Deconversion and reconversion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9dc4gDLcQE

Is God a Moral Monster? A Conversation with Dr. Paul Copan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU7CEl55qXY&feature=youtu.be

Cultural genocide

I'll make a few observations:

https://randalrauser.com/2018/01/1-samuel-15-paul-copans-middling-compromise/

The Christian committed to recognizing the plenary inspiration of all Scripture now faces a dilemma:

Option 1: retain our moral intuitions that it is always wrong to slaughter non-combatants and thus deny that the plain reading that God commanded mass civilian slaughter is correct.

Option 2: accept the plain reading of the text that God commanded mass civilian slaughter and thus deny our intuitions that it is always wrong to slaughter non-combatants.

The Plain Reading of 1 Samuel 15: Mass Civilian Slaughter

i) According to whose moral intuitions is it "always wrong to slaughter non-combatants"? Did it violate the moral intuitions of Bible writers? Did it violate the moral intuitions of the soldiers who carried out those commands? Historically, is it universally or even generally true that killing noncombatants violates our moral intuitions? 

ii) The word "slaughter" is prejudicial. I don't deny that there are cases in which that's an appropriate word. But is killing noncombatants always equivalent to "slaughter", with its pejorative connotations?

iii) Notice Rauser's indiscriminate category: "civilians/noncombatants". But do all individuals covered by that umbrella term have the same moral status? Is it morally permissible to kill a combatant who uses a biochem weapon, but impermissible to kill a scientist who designs the biochem weapon? What makes civilian scientist sacrosanct? Isn't he morally complicit? 

What about a civilian who gives the orders? Why is it morally permissible to kill a combatant but impermissible to kill a civilian leader who issues orders to combatants? Isn't the leader more responsible (or culpable) than a footsoldier–who may well be a conscript? 

Rauser's dichotomy is morally arbitrary. He's taking intellectual shortcuts. 

You could argue that killing some types of noncombatants is morally wrong without arguing that killing all types of noncombatants is morally wrong. Or you could argue that killing some types of noncombatants is normally wrong, but sometimes there are extenuating circumstances.

iv) There's a difference between what's morally repellent and what's emotionally repellent. An action may be morally justifiable even if it's gut-wrenching. Sometimes it's morally licit or even obligatory to do things we hate. Take human shield situations. Or amputating a gangrenous limb. 

You see, the concept of genocide is a precisely defined legal concept which refers to any systematic attempt to destroy a cultural, religious, and/or social identity. And one can seek to destroy an identity without ever killing a person. Needless to say, it is small consolation that Copan’s abandonment of the plain reading still commits one to God’s commanding a legal genocide.

Is there something intrinsically wrong with destroying cultural identity? Take cultures that practice human sacrifice. Is it wrong to destroy their cultural identity?

What about the Third Reich? Was it wrong to destroy Nazi cultural identity? 

Some of my ancestors were Vikings. Vicious, ruthless pagan marauders. Christian missionaries destroyed their cultural identity. How unethical! 

Did God Really Command Genocide?

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2014/09/did-god-really-command-genocide-a-new-book-by-copan-and-flannagan.html

"No magic bullet--Copan's insufficient answer to the slaughter of the Canaanites"

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2014/08/no-magic-bullet-copans-insufficient.html

Does Scripture condone child sacrifice?

Thom Stark wrote a longwinded attack (“Is God a Moral Compromiser?” available online) on Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster?

Stark is a “Christian” of the John Spong variety. He’s a theological soul mate of Randal Rauser, who’s often written sympathetically about Stark’s material. I’m going to concentrate on one of Stark’s prooftexts:

After quoting Ezk 20:23-26, Stark says:

Some Israelites were appealing to the law of Moses to justify the institution of child sacrifice. Exod 22:29b says: “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.” With good reason, Israelites interpreted this as a command to sacrifice their firstborn children to Yahweh.

Ezekiel admits that Yahweh did in fact command the Israelites in the wilderness to sacrifice “all their firstborn” to him. But Ezekiel reinterprets this as a “bad command”… (89).

Stark’s analysis suffers from multiple confusions:

i) He assumes that Ezekiel is alluding to Exod 22:29. However, that’s not the only passage which uses this type of language. As one commentator points out:

Part of the vocabulary of v26 (“every opening of the womb,” “make over”) echoes the law of the redemption of the firstborn particularly represented in Exod 13:12-13. It ruled that, whereas firstborn male sacrificial animals were to be sacrificed, firstborn sons were to be redeemed with money paid to the sanctuary. L. Allen, Ezekiel 20-48 (Word 1990), 12.

If that’s what Ezekiel is actually alluding to, then that’s hardly a command to perform child sacrifice. Just the opposite: it’s a command to redeem firstborn sons.

ii) But even if Ezekiel is alluding to Exod 22:29, Stark misconstrues that passage. As one commentator explains:

The giving of the firstborn of animal and child to the Lord has already surfaced in Exodus (13:1-2,11-13), and will appear later in 34:19-20. There is one major difference between the data in chap. 22 and that in chaps. 13 and 34. Both chaps. 13 and 34 urge the parent to “redeem” (with a sheep maybe?) every firstborn son (Exod 13:13b; 34:20b). Exod 22:29 omits any reference to the “redemption” of the firstborn son.

In response, I say that the primary emphasis on these two verses is on giving to the Lord the first and best of one’s agricultural and animal products. The statement about the giving of the firstborn son is terse and almost parenthetical. Hence, the data is truncated and is to be “filled in” with the fuller data from chaps. 13 and 34.

Second, there are other passages in the Bible of individuals “given” to the Lord with no mention of their being “redeemed.” For example, when Hannah prayerfully vows, “If you will…give [me] a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life” (1 Sam 1:11), does she mean “sacrifice” the child, or dedicate/hand over the child? Similarly, Num 8:16 refers to the Levites as those “who are to be given wholly to me.” “Wholly given” surely does not mean “sacrificed,” but “dedicated.” V. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker 2011), 418-19.

In other words, Exod 22:29 is just a shorthand statement, qualified by other statements of the same kind in the same book.

iii) Stark has Ezekiel deliberately opposing the Mosaic law. Yet Ezekiel revered the authority of the Mosaic law (Ezk 22:26). His indictment of Israel in Ezk 5-6 invokes the curse sanctions in Lev 26. His indictment of Israel in 8:5-18 has its background in the Mosaic prohibitions contained in Exod 20:3-6, Num 33:52, Deut 4:1-20, 5:1-12, and 17:2-5.

iv) Ezekiel is addressing the exilic community. But why were the Jews exiled in the first place? Because they were covenant-breakers. Because they disobeyed the Mosaic law.

And they were exiled, not merely because they disobeyed God’s law. Rather, their disobedience took a specific form. They disobeyed God’s law by defiantly doing the very things which God solemnly forbad. By emulating the abominable practices of their pagan neighbors. That’s the very thing which the Mosaic law forewarned them to studiously avoid (e.g. Lev 18:21, 20:1-6; Deut 12:31, 18:9-13).

Now, on Stark’s interpretation, he has Ezekiel telling the Jews that God banished them, not for disobeying his commands, but for obeying his commands. According to Stark, God originally commanded the Jews to practice child sacrificed, the Jews complied, then God punished them for obeying his command. Of course, that interpretation is utterly nonsensical.

v) As one commentator notes, 

Some interpreters even take 20:26 as implying that Yahweh commanded the Israelites to sacrifice their children to Molech, but it is clear in 16:20-21 that Jerusalem acted against Yahweh's will and express command when, as the folding baby girl turned whore, she slaughtered the children she had borne to Yahweh by making them pass through the fire (the same act of which the people are accused here. H. Hummel, Ezekiel 1-20 (Concordia 2005), 596-97. 

vi) Finally, Stark has a tin ear for Ezekiel’s morbid sarcasm, which he employs for shock value. As one commentator observes:

Ezekiel is being horrendously controversial in this whole chapter, creating a rhetorical parody of Israel’s history in order to highlight its worst side. In a context of such sustained sarcasm and irony, we cannot suddenly take a verse like this as a face-value doctrinal or historical affirmation. C. Wright, The Message of Ezekiel (IVP 2001), 160.

