguments, plus his fifth, self confessed non-argument, fail in these ways:

1. Claiming that God is the best answer for the origin of the universe suffers from at least two fatal flaws:
   • it presupposes an entity that itself has to have a "somewhere" as a platform in which to exist and from which to cause the universe's existence. This raises the question of where did God and his "somewhere" come from - a classic infinite regress problem. If you claim he doesn't need to be created, then that's special pleading - the universe does need creating, and God does not;
   • it postulates more than is needed to explain existence. Assuming the extra added term "God" is a violation of Occam's razor. It does not clarify or simplify the solution.
2. The apparent complex order in the universe is a misunderstanding of physics, chemistry and biology. The universe looks the way we would expect it if it were not designed by an intelligent agent. What we observe to be our universe appears to have emerged from a small, hot, dense mass 13.7 billion years ago. The formation of elements, stars, galaxies, planets, complex molecules and life itself follow predictable patterns. We don't know where the universe came from with certainty, and we don't know how complex molecules came together to result in the simplest living things, but all signs are that this is within our reach. These gaps in our knowledge are not wide enough that they require shoe-horning a conjectural super being into the picture to explain things. We exist in a universe like this precisely because we can exist here. That is not a miracle. It would be a miracle if the "fine-tuning" indicated that we could not exist. Then you'd have something!.
   
3. Objective moral values in the world ... is a non-argument, an appeal to emotions. We feel joy and repulsion, and they indicate to us individually that something must be inherently good or bad. Dr. Craig never indicates what the standard of objectivity is, nor how we could determine how that objective standard applied in all cases in the timeframe in which it might be in force.
   
4. The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus ... is one of the weakest "real" arguments that he makes, but is one that has a lot of emotional appeal to believers - it's the basis for Christianity. Without it, Christianity is a philosophical framework, not an inerrant record of miraculous & existential importance. No record of Jesus first 30 years exists, nor is implied to have ever existed. His life, works, death and resurrection were not important enough to warrant mention for at least twenty years after his death, and then were mentioned first by a man - Paul - who had a track record of using and misusing influence. Paul made the claims he did based on revelation, not on oral legend or personal observation. Not compelling at all. Mark, Matthew, Luke, John and the other John all followed suit years and decades after Paul's personal revelations about a subject he wasn't personally privy to. This is an extraordinarily weak association between the final product (the New Testament) and the purported events it is based on.
   
5. Dr. Craig himself notes that his "personal experience of God" argument is not an argument at all, so it's not worth rebutting. Nice feint!
   

I'll look over Dr. Pigliucci's Opening statement next.

Poke it with a stick - The Resurrection

This is my fifth post reviewing the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The other four are: Dr. Craig's opening words, "The origin of the universe", "The complex order in the universe" and "The existence of objective moral values".

Dr. Craig's fourth argument in favor of the existence of God is "The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus".

First, a brief impression of his previous arguments: the first two are somewhat technical - the cosmological and teleological arguments. They might be hard to follow for the uninitiated - which is most of us. I'll guess that the majority of people not having at least an introductory course in argumentation and rhetoric under their belt, and a passing acquaintance with current cosmology, will be at the mercy of the two opponents in this debate.

The "existence of objective moral values" argument discussed in my prior post is just an appeal to your instinct - and not to your intellect. It didn't - as presented by Dr. Craig - really make a sound argument - let alone present evidence - for objective moral values and how we might validate their objectivity. Consequently, he doesn't move his overall "God Exists" thesis forward.

