“One of my professors was the dean of Evangelicalism for many years before he passed away, Dr. Kenneth Kantzer, who was an influential Calvinistic evangelical thinker at the time. He studied under the premier Calvinist of the last century, Karl Barth. I took a class with him on Calvinism, and I did my Master’s thesis on Karl Barth.”
—John Loftus
Karl Barth was in dialogue with Reformed historical theology. He was indebted to Calvinism.
But he was not a Calvinist. His own theological system is a highly eclectic and idiosyncratic synthesis.
For a comparative analysis of Barth by a Dutch-Reformed theology prof. who studied under Barth, cf.
Fred. H. Klooster: The significance of Barth's theology; an appraisal: with special reference to election and reconciliation (Baker 1961).
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Dumping on Debunker Week (7/13/06)
This is an open forum for the benefit of Christian commenters who've been banned from other secular sites. Fire away!
The naturalistic fallacy
***QUOTE***
Jim said:
Steve,
Interesting post. However, I don't think that it applies in every case of an atheologian's use of the "problem of evil."
Usually the a-theologian will claim that "evil happens" (therefore there is no God) and your criticism would apply. However, he doesn't NEED to do this to formulate an argument. All he needs to state is that "'evil' - as a theist would define it - exists" while maintaining a relativist position, and he could sidestep your objection.
BTW - I believe your criticism of George is accurate - he is clearly appalled by the actions he posits. But what if he formulated his argument by saying that the THEIST should see these things as evil - even though he views them reserved nonprescriptive stance?
***END-QUOTE***
Jim,
Good questions.
1.Yes, it is possible for a moral relativist to mount a purely internal critique of the Christian faith.
Since, however, George and Sam Harris are clearly including their own moral intuitions in the way they frame the problem of evil against Christianity, I didn’t bother to address your example.
2.But let’s play along with your example a little further. A moral relativist can press the problem of evil against Christian theism, but he will pay a price.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he’s successful in showing that the problem of evil disproves the existence of the Christian God. What has he accomplished?
As a moral relativist, he doesn’t think it’s wrong to hold false beliefs. So even if the Christian faith were a false belief-system, there would be nothing morally objectionable, from his viewpoint, about continuing to adhere to the Christian faith.
So his victory would be a Pyrrhic victory.
***QUOTE***
George said:
“I don’t have to do any such thing, I just have to point to what theists consider evil, and show that their myriad gods are doing nothing to stop it.”
There are a couple problems with this claim:
i) Yes, you can point to events which a Christian would regard as evil. But that’s not enough to make an internal case against the Christian.
Rather, you need to point to events which a Christian would regard as gratuitous evils.
ii) To say that God is doing nothing to stop evil is fatally ambiguous.
It’s true that God doesn’t prevent every evil. But by common grace, he prevents many evils.
And in terms of Christian eschatology, there will be a day of reckoning.
“Most theists don’t want to die, or have their loved ones die slow painful deaths from diseases. Thus, they pray to their gods to intervene and provide a supernatural cure for these illnesses.”
This does nothing to disprove Christian theism. Christian theology doesn’t deny the existence of death and disease.
And prayer is not unconditional in Scripture.
For you to successfully mount an internal critique of the Christian faith based on the problem of evil, you need to cite phenomena inconsistent with Christian theology.
Your anecdotal examples don’t achieve that objective.
“Yet these alleged caring gods who allegedly ‘intelligently designed’ these killer viruses and cancers, don’t cure theists, or Reformed Protestant Christians, with any greater frequency than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.”
All you’ve done is to frame a straw man argument.
1.If some Christians labor under the misimpression that God will answer every prayer, the fact that their false expectations will be disappointeed does nothing to falsify the Christian faith. To falsify a false belief does nothing to falsify a true belief.
George, you need to try a little harder to be logical. You are letting your emotionalism get the better of the argument.
2.Also, I expect that Christians are healed at a higher rate than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.
“Again, if you want to claim that your god wants a little 12 year old Christian girl, to die a slow, painful death of cancer, and have her parents and her whole church, racked with anquish, as their prayers to this god go unanswered, that’s fine. I'm sure it can all be rationalized as "god's plan". But please don’t pretend that this god ‘cares’ about the welfare of this little girl or her family in this life and this world.”
Again, George, you’re substituting hysteria for reason. As Paul Helm has stated:
“There is no reason to think that God intends the details of the universe separately; there is one divine will, which encompasses all events. It would be fallacious to suppose that the divine attitude is the same with respect to every detail of what god wills…As Aquinas put it, ‘God, and nature, and indeed, every causal agent, does what is best overall, but not what is best in every part, except when the part is regarded in its relationship to the whole.’ We may suppose that when God knowingly and willingly permits certain events he does so in furtherance of some wider consideration wholly consistent with his character with respect to which they are a logically necessary condition. And likewise, some of those things which he causes are means to some further end,” J. Beilby & P. Eddy, eds. Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (IVP 2001), 182.
“Your gods, as usual, are nowhere in sight.”
You are falling into a fallacious all-or-nothing argument. The fact that God doesn’t intervene every time doesn’t mean that God doesn’t intervene anytime.
Once again, try to be rational about this.
“As far as your cliché strawman that I can’t critique your invisible god’s impotence, in the face of the death and destruction of his loyal followers, ‘without an external standard of comparison’. I believe if I commissioned a poll, most Christians would agree that they don’t want to die slow, painful, premature deaths. Nor do they want their children to. And I believe the same poll would show most of these Christians believe they can petition the Christian god to change the course of events should they be stricken with a deadly disease. They may even say that there god is ‘watching out for them’ or perhaps he has assigned an angel the task, or some such superstition.”
This is not an internal critique of the Christian belief-system. Every step of the way you fail to make good on your stated claim.
The fact that some churchgoers get their theology from “Touched By An Angel” rather than the Bible is irrelevant to the coherence of Christian theism.
“I’m not sure who told you that naturalists can’t believe that certain human behaviors are atrocious or gratutious or even ‘evil’ without the benefit on your three headed Hebrew tribal deity. But I assure you, you’re wrong. Just because someone accepts the universe and natural world for what it is, and perhaps can even identify the causes of disease or violent tendencies in certain humans, doesn’t mean we surrender our value judgments of what we believe is good or right behavior.”
If you are a naturalist, then where are you getting your value judgments if not from the natural world? So why are you so disapproving of what you seen around you? For a naturalist you’re pretty ill-adapted to your natural surroundings.
“No, the ‘problem of evil’ only exists when there is an allegedly omnipotent god that could prevent evil...but doesn't, for unknown reasons that theists like to rationalize.”
This is a simple-minded caricature of the problem. The fact that God doesn’t prevent every instance of evil, here and now, is not a defeater for Christian theism.
Also, the fact that we may not know why every individual evil takes place does not mean that we are in the dark regarding the general role of evil in a Christian theodicy.
“Perhaps you are the kind of theist who upon witnessing a rape, thinks ‘I’d better not do anything to stop it, I’m sure my personal god has a good reason for allowing this evil to occur.’
This is false with respect to the preceptive and decretive will of God alike. Rape is a sin. Rape is contrary to God’s moral law for man.
Conversely, if God had decreed me not to intervene, then I’d be unable to intervene. If I’m able to intervene, then my intervention does not run counter to his decretive will.
***QUOTE***
I thought I explained that in my reply. That's a really nasty fallacy spread by theists, in order to distract from any argument, that has a moral component. Theists, especially Muslims and Christians, certainly don't have the patent on human morality. Nor do their alleged killer gods.
If you want to argue with me over rape being wrong, thats fine. If you agree its wrong, please don't pretend we don't share that same moral standard, in an effort to sidetrack the main discussion.
"Rape" is wrong by definition. The value judgment is contained in its definition. Just like it is in the word murder.
***END-QUOTE***
There are a couple of basic problems with this reply:
1.The association of moral relativism with secular humanism isn’t a malicious rumor spread by Christians.
It was Hume who brought up the is-ought problem. It was Moore who brought up the naturalistic fallacy.
Various unbelievers subscribe to some version or another of moral antirealism, whether emotivism, non-cognitivism, social constructivism, cultural relativism, descriptive relativism, &c.
These debates crop up all the time in varieties of evolutionary ethics, such as social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology.
For an overview, cf.:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evol-eth.htm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/
And this is applied to cases of rape. Consider academic studies such as:
A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT 2000)
by Randy Thornhill, Craig T. Palmer, Margo I. Wilson
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Mariner Books 1997)
by Dale Peterson, Richard Wrangham
Or consider the following exchange between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston:
***QUOTE***
R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.
C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?
R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.
C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?
R: By my feelings.
C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?
R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it [to] you.
C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you’d have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.
R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.
C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it’s simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.
R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.
C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?
R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?
C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.
R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.
C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don’t like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the Commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.
C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.
R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.
C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don’t approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the Commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.
R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don’t agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they’re not yellow, and most people agree with me that the Commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.
C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?
R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.
C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?
R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you’ve got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.
C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.
R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.
R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.
C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don’t see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.
R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.
C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.
R: But the lawgiver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial lawgivers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.
C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. It can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.
R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody’s imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."
C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....
R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.
C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can’t help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.
R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn’t do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.
C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it’s lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.
R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can’t imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm
***END-QUOTE***
To finish up on George:
“The fact remains, the alleged, caring, omnipotent, Christian god chooses not to stop rape, in the worldview of Christians. He doesn't stop rape in my worldview, because he doesn't exist, he's a figment of theist imagination. Thus his failure to act, to protect, and to cure, like any loving parent would, is a problem for Christians to rationalize, and they've become very good at it over the years.”
This is not an internal critique of Christian theism. All George has ever done in this course of this thread is to pull certain adjectives like “loving” and “caring” out of the air, apply them to God, point to some instance of evil, then exclaim: “Aha! God doesn’t exist!”
You are attacking your own homegrown version of Christian theism.
Jim said:
Steve,
Interesting post. However, I don't think that it applies in every case of an atheologian's use of the "problem of evil."
Usually the a-theologian will claim that "evil happens" (therefore there is no God) and your criticism would apply. However, he doesn't NEED to do this to formulate an argument. All he needs to state is that "'evil' - as a theist would define it - exists" while maintaining a relativist position, and he could sidestep your objection.
BTW - I believe your criticism of George is accurate - he is clearly appalled by the actions he posits. But what if he formulated his argument by saying that the THEIST should see these things as evil - even though he views them reserved nonprescriptive stance?
***END-QUOTE***
Jim,
Good questions.
1.Yes, it is possible for a moral relativist to mount a purely internal critique of the Christian faith.