Answering Objections to Presuppositionalism

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/03/13/answering-objections-to-presuppositionalism/print/

Does Presuppositionalism Engage in Question-Begging?

http://www.proginosko.com/2012/03/does-presuppositionalism-engage-in-question-begging/

Paul Copan on common ground

Second, Christians share common ground with unbelievers, who are likewise made in God's image, which is not erased by the fall. Someone has said, "A person who believes in total depravity can't be all that bad!" Yet in some Reformed circles, the doctrine of total depravity seems to leave no trace of the imago Dei. The Scriptures affirm otherwise (Gen. 9:6), and God can and does speak to unbelievers through reason, beauty, moral failure, and the existence of evil. As a cloud of apologetical witnesses can testify, God has used philosophical arguments for his existence, scientific supports for the universe's beginning (Big Bang) and its fine-tuning, and historical evidences for the resurrection of Jesus to assist people in embracing Christ---just as God uses the preaching of the gospel (Romans 1:16) or the loving character of a Christian community (John 13:35). These are all part of the holistic witness to the reality of God and the gospel, all of which the Spirit of God can use to lead unbelievers to embracing Jesus Christ.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/03/12/questioning-presuppositionalism/

Several problems:

i) No mainstream Reformed theologian thinks the fall effaces the imago Dei.

ii) Copan is using the imago Dei as a cipher to pour in gallons of psychological properties. But I don’t think that’s exegetically sustainable. In Scripture, the category of the imago Dei doesn’t have all that psychological content. Take David Clines’ classic monograph:

http://98.131.162.170//tynbul/library/TynBull_1968_19_03_Clines_ImageOfGodInMan.pdf

iii) Presuppositionalists like John Frame and James Anderson don’t object to deploying a variety of different arguments in Christian apologetics.

iv) Common ground is person-relative. Take the abortive debate between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett:

http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2009/02/an-opinionated.html

http://www.apologetics315.com/2009/02/alvin-plantinga-daniel-dennett-debate.html

D. Dennett & A. Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (OUP 2010).

That went nowhere because Plantinga and Dennett don’t share enough common ground to build a bridge.

v) This brings us to the noetic effects of sin. Depending on where you come down on that issue, you will have different views about the unbeliever. Some professing Christian apologists think it’s rational to be an atheist. An atheist is a sincere truth-seeker. He is arguing in good faith. The problem is insufficient evidence.

But on another view, the impediment is less intellectual than ethical or emotional–less a matter of reason than will (or willfulness). The unbeliever is a rebel. His problem is not a lack of light or enlightenment, but turning his back on the light.

As a result, the unbeliever will try to rig the game. Impose arbitrary rules of evidence to filter out evidence that challenges his unbelief. And this isn’t just theoretical. Some unbelievers are clearly evasive. Try to find common ground with Richard Carrier, Robert Price, Keith Parsons, David Hume, or Ernst Troeltsch.

Or consider the recent debate between Paul Copan, Richard Hess, Thom Stark.  There’s no room for constructive dialogue. No way to advance the argument.

vi) This doesn’t mean apologetic dialogue is futile. Rather, there is no presumption regarding how reasonable or unreasonable any particular unbeliever will be. A Christian apologist will do the best he can, but some unbelievers give him nothing to work with.

vii) The rules of evidence are frequently far from “neutral.” Take methodological naturalism. That’s a prejudicial stipulation. A Christian apologist can’t operate within that framework–and he shouldn’t. That needs to be challenged, not accommodated.

Does presuppositionalism beg the question?

First, it engages in question-begging---assuming what one wants to prove. It begins with the assumption that God exists, and then concludes that God exists. Such reasoning would get you an "F" in any logic class worthy of the name!

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/03/12/questioning-presuppositionalism/

i) In a stock Van Tilian dialogue, the apologist asks the unbeliever to assume the truth of Christianity for the sake of argument, then consider the explanatory power of Christianity. Presupposing Christianity is a thought-experiment. And a hypothetical scenario isn’t begging the question.

ii) Conversely, the apologist assumes the truth of atheism (or some other non-Christian worldview) for the sake of argument, then asks the unbeliever a series of Socratic questions to show how his non-Christian worldview lacks explanatory power.