This post's argument is even more indirect. It is however, probably effective when delivered to believers because they're prepared to accept the Bible as (at least) reliable enough. I'll admit to being biased against the "historical facts of Jesus" argument primarily due to my own journey through Christianity. When I really looked, only the Bible claimed that Jesus existed and was resurrected, and those claims weren't even formulated in writing until a good twenty years after his passing. Every subsequent claim of Jesus and his resurrection leads back to 1) the Bible; 2) hearsay (e.g. see Josephus )

Dr. Craig:

Fourth Argument

4. The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and, thus, evidence for the existence of God.

Notice how tentative this begins when you read the words. "New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that ...". It sounds a lot different when you hear it as Dr. Craig delivers it - that's part of his magic. So we get an assertion that scholars "somewhat" agree that Jesus had a divine sense of authority ... yadda-yadda-yadda. What Jesus felt about himself is irrelevant, and Dr. Craig immediately zooms past that to attempt the case for the resurrection. This is kinda sneaky: he gets to toss the term "consensus" at the audience, then drills right into "facts" that he hopes you'll believe support the argument. With any luck, that throw-away word "consensus" will be still ringing in your ears, you'll associate it to his "facts", and you'll interpret it as "there is consensus on these facts" - even though he didn't explicitly say there was consensus on the "facts" that he subsequently presented. Sneeeee-keeeee.

Next - "supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead" , and the conditional "if he was resurrected then it's proof of God". It appears Dr. Craig's whole argument here hinges on this, just as we suspected. Since there are no reliable first-hand reports of either his death or resurrection, we can assume that there's more eloquent word-smithery in our immediate future.

Dr. Craig resumes:

Now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept on faith or not. But there are actually three established facts, recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today, which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.

Fact #1: On the Sunday following his crucifixion, Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. According to Jacob Kremer, an Austrian scholar who has specialized in the study of the resurrection, "By far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb."{13} According to D. H. Van Daalen, it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions.{14}

AHA! Dr. Craig's introduction to Fact #1 is another nice piece of word-smithing. He declares "three established facts, recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today, which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus". Notice that he doesn't say that the majority of scholars believe that the purported facts are "best explained by the resurrection of Jesus" - it's Dr. Craig supplying this. This is indirect. The audience won't notice - I surely didn't - but you can see it when it's written down.

There is a lot of contingent, conditional, indirect truthiness here. We know what truthiness is.

I'll beat a dead horse here and point out that Fact #1 relies wholly on words from the Bible. No independent confirmation is available. There is no implication that such confirmation ever existed.

Dr. Craig's second "fact":

Fact #2: On separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death. According to the prominent New Testament critic of Vanderbilt University Gerd Lüdemann, "It may be taken as historically certain that . . . the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the Risen Christ.{15}These appearances were witnessed not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, skeptics, and even enemies.

ummmm ... more hearsay.

More "facts":

Fact #3: The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah, and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead before the end of the world. Nevertheless, the original disciples came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory University, muses, "Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was . . . ."{16} N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, "That is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him."{17}

Dr. Craig makes claims about the disciples personal dispositions toward a dying and rising Messiah without having any possible way of making that claim. We can reject this as a bare assertion. Adding quotes from other scholars is a nice way to weave his bare assertion into a scholarly analysis, but does nothing to establish fact.

Finally:

Attempts to explain away these three great facts--like the disciples stole the body or Jesus wasn't really dead--have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. The simple fact is that there just is no plausible, naturalistic explanation of these facts. Therefore, it seems to me, the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists.

Entails. I love the use of the word "entails". It sounds so logicky!

Seriously though, Dr. Craig makes an impressive-sounding closing, as if three bare assertions combine to make a not-bare-assertion. There is "just is no plausible, naturalistic explanation of these facts" because there are no facts. Plausible, naturalistic explanation is not needed here. He signals the implausibility of this with the tepid "it seems to me, the Christian is amply justified in believing ...". He's not saying "Thus every reasoning being in the universe must assent that this is undeniably, unassailably true". He's saying "you guys that already believe this are okay to keep on believing it".

This fourth argument is worthy of being included in a Sunday Sermon, but not in a discussion of how reality works.

Next up, the "argument" from personal experience.

Poke it with a stick - Dr. Craig's argument to Objective Moral Values

This is my fourth post reviewing, line-by-line, the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The other three are: Dr. Craig's opening words,
the origin of the universe and the complex order in the universe.