Since, however, George and Sam Harris are clearly including their own moral intuitions in the way they frame the problem of evil against Christianity, I didn’t bother to address your example.
2.But let’s play along with your example a little further. A moral relativist can press the problem of evil against Christian theism, but he will pay a price.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he’s successful in showing that the problem of evil disproves the existence of the Christian God. What has he accomplished?
As a moral relativist, he doesn’t think it’s wrong to hold false beliefs. So even if the Christian faith were a false belief-system, there would be nothing morally objectionable, from his viewpoint, about continuing to adhere to the Christian faith.
So his victory would be a Pyrrhic victory.
***QUOTE***
George said:
“I don’t have to do any such thing, I just have to point to what theists consider evil, and show that their myriad gods are doing nothing to stop it.”
There are a couple problems with this claim:
i) Yes, you can point to events which a Christian would regard as evil. But that’s not enough to make an internal case against the Christian.
Rather, you need to point to events which a Christian would regard as gratuitous evils.
ii) To say that God is doing nothing to stop evil is fatally ambiguous.
It’s true that God doesn’t prevent every evil. But by common grace, he prevents many evils.
And in terms of Christian eschatology, there will be a day of reckoning.
“Most theists don’t want to die, or have their loved ones die slow painful deaths from diseases. Thus, they pray to their gods to intervene and provide a supernatural cure for these illnesses.”
This does nothing to disprove Christian theism. Christian theology doesn’t deny the existence of death and disease.
And prayer is not unconditional in Scripture.
For you to successfully mount an internal critique of the Christian faith based on the problem of evil, you need to cite phenomena inconsistent with Christian theology.
Your anecdotal examples don’t achieve that objective.
“Yet these alleged caring gods who allegedly ‘intelligently designed’ these killer viruses and cancers, don’t cure theists, or Reformed Protestant Christians, with any greater frequency than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.”
All you’ve done is to frame a straw man argument.
1.If some Christians labor under the misimpression that God will answer every prayer, the fact that their false expectations will be disappointeed does nothing to falsify the Christian faith. To falsify a false belief does nothing to falsify a true belief.
George, you need to try a little harder to be logical. You are letting your emotionalism get the better of the argument.
2.Also, I expect that Christians are healed at a higher rate than Buddhists or humanists or atheists.
“Again, if you want to claim that your god wants a little 12 year old Christian girl, to die a slow, painful death of cancer, and have her parents and her whole church, racked with anquish, as their prayers to this god go unanswered, that’s fine. I'm sure it can all be rationalized as "god's plan". But please don’t pretend that this god ‘cares’ about the welfare of this little girl or her family in this life and this world.”
Again, George, you’re substituting hysteria for reason. As Paul Helm has stated:
“There is no reason to think that God intends the details of the universe separately; there is one divine will, which encompasses all events. It would be fallacious to suppose that the divine attitude is the same with respect to every detail of what god wills…As Aquinas put it, ‘God, and nature, and indeed, every causal agent, does what is best overall, but not what is best in every part, except when the part is regarded in its relationship to the whole.’ We may suppose that when God knowingly and willingly permits certain events he does so in furtherance of some wider consideration wholly consistent with his character with respect to which they are a logically necessary condition. And likewise, some of those things which he causes are means to some further end,” J. Beilby & P. Eddy, eds. Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (IVP 2001), 182.
“Your gods, as usual, are nowhere in sight.”
You are falling into a fallacious all-or-nothing argument. The fact that God doesn’t intervene every time doesn’t mean that God doesn’t intervene anytime.
Once again, try to be rational about this.
“As far as your cliché strawman that I can’t critique your invisible god’s impotence, in the face of the death and destruction of his loyal followers, ‘without an external standard of comparison’. I believe if I commissioned a poll, most Christians would agree that they don’t want to die slow, painful, premature deaths. Nor do they want their children to. And I believe the same poll would show most of these Christians believe they can petition the Christian god to change the course of events should they be stricken with a deadly disease. They may even say that there god is ‘watching out for them’ or perhaps he has assigned an angel the task, or some such superstition.”
This is not an internal critique of the Christian belief-system. Every step of the way you fail to make good on your stated claim.
The fact that some churchgoers get their theology from “Touched By An Angel” rather than the Bible is irrelevant to the coherence of Christian theism.
“I’m not sure who told you that naturalists can’t believe that certain human behaviors are atrocious or gratutious or even ‘evil’ without the benefit on your three headed Hebrew tribal deity. But I assure you, you’re wrong. Just because someone accepts the universe and natural world for what it is, and perhaps can even identify the causes of disease or violent tendencies in certain humans, doesn’t mean we surrender our value judgments of what we believe is good or right behavior.”
If you are a naturalist, then where are you getting your value judgments if not from the natural world? So why are you so disapproving of what you seen around you? For a naturalist you’re pretty ill-adapted to your natural surroundings.
“No, the ‘problem of evil’ only exists when there is an allegedly omnipotent god that could prevent evil...but doesn't, for unknown reasons that theists like to rationalize.”
This is a simple-minded caricature of the problem. The fact that God doesn’t prevent every instance of evil, here and now, is not a defeater for Christian theism.
Also, the fact that we may not know why every individual evil takes place does not mean that we are in the dark regarding the general role of evil in a Christian theodicy.
“Perhaps you are the kind of theist who upon witnessing a rape, thinks ‘I’d better not do anything to stop it, I’m sure my personal god has a good reason for allowing this evil to occur.’
This is false with respect to the preceptive and decretive will of God alike. Rape is a sin. Rape is contrary to God’s moral law for man.
Conversely, if God had decreed me not to intervene, then I’d be unable to intervene. If I’m able to intervene, then my intervention does not run counter to his decretive will.
***QUOTE***
I thought I explained that in my reply. That's a really nasty fallacy spread by theists, in order to distract from any argument, that has a moral component. Theists, especially Muslims and Christians, certainly don't have the patent on human morality. Nor do their alleged killer gods.
If you want to argue with me over rape being wrong, thats fine. If you agree its wrong, please don't pretend we don't share that same moral standard, in an effort to sidetrack the main discussion.
"Rape" is wrong by definition. The value judgment is contained in its definition. Just like it is in the word murder.
***END-QUOTE***
There are a couple of basic problems with this reply:
1.The association of moral relativism with secular humanism isn’t a malicious rumor spread by Christians.
It was Hume who brought up the is-ought problem. It was Moore who brought up the naturalistic fallacy.
Various unbelievers subscribe to some version or another of moral antirealism, whether emotivism, non-cognitivism, social constructivism, cultural relativism, descriptive relativism, &c.
These debates crop up all the time in varieties of evolutionary ethics, such as social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology.
For an overview, cf.:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evol-eth.htm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/
And this is applied to cases of rape. Consider academic studies such as:
A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT 2000)
by Randy Thornhill, Craig T. Palmer, Margo I. Wilson
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Mariner Books 1997)
by Dale Peterson, Richard Wrangham
Or consider the following exchange between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston:
***QUOTE***
R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.
C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?
R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.
C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?
R: By my feelings.
C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?
R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it [to] you.
C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you’d have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.
R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.
C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it’s simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.
R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.
C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?
R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?
C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.
R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.
C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don’t like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the Commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.
C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.
R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.
C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don’t approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the Commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.
R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don’t agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they’re not yellow, and most people agree with me that the Commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.
C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?
R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.
C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?
R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you’ve got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.
C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.
R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.
R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.
C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don’t see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.
R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.
C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.
R: But the lawgiver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial lawgivers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.
C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. It can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.
R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody’s imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."
C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....
R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.
C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can’t help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.
R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn’t do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.
C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it’s lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.
R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can’t imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm
***END-QUOTE***
To finish up on George:
“The fact remains, the alleged, caring, omnipotent, Christian god chooses not to stop rape, in the worldview of Christians. He doesn't stop rape in my worldview, because he doesn't exist, he's a figment of theist imagination. Thus his failure to act, to protect, and to cure, like any loving parent would, is a problem for Christians to rationalize, and they've become very good at it over the years.”
This is not an internal critique of Christian theism. All George has ever done in this course of this thread is to pull certain adjectives like “loving” and “caring” out of the air, apply them to God, point to some instance of evil, then exclaim: “Aha! God doesn’t exist!”
You are attacking your own homegrown version of Christian theism.
The Evidence Of Prophecy
In an earlier post responding to Sam Harris, Steve Hays made a good point about Biblical prophecy:
"If a prophecy were too specific, it’s fulfillment could be thwarted. It would give people enough advance knowledge to frustrate the terms of fulfillment by doing something else—like tipping off a drug dealer that the cops are about to stage a raid on his base of operations."
I would add that God could also have a variety of other reasons for making prophecies more or less detailed, depending on how the details would influence people, how He wanted the events to be perceived, etc. There's no way for us to know what all of the reasons would be for the degree of detail we're given, so our primary concern in evaluating the evidential significance of these prophecies should be whether the prophecies are sufficient to suggest foreknowledge, not whether they're exhaustive. If there is no credible naturalistic explanation for a prophecy with five details, then objecting that there aren't eight or ten details instead isn't enough to overcome the evidential significance of the prophecy.
Books like Isaiah and Daniel, or portions of the books, are dated late largely in an attempt to explain the fulfillment of highly detailed prophecies contained in those books. Critics have long acknowledged that the prophecies are detailed enough to suggest the supernatural. But the arguments for dating the books late are highly speculative, and we have better evidence for dating the books early. See, for example, here, here, and here on the book of Daniel.
Some of the prophecies can't be dated at or past the time of their purported fulfillment, so critics have attempted to dismiss these prophecies as taken out of context or not detailed enough, for example. The prophecies most often discussed in this context are the ones associated with Jesus, partly because there's agreement that Jesus was born after the prophecies in question were written. While many of the prophecies associated with Jesus are of a typological nature, and so they aren't of much evidential value individually, there are others that are non-typological. There's nothing unclear about the prediction that the Messiah would be a descendant of David, for example, and it isn't difficult to discern whether Jesus was perceived as a descendant of David by His contemporaries and whether evidence about His ancestry was available to those early sources. Much the same can be said about Micah 5 and Bethlehem, for example.
Even with prophecies that are more open to a variety of interpretations, such as Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy, there are limits to that variety. The city Daniel names is Jerusalem. That's not vague. He refers to the city and the temple being destroyed, something that could have been avoided, and the city could have been overtaken without the destruction of the temple, for example. He gives specific timeframes. Even if people disagree over whether the years in question consist of 360 or 365 days, for example, there are only so many plausible candidates for the number of days in a year. Nobody is going to be able to credibly argue that a year lasts 5 days or 820 days, for example. While some elements of the prophecy are flexible, the flexibility is highly limited by the details that are given. Jesus would have to fit into a narrow window in order to fulfill the passage. Objecting that the window could have been made even narrower by giving more detail doesn't change the fact that the window is narrow without such additional details or the fact that Jesus fulfills it. (See here for a discussion of the fulfillment.)
