Gary, I have Figured Out Your Problem: Well, One Of Them

Gary wrote a post about his poor feels.  In the post, he attributes something I wrote to “James, conservative Christian.”  Then, he swings for the fences and says he thinks that I’m actually JP Holding.

LULZ!

First, what did Gary quote me as saying?  I’m glad you asked.  Gary had said: “Ask Jesus to levitate my coffee table three feet off the ground for three minutes and I will believe.”  To which I responded:

Why would something that Derren Brown can emulate be enough to convince you that Jesus is Lord?

This inadvertently exposes a fundamental problem for you. You hate God so much that you don't even know what would count as evidence. You pretend that it wouldn't take much evidence to convince you, but what you ask for is a magic trick. And not only that, but one that can be performed by dozens of people in ways you would never be able to catch. Penn & Teller could perform a levitating table trick for you right now and you wouldn't be able to tell how they did it. Does that count as evidence they are divine? Of course not.

So when you say that's what it would take for you to believe Jesus, you obviously lie. Why?

I mean that seriously. Ask yourself. Why is it you insist on giving trials that would not prove the thing you're requesting in the first place? Were you really blinded to it? If so, what would be sufficient to blind you to how obvious this is? Perhaps a sin nature at enmity with God?

Gary is upset that I pointed out that he hates God.  He even bolded and italicized that sentence when he quoted it (without saying “emphasis added” or anything like that, since I didn’t bold or italicize it myself).  Gary then said: “Good grief.  This guy knows nothing about me but decides after a very brief conversation that the reason for my deconversion was that I hate God.”

Actually, I know more about Gary than he might think, such as that he’s been going around whining on several people’s blogs since early July trying to pick fights with theists.  But whatever, that’s par for the course for atheists who have nothing better to do with their life.  Also, I stated my reasons for making the statement.  Gary gave us a very obvious lie.  Why?  What could explain that?  Well, hatred of God certainly fits the bill.  Either way, Gary still didn't give a counter reason for why he gave such an obvious lie.

In the comments on his blog, Gary accuses me of being JP Holding by saying: “After receiving a few nasty, personally demeaning responses to my comments on Triablogue, I started to recognize the handiwork of JP Holding. Isn’t he one of the owners of Triablogue? His primary strategy on every blog in which he is involved is to personally attack and demean the skeptic to shut them up. His minions follow suit in the personal attacks.”


I asked JP Holding if I was permitted to confirm he was an owner of Triablogue now that the great Gary had figured it out, and he said "Only if you call me Patrick Chan."  So, there is that.

But personally, I don’t know how it’s demeaning to ask Gary to be consistent.  Well, actually given the impossible “standards” he uses, I suppose it would be demeaning to hold someone to them. I still find it funny that Gary thinks that I’m JP Holding though.  This gives me even further reason not to take anything Gary says seriously.

But I will.  See, I’ve actually taken Gary seriously throughout.  More seriously than Gary does, as a matter of fact.

How can I say that?  Because I insist that if Gary uses a standard that he USES that standard.  The end of the very first thing I said to him in my first response was: “If you plan on going that route, you're going to have to apply it to your own view too. Unless you don't care about consistency. But if that's the case, I don't care about what you have to say.”

And see, that still stands.  If Gary doesn’t apply his own rhetoric to his own position, then clearly what he says doesn’t have any substance.  I respect Gary too much to pretend that his non-responses are actually responses when he clearly doesn’t believe they are responses.

But let us look at what Gary has yet to actually respond to, and this is just in what I’ve presented to him.  I am persistent and have no problem pointing it out:

Gary wrote:
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Just because a lot of people believe something...doesn't mean it is true.
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The reality is, people had evidence for geocentrism, starting with what they observed with their own senses. They had reason to suspect the Earth was stationary because anyone could put a drop of water on the side of a top and give it a twirl and watch the water go flying off on a tangent line to the rotation of the top, so if the Earth was spinning that would mean we ought to go flying off its surface too.

The fact is, no matter what foolish theory you decide to pick throughout history, it was always believed because of the evidence, not due to the lack of the evidence. And the only reason that anyone ever changed their mind on a topic was when a paradigm-shift happened.

Newtonian physics could not explain the orbit of Mercury, and it took Einstein thinking outside the box to explain it better. Even then, we know for a fact that many of our current theories are still flawed because there are fundamental contradictions between relativity and quantum mechanics. In a decade, people could view something like string theory in the same way we currently view phlogiston.