Today I'll tackle Dr. Craig's third argument - the existence of "Objective moral values in the world". I originally thought that this would take more line-by-line criticism, since it seemed that many of his statements were worth addressing individually. Instead, I realized that the whole argument relies solely on an unproven premiss and circularity, so I scaled it down considerably.

I consider Dr. Craig to be at his polemical best so far when he makes this argument, because he draws clear battle lines between the theist and atheist position. The implication is made that atheists accept behavior that is clearly immoral to the theist - an obvious but effective play to the theist' (presumed) sense of superiority. In spite of not providing any evidence that the theist position has a basis in reality - he hasn't and he won't - his rhetoric is sure to strike a chord with believers. In a sense, his whole third argument is one long ad hominem attack on baby-eating atheists.

Dr. Craig:

Third Argument

3. Objective moral values in the world. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. Many theists and atheists alike concur on this point. Michael Ruse, a noted agnostic philosopher of science, explains,

The position of the modern evolutionist is that . . . morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.{11}

Dr. Craig begins by claiming that

If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.

I couldn't agree with him more on both points!

Setting aside my snide comment for a moment, this argument hinges on the existence of both "God" and "objective moral values" to have any meaning, You couldn't slide this by a neutral, attentive and informed high school logic class, but he usually does it with ease when confronted with atheists who are less experienced debaters, and who do not know the material well. Since there is no formal judge in this debate, Dr. Craig scores points with the audience because of the crisp and confident way he delivers the claim, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. I assume that audiences attending his debates are predominantly theist by the same proportion that the American public is - say 90:10. I will also guess that he can depend on the majority of the audience taking as a given that some subset of the laws, ethics and social conventions we adhere to are "objective moral values" - and that the reason they can be called objective is that they come from a higher power. Heck - even I suspect that morality comes from a higher power - but in my atheistic view, that higher power is the weight and momentum of a species that constantly adapts its behavior in order to better perpetuate the species.

The Doctor attempts to bolster his case:

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.

I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right.

Here, Dr. Craig is doing some fine word-smithing, intended for his target demographic. First, he outright calls Nietzsche an atheist. Although I'm quite happy to think that he may have been, it's not clear that he was. From Wikipedia:

The statement "God is dead", occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in The Gay Science), has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, most commentators[116] regard Nietzsche as an atheist; others (such as Kaufmann) suggest that this statement reflects a more subtle understanding of divinity.

Then, by claiming that Nietzsche "understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life" - he paints another picture of atheists that believers probably find repugnant. They want life to have meaning. They assume meaning and purpose come from God. Particularly for the disadvantaged, the hope that their existence is part of a higher purpose is seductive. Nihilism - the idea that life has no intrinsic purpose, is likely abhorrent to them. Yet, what Nietzsche also says is:

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!"[120]According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.

He's not nearly as dark as Craig paints him, in fact "Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be".

In Craig's brief passage, Nietzsche is painted as "the other" (an atheist!) who holds a view antithetical to Christians, who assume that we are all part of God's plan. The "other" instead says that life in fact has no meaning. This misrepresentation of Nietzsche is effective if you don't care about misrepresenting the positions of dead philosophers, but doesn't really make any sense as a warrant to support an argument for the existence of God.

Dr. Craig continues:

But we must be very careful here. The question here is not: "Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?" I'm not claiming that we must. Nor is the question: "Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God?" I think that we can.

I'm not clear on why this paragraph is valuable to Dr. Craig's argument. Is he just making idle chatter?

More Dr. Craig:

Rather the question is: "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?" Like Prof. Ruse, I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, the morality evolved by homo sapiens is objective. And here I think Dr. Pigliucci would agree with me. He writes, "It has been pretty obvious since Darwin that we, indeed, are nothing but machines."{12} In the absence of God, we're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of human development has become taboo; but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, there's nothing really wrong with your raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

There are at least two tacks being taken here. One, that God and Objective Moral Values exist and are inextricably related; two, a subtly anti-evolutionist we-are-the-product-of-direct-creation-by-God-and-not-sullied-by-the-unholy-action-of-eons-of-evolution-that-does-not-have-us-as-its-sole-objective tack. Dr. Craig says that "In the absence of God, we're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time."

Yeah - and that's not an awesome, exhilarating and humbling realization how?

Seriously, the "accidental by-products of nature" trope is effective if you believe that you are the crown of creation, but Dr. Craig is closer to telling the truth than some of his demo are comfortable with. Strictly speaking, we are not accidental in terms of incremental changes over time. We are a successful adaptation descended from another successful adaptation, on nearly ad infinitum. I think he uses the adjective "accidental" to further appall believers who really want to feel that they are the apple of God's eye.

Next, Dr. Craig makes his most blatantly bare assertion:

But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it. There's no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. Actions like rape, cruelty, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behavior--they're moral abominations. Some things are really wrong. Similarly love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good.

...and Reality replies:

• Dr. Craig: "Objective Moral Values Exist". Reality: "Based on what?"
  
• Dr. Craig: "...deep down we all know it". Reality: "What humans 'deep down know' is irrelevant".
  
• Dr. Craig: "There's no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world.". Reality: "I'm waiting for evidence - when can I expect it?"
  
• Dr. Craig: "Actions like rape, cruelty, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behavior--they're moral abominations. ". Reality: "I couldn't agree with you more - but you're avoiding citations from your holy book that sanction murder, rape, killing children, and ignoring the subjective nature of even the ten commandments"
  
• Dr. Craig: "Some things are really wrong." Reality: "No offense Doc, but I didn't need you to tell me that."
  
• Dr. Craig: "Similarly love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good." Reality: "You're really a risk-taker, aren't you? How could we have known this without your ground-breaking explanation?"

Dr. Craig attempts to drive this nail home:

Thus, we can summarize this third consideration as follows:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

At this point, it's fair to say that Dr. Craig hasn't made any progress in justifying this argument as support for the proposition that God exists. Objective Moral Values were never defined, and are never shown to exist; the existence of God is the subject of the debate, and can't be used in association with Objective Moral Values to prove itself unless an unbreakable link between is established. This, of course, is not done. On balance, the argument fails abysmally. I do think the fact that he delivers this argument, pulls on your heart strings, makes bare assertions and uses undefined terms in the space of a minute or two, and doesn't bat an eye, crack a smile, or exhibit a facial tick that might be interpreted as a "tell" - well, there's still a lot to admire here. He's not really lying, but he could be related to "Baghdad Bob".

A final thought on Objective Moral Values, whatever they are. The Christian will assume that they are the Ten Commandments, because they were obtained directly from God. Further, the words of the Old and New Testaments can be presumed to be the word of God as well, and thus arbiter of Objective Moral Values. Dr. Craig never has to say this in this portion of the debate, because he knows believers have a general disposition to accept this uncritically. Non-believers are critical, however, and for good reason. Take the Ten Commandments. Read it for yourselves, and realize on first glance that most of this is useless. You can say that "Thou shalt not kill" (or "thou shalt not murder" - depending on which version of the Bible you choose to read), "Neither shalt thou commit adultery", "Neither shalt thou steal", "Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour" are all sound principles for civil society, and several others are sound for preventing descent into immoral behavior, but these ten are insufficient for life, many are unenforceable, and many require the existence of God to be even seen as plausible.

Instead, as much as literalists and fundamentalists might holler, there is a better way of behaving morally in the world, particularly compared to the ambiguity, inconsistency, and/or contradictory dictates of the Bible. Without spending more than a few minutes, I can suggest: "Have respect for your well being so that you can be healthy enough to feed, house, clothe, administer first aid to, love, respect and nurture your wife, your parents, your siblings and your offspring is the first commandment. When this is fulfilled, extend it to your neighbors; when this is fulfilled, extend it to your community; when this is fulfilled, spread it throughout the world." God - if he, she or it existed, could have written these words - or something beautiful and more concise - on the moon in letters miles high so that we could be reminded of them every day of our lives. He, she or it didn't do that. THAT alone is enough reason to disbelieve any claim that God exists.

Next time - The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. \

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Edit 1 - 6/10/2012 - eliminated redundant criticisms of the unproven propositions "God" and "Objective Moral Values exist" - and their reliance on each other as a proof of the existence of God

Edit 2 - 6/10/2012 - further redacted redundant criticisms and general wordiness.

Poke it with a stick - Dr. Craig's Fine-Tuning Argument

This is the third in a number of posts reviewing, line-by-line, the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The prior post covered Dr. Craig's "argument from first cause". This post focuses on "The complex order in the universe" ... a "fine-tuning argument".

Two notes:

1) In case you wondered why I didn't pick a more recent debate of Dr. Craig's, there are several reasons. A) I wanted to find one that addressed the "Does God Exist?" resolution and that had Dr. Craig speak first. The reason was that I wanted to put together another imaginary debate between he and I, where I get to respond to arguments that he's made in a real debate. I got sidetracked into this review, because, frankly it's interesting, and will be good preparation. B) The Craig-Pigliucci debate was the first one that I found that had a written transcript; C) I didn't feel that the age of the debate makes much difference in the arguments that Dr. Craig makes. He himself declared in 2010 that he's been making "the same five arguments ... for 20 years".

2) I know I'm not the first to point this out, but Dr. Craig can present his arguments quickly because his audience - most of the actual audience members - already "know in their hearts" that god exists, so his more technical-sounding arguments can omit rational and evidentiary support. His target audience never misses them because reason and evidence are not part of the world view that arrives at the "goddidit" conclusion. Opponents such as Massimo Pigliucci likely have more technical and unfortunately lengthier arguments to make when developing a positive case for non-belief. Pointing out the logical fallacies that Dr. Craig employs will satisfy a qualified debate judge, but may be over the head of, or simply uninteresting to, a lay audience. I've not seen a debate in which he's appeared that used judges.

Second Argument

2. The complex order in the universe. During the last 30 years, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours. How much more probable?

As I said, this is a "fine-tuning" argument - a version of the well-known teleological argument - or "argument from design". There are LOTS of sober, clear counterarguments against this (see the appendix at the end of this post), not the least of which is that the universe is preposterously hostile to us. Human beings are unable to exist on 70% of the Earth's surface because it's water, and the other 30% contains deserts and mountains in which life is not ideal. Add that there are approximately 410 nonillion cubic light years in the universe, and we occupy less than 394 septillionths of a single cubic light year. I believe that says we occupy less than one in 1.6 x 10^59th part of the universe. Please check my math! If the universe was truly fine tuned for our existence, we'd just require one patch of land, and the all knowing all-loving creator could feed and clothe us via god mail or carry-out. We'd hardly expect that at least a septillion stars spread out over at least 410 nonillion cubic light years was required so that we - god's creation - could exist. The big guy wasted 162 octodecillion times more space than he needed to. Evidence of design? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad design maybe. Or maybe bad planning - could be either.

Also - did you catch that Dr. Craig posits "universes" (plural)? "We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable...". If he's copping to the possibility of multiple occurrences of universes, this implies that the possibility for occurrences to be realized are endless. Endless occurrences in which to realize a specific combination of parameters having a non-zero probability means there are endless occurrences of life-permitting universes. Surely he doesn't want to go down that road.

The answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable. For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.{5} P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least.{6} John Barrow and Frank Tipler estimate that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe.{7} There are around 50 such quantities and constants present in the Big Bang which must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it's not just each quantity which must be exquisitely fine-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely-tuned. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

Honestly, I believe he's just thinking backward here. Even if we accept his numbers - and we have no idea whether he knows what he's talking about - the facts that we can determine are 1) we are here; 2) any a priori probability he throws out is irrelevant once we affirm that we are, indeed, here. He might as well argue that we're not here.

If it was physically impossible that we exist in the universe, and yet we did, then positing the existence of "something else" that makes life possible would be understandable. It still does not indicate that his formulation of that first cause - God - is required, because God is even more improbable than we are. The Christian God layers more improbability on top of improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers. Sorry for making fun of you Dr. Craig! :-D

Since Dr. Craig himself does not claim that we are an impossible occurrence, it is not impossible that we exist. That we do exist just indicates that we are the realization of that non-zero probability.

Duh!

There is no physical reason why these constants and quantities should possess the values they do. The one-time agnostic physicist Paul Davies comments, "Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact."{8} Similarly, Fred Hoyle remarks, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics."{9} Robert Jastrow, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, calls this the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science.{10}

This deft quote-mining doesn't yield anything that says "Davies, Hoyle and Jastrow all provide undeniable evidence of the existence of god". Not one quote says, "this is the smoking gun". The first guy "believes", the second guy claims a common sense interpretation but gives us no clue as to whether he thinks it is a correct interpretation, and the third guy (Jastrow) gives you a relative value without telling us what "best" means in absolute terms. If previous evidence of god was non-existent, then even the most trivial but plausible tidbit can be claimed to be "best". If this is truly "the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science" - then we can go home and enjoy a Pete's Wicked Ale right now, comfortable in the knowledge that apologists have no more evidence now then they had 2 and 3 thousand years ago.

So once again, the view that Christian theists have always held, that there is an intelligent Designer of the universe, seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe, when it popped into being uncaused out of nothing, just happened to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life.

The paragraph above is one of my favorites - Dr. Craig applies some "so, the universe just popped out of nothing" ridicule to non-believers, and substitutes it with some "the universe popped out of nothing because god did it" jujitsu.

I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say: "sometimes you just gotta say 'What the Fuck?' "

We can summarize our reasoning as follows:
1. The fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to either law or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

What you see here is:
1. The first premiss is technically incomplete, thus a False Choice. To be complete, we can include evolution of the universe (on the conjecture that the universe evolves like biological life evolves); we can include the idea that the universe is cycling through all combinations of parameters that have non-zero probabilities in a natural manner; and as long as we're positing the supernatural, we can include any supernatural entity performing anything that might result in a universe. The Great GoogaMooga's kid Skippy could have been tweaking dad's etch-a-universe, and had an accident.
2. The second premiss is a bare assertion - there is no reason why this is so. Dr. Craig hasn't argued that, until now.
3. The conclusion is false because premisses 1 & 2 are fallacious.

This concludes his second argument - I'm stunned that it's so full of holes so far.

Appendix

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Here are some links that I ran across and used during my analysis of the fine-tuning argument:

• Wikipedia: The Fined Tuned Universe
  
• Infidels (Theodore Drange) - Fine Tuning
  
• Strong Atheism.net - the Problems in Fine Tuning
  
• Skeptico - Fine Tuning Arguments
  
• A technical discussion from Neil Manson at Ole Miss
  
• Iron Chariots - a VERY thorough discussion of Fine Tuning - I really like this one!
  

...and here's a discussion of Time that affects Dr. Craig's Cosmological Argument from previously: Infidels - the Intractable Problem of Time

Dumb as a rock

A couple of items from the interwebs prompted this thought: that God may very well be dumb as a rock. The items are:

A comment by pboyfloyd on Evangelical Realism to a post on Defending the Courtiers at Intellectual Conservative:

Consciousness(as I understand it) is a property of certain organic beings, and of course there is a ‘gradient’, and of course we could devise tests to grade the consciousness of everything from a rock to a god.
Hint:- gods don’t do well.(they don’t seem to live up to their omnipresence to answer, while rocks, although ‘there’, don’t display any observable consciousness of their environment.)

...and a transcript of the 1995 debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Corey Williamson on "Does God Exist" ... Dr. Williamson states:

"Every morning, I, a lot of you, get up and we go to our car, and we put the key in the ignition, turn it over, and the car starts up. You can think of the ignition of the gasoline as somewhat of a big bang. There's this explosion of gasoline igniting. What's the cause of the gasoline igniting? The sparkplug.[11] It's a spark off this sparkplug, which causes the gasoline to ignite, that causes the small big bang that gets you to school every day. What Professor Craig has given us is that there is some sort of cosmological sparkplug. Maybe there is. But if there is, we've no reason to believe it's omniscient, no reason to believe it's omnibenevolent, and no reason to believe that it's omnipotent. From the fact that the universe was created, all we have some reason to believe is that it is slightly more powerful than its effects. So maybe it's a little stronger or more powerful than the nature of the universe as it exists. But the universe is finite, as Dr. Craig has argued. So we don't have any reason to conclude this thing is infinite. It may be strong but finite. We don't have any reason to believe its omniscient or even sentient at all. It could be a spark plug of some kind, maybe a timeless sparkplug, but a sparkplug nevertheless."

So, this morning, my non-devotional thought is: God is not "necessary" in any sense. The argument that "because the universe began to exist, it had to have a cause, and that cause must be God" is wholly unsupported. It could have been a spark plug. Literally or metaphorically. It did not have to have intelligence or power. It could have been a catalyst for material or forces that already existed. Or it could have been something entirely unimaginable at this time in our history.

And it could have been dumb as a rock.

Apologia and Apologist tactics for amateurs

I'm still reading the Bible verse-by-verse with Bruce and the gang at Project: The King and I. We're finally in the New Testament, which is fun. I may have mentioned that this is my third reading of the NT ... The second verse-by-verse effort. I was once Born-Again many many years ago, and it was reading the OT immediately after immersing myself in the NT where things began to unravel.

Coincidentally, I've just watched my third debate video starring Dr. William Lane Craig , famous apologist and all-around fun guy. At the same time Deacon Duncan at Evangelical Realism is writing a chapter-by-chapter review of Dr. Craig's book "On Guard" - which I believe is intended as a handbook for amateur apologists. I look forward to Duncan's weekly installments like an adolescent waiting for the next issue of Spiderman to hit the comic book stands. (Duncan also blogs at Alethian Worldview at Freethought Blogs )

The three endeavors dovetail somewhat, which is the background for today's effort.

Encountering formal apologetics, such as presented by Dr. Craig, is fascinating. Duncan's critique of "On Guard" confirms and elaborates some of my informal observations - there's a lot of bait-and-switch, ad hominem attacks, bare assertion and avoidance in the tactics that a polished apologist such as Dr. Lane uses. Informal and amateur apologists, such as we encounter at P:TKAI should be less of a challenge due to their less practiced and polished approach. That's not really true.

We have a new commenter on P:TKAI who is a friend of Bruce, and who is a believer that's quite willing to engage in apologia. It's both head-shaking and irritating. He often makes claims out of thin air that seem as if they're from other conversations. The other day, he stated (quote) "By the way, nice touch on you approving our evidence that God and Jesus exist. Einstein found enough evidence. ...". He was replying to me after I chided him on a false equivalence that he used to bait commenters into demonstrating that scientific proof cannot be certain. It was a mess. This "evidence" rejoinder was completely out of the blue, and certainly didn't address anything that I had written. *

Here's where I'm going with this: I see a pattern with the vocal believers, in that they have (at least on the P:TKAI blog) exhibited a tendency toward non-sequitur. Three different apologists come to mind, each replying to specific posts with declarations that were either off the point (but still in the ballpark) or from completely beyond left field, like the one I cite above.

The pattern is that words go in one ear, and are replaced, partially or completely, with something off-topic. It's too small of a sample to make a general statement, but ***it looks like*** there's a comprehension problem at work. Or dishonesty. Time will tell.

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* There's a fine line to be tread on the P:TKAI blog, since Bruce wants it to be civil ... add to that we're now dealing with a personal friend of his. With a little too much caffeine and some shorter-than-normal patience, and I can see accusations of stupidity, delusion and childishness becoming hard to resist. Counting to ten - or sleeping on it - is definitely warranted.