The implausibility of the critical position on some of these prophecies can be seen in the attempts critics make to find some fulfillment of these passages outside of Jesus. On Isaiah’s Suffering Servant prophecy, John Oswalt writes:
"Despite myriad attempts to find a figure in the sixth century B.C. who might be the referent in this passage, none has been successful. By contrast, the congruence with Jesus' life is remarkable...The most concerted recent attempt to do so [find a sixth century B.C. referent for Isaiah 52-53] was by R.N. Whybray in his Thanksgiving for a Liberated Prophet. But the fact that he has to go to great lengths to show that the apparent meaning of the text is not correct suggests that the undertaking is a futile one." (The NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2003], pp. 587-588)
The Suffering Servant prophecy tells us that the figure in question will die in a way that significantly disfigures his body rather than by some other means (Isaiah 53:14); tells us that this figure will be a Jew (53:2), yet will be highly influential among not only Gentiles, but even Gentile rulers (52:15); tells us that he’ll have an ordinary appearance (Isaiah 53:2); tells us that he’ll be rejected by his own people (Isaiah 53:3); tells us that he’ll die an atoning death (Isaiah 53:6); tells us that he’ll remain silent at an important time before those who condemn him (Isaiah 53:7); tells us that he would be associated with the rich in his death (Isaiah 53:9); tells us that he’ll be unusually righteous (Isaiah 53:9); tells us that his life will be prolonged, in the context of discussing his physical death, thus suggesting a physical resurrection (Isaiah 53:11); tells us that his atoning death was deliberate (Isaiah 53:12); etc. To say that the Suffering Servant prophecy isn’t detailed enough to be of much evidential significance is absurd. How many people in world history, even if we don't limit ourselves to the Jewish people, have been perceived as deliberately giving their lives to make atonement for the sin of others? That one element of the prophecy is enough to eliminate almost every human from consideration, and the window for fulfillment narrows even further when the other details are added. If the prophecy is detailed enough to single out one human being among the billions who have lived, how can specificity that singles out one among billions be considered insufficient specificity?
Many skeptics of Biblical prophecy have a mindset similar to that of Celsus, a second century critic of Christianity:
"Christians claimed that the facts of Jesus' life were proclaimed beforehand in the Jewish prophecies, but [according to Celsus] in fact the 'prophecies could be applied to thousands of others far more plausibly than to Jesus' ([Origen’s Against Celsus] 2.28)." (Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984], p. 115)
As Origen explained in response to Celsus, the claim that "thousands" could fulfill the prophecies better than Jesus is absurd. It’s the sort of vague and unthinking objection that you would expect from somebody more interested in avoiding the truth than in finding it. Nobody other than Jesus has ever come close to fulfilling a passage like Isaiah 52-53 or Daniel 9. Jesus not only has fulfilled these passages, but also has fulfilled many others. Even some of the more vague prophecies, such as His being both a king and a priest (Psalm 110) and His causing the Gentile nations to follow the God of Israel (Isaiah 49:6, 52:15) are unusual and significant. In contrast to the irrational mindset of Celsus, Theophilus of Antioch, a Christian contemporary of Celsus, gives us a more truthful assessment:
"The Egyptian or Chaldaean prophets, and the other writers, should have been able accurately to tell, if at least they spoke by a divine and pure spirit, and spoke truth in all that was uttered by them; and they should have announced not only things past or present, but also those that were to come upon the world. And therefore it is proved that all others have been in error; and that we Christians alone have possessed the truth, in as much as we are taught by the Holy Spirit, who spoke in the holy prophets, and foretold all things. And, for the rest, would that in a kindly spirit you would investigate divine things - I mean the things that are spoken by the prophets - in order that, by comparing what is said by us with the utterances of the others, you may be able to discover the truth." (To Autolycus, 2:33-34)
"If a prophecy were too specific, it’s fulfillment could be thwarted. It would give people enough advance knowledge to frustrate the terms of fulfillment by doing something else—like tipping off a drug dealer that the cops are about to stage a raid on his base of operations."
I would add that God could also have a variety of other reasons for making prophecies more or less detailed, depending on how the details would influence people, how He wanted the events to be perceived, etc. There's no way for us to know what all of the reasons would be for the degree of detail we're given, so our primary concern in evaluating the evidential significance of these prophecies should be whether the prophecies are sufficient to suggest foreknowledge, not whether they're exhaustive. If there is no credible naturalistic explanation for a prophecy with five details, then objecting that there aren't eight or ten details instead isn't enough to overcome the evidential significance of the prophecy.
Books like Isaiah and Daniel, or portions of the books, are dated late largely in an attempt to explain the fulfillment of highly detailed prophecies contained in those books. Critics have long acknowledged that the prophecies are detailed enough to suggest the supernatural. But the arguments for dating the books late are highly speculative, and we have better evidence for dating the books early. See, for example, here, here, and here on the book of Daniel.
Some of the prophecies can't be dated at or past the time of their purported fulfillment, so critics have attempted to dismiss these prophecies as taken out of context or not detailed enough, for example. The prophecies most often discussed in this context are the ones associated with Jesus, partly because there's agreement that Jesus was born after the prophecies in question were written. While many of the prophecies associated with Jesus are of a typological nature, and so they aren't of much evidential value individually, there are others that are non-typological. There's nothing unclear about the prediction that the Messiah would be a descendant of David, for example, and it isn't difficult to discern whether Jesus was perceived as a descendant of David by His contemporaries and whether evidence about His ancestry was available to those early sources. Much the same can be said about Micah 5 and Bethlehem, for example.
Even with prophecies that are more open to a variety of interpretations, such as Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy, there are limits to that variety. The city Daniel names is Jerusalem. That's not vague. He refers to the city and the temple being destroyed, something that could have been avoided, and the city could have been overtaken without the destruction of the temple, for example. He gives specific timeframes. Even if people disagree over whether the years in question consist of 360 or 365 days, for example, there are only so many plausible candidates for the number of days in a year. Nobody is going to be able to credibly argue that a year lasts 5 days or 820 days, for example. While some elements of the prophecy are flexible, the flexibility is highly limited by the details that are given. Jesus would have to fit into a narrow window in order to fulfill the passage. Objecting that the window could have been made even narrower by giving more detail doesn't change the fact that the window is narrow without such additional details or the fact that Jesus fulfills it. (See here for a discussion of the fulfillment.)
The implausibility of the critical position on some of these prophecies can be seen in the attempts critics make to find some fulfillment of these passages outside of Jesus. On Isaiah’s Suffering Servant prophecy, John Oswalt writes:
"Despite myriad attempts to find a figure in the sixth century B.C. who might be the referent in this passage, none has been successful. By contrast, the congruence with Jesus' life is remarkable...The most concerted recent attempt to do so [find a sixth century B.C. referent for Isaiah 52-53] was by R.N. Whybray in his Thanksgiving for a Liberated Prophet. But the fact that he has to go to great lengths to show that the apparent meaning of the text is not correct suggests that the undertaking is a futile one." (The NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2003], pp. 587-588)
The Suffering Servant prophecy tells us that the figure in question will die in a way that significantly disfigures his body rather than by some other means (Isaiah 53:14); tells us that this figure will be a Jew (53:2), yet will be highly influential among not only Gentiles, but even Gentile rulers (52:15); tells us that he’ll have an ordinary appearance (Isaiah 53:2); tells us that he’ll be rejected by his own people (Isaiah 53:3); tells us that he’ll die an atoning death (Isaiah 53:6); tells us that he’ll remain silent at an important time before those who condemn him (Isaiah 53:7); tells us that he would be associated with the rich in his death (Isaiah 53:9); tells us that he’ll be unusually righteous (Isaiah 53:9); tells us that his life will be prolonged, in the context of discussing his physical death, thus suggesting a physical resurrection (Isaiah 53:11); tells us that his atoning death was deliberate (Isaiah 53:12); etc. To say that the Suffering Servant prophecy isn’t detailed enough to be of much evidential significance is absurd. How many people in world history, even if we don't limit ourselves to the Jewish people, have been perceived as deliberately giving their lives to make atonement for the sin of others? That one element of the prophecy is enough to eliminate almost every human from consideration, and the window for fulfillment narrows even further when the other details are added. If the prophecy is detailed enough to single out one human being among the billions who have lived, how can specificity that singles out one among billions be considered insufficient specificity?
Many skeptics of Biblical prophecy have a mindset similar to that of Celsus, a second century critic of Christianity:
"Christians claimed that the facts of Jesus' life were proclaimed beforehand in the Jewish prophecies, but [according to Celsus] in fact the 'prophecies could be applied to thousands of others far more plausibly than to Jesus' ([Origen’s Against Celsus] 2.28)." (Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984], p. 115)
As Origen explained in response to Celsus, the claim that "thousands" could fulfill the prophecies better than Jesus is absurd. It’s the sort of vague and unthinking objection that you would expect from somebody more interested in avoiding the truth than in finding it. Nobody other than Jesus has ever come close to fulfilling a passage like Isaiah 52-53 or Daniel 9. Jesus not only has fulfilled these passages, but also has fulfilled many others. Even some of the more vague prophecies, such as His being both a king and a priest (Psalm 110) and His causing the Gentile nations to follow the God of Israel (Isaiah 49:6, 52:15) are unusual and significant. In contrast to the irrational mindset of Celsus, Theophilus of Antioch, a Christian contemporary of Celsus, gives us a more truthful assessment:
"The Egyptian or Chaldaean prophets, and the other writers, should have been able accurately to tell, if at least they spoke by a divine and pure spirit, and spoke truth in all that was uttered by them; and they should have announced not only things past or present, but also those that were to come upon the world. And therefore it is proved that all others have been in error; and that we Christians alone have possessed the truth, in as much as we are taught by the Holy Spirit, who spoke in the holy prophets, and foretold all things. And, for the rest, would that in a kindly spirit you would investigate divine things - I mean the things that are spoken by the prophets - in order that, by comparing what is said by us with the utterances of the others, you may be able to discover the truth." (To Autolycus, 2:33-34)
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Whose problem?
For whom is the problem of evil a problem?
***QUOTE***
George said:
"1.He never explains, from a secular standpoint, why the problem of evil is a problem. What is problematic about natural or moral evil?"
The "problem of evil" is not a problem for the naturalist.
You are quite correct that natural disasters and illness and violence are to be expected in the natural world, and the natural world does not care about what individual humans think about how "evil" or "unfair" something seems to their social primate brains.
The problem of evil only exists when theists start postulating all kinds of supernatural, personal, caring gods, that are the patrons of faithful humans, and allegedly care and watch over these humans and respond to their prayerful petitions.
Yet there is nothing to suggest from human history that any god of any religious tradition favors anyone, or prevents any evil from happening.
***END-QUOTE***
This won’t work. For the problem of evil is not merely internal to theism. In order for the naturalist to raise the problem of evil as a problem for theism, the naturalist must be able to identify objective instances of moral and natural evil, then take these paradigm-cases as a frame of reference.
The naturalist is comparing Christian theism with what he—the naturalist—regards as real evil in the world.
The internal critique cannot achieve escape velocity without an external standard of comparison.
This is exactly what we see in the examples that Harris has paraded to illustrate his point:
“Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most.”
“One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda…Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants.”
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/
But if naturalism were true, why does Harris act as if this is not the way things are supposed to be? “Atrocity.” “Gratuitous.”
Continuing with George:
***QUOTE***
I don't think anyone has summed it up better since Epicurus:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
***END-QUOTE***
It may be that no one has done a better job of summing up the problem of evil, but it’s not as if theologians are speechless in the face of evil. Harris contents himself with stating the problem as if the problem remained unanswered. He might not agree with the answers, but to keep repeating the question while ignoring a number of answers is anti-intellectual.
***QUOTE***
George said:
"1.He never explains, from a secular standpoint, why the problem of evil is a problem. What is problematic about natural or moral evil?"
The "problem of evil" is not a problem for the naturalist.
You are quite correct that natural disasters and illness and violence are to be expected in the natural world, and the natural world does not care about what individual humans think about how "evil" or "unfair" something seems to their social primate brains.
The problem of evil only exists when theists start postulating all kinds of supernatural, personal, caring gods, that are the patrons of faithful humans, and allegedly care and watch over these humans and respond to their prayerful petitions.
Yet there is nothing to suggest from human history that any god of any religious tradition favors anyone, or prevents any evil from happening.
***END-QUOTE***
This won’t work. For the problem of evil is not merely internal to theism. In order for the naturalist to raise the problem of evil as a problem for theism, the naturalist must be able to identify objective instances of moral and natural evil, then take these paradigm-cases as a frame of reference.
The naturalist is comparing Christian theism with what he—the naturalist—regards as real evil in the world.
The internal critique cannot achieve escape velocity without an external standard of comparison.
This is exactly what we see in the examples that Harris has paraded to illustrate his point:
“Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most.”
“One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda…Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants.”
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/
But if naturalism were true, why does Harris act as if this is not the way things are supposed to be? “Atrocity.” “Gratuitous.”
Continuing with George:
***QUOTE***
I don't think anyone has summed it up better since Epicurus:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
***END-QUOTE***
It may be that no one has done a better job of summing up the problem of evil, but it’s not as if theologians are speechless in the face of evil. Harris contents himself with stating the problem as if the problem remained unanswered. He might not agree with the answers, but to keep repeating the question while ignoring a number of answers is anti-intellectual.
The end of irreligion
Along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris appears to be the superstar atheist du jour. He’s written a book, a few articles, and given a slew of interviews. But what does his argument amount to? Let’s take a representative sampling.
In his “Atheist Manifesto,” he spends a lot of time on the problem of evil in his opening gambit. But there are a couple of fundamental failings with this objection:
1.He never explains, from a secular standpoint, why the problem of evil is a problem. What is problematic about natural or moral evil?
From a secular standpoint, natural disasters are natural mechanisms by which the ecosystem equalizes certain imbalances in nature.
Likewise, from a secular standpoint, violence is a biological imperative, programmed into our genes by natural selection. It confers a survival advantage on the species, the way a young lion will oust an old lion from the pride, kill the cubs, and take over the harem.
If nature is all there is, or if human beings are the byproduct of evolution, then why is Harris so offended by the indifference of nature or the bestiality of human behavior?
His moral and emotional intuitions are at war with his worldview.
2.He never engages any of the theodicean proposals to deal with the problem of evil. Various answers have been given. But he makes no reasoned effort to show what’s wrong with these answers.
He then launches into a trenchant critic of theological moderates. A conservative could agree with this element of his argument.
He also takes issue with Pascal’s wager. However, it does look like he’s ever read Pascal. It’s just the usual, second-hand dismissal.
The wager is not the sum of Pascal’s apologetic. Pascal offers various lines of evidence for the Christian faith. The wager is merely a way of getting the apathetic unbeliever to look at the evidence. It was never intended to be a substitute for evidence.
Harris equates faith with fideism. But fideism is only one particular tradition. There are many other theological traditions in which the relation between faith and reason is not fideistic, viz. Thomism, evidentialism, Augustinianism, presuppositionalism, &c.
He then spends some time trying to explain away the atrocities of secular humanism, viz. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
He also argues that post-Christian countries are more charitable than the US. Among other things, this fails to distinguish between private charity and foreign aid.
In the final section he contends that religion in a source of violence. For example:
“The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.”
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/page4/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/
i) But there are several flaws in this illustration, such as its basic failure to isolate religious motives from nationalism or ethnic identity.
Moreover, many Jews are secular Jews. Many Hindus and Buddhist are nominal Hindus and Buddhists.
ii) It fails to distinguish between aggression and self-defense.
iii) Notice, too, the common denominator of Islam.
Here’s another formulation of his argument:
“It’s quite simple and direct. And inevitable. If you truly believe that your neighbor is going to hell for his unbelief, and you believe that his ideas about the world are putting the souls of your children in peril, it is quite sensible to drive him from your community, or kill him.”
http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/full-text/qa_with_sam_harris/
But this is only “quite simple, direct, and inevitable” if the religionist believes that nominal faith is saving faith.
Evangelicalism does not regard nominal faith as saving faith.
Here’s an effort by Harris to target Christianity in particular:
“Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have received thousands of letters and e-mails from religious believers insisting that I am wrong not to believe in God. Invariably, the most unpleasant of these communications have come from Christians.”
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4
But there are a couple of problems with this allegation:
1.Harris himself has leveled many unpleasant accusations against the Christian faith. So why does he reserve the exclusive right to be unpleasant?
2.Harris has also said: “In fact, it's ironic that some of the most vituperative criticism I've gotten has come from atheists because, in the last chapter of my book, I talk about meditation and mystical experience.”
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/index.html
How does Harris square his sweeping statement about Christian critics with his opposing statement about the secular critics?
Continuing:
“Many who claim to have been transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.”
Many Christians are “murderously” intolerant of criticism? Has Harris been murdered? He seems pretty articulate for a murder victim.
Can Harris cite any crime stats from the FBI on the number—remember, it’s “many”—of Christians who murder unbelievers due to their sectarian intolerance of the secular critics?
Continuing:
“Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you now have for being a Christian.”
Is that a fact?
i) To begin with, most devout Muslims live in closed societies where it’s a capital offense to leave the Islamic faith. Do Christian Americans suffer from the same disincentive?
ii) Harris is also assuming, without offering any comparative documentation, that the evidence for Islam is the same as the evidence for Christianity.
“And yet, you know exactly what it is like not to find these reasons compelling.”
We don’t find their reasons compelling because they either don’t give the same reasons, or because, when they try to give the same reasons, the parallel doesn’t hold up to rational scrutiny.
“On virtually every page, the Qur'an declares that it is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. Muslims believe this as fully as you believe the Bible's account of itself.”
This is not the only reason that Christians believe the Bible. If Harris spent a little time in the field of Christian apologetics, he would know better.
“There is a vast literature describing the life of Muhammad that, from the Muslim point of view, proves his unique status as the Prophet of God.”
Yes, dating to about 200 years after his death at the earliest.
“While Muhammad did not claim to be divine, he claimed to offer the most perfect revelation of God's will. He also assured his followers that Jesus was not divine (Qur'an 5:71-75; 19:30-38) and that anyone who believed otherwise would spend eternity in hell. Muslims are convinced that Muhammad's pronouncements on these subjects, as on all others, are infallible. Why don't you find these claims convincing? Why don't you lose any sleep over whether or not you should convert to Islam?”
Why don’t we find these claims convincing? For at least a couple of reasons:
i) They are uncorroborated by prophecy, prodigy, archeology, or multiple-attestation—among other deficiencies.
ii) As a Christian heresy, Islam claims to be verified by the Bible. But if you compare the Bible to the Koran, Islam is falsified by the Bible.
That’s just for starters.
“Understand that the way you view Islam is precisely the way every Muslim views Christianity.”
True, and that’s because most Muslims are ignorant of the Bible, church history, and Koranic lower criticism.
“Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events.”
No, we don’t merely assert it—we argue for it.
“But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy could be if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make specific, falsifiable predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage like, "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers-the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus-and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing remotely like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.”
1.Notice that Harris has done nothing to disprove the argument from prophecy. No attempt to deal with the actual prophecies of Scripture. Instead, he’s changing the subject.
ii) If a prophecy were too specific, it’s fulfillment could be thwarted. It would give people enough advance knowledge to frustrate the terms of fulfillment by doing something else—like tipping off a drug dealer that the cops are about to stage a raid on his base of operations.
“Take a moment to imagine how good a book could be if it were written by the Creator of the universe. Such a book could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight the earth has ever seen.”
That is not the purpose of the Bible.
“Instead, the Bible contains some very obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book gives the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter as simply 3 (1 Kings 7: 23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4: 2-5). We now refer to this constant relation with the Greek letter p. While the decimal expansion of p runs to infinity-3.1415926535 . . .-we can calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like.”
Several problems with this charge:
i) The Bible uses round numbers. Is a round number an error?
If so, is Harris in error when he rounds off Pi to the 10th decimal place?
ii) Since Pi has an infinite decimal expansion, it isn’t even possible, much less practical, to write down the exact ratio.
iii) Concrete objects approximate numerical ratios. No concrete object precisely exemplifies an abstract numerical universal.
“Why doesn't the Bible say anything about electricity, about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer?”
Why doesn’t the Bible have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies?
If God were benevolent, he’d want us to eat chocolate chip cookies. So either God is able, but unwilling, to give us an inspired recipe for chocolate chip cookies—in which case he’s evil—or else he’s willing, but unable—in which case he’s impotent.
“Millions of people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, many of them children. When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding will surely be reducible to a few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? The Bible is a very big book.”
i) The Bible doesn’t offer a cure for answer because the Bible offers a cure for sin. The Bible treats the underlying cause of natural and moral evil, not the symptoms.
ii) It’s an example of how frivolous Harris is that he even comes up with this demand. Clearly he’s made no attempt to think through what it would mean to give an Iron-age people the cure for cancer.