So what you're really trying to say is "Just because a lot of people have evidence for something...doesn't mean it is true." Because what you're attacking is not the belief, but instead the evidence provided for the belief.

If you plan on going that route, you're going to have to apply it to your own view too. Unless you don't care about consistency. But if that's the case, I don't care about what you have to say.

…

Gary wrote:
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As mammals we are "herd animals" and herds operate best (and are more likely to pass on their genetic material) when the herd establishes rules for the herd that are also beneficial to the individuals in the herd.
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Except clearly our view of morality do NOT operate in such a manner; they operate in opposition to this. We have compassion on the weak and sick--which not only is not Darwinian, but it actually undermines Darwinism by increasing the ability of non-ideal genetics to get passed on.

But if you really hold to Darwinism, I think you're facing a bigger problem. Atheists are a very, very small subset of people who exist. Something like 4% worldwide, according to Dawkins. I'll be generous and say 10% of the population is atheist. That means that 90% of people hold to some kind of deity.

According to Darwinistic reasoning, the only way to get to this level of disparity is if atheism harms evolution. There is some survivability advantage to believing in a God (of whatever kind) that doesn't attain for atheists.

But I'm quite sure you believe it is a *FACT* that there is no God, so you're left with a dilemma. Darwinism is selecting for something that is false. That which is NOT TRUE provides a better survivability rate than the truth does. Which is problematic on the face of it, but gets worse when you realize that EVERYTHING you think and reason about is the result of evolution, in your view, and if evolution does not select for truth then you have no basis to trust any of your beliefs whatsoever.

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"If two billion people always pray to Jesus when they are ill, then statistics tells us that there are going to be millions of instances in which the person recovers from that illness shortly after praying to Jesus. It's just basic math, folks."

And how are you going to establish what the baseline "random" recoveries should be? What if the reason the common cold isn't fatal more frequently is because Christians pray? Does this even enter into your mind to think on? Of course not, because you have a drum to pound and you're going to pound it.

You've mentioned several times that the rate of miraculous healing between atheists, Muslims, Hindus, etc. is all the same, but this conveniently overlooks the fact that Christians do not pray ONLY for Christians, but also for non-Christians. Indeed, sometimes we pray more for non-believers than we do for believers, because we know that if a believer dies he or she is going to heaven whereas the non-believer will go to hell. It is far more important to pray for the non-believer's recovery than the believer's. But again, it doesn't even enter into your mind to think about that aspect.

Expand your horizons. The box you inhabit is far too small.

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"If the overwhelming majority of experts on an issue find out they are wrong and change their position then we non-experts should follow suit."

Except, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out, scientists don't change their position even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They just die while the new generation doesn't believe what the old one did.

That's how scientific consensus changes through time.

…

Since you brought up the fact that we should listen to experts, Gary, how are you an expert in anything you're talking about. This includes the "consensus of NT scholarship"--are you an expert in NT scholarship? Note, I'm not asking if you're an expert in the NT (that comes later) but if you are an expert in what constitutes genuine NT scholarship. What is your degree in? Prove your credentials.

This isn't my standard, it's yours. Until you live by your own standard, kindly shut up.

And only after all of this was ignored did I finally say:

Gary,
Oh so now you're an expert in defining the "scientific community" too, eh? What are your credentials, Garebear? A PhD in Google-Fu? What fields are you an expert in? Who did you study under? What makes your words of whizzdumb so important that anyone should listen to you?

You're a gasbag of randomly arranged atomic particles that somehow has self-awareness but which will pass into nothing the instant you die. This isn't what I believe--it's what you believe.

So why should anyone care about one word you've said? C'mon. Put up your dukes or hightail it out of here like the inconsistent coward you are.

At this point, Gary said (to another atheist responding): “Hi Lehman. My interest in this conversation is waning. If you feel like it, take over, my non-supernaturalist brother! You are more than capable of dealing with this set of supernaturalists.”

To which, I said: “I suspect it's pretty hard to stay interested when people keep pointing out how you're not following your own standards.  Gary still hasn't given his credentials either, so I'm assuming he has none.”

Now Gary, you can retreat to your own blog and misidentify me and whine and complain all you want, but really all your screeching is doing is demonstrating that you don’t have a leg to stand on.  You ignored everything of substance brought against your position, shifted the goalposts, pretended that we haven’t already presented counter arguments to your own position, and lied repeatedly throughout our interaction.  You got mad at me because I saw through it and refused to play along with you and insisted you use your own standards.

You made the rules, Gary.  I’m enforcing your own standards against you.

If you don’t like it, perhaps you should get better standards.