***QUOTE***
6:44 AM, September 06, 2006, Daniel Morgan said...
SA,
John was arguing reductio ad absurudum, that, in Steve's theology, since what one believes is willed by God, belief is independent of evidence: it is possible to believe in spite of evidence to the contrary, or to disbelieve in spite of evidence for God's existence. Belief is not contingent upon reason or evidence, in other words. [after all, according to this, unbelievers know God exists, so arguing contrariwise is a sign of irrationality]
Therefore, a Calvinist who argues that those who disbelieve are stupid [based on evidence] is incoherent. The unbeliever may or may not be evidentially justified, but the point is that God wills that the unbeliever is not granted grace, and thus does not come to have faith. Faith is not based on the evidence, then, but on God's choice and action to "regenerate" the unbeliever. Thus, Steve cannot call reprobates "stupid", just "those God has chosen not to believe".
It is possible to show someone the inconsistency of their own position without making a judgment on the truth value of any particular proposition -- simply by showing that their argument is invalid. In this case, Steve's premises about God's sovereignty and the unbeliever's stupidity cannot coexist in an argument.
At least, this is my perception of the argument and the crux.
***END-QUOTE***
Once again, Daniel Morgan rushes in to improve on Loftus original formulation. But his attempt to salvage the sagging argument is no more successful than the original:
1.Yes, it’s possible, in principle, to mount an internal critique, for the sake of argument.
But if Loftus’ reductio were successful, it would only be successful if we grant an assumption which undercuts his own position at the very same time as it serves to undermine the opposing position.
You can’t affirm the consequences and also isolate its consequences from his own position.
His hypothetical is predicated on the existence of the Calvinistic God. And it attempts to draw certain inference from that premise.
But if the consequences hold for Calvinism, then the premise must hold for atheism.
According to the terms of the hypothetical, they rise or fall together.
If we affirm the veracity of the premise, then even if the argument is valid, it would, at best, disprove atheism and Calvinism alike.
If, however, Loftus is merely floating this hypothetical as a counterfactual; if, in actual fact, he denies the operating premise (i.e. the existence of the Calvinistic God), then he can only shield atheism from the consequences of his argument by shielding Calvinism from the consequences of his argument.
2.But, ironically, the argument, if valid, is more damaging to atheism than it is to Calvinism.
The argument, if valid, would disprove atheism while failing to disprove Calvinism.
For the argument assumes that Calvinism is true. If so, then his assumption can only be purchased at the cost of assuming that atheism is false.
The most that the argument can hope to achieve is to show that the faith of a Calvinist is unjustified, because it lacks evidentiary warrant.
And it would only be unjustified in the highly qualified sense that his belief in God is still a true belief.
3.But it gets even worse for Morgan and Loftus. What we’re treated to is yet another ignorant misstatement of Reformed theology.
Predestination and regeneration are necessary conditions of salvaing faith. They are not, however, sufficient conditions.
Predestination ensures the salvation of the elect. They will be regenerated, and come to saving faith.
But regeneration doesn’t create saving faith all by itself. Regeneration doesn’t transplant a fully-formed faith into the mind of the regenerate.
Rather, regeneration creates a predisposition to believe. It makes the mind receptive to spiritual truth by removing the ethical impediments to faith in God.
Thus, when the regenerated mind is presented with suitable evidence, it will respond accordingly. As B. B. Warfield said a long time ago:
"Faith is the gift of God; but it does not in the least follow that the faith that God gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without grounds in right reason. It is beyond all question only the prepared heart that can fitly respond to the ‘reasons’; but how can even a prepared heart respond, when there are not ‘reasons’ to draw out its action? One might as well say that photography is independent of light, because no light can make an impression unless the plate is prepared to receive it. The Holy Spirit does not work a blind, an ungrounded faith in the heart. What is supplied by his creative energy in working faith is not a read-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new ability of the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the understanding…for the birth of faith in the soul, it is just as essential that grounds of faith should be present to the mind as that the Give of faith should act creatively upon the heart,” SSW 2:98-99.
Both Loftus and Morgan have fallen into the usual trap of equating Calvinism with Hyper-Calvinism.
But while regeneration is immediate, the means of grace supply the object of faith.
Regeneration is a supernatural act. But it removes the mental block, due to the noetic effects of sin, that prevented the mind from naturally and spontaneously assenting to the evidence of God and the gospel.
4.Once again, I have to remind Danny that I never said an atheist was stupid. Some are, some aren’t.
Believers and unbelievers range along the same intellectual continuum—from high to low.
And I freely concede, as I’ve said before, that some unbelievers are quite brilliant. A few are men of genius.
However, only a small fraction of the brightest unbelievers even bother to attack the Christian faith.
As Steven Weinberg recently said:
“I've occasionally... not too often, gotten into conversations with my physicist colleagues about religion and I find an overwhelming lack of interest in it. I once said that they don't care enough about it to qualify as practicing atheists. They... they just regard it as a sort of question that it's silly to raise, and umm... I, for some obscure reason, I tend to care about it and I'm interested in religion, but most of my physicist friends are not.”
http://cotimotb.siteburg.com/wiki/index.php?wiki=AtheismTapesTwo
Likewise, John Searle has said:
“In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion…Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.”
“What has happened?…I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified…we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations.”
http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/1125014675.shtml
Ironically, then, the finest minds in modern-day secularism are also among the most ignorant of Christian theology.
It’s a viciously circular form of infidelity. They know next to nothing about Christian theology because they prejudge it to be untrue, and because they prejudge it to be untrue, they don’t bother to brush up on Christian theology.
Hence, the case for atheism is kicked downstairs to a bunch of intellectual hacks and flacks. By default, it’s overwhelmingly the third-tier thinkers who end up defending atheism.
Loftus is resentful of the way I rate the intellectual merits of atheism, but it’s his side, not mine, that’s responsible for the intellectual demotion of atheology to third-rate minds.
And of the few superior minds who do make an effort to assail the faith, while they themselves may be ever so brilliant, their objections are inept (e.g. Russell).
5.Finally, if Loftus and Morgan rankle under a perceived slight against the IQ of unbelievers, I’d merelyobserve that they hardly deflect the charge by mounting so many ill-informed criticisms of Calvinism—or the Bible.
The effect is to reinforce the allegation rather than rebut it.
It does get kind of irritating to keep reading people who pretend that if God exists He can only ordain the ends and not the means to that end too.
ReplyDeleteYes, God ordains that certain people will believe in Him--BUT He ordains that they will believe in Him through specific means, which He has also ordains. God doesn't just ordain "Joe Blow will believe in me." He ordains, "Joe Blow will believe in me because I will provide Him with the ability to accept the reasons for my existence" etc.
Of course, the bottom line is that non-belief in God does not rest in evidence but instead in the inability to accept the evidence that is there. The nonbeliever does not need more evidence but a turn of heart. This was demonstrated nicely by the lovely Master Green who asserted that if Christianity was proven to his arbitrary standard (which he has set up to specifically exclude Christianity--but that's another story), he'd kill himself rather than follow it.
It does get old having to continually repeat it...but as Steve points out, the Debunkers do a great job of reinforcing belief by demonstrating the lunacy of their position (i.e. the complete inability to understand one's own hypothetical...).