The technicalities of a scientific explanation would be unintelligible to an Iron-age people. There wouldn’t even be a preexisting vocabulary to express the idea.
And even if it could be expressed, the technology would be absent to implement the explanation.
Let’s take one more example of his reasoning:
“I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus.”
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/index1.html
This is alike a man who stands in front of Niagara Falls and dares anyone to find a source of water.
“Water? What water? I don’t see any water?”
There’s a vast body of apologetic literature in which abundant evidence is given to distinguish one religious claim from another.
Harris trumpets his ignorance in the face of the evidence, not in the absence of evidence.
In his “Atheist Manifesto,” he spends a lot of time on the problem of evil in his opening gambit. But there are a couple of fundamental failings with this objection:
1.He never explains, from a secular standpoint, why the problem of evil is a problem. What is problematic about natural or moral evil?
From a secular standpoint, natural disasters are natural mechanisms by which the ecosystem equalizes certain imbalances in nature.
Likewise, from a secular standpoint, violence is a biological imperative, programmed into our genes by natural selection. It confers a survival advantage on the species, the way a young lion will oust an old lion from the pride, kill the cubs, and take over the harem.
If nature is all there is, or if human beings are the byproduct of evolution, then why is Harris so offended by the indifference of nature or the bestiality of human behavior?
His moral and emotional intuitions are at war with his worldview.
2.He never engages any of the theodicean proposals to deal with the problem of evil. Various answers have been given. But he makes no reasoned effort to show what’s wrong with these answers.
He then launches into a trenchant critic of theological moderates. A conservative could agree with this element of his argument.
He also takes issue with Pascal’s wager. However, it does look like he’s ever read Pascal. It’s just the usual, second-hand dismissal.
The wager is not the sum of Pascal’s apologetic. Pascal offers various lines of evidence for the Christian faith. The wager is merely a way of getting the apathetic unbeliever to look at the evidence. It was never intended to be a substitute for evidence.
Harris equates faith with fideism. But fideism is only one particular tradition. There are many other theological traditions in which the relation between faith and reason is not fideistic, viz. Thomism, evidentialism, Augustinianism, presuppositionalism, &c.
He then spends some time trying to explain away the atrocities of secular humanism, viz. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
He also argues that post-Christian countries are more charitable than the US. Among other things, this fails to distinguish between private charity and foreign aid.
In the final section he contends that religion in a source of violence. For example:
“The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.”
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/page4/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/
i) But there are several flaws in this illustration, such as its basic failure to isolate religious motives from nationalism or ethnic identity.
Moreover, many Jews are secular Jews. Many Hindus and Buddhist are nominal Hindus and Buddhists.
ii) It fails to distinguish between aggression and self-defense.
iii) Notice, too, the common denominator of Islam.
Here’s another formulation of his argument:
“It’s quite simple and direct. And inevitable. If you truly believe that your neighbor is going to hell for his unbelief, and you believe that his ideas about the world are putting the souls of your children in peril, it is quite sensible to drive him from your community, or kill him.”
http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/full-text/qa_with_sam_harris/
But this is only “quite simple, direct, and inevitable” if the religionist believes that nominal faith is saving faith.
Evangelicalism does not regard nominal faith as saving faith.
Here’s an effort by Harris to target Christianity in particular:
“Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have received thousands of letters and e-mails from religious believers insisting that I am wrong not to believe in God. Invariably, the most unpleasant of these communications have come from Christians.”
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4
But there are a couple of problems with this allegation:
1.Harris himself has leveled many unpleasant accusations against the Christian faith. So why does he reserve the exclusive right to be unpleasant?
2.Harris has also said: “In fact, it's ironic that some of the most vituperative criticism I've gotten has come from atheists because, in the last chapter of my book, I talk about meditation and mystical experience.”
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/index.html
How does Harris square his sweeping statement about Christian critics with his opposing statement about the secular critics?
Continuing:
“Many who claim to have been transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.”
Many Christians are “murderously” intolerant of criticism? Has Harris been murdered? He seems pretty articulate for a murder victim.
Can Harris cite any crime stats from the FBI on the number—remember, it’s “many”—of Christians who murder unbelievers due to their sectarian intolerance of the secular critics?
Continuing:
“Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you now have for being a Christian.”
Is that a fact?
i) To begin with, most devout Muslims live in closed societies where it’s a capital offense to leave the Islamic faith. Do Christian Americans suffer from the same disincentive?
ii) Harris is also assuming, without offering any comparative documentation, that the evidence for Islam is the same as the evidence for Christianity.
“And yet, you know exactly what it is like not to find these reasons compelling.”
We don’t find their reasons compelling because they either don’t give the same reasons, or because, when they try to give the same reasons, the parallel doesn’t hold up to rational scrutiny.
“On virtually every page, the Qur'an declares that it is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. Muslims believe this as fully as you believe the Bible's account of itself.”
This is not the only reason that Christians believe the Bible. If Harris spent a little time in the field of Christian apologetics, he would know better.
“There is a vast literature describing the life of Muhammad that, from the Muslim point of view, proves his unique status as the Prophet of God.”
Yes, dating to about 200 years after his death at the earliest.
“While Muhammad did not claim to be divine, he claimed to offer the most perfect revelation of God's will. He also assured his followers that Jesus was not divine (Qur'an 5:71-75; 19:30-38) and that anyone who believed otherwise would spend eternity in hell. Muslims are convinced that Muhammad's pronouncements on these subjects, as on all others, are infallible. Why don't you find these claims convincing? Why don't you lose any sleep over whether or not you should convert to Islam?”
Why don’t we find these claims convincing? For at least a couple of reasons:
i) They are uncorroborated by prophecy, prodigy, archeology, or multiple-attestation—among other deficiencies.
ii) As a Christian heresy, Islam claims to be verified by the Bible. But if you compare the Bible to the Koran, Islam is falsified by the Bible.
That’s just for starters.
“Understand that the way you view Islam is precisely the way every Muslim views Christianity.”
True, and that’s because most Muslims are ignorant of the Bible, church history, and Koranic lower criticism.
“Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events.”
No, we don’t merely assert it—we argue for it.
“But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy could be if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make specific, falsifiable predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage like, "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers-the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus-and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing remotely like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.”
1.Notice that Harris has done nothing to disprove the argument from prophecy. No attempt to deal with the actual prophecies of Scripture. Instead, he’s changing the subject.
ii) If a prophecy were too specific, it’s fulfillment could be thwarted. It would give people enough advance knowledge to frustrate the terms of fulfillment by doing something else—like tipping off a drug dealer that the cops are about to stage a raid on his base of operations.
“Take a moment to imagine how good a book could be if it were written by the Creator of the universe. Such a book could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight the earth has ever seen.”
That is not the purpose of the Bible.
“Instead, the Bible contains some very obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book gives the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter as simply 3 (1 Kings 7: 23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4: 2-5). We now refer to this constant relation with the Greek letter p. While the decimal expansion of p runs to infinity-3.1415926535 . . .-we can calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like.”
Several problems with this charge:
i) The Bible uses round numbers. Is a round number an error?
If so, is Harris in error when he rounds off Pi to the 10th decimal place?
ii) Since Pi has an infinite decimal expansion, it isn’t even possible, much less practical, to write down the exact ratio.
iii) Concrete objects approximate numerical ratios. No concrete object precisely exemplifies an abstract numerical universal.
“Why doesn't the Bible say anything about electricity, about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer?”
Why doesn’t the Bible have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies?
If God were benevolent, he’d want us to eat chocolate chip cookies. So either God is able, but unwilling, to give us an inspired recipe for chocolate chip cookies—in which case he’s evil—or else he’s willing, but unable—in which case he’s impotent.
“Millions of people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, many of them children. When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding will surely be reducible to a few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? The Bible is a very big book.”
i) The Bible doesn’t offer a cure for answer because the Bible offers a cure for sin. The Bible treats the underlying cause of natural and moral evil, not the symptoms.
ii) It’s an example of how frivolous Harris is that he even comes up with this demand. Clearly he’s made no attempt to think through what it would mean to give an Iron-age people the cure for cancer.
The technicalities of a scientific explanation would be unintelligible to an Iron-age people. There wouldn’t even be a preexisting vocabulary to express the idea.
And even if it could be expressed, the technology would be absent to implement the explanation.
Let’s take one more example of his reasoning:
“I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus.”
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/index1.html
This is alike a man who stands in front of Niagara Falls and dares anyone to find a source of water.
“Water? What water? I don’t see any water?”
There’s a vast body of apologetic literature in which abundant evidence is given to distinguish one religious claim from another.
Harris trumpets his ignorance in the face of the evidence, not in the absence of evidence.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Liar, Liar...
Bob L. Ross' downward spiral continues. I know I said I would not respond, but it would be unloving not to respond when a man of Bob L. Ross rapidly deteriorating good reputation is openly lying about those with whom he disagrees and there is irrefutable evidence to show it, if only for it to serve as a witness against him and call him to repent. Here, as you will see, he has most certainly lied. There is no other word for this behavior.
Bradley's primary doctrine is the same as the current crop of Hybrid Calvinists -- namely, "born again before faith," or "regeneration precedes faith." This is the same "direct operation" palabber taught by the pedo-regenerationist theologians Shedd, Berkhof, and R. C. Sproul, and other preachers such as James White, Scott Morgan of the Founders, Gene Bridges, Tom Schreiner of the Southern Seminary, and others who advocate "Reformed" theology according to the Berkhof theology book.
None of them has given evidence that they believe that the Word of God is an instrumentality in the "quickening" work of the Spirit in regeneration or the New Birth, contrary to the Creedal Calvinism of all the Calvinistic Confessions of Faith.
http://www.carthage.lib.il.us/community/churches/primbap/BradleyProgressive.html
Now, here are some representative quotes from just about all the folks he names in the portion emphasized:
1. R.C. Sproul: Sproul does speak of regeneration being the direct act of the Holy Spirit. However he says,
"God's call is made effectual by the Word and the Spirit. It is important to see that the Word and the Spirit are here conjoined as two vital factors of regeneration. The Holy Spirit is not working apart from the Word or against the Word, but with the Word. Nor is the Word working alone without the presence and power of the Spirit.
The call referred to in effectual calling is not the outward call of the gospel
that can be heard by anyone within range of the preaching. The call referred to here is the inward call, the call that penetrates to and pierces the heart, quickening it to spiritual life. Hearing the gospel enlightens the mind, yet it does not awaken the soul until the Holy Spirit illuminates it and regenerates it. This move from ear to soul is made by the Holy Spirit. This move is what accompanies God's purpose of applying the benefits of Christ' work to the elect. (Grace Unknown: The Heart of Reformed Theology, p.190 -91, 2000 edition).
How is this evidence that “none of them has given evidence that they believe the Word of God is an instrumentality in the Spirit’s work of regeneration?"
2. Here is Shedd on regeneration in general:
In this manner, prayer for the instantaneous gift of regenerating grace harmonizes with the gospel-call to immediate faith and repentance. Faith and repentance naturally arid necessarily result from regeneration. Whoever is regenerated will believe and repent.1 To pray therefore for instantaneous regeneration is, virtually, to pray for instantaneous faith and repentance, and vice versa. He who prays: "Help thou mine unbelief; take away the stony heart, and give the heart of flesh," prays that God would " renew and powerfully determine the will," which is the definition of regeneration. At the same time, prayer for regenerating grace must not be substituted for the net of faith and repentance. The direction is: " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." This is the Biblical answer to the question : " What must I do to be paved ?" But when the convicted person discovers that the act of faith is hindered and prevented by the blindness of his understanding, and the bondage of his will to sin, and asks if he may implore the "enlightening and quickening energy of the Holy Spirit, to persuade and enable him to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered in the gospel" (S. C., 31), he is to be answered in the affirmative. In imploring the regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, he is " striving to enter in at the strait gate ; " he is endeavoring to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. The act of faith in the blood of Christ, in its own nature^ is simple and easy. "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light," Matt.
«
3. Here is Shedd on means:
In this manner, prayer for the instantaneous gift of regenerating grace harmonizes with the gospel-call to immediate faith and repentance. Faith and repentance naturally and necessarily result from regeneration. Whoever is regenerated will believe and repent.1 To pray therefore for instantaneous regeneration is, virtually, to pray for instantaneous faith and repentance, and vice versa.
Moreover, he writes that in the midst of discussing prayer and preaching and its vital role in the effectual call! So it seems that he doesn't say any of this without first discussing what? Answer: instrumentality!
He writes:
While regeneration is a sovereign act of God according to election, it is an encouraging fact both for the sinner and the preacher of the word that God's regenerating grace is commonly bestowed where the preparatory work is performed. This is the rule, under the gospel dispensation. He who reads and meditates upon the word of God is ordinarily enlightened by the Holy Ghost, perhaps in the very act of reading, or hearing, or meditating. "While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word," Acts
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/Shedd_Regeneration.html
How is this then “no evidence" that he believed the Word of God is an instrumentality in the Spirit’s work of regeneration? Mr. Ross has read Shedd on infant regeneration and then read that back into what he states about those not regenerated in infancy.
Incidentally, notice that Shedd does not have the infants growing into adult.
The regenerate child, youth, and man, believe· and repent* immediately. The regenerate infant believe· and repent· when his· faculties will admit of the exercise and manifestation of faith and repentance.
Rather, as soon as they are able, the repent and believe! What's more, they are, presumably "covenant children" and so are exposed to what? The instrumentality of the Word of God, prayer, instruction, and most importantly the gospel!
Now, what is the other truth of this? That those who do not repent and believe as soon as they are able are were not regenerated in infancy! Ergo, there is nothing here that leads to the Hardshell doctrine, for in Hardshellism an infant (or an adult) can live until adult / senior adult, even near his death and still not convert!
I'd further add that the
"The education of children should proceed on the principle that they are in an unregenerate state, until evidences of piety clearly appear, in which case they should be sedulously cherished and nurtured. . . . Although the grace of God may be communicated to a human soul, at any period of its existence, in this world, yet the fact manifestly is, that very few are renewed before the exercise of reason commences; and not many in early childhood.
Clearly, Mr. Ross is taking the exception (infant regeneration) in Presbyterianism and reading it as the rule (applicable to non-infants). This is considered to be highly unusual and is in the realm of speculation according to their theologians. Does Mr. Ross ever note this? NO. Furthermore, how is Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed theology on infant salvation at all germane to Reformed Baptist issues? The LBCF2 already includes a line about elect infants.
Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit; who worketh when, and where, and how he pleases; so also are all elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.
4. Tom Schriener.
Here, he talks about evangelism itself:
http://stream.sbts.edu:9037/ramgen/collconf2003/Rainer.rm
From beginning to end it is about instrumentality.
and
Regeneration means that one has been born again or born from above (John 3:3, 5, 7, 8). The new birth is the work of God, so that all those who are born again are “born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 ESV here and henceforth). Or, as 1 Pet 1:3 says, it is God who “caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Pet 1:3). The means God uses to grant such new life is the gospel, for believers “have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet
I would ask how it is that Dr. Schriener has given no evidence that he affirms that the Word of God is an instrumentality in the "quickening" work of the Spirit in regeneration?
See:
http://www.9marks.org/CC/article/0,,PTID314526%7CCHID598016%7CCIID1731702,00.html
5. James White:
As if that wasn’t enough, Dr. White dropped a not so subtle hint toward Charles and Mr. Ross on
What's Unclear About These Words?
It's been a few weeks since the last Scripture memorization text, so I thought it would be good to allow Jesus' words, spoken in direct response to those who objected to His teachings regarding faith and disbelief, speak again:
"No one can come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. "It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught of God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me." (John 6:44-45)
Some texts are unpopular because they go against what is "comfortable." Men's traditions serve as a lens through which people read the words of Jesus, and these often get filtered out in the process. You've heard much about John 6:44; you know it completely undercuts the common views of most man-centered evangelicals and continues the thread begun earlier in the discourse regarding God giving the elect to Christ who then undertakes to be their perfect Savior. You know you have to eisegetically insert a break into the text to make those who are raised up on the last day a different group than those who are drawn. The advantage of memorizing verse 45 with verse 44, however, lies in this: v. 45 not only continues the theme of the preceding passages, in so doing it ties 44 in for us and once again closes the door to the many attempts men concoct to escape the meaning. Jesus has just said He will raise up those drawn to Him by the Father, and he then provides a scriptural basis. "They shall all be taught of God" is a rephrasing of being "drawn by the Father." Drawing involves knowledge, revelation. God is the the only source of this "teaching." Just as only the Father can draw, so only the Father can teach. But just as giving (v. 37) and drawing lead, infallibly, to coming, so to this teaching (since it is just another way of referring to drawing) leads to the same perfect result: the coming of all those who experience it to Christ. True regeneration never takes place in a vacuum; true faith cannot exist without an object. Just as one is drawn to the Son, so one learns from the Father. This learning involves true, saving faith in the only one who can save, Jesus Christ. Word and Spirit, together, inseparable, triune work of salvation! All glory, laud and honor!
See: http://www.aomin.org/index.php?itemid=1276
Because it still wasn’t enough, apparently, he posted this:
What I Believe About Regeneration
1. Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, he is pleased in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.
2. This effectual call is of God's free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature, being wholly passive therein, being dead in sins and trespasses, until being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit; he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it, and that by no less power than that which raised up Christ from the dead. (LBCF 10:1-2)
“Of his own will begat he, us.” Regeneration and all consequent blessings come to us entirely through the absolute but gracious will of God. He is not bound to give; he may, if he wills, withhold. We have no claim upon God, except the claim of justice; and what would that involve but that he should punish us for our sin? We are felons against the Majesty of heaven. We have forfeited all the rights we ever had under the divine government. The right to punishment is the only right we can now claim upon the footing of justice. Henceforth we are simply in the hands of God awaiting his sentence. He may, if he wills, save the entire human race; if it pleaseth him, he may save none. If so he wills, he may make this mien a monument of mercy, and leave his neighbor to reap the due reward of his works. This is what God has a right to do, and he claims his sovereign prerogative. Are not his own words heard through Scripture like peals of thunder, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion; so then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy”? There are some who, in their blindness, grow wrathful at this doctrine, as if it were ungracious to mention a fact which it is impossible to disguise; they will almost froth at the mouth when the subject is broached. Well, let them do so, it still standeth firm as a rock and fast as the eternal hills. Jehovah giveth no account of his matters. He doeth as he wills among the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of this lower earth. So,-
“Mortals, be dumb; what creature dares
Dispute his awful will?
Ask no account of his affairs,
But tremble, and be still.”
Brethren, you and I, to whom this sovereignty has looked forth through the lattice of grace, can gladly appreciate it. We bless that wonderful, discriminating love which fixed upon us, whilst others were let to go their downward course and perish. The only motive God had to stir up his mercy, was his own will. To us therefore it is precious. Before we ever prayed, before we ever sought his face, his own will, acting spontaneously, brought to us the bounty of his lovingkindness. Now mostly, men who are generous need to have their generosity excited. They will need to be waited upon; appeals must be laid before them; they must sometimes be pressed; an example must lead them on. But “of his own will” God did to us all that has been done, without any incentive or prompting, moved only by himself, because he delighteth in mercy; because his name and his nature are love because evermore, like the sun, it is natural to him to distribute the beams of his eternal grace. “Of his own will begat he us.” Come, my brethren, let us magnify the Lord who loved us when we were dead in trespasses and sins. Let us extol the freeness of that mercy, the goings-forth of which were of old, from everlasting, while we recollect that we deserved it not; that we set ourselves against it; that, when we did know it, we despised it; that, when it was presented to us, we defied it, resisted it, stood out against it many a long year. Oh! when we think of this, I say, let us bow humbly before the throne of the Infinite Majesty, and bless him whose mercy endureth for ever, and whose lovingkindness, like himself, owes nothing to any incentive beyond itself, but is causeless, uncommunicated, existing full and free in the mind of God himself. Because he willed, and according to the dictate of his own good pleasure, did he have compassion upon us.
The benefit we have thus received is described in the next words, “Of his own will begat he us: “ that is to say, we have by divine power been born again. Our first birth was to us our sensitive creation; our second birth, our regeneration, is our second creation. We were made once, and God made us. These bodies are the wonderful fabrics of his skill, and these souls are the emanations of his power. Father of spirits thou art, O God, and we are his offspring, and his alone! But our being made again is as great a work of God, and quite as solely a work of God, quite as entirely the handiwork of God, as our first creation. Of his own will he gave us a new life, and made: us new creatures. Beloved, are we conscious to-night that we are new creatures? Some, perhaps, have doubts about it sometimes, but a man cannot be a new creature and not be conscious of some sort of change; and there must be times, with the most doubtful of the saints, when they are certain and assumed that they are no longer what they were, but have passed from death unto life. Search your own hearts, dear friends; let the prayer that was offered just now to the great Searcher of hearts, and Trier of the reins of the children of man, come from your lips and your hearts, “Search us, O God, and try us! “ Verily, verily, I say unto you, if you have not something more than nature gave you, you will perish. If you are not something higher than the but morality, the most exact discipline, and the most consistent moral behavior can make you, you will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.
“Ye must be born again.” This declaration stands like a sentry at the gate of heaven, thrusting the bayonet in the way to show that, however amiable, moral, upright, and excellent those may be who seek to enter there, they must be born again. Ye must be born again.” Ye dignitaries of the church, ye senators of the nation, ye who wear imperial crowns, and ye who don your coronets, ye must be born again. Ye who have been brought up and dandled upon the knees of piety, ye who have not only offended against the law, ye who have been in your houses a joy and in the world a delight, ye must be born again. It mattereth not who ye are; if ye are born of woman, how can that be clean which cometh of the unclean? Ye must be passed out of the flesh into the spirit, and this must be the work of God himself, or it is nothing worth. It must be a supernatural change, above and beyond all the strugglings and the strivings of the creature. It must be the display of the eternal power of the Holy Spirit, or else where God is you cannot come. Happy should you be, my brethren and sisters, who trust that you have a share in this unutterably precious privilege! “ Of his own will begat he you.” You are twice born. You are God’s children with an emphasis which belongs most to other men. You, though you were dead, are now alive. Though you were carnal you have been spiritualized. Though you were far off, you have been brought nigh; and this is due to the sovereign will of God alone. Bless him, bless him, and humble your hearts before him.
The instrumentality through which this singular change has been wrought in us is clearly stated, “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth.” Men are not usually saved without the immediate agency of the gospel. Some have said that the Spirit of God always works through the truth, and that the truth is sure to work conviction. The truth, however, is preached, and faithfully preached, to tens of thousands, to whom it conveys not a blessing at all, but is the savor of death unto death. Others have said that the Spirit of God regenerates men apart from the Word of God but this is not told us in Scripture, and is not therefore to be received. But evermore the Word and the Spirit are put together. Scripture does not talk of the Word of God as a dead letter; it says, “The Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword.” On the other hand, Scripture does not speak of the Holy Spirit as though the Word would work apart from him, but the two are put together, and “ what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” My dear brethren and sisters, you who have been begotten again unto a lively hope, was it not through the hearing of the Word, or the reading of it, or the remembrance of some hallowed text which you had almost forgotten? You know it was. Good McCheyne used to say, “Depend on it, it is God’s Word that saves souls, and not our comment upon God’s Word;” and so I believe it is. It is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth. (C.H. Spurgeon, Jan. 5th, 1868)
Let it be known I believe and profess the confessional statement quoted above; let it be known I object to not a word in Spurgeon's exposition. If you encounter someone confused by others about my views, correct them. If you encounter one who claims to know my heart better than I do and who refuses to accept this confession of faith, dismiss him as the addled ranter he is. There is no reasoning with those who will not listen and who profess personal infallibility on matters about which they are completely ignorant or, worse, dishonest.
http://www.aomin.org/index.php?itemid=1297 How is this “no evidence” of believing in the instrumentality of the Word of God in the work of regeneration? This is dated in March, over a month before Mr. Ross libeled Dr. White.
7. Berkhof:
Divine calling and regeneration stand in the closest possible relation to each other. With respect to regeneration several points deserve consideration:
a. Its nature. The word 'regeneration' is not always used in the same sense. Our Confession uses it in a broad sense, as including even conversion. At present it has a more restricted meaning. In the most restricted sense it denotes that act of God by which the principle of the new life is implanted in man, and the governing disposition of the soul is made holy. In a slightly more comprehensive sense it designates, in addition to the preceding, the new birth or the first manifestation of the new life. It is a fundamental change in the principle of life and the governing disposition of the soul, and therefore affects the whole man,
It is completed in a moment of time, and is not a gradual process like sanctification. Through it we pass from death into life,
It is a secret and inscrutable work of God that is never directly perceived by man, but can be known only by its effects.
b. Its author. God is the author of regeneration. Scripture represents it as the work of the Holy Spirit,
Over against the Arminians we maintain that it is exclusively the work of the Spirit of God, and not in part the work of man. There is no co-operation of God and man in the work of regeneration, as there is in the work of conversion. Moreover, it should be said that regeneration in the most restricted sense of the word, that is, as the implanting of the new life, is a direct and immediate work of the Holy Spirit. It is a creative work in which for that very reason the word of the gospel cannot very well be used as an instrument. It may be said that
Jas. 1:18 "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (James 1:18)"
and
I Pet.
prove that the word of preaching is used as an instrument in regeneration, but these passages refer to regeneration in a broader sense, as including the new birth. In that more inclusive sense regeneration is undoubtedly wrought through the instrumentality of the Word.
So, Berkhof has merely stated that the actual action involved in itself belongs to God. This is the immediate working, the most narrow sense. However, preaching is most certainly involved when we include conversion itself as its result. How is this a denial of means on his part?
Here’s another statement from Berkhof:
While we distinguish two aspects of the calling of God, this calling is really one. The internal call is really the external call made effective by the operation of the Holy Spirit. It always comes to the sinner through the Word of God, savingly applied by the operation of the Holy Spirit, I Cor . 1:23, 24. (http://www.ccel.org/pipeline/1-html/5-berkhof-summery/Berkhof%2019.htm )
So, right there, Berkoff affirms the instrumentality of the Word of God. Yes, he does affirm infant regeneration, but so did James Boyce. He also presents infant regeneration as the exception not the rule.
How is this not evidence that Berkhof affirmed that the Word of God is an instrumentality in the "quickening" work of the Spirit in regeneration or the New Birth? Is it because he elsewhere affirms that infants are regenerated? If so, that is a separate issue. Mr. Ross needs to learn to separate the issues. When refuted on the views of paedobaptist theologians with respect to regeneration in non-infants, he has to run away and talk about infant regeneration as if that refutes what is said about adults. But, in that case, any argument infant regeneration is a highly caveated argument. How then does citing beliefs about infant regeneration constitute a refutation of regeneration preceding faith in non-infants?
8. Myself:
Regeneration is attended by the Word of God and gospel truth in all those not dying in infancy. It is monergistic. It precedes faith. It is attended by sorrow for sin, repentance, and faith, but these are its effects, not its efficient cause.
See: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/04/charles-and-bob-l-ross-vs-scripture.html
I’ll make this easy for him: When I say “regeneration precedes faith,” I am simply stating that their relationship causal and logical, if it is temporal it implies nothing of the interval, and I would affirm it in the limiting case of John the Baptist, but, by the same token I’m not completely convinced of the classic text for that. The ordinary means (that for adults and children of competency in understanding) always is via the accompaniment of the Word of God and the calling to mind of other circumstances. I agree with Boyce on this, except in his third and possibly his second limiting case.
From here:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/04/can-he-possibly-grow-more-incohrent.html
Here is the illustration I used:Regeneration is to faith what birth is to crying and breathing. As a new baby cries and breathes on its own when it is born, so the man regenerated by the power of the Spirit working through the gospel believes and is justified.
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/04/tulip-of-calvinism-in-light-of-history.html
How, pray tell, can anybody conclude that I have given “no evidence” that I believe the Word of God is an instrumentality in the Spirit’s work of regeneration, when I plainly stated to Mr. Ross exactly the contrary? I have both affirmed the necessity of instrumentality in regeneration, and I have stated that I confine infant regeneration only to those dying in infancy, not those surviving from infancy into childhood, though I find Boyce's inference from John the Baptist plausible, but speculative.
I would add that this is exactly why I posted those words they way I did in my last direct response to him. I knew he would misrepresent me. He has not disappointed. I have now successfully caught him in a lie. Now, do you see why I mentioned him under the statements of TitusReject a factious man after his first and second warning, knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned.
The Fallacy of Reification
I've taken a lot of flack about how I view logic et. al., in my recent debate with Dan Barker. Basically, the charge being leveled is that I committed the fallacy of reification. On some atheist discussion boards we're told that "Manata thinks logic is a THING." And, "Manata didn't see how Barker refuted him because Barker pointed out that logic isn't a thing."
Now, I thought I had responded to Barker's claim in the debate quite appropriately. I actually didn't spend much time rebutting it because it is actually a very ignorant charge to level at me. I simply pointed out that to simply say "logic exists" is not to commit the fallacy of reification. Indeed, the fallacy applies in my situation only if a sort of nominalism is adhered to. But one can't just *assume* nominalism and then, without benefit of argument, accuse another of reifying certain entities. Furthermore, no examples, either by Barker or by the amateur internet atheologians, are forthcoming in showing how, exactly, I committed this fallacy. Since so many atheists thought that I committed this fallacy I thought I'd write a post dealing specifically on the fallacy of reification. Furthermore, I will show by quoting from either respected atheists or respected philosophy and logic texts, that I committed no such fallacy.
Now then, what is the fallacy of reification? Morris Engel in his respected book With Good Reason defines this fallacy (aka, the fallacy of hypostatization) as treating "abstract terms as if they were concrete ones. Frequently we ascribe human properties to them" (124). Interestingly, a frequent example (e.g., Engel's text) of this fallacy is when evolutionists tell us that "nature selects" certain traits. The "Skeptic Files also agrees with the above when it defines this fallacy:
REIFICATION
Description: To reify something is to convert an abstract concept into a concrete thing. Reification is a Fallacy of Ambiguity. Reification is also sometimes known as a fallacy of "hypostatization".
Now, no evidence is put forth showing how I did the above. Why is it claimed, then, that I commit this particular fallacy. Well, it's simply because I say that "logic exists." Now, if one's ontology commits him to the view that the only entities which exist are concrete particulars, then when they hear me saying "logic exists" they hear me saying "logic is a concrete particular." Or, if one's ontology holds that only entities like rocks, trees, atoms, and neurons exist, then when one hears me say that logic exists then they hear me saying that logic is like a rock, or something. Therefore we can see that this fallacy is partly determined by one's ontological commitments. Thus when one hears me say that logic is an entity, it is assumed, because one holds to a materialist ontology, that I'm reifying logic, since only things like cake, cars, and cheetahs, are 'entities.'
We are told that we cannot call logic an entity. But this simply begs the question against the realist. We are told that logic "is not a thing" (to quote Barker). But all of the above trades on what ontological scheme one holds to. Given my particular view of ontology it is perfectly alright for me to refer to logic as an entity, and not commit the fallacy of reification. This is because I do not hold that to exist, or to be an entity, or to be a thing, is to be something like a small, hard, impenetrable marble. Am I within my rights to do so? Well, the Oxford Companion To Philosophy sides with me on this issue when it tells us that,
Likewise, The Cambridge Companion To Philosophy (CCP) rightly notes that, "an object lacking spatio-temporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist" is referred to as an "abstract entity" (p.3). Therefore we see that the fallacy of reification "turns largely on criteria of ontological commitment" (CCP, 409). Therefore, upon analysis, the reason this charge has been leveled at me is because the one who levels it holds to a certain ontological commitment which disallows anything that is not, say, marble-like, to be said to exist. But, given my ontological commitment, I've committed no such crime against logic. Therefore, without the ontological debate proceeding this charge, then all this charge amounts to is a question begging argument against the realist. Only if my ontology is disproved could someone say that I've reified said entity.
Now, I'm a theist, and so that automatically gets me labeled as someone who is deficient in his reasoning abilities. And so when I call logic an entity that is just more evidence that theists are stupid, because an entity is something like a rock, and so I'm saying that logic is something one could stub his toe on. But what happens when we put forth a couple atheists who maintain the same position on this view as I? Let me put forth two such paradigms of enlightenment: Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell.
Michael Martin, in his paper "Does Logic Presuppose God", tells us that,
"Second, although some atheists have been materialists there is no reason why they must be and, indeed, many philosophical trained atheists are not. Many modern atheists assume a pluralistic ontology in which material entities comprise only one kind of entity in their ontology. Bertrand Russell, for example, was an atheist but believed in abstract mathematical entities."
And in his reply to Michael Butler Michael Martin tells us,
"Does Butler add anything to Frame's position? Yes, he does. He attacks TANG by wrongly assuming that I am committed to materialism. Maintaining that materialism cannot give an account of logic, he says that I as an atheist cannot. But although all materialists are atheists, not all atheists are materialists. Indeed, many atheists have a pluralist ontology. For example, some atheists believe that neither mental events nor numbers can be reduced to material entities. I am not a materialist. I do not know whether mental events are reducible to brain states--the question is still open for me--and I certainly do not think that the principles of logic are so reducible."
Now would the neophytes on the Infidel Guy forums tell Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell that they are committing the fallacy of reification? Would Dan Barker tell Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell that "they are silly" for saying "logic (or numbers) is an entity" because "logic (or numbers) are not things, there's no capital L (or N) floating around out there." Are we to assume that these atheists think the famed Michael Martin thinks that logic is some physical "thing" which "floats around" in the sky? If so, I ask them to rightly call them on the carpet for their "stupidity." If not, then on what basis do they level this charge at me? Indeed, even the famed "Secular Web" applies this fallacy in the exact opposite direction than the atheists who have complained about my logical sins. We read,
Reification / Hypostatization
Reification occurs when an abstract concept is treated as a concrete thing.
"I noticed you described him as 'evil'. Where does this 'evil' exist within the brain? You can't show it to me, so I claim it doesn't exist, and no man is 'evil'."
Here we see that the Secular Web treats evil as an existent thing. The fallacy is committed by the likes of our sophomoric atheist friends who say that since evil isn't some rock-like entity, then it can't exist!
In conclusion we note that the atheist objector is actually naïve about his subject matter. He uncritically assumes an ontological position, does not argue for that position, and then assumes, without benefit of argument, that his position is true; thus allowing him to charge me with this logical crime. We further note that it is entirely appropriate to speak of logic as an object, thing, or entity given our ontological commitment. We have further seen that their childhood heroes, Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell, speak the same way I do yet the mocking is strangely silent when it comes to them. If I'm a "dumb idiot" then so are they (on this issue). Michael Martin can be reached by phone and I suggest that they call him up and tell him how dumb he is. Lastly, we should note, that given their ontological schema they are consistent in saying that I have reified these items. But, let's note that they need to be consistent and deny the existence of: logic, numbers, proposition, sets, etc. If they do not deny the existence of these entities then they are part of their ontology and, as we have read, a member of one's ontology is properly called an object, thing, or entity. Therefore to mock me they must become anti-realist with respects to the above. Suffice it to say, that's a big pill to swallow but since it's not the purpose of this post to argue for a realist take on the above I'll leave it at that.
Now, I thought I had responded to Barker's claim in the debate quite appropriately. I actually didn't spend much time rebutting it because it is actually a very ignorant charge to level at me. I simply pointed out that to simply say "logic exists" is not to commit the fallacy of reification. Indeed, the fallacy applies in my situation only if a sort of nominalism is adhered to. But one can't just *assume* nominalism and then, without benefit of argument, accuse another of reifying certain entities. Furthermore, no examples, either by Barker or by the amateur internet atheologians, are forthcoming in showing how, exactly, I committed this fallacy. Since so many atheists thought that I committed this fallacy I thought I'd write a post dealing specifically on the fallacy of reification. Furthermore, I will show by quoting from either respected atheists or respected philosophy and logic texts, that I committed no such fallacy.
Now then, what is the fallacy of reification? Morris Engel in his respected book With Good Reason defines this fallacy (aka, the fallacy of hypostatization) as treating "abstract terms as if they were concrete ones. Frequently we ascribe human properties to them" (124). Interestingly, a frequent example (e.g., Engel's text) of this fallacy is when evolutionists tell us that "nature selects" certain traits. The "Skeptic Files also agrees with the above when it defines this fallacy:
REIFICATION
Description: To reify something is to convert an abstract concept into a concrete thing. Reification is a Fallacy of Ambiguity. Reification is also sometimes known as a fallacy of "hypostatization".
Now, no evidence is put forth showing how I did the above. Why is it claimed, then, that I commit this particular fallacy. Well, it's simply because I say that "logic exists." Now, if one's ontology commits him to the view that the only entities which exist are concrete particulars, then when they hear me saying "logic exists" they hear me saying "logic is a concrete particular." Or, if one's ontology holds that only entities like rocks, trees, atoms, and neurons exist, then when one hears me say that logic exists then they hear me saying that logic is like a rock, or something. Therefore we can see that this fallacy is partly determined by one's ontological commitments. Thus when one hears me say that logic is an entity, it is assumed, because one holds to a materialist ontology, that I'm reifying logic, since only things like cake, cars, and cheetahs, are 'entities.'
We are told that we cannot call logic an entity. But this simply begs the question against the realist. We are told that logic "is not a thing" (to quote Barker). But all of the above trades on what ontological scheme one holds to. Given my particular view of ontology it is perfectly alright for me to refer to logic as an entity, and not commit the fallacy of reification. This is because I do not hold that to exist, or to be an entity, or to be a thing, is to be something like a small, hard, impenetrable marble. Am I within my rights to do so? Well, the Oxford Companion To Philosophy sides with me on this issue when it tells us that,
"'Thing,' in its most general sense, is interchangeable with 'entity,' or 'being' and is applicable to any item whose existence is acknowledge by a system of ontology, whether that item be particular, universal, abstract, or concrete. In this sense not only material bodies but also properties, relations, events, numbers, sets and propositions are - if they are acknowledge as existing - to be accounted 'things'" (p. 871).
Likewise, The Cambridge Companion To Philosophy (CCP) rightly notes that, "an object lacking spatio-temporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist" is referred to as an "abstract entity" (p.3). Therefore we see that the fallacy of reification "turns largely on criteria of ontological commitment" (CCP, 409). Therefore, upon analysis, the reason this charge has been leveled at me is because the one who levels it holds to a certain ontological commitment which disallows anything that is not, say, marble-like, to be said to exist. But, given my ontological commitment, I've committed no such crime against logic. Therefore, without the ontological debate proceeding this charge, then all this charge amounts to is a question begging argument against the realist. Only if my ontology is disproved could someone say that I've reified said entity.
Now, I'm a theist, and so that automatically gets me labeled as someone who is deficient in his reasoning abilities. And so when I call logic an entity that is just more evidence that theists are stupid, because an entity is something like a rock, and so I'm saying that logic is something one could stub his toe on. But what happens when we put forth a couple atheists who maintain the same position on this view as I? Let me put forth two such paradigms of enlightenment: Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell.
Michael Martin, in his paper "Does Logic Presuppose God", tells us that,
"Second, although some atheists have been materialists there is no reason why they must be and, indeed, many philosophical trained atheists are not. Many modern atheists assume a pluralistic ontology in which material entities comprise only one kind of entity in their ontology. Bertrand Russell, for example, was an atheist but believed in abstract mathematical entities."
And in his reply to Michael Butler Michael Martin tells us,
"Does Butler add anything to Frame's position? Yes, he does. He attacks TANG by wrongly assuming that I am committed to materialism. Maintaining that materialism cannot give an account of logic, he says that I as an atheist cannot. But although all materialists are atheists, not all atheists are materialists. Indeed, many atheists have a pluralist ontology. For example, some atheists believe that neither mental events nor numbers can be reduced to material entities. I am not a materialist. I do not know whether mental events are reducible to brain states--the question is still open for me--and I certainly do not think that the principles of logic are so reducible."
Now would the neophytes on the Infidel Guy forums tell Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell that they are committing the fallacy of reification? Would Dan Barker tell Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell that "they are silly" for saying "logic (or numbers) is an entity" because "logic (or numbers) are not things, there's no capital L (or N) floating around out there." Are we to assume that these atheists think the famed Michael Martin thinks that logic is some physical "thing" which "floats around" in the sky? If so, I ask them to rightly call them on the carpet for their "stupidity." If not, then on what basis do they level this charge at me? Indeed, even the famed "Secular Web" applies this fallacy in the exact opposite direction than the atheists who have complained about my logical sins. We read,
Reification / Hypostatization
Reification occurs when an abstract concept is treated as a concrete thing.
"I noticed you described him as 'evil'. Where does this 'evil' exist within the brain? You can't show it to me, so I claim it doesn't exist, and no man is 'evil'."
Here we see that the Secular Web treats evil as an existent thing. The fallacy is committed by the likes of our sophomoric atheist friends who say that since evil isn't some rock-like entity, then it can't exist!
In conclusion we note that the atheist objector is actually naïve about his subject matter. He uncritically assumes an ontological position, does not argue for that position, and then assumes, without benefit of argument, that his position is true; thus allowing him to charge me with this logical crime. We further note that it is entirely appropriate to speak of logic as an object, thing, or entity given our ontological commitment. We have further seen that their childhood heroes, Michael Martin and Bertrand Russell, speak the same way I do yet the mocking is strangely silent when it comes to them. If I'm a "dumb idiot" then so are they (on this issue). Michael Martin can be reached by phone and I suggest that they call him up and tell him how dumb he is. Lastly, we should note, that given their ontological schema they are consistent in saying that I have reified these items. But, let's note that they need to be consistent and deny the existence of: logic, numbers, proposition, sets, etc. If they do not deny the existence of these entities then they are part of their ontology and, as we have read, a member of one's ontology is properly called an object, thing, or entity. Therefore to mock me they must become anti-realist with respects to the above. Suffice it to say, that's a big pill to swallow but since it's not the purpose of this post to argue for a realist take on the above I'll leave it at that.
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