skepticali: Alethian Worldview

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Fare well Deacon Duncan

Deacon Duncan of Evangelical Realism and Alethian Worldview is one of my favorite bloggers - his attention to details and his perseverance in unearthing apologist foolishness have been fascinating and inspiring to me. Over the last year and a half, I've happily followed his careful deconstruction of William Lane Craig's book "On Guard", a series on presumably the first apologist - Justin Martyr, and finally a detailed examination of Pastor Stephen Feinstein's rather inane and irritating “arguments” against atheism in his on-line debate with Russell Glasser.

His prior efforts on Evangelical Realism and Alethian Worldview were also worthy reads - I especially appreciate his Gospel Hypothesis series.

Deacon is now burned out by all this.

I understand the burnout. There is no physical evidence for a supernatural scheme of any sort, let alone God. The classic arguments for the existence of God are shot through with logical fallacies - they fail without exception. Current attempts by modern apologists are mostly awful, and occasionally bizarrely foolish. No wonder Deacon is burned out. I believe that the best counter-apologists (like Duncan) reach the limit of knowledge on the subject of theism and apologia, because it is not a real science. It is an attempt to make excuses for a superstitious mode of thinking that should have been dead millennia ago. New “arguments” are just reformulations of old arguments that were never any good to begin with.

There's no “there” there.

Here’s to Deacon - may he fare well. And may we see him down the road.

Friday, December 28, 2012

The Reality Hypothesis

Deacon Duncan just completed a series of ten posts discussing The Gospel Hypothesis:

"documenting the fact that it takes many more rationalizations to reconcile reality and theism than it does to reconcile reality and atheism"

He prefaced them with three posts that introduced the series - so I consider them to be part of the overall thesis. I think this can be generalized somewhat to

"it takes many more rationalizations to reconcile reality and propositions that are not observed in reality, than it does to reconcile reality and propositions that are observed in reality".

I offer this generalization in order to include anything supernatural, conspiracy-based, cultish, etc. including magic, prophecy, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, the "9/11 was an inside job" meme and the like.

In its simplest form, you can state the comparison just as a programmer would structure a conditional logic statement:

   If Proposition A is true

      Then some facts about Proposition A will be observed in the world

   Else If Reality is true

      Then some facts about Reality will be observed in the world

Spoiler alert: this is dead simple!

You can then compare the facts listed in the "If" and "Else If" clauses and adjudge the more plausible conclusion.

You can use this approach on any topic you care to - with the caveat that you have to be honest, make sound arguments, and just say "I don't know" when you don't know the answer to something. And always remember that concluding that your preferred result pertains will only work if concluding so is logically valid, and its premises and warrants are valid and true.

DD could have extended his series to many topics within the Bible - creation of the universe, creation of life, Noah's Ark, Jesus' resurrection - but that wasn't necessary to make his point. The result of any comparison that concludes that goddidit remains that Bible stories do not explain what we observe in the world, hence can be assumed to be myth until evidence is provided that could change that conclusion.

Links to the prefatory posts:

Links to individual Gospel Hypothesis posts: