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Saturday, July 25, 2020

A Thick Layer: A Fine-Tuned Critique of Arvin Ash

Luke Barnes responds to Arvin Ash on the fine-tuning argument.

16 comments:

  1. I'm sure there are plenty of atheists who watched the referenced Youtube video, patting themselves on the backs for not being theists and for being so reasonable and scientific. Sounds like nothing more than a strawman.

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  2. All the way through this article I found myself wondering, why did he bother to write this? In his conclusion, he asks himself the same question and answers with the number of views Ash's claptrap had received.

    We live in an age when certain people want to create pseudoscience and other people willingly listen and believe. I don't understand either mindset, not in the slightest. I suppose it's the consequence of our society's almost total loss of critical thinking skills. All these poor people have left is a gut feeling or their "best guess" or an unthinking acceptance of a received dogma.

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    1. But do we have any info on how most peopled reasoned in the past? Can it be said things have gotten worse, or just that people can now make it more obvious how they (don't) reason.

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    2. To some extent in the past, it only mattered how the intelligentsia thought. The rabble had no power. Ever-increasing suffrage--and now, social media--have changed all that. Now, we have heavy hitters on the floor of Congress with precious little education and no idea of (nor concern for) the long-term consequences of their proffered policies.

      We do know that those who were educated in the past were more schooled in rhetoric and logic and the like. Even well-educated folks these days have difficulty constructing a coherent argument. We do well with those hard sciences that do not lend themselves to politicization (simple chemistry and physics) but go astray on anything more complicated or controversial (epidemiology, climatology, the origins of life, etc). And we go absolutely schizoid when it comes to the soft sciences.

      Part of our current problem is with epistemological frameworks. Postmodernism is driven more by subjective narrative and community sentiment. It doesn't lend itself well even to the concept of sound argument.

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    3. Oh, so you mean math isn't white and therefore racist? :)

      I suppose a fundamental problem today is so many people cast doubt on (if not deny) moral realism coupled with the same people willing to follow progressive-minded technocrats on a host of issues (e.g. we can make men women and women men, medical science is racist against blacks, embryos are a mere clump of cells).

      Come to think of it, much of what's happening today may not be significantly different from the period leading up to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength in the midst of WW2.

      WW2 in turn was to a large extent about totalitarian regimes (e.g. Nazis, Imperial Japanese, our momentary allies the Soviets) imposing their ethical norms onto masses of people via forward-thinking or "enlightened" technocrats who purportedly know what's best for "society". Much of it justified by similar language and rhetoric we hear today.

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    4. Eric's comment reminds me a little of When Reason Goes on Holiday. Philosophers, who were good in their field of philosophy, jettisoned all thinking when it came to Marxism and gave it a big warm embrace, up to and including changing their speeches (America shouldn't go to war against Nazi Germany) when the Soviets were invaded.

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    5. It's very Lewisian (is that a word?), but it's annoying because they still use the same language that requires objective standards. Progress with a capital P needs a standard to be objectively progress, and the Good needs a standard for the same reason.

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    6. Great points, TFC!

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    7. Hawk--

      I adore Pearcey, but she's behind the times!!
      I remember asking a friend of mine, an elder at my church who was a doctoral student in math pedagogy, whether there was such a thing as "ethno-mathematics." I asked it with half a chuckle, expecting a negative reply. He shocked me by quickly responding that my made-up field of study was very real. Those formerly under colonial rule wanted to start from scratch even in terms of mathematics. They wanted to do things their own way and not submit to the findings of an oppressive power.

      But that was 25 years ago!!! 😮

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    8. All in all, though, mathematics is spectacularly non-controversial. Democrats and Republicans, Socialists and Libertarians, social workers and librarians...all agree that the square root of nine is three. It's nice to have some "common ground" as Americans!!

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    9. Of course, my bit about math was a lark. ;)

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    10. Speaking of postmodernism and pseudoscience and the fact that "they still use the same language that requires objective standards" -- In the same way that the Democrats accused Trump of the very thing that they were guilty of doing ("Russian collusion"), I think we have to step back away from science and talk about "how the discussion is happening". If "discussion" can even occur. The language is being (and to a large degree already has been) hijacked, and when people DO talk, they are using the same words, perhaps, with different meanings.

      I talk with my atheist sons (who are moderating to be sure) about Intelligent Design, and I'm very specific with what someone like Michael Behe or Stephen Meyer says about the construction of the cell or DNA, and it doesn't even matter, because they can say "pseudoscience" of ID, even the way that everyone is "racist" today. The actual science behind ID doesn't even matter. Someone on Wikipedia called it "pseudoscience" and so these guys feel that they can call it pseudoscience, end of discussion, no need to go into the details.

      It is the same thing that Machen described in "Christianity and Liberalism". The same words are being used, but with totally different "content" to those words, and it's no wonder things have gotten to be the way they are.

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    11. The scary thing about the abuse and misuse of language and truth is that someday God "will send them a strong delusion so that they will believe the lie". (2 Thess 2).

      We already see delusional thinking running rampant, and Pilate's infamous question to Christ still echoes today, "What is truth?"

      It's only going to get worse as lawlessness increases and mankind generally descends further and further down the ignoble spiral outlines in Roman's 1:18-32.

      Maranatha Lord Jesus!

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    12. Bill Vallicella has said quite a bit about the need for definitions, and James Lindsay has started "A Plain-Language Encyclopedia of Social Justice Terminology". This New Dicourses site is academic but definitely not Christian, and it's only just starting, but I think this is the kind of thing that's needed:

      https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/

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    13. If SJWs end up with real definitions, they'll quickly have to jettison them. SJWs thrive on the amorphous nature of their language. It can mean whatever they want it to mean depending on what they want to attack currently. That's not a bug, that's the feature.

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  3. PP, you are right on point there. Lets not even get started on "dog whistles". They can pick any word and suddenly decided it is a dog whistle, which means a super secret code word that only other racists/sexist/whatever -ist they are attacking today know about. You use of the word automatically marks you as a *-ist, and thus your argument is invalid. At this point, I think I have head that multiple commonly used words are really dog whistles that mark you as racist.

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