Copan on presuppositionalism

I’m going to comment on some statements that Paul Copan made here:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/03/12/questioning-presuppositionalism/

First, it engages in question-begging---assuming what one wants to prove. It begins with the assumption that God exists, and then concludes that God exists. Such reasoning would get you an "F" in any logic class worthy of the name!

Several problems with this objection:

i) Copan fails to distinguish between a circular argument and a circular epistemology. Between logical circularity and epistemic circularity.

Circularity in a logical syllogism is fallacious. By contrast, philosophers like Roderick Chisholm and William Aston concede the inevitabliity of epistemic circularity. That’s not invalid. Epistemology is broader than logical validity.

ii) It’s not uncommon for people to assume what they intend to prove. And there’s nothing inherently suspect about that. For instance, great scientists like Newton, Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Linus Pauling may intuit the answer before they formally prove the answer. Indeed, there’s a term for that: “physical intuition.”

Great mathematicians like Henri Poincaré, Paul Cohen, Benoit Mandelbrot, Roger Penrose, and Andrew Wiles may discover a solution through a flash of insight, before they get around to formally proving their solution. There’s a term for that too: “mathematical intuition.”

Great chess players such as Capablanca have innate sight-of-the-board. They can size up what to do next at a glance. By the same token, medical diagnosticians are often guided by hunches.

iii) Copan has written many apologetic books and articles. Surely he doesn’t zero out his Christian faith and begin from scratch every time he sits down to write a new book about Christianity. Surely he doesn’t come to each new literary project undecided on the existence of God or the truth of Christianity. No. He begins with what he already believes. That’s a given. He assumes at the outset what he’s going to prove.

When he sits down to write a new book or article on Christianity, I doubt he’s in a state of suspense regarding the outcome. No. His conclusion is a foregone conclusion. If his book winds up defending Christianity, it’s not as if his belief only emerged at the end of the writing process. It’s not as if he had to finish writing the book to find out what he believes. Proving something isn’t necessarily, or even generally, a process of discovery.

Of course a Christian apologist takes the Christian faith for granted when he reasons with an unbeliever. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a Christian apologist.

iv) Now perhaps what Copan means is that while a Christian apologist assumes what he needs to prove at the time he reasons with an unbeliever, his current conviction is the result of prior investigation. He arrived at his Christian position by carefully verifying the claims of Christianity. But if that’s what Copan means, then that exposes the ambiguity of his objection.

v) Finally, Frame has said his methodology is linear rather than circular. Cf. S. Cowan, ed. Five Views On Apologetics (Zondervan 2000), 210.

While we begin our worldview examination from somewhere, universal logical laws like the law of non-contradiction or excluded middle are inescapable for assessing and critiquing worldviews.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But what grounds the laws of logic? What’s the ontology of logic?

You can begin with logic, but you can also go behind logic to construct a transcendental argument for logic. What’s the metaphysical machinery that underwrites logic?

Furthermore, why the Christian God and not the God of the Qur’an as the ground for rational thought?

i) Keep in mind that Islam is a Judeo-Christian heresy. A rip-off. Muhammad’s worth-of-mouth knowledge (often garbled) of the Bible and Christian theology often feeds into the Koran. So Islam illustrates the Van Tilian adage about unbelievers welching on the borrowed capital of Christianity.

ii) It may be that transcendental arguments are insufficiently discriminating to single out Christianity. If so, then you need to deploy different types of arguments to disprove Islam. In that event, transcendental arguments must be supplemented by other kinds of arguments. But that doesn’t obviate the distinctive contribution of transcendental arguments.

Paul Copan replies to Hector Avalos

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/07/guest-post-paul-copan-replies-to-hector-avalos-deuteronomy-2511-12-an-eye-for-an-eye-and-raymond-westbrook.html

Does religion originate in the brain?

Paul Copan addresses the question.

(BTW, Angus Menuge does as well but his response apparently isn't freely available. But perhaps it overlaps with some of what he said in his debate with P.Z. Myers.)