Truth or Delusion

http://www.xulonpress.com/bookstore/bookdetail.php?PB_ISBN=9781613798492

Comparative credentials

EDWARD T. BABINSKI SAID:

Do you honestly believe that one Young Earth creationist ancient historian, Noel Weeks, who writes for ‘Answers in Genesis’ is on par with the scholars I mentioned in my blog reply (and in my chapter) whose specialties are ANE cosmologies?

Let’s see. Ed cites no fewer than six different writings by Paul Seely in TCD. Yet as Peter Enns, who’s sympathetic to Seely, points out:

One reason for this, I suspect, is that Seely is not a professional academic with a recognized teaching post. He is a seminary graduate (Westminster Theological Seminary, 1968, B.D.) who has taken upon himself a life of continued self-education, part of which includes a patient reading of the entire Christian Bible in the original languages along with secondary sources. Absence of doctoral work at a research university cannot easily be overcome…

http://peterennsonline.com/book-reviews/review-inerrant-wisdom-by-paul-seely/

Compare that to the credentials of Noel Weeks:

Dr Noel Weeks earned a B.Sc. (Honors in Zoology) from the University of New England, Armidale (Australia), a B.D. and Th.M. from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. (Mediterranean Studies, dealing with some of the Nuzi texts) from Brandeis University, Massachusetts. He is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and is an Associate of their Department of Classics and Ancient History, with an interest in the Ancient Near East, specializing in Mesopotamia and Israel, and the Akkadian Language.

http://creation.com/noel-weeks-ancient-near-east-history

So if we measure Paul Seely and Noel Weeks by Ed’s own yardstick, guess which one comes up short?

Ed tries to play the credentials card to dodge having to engage the arguments of Noel Weeks. Having lost the bet, will Ed now engage the argument?

"Mainstream" standards

Imagine if we applied Paul Tobin's idolization of "mainstream" consensus to science:

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the New England divine, actually proposed a germ theory of medicine when 99.9% of the medical community disagreed with him. Conversely, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) proposed a “phlogiston” theory to explain combustion (burning) and rusting that nearly every scientist of the day (including Joseph Priestly [1733-1804]), hailed. 

http://www.uncommondescent.com/culture/consensus-science-voyage-of-the-dumbed/

Can't you just see Tobin with the powdered wig and gavel sentencing an upstart like Mather to the stocks?

Idolizing the status quo

Whenever Paul Tobin runs out of bad arguments, which doesn’t take long, he retreats into his all-purpose appeal to “mainstream” scholarship.

But that’s intellectually stultifying. Imagine if we applied his policy to medical science. There would be no incentive to advance medical science, for we’d always default to the status quo. Unquestioning allegiance to “mainstream” opinion would lead to scientific stagnation. If Tobin had his way, we’d still be using Galen and the “four humors” of Hippocratic medicine.

Any challenge to the Medieval status quo would be treated as heretical pseudoscience. 

Abusing history

David Marshall has responded to Hector Avalos in a series of posts: here; here; and here.

Timothy McGrew on Richard Carrier

(Posted on behalf of Steve.)

Dr. Timothy McGrew is mounting a takedown of Richard Carrier. Las Vegas bookies are currently taking bets on whether Dr. McGrew will defeat Carrier by K.O., kimura, armbar, guillotine, gogoplata, or rear-naked choke.

Lydia McGrew on Richard Carrier

"The odds form of Bayes's Theorem" by Lydia McGrew.

The Outsider Test for Catnip

If Billy Graham was a kitten, he’d be crazy about catnip. But if Billy Graham was a mosquito, he’d be repelled by catnip.

So his love or loathing of catnip is an accident of birth. The statistical data is indisputable.

Therefore, Billy Graham ought to take the Outsider Test for Catnip.   

Artificially-induced religious experiences

Since it's a brief post, I'll quote in full Steven Nemes quoting Mark Anderson:

Some people seem to be of the opinion that artificially-induced religious experiences somehow take from the veridicality of non-artificially-induced religious experiences. This is not compelling. Quoth Mark Anderson:

Our vision of a chair depends upon neurological activity. A neurologist can cause a patient to experience this and other visions simply by manipulating his brain--by introducing the appropriate drug, for example, or by manually stimulating the relevant neural pathways. This does not persuade us that there really no chairs, that our visions of chairs are nothing more than the electrical-chemical activity inside our skulls. Why then should we believe that artificially induced religious experiences or "the God center" in our brain implies the non-existence of the object of our mystical experience?

Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One (Sophia Perennis, 2009), p40.

A spherical argument

Quodlibeta debunks the myth that people prior to Columbus believed the earth was flat.

Intellectually-challenged infidelity

DrAvalos1110 Yesterday 05:50 AM

He claims he did nothing wrong. The fact that the philosophers he contacted asked him to remove their comments itself is evidence that they did not think what he did was right. 

Since Avalos is too muddled-headed to grasp the salient distinction, I guess we'll have to explain it to him. Manata didn't ask them for advice on ethics, but logic. He didn't ask them to assess the ethical quality of Hector's argument, but the logical quality of Hector's argument.

The question at issue wasn't who is morally right, but whether Hector's argument for moral relativism logically sound. Was his formulation fallacious? That's the only question that Manata ran by the philosophers.

Hector Avalos: Fundy, Angry, Militant Atheism Gone Wild

Hector Avalos is mad that an "utter amateur" like myself argued him down over the issue of relativism vs. realism. To someone with a degree from Haaaavad, that's a rough pill to swallow. I think they promise you that if you graduate from Haaavaad, you will never lose an argument to an "utter amateur," and so Hector is fuming. Here's my arguments against him.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/07/thc-hector-confusion.html and here:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/07/hector-avaloss-non-expertise-exposed.html


Notice, despite the bloviating, there's not been any substantive response to the arguments I presented him. So his claim that I "couldn't beat him in an argument, so I had to go call the experts [to say essentially what I had already said, mind you]" is false. Hector is resorting to lies and deception.

Now, Hector is trying to pretend that I misrepresented his arguments and that is the only way some of the world's top ethicists could dismiss it. Okay, let him put his money where his mouth is. Why doesn't he get the same ethics profs I emailed to offer their take on his argument for relativism and, after getting their permission of course!, post their comments on his blog. Seems to be an easy way to settle matters.

In any case, I have no idea why Hector gives people such a bad impression of professional academics. He's imputing dishonesty to them all by claiming that they would rebuke his poor argument in private but prais it in public. It's unethical to call people hypocrites with no evidence.

Hector's latest response is an exercise in more digging of his own grave. He should have let sleeping dogs lie. Now he's brought to everyone's attention again the fact that not only was he bested by an amateur, some of the world's most knowledgeable ethicists scoffed at his argument. Those are the factors that Hector, alleged intellectual that he is, should be most concerned with. He needs to worry about his poor argument and his contribution to false ideas. Isn't that what he got his colleague, Guillermo Gonzalez, denied tenure for? Hector's the I.D. theorist of the world of ethicists.

His latest post is self-incriminating and also deceptive:

HECTOR: "What he did wrong was to ask for their comments under false pretenses. He intended to post their comments all along, but he did not tell them that he was going to do that."

I appreciate the massive credit he gives me to know the field well enough to know, in advance, that the philosopher's would all find Hector's argument laughable---the realists and the relativists, the atheists and the Christians, all of them I knew, in advance, would pan Hector's argument. What explains my predictive abilities in a field I am not an expert in? How could I know the non-cognitivists, the relativists, and the atheistic ethical naturalists would all scoff at Hector's argument? How could he not know that, since he apparently thought his argument worthy of public consumption? Would he have made his argument if he knew in advance what some of the world's best ethicists would say about it? No. So apparently this is a tacit admission to my knowledge of the field over against his.

HECTOR: So, by August 6, Manata was probably frustrated by the fact that he could not find a way out of the circular nature of his ethics, and so he ran to these philosophers for help. They actually did not help him. Some told him to stop doing what he was doing.

Apart from the speculation, this is another lie. No one "told me to stop." All of the philosophers laughed at Hector's "circular nature argument for relativism." So Hector has now taken to lying to defend a post where he lied about me lying.

HECTOR: "He claims he did nothing wrong. The fact that the philosophers he contacted asked him to remove their comments itself is evidence that they did not think what he did was right."

This is false; or at least misleading, and so deceptive (!) on Hector's end. Only two contacted me, though Hector no doubt contacted more than two. Furthermore, one of the two, did not even ask me to remove the post, I did that on my own accord. Only one person asked me to remove his quote, and he said that I had "failed to protect [his] identity." I assume he wouldn't have cared if the post didn't tie him to it. So what of the other 7 or so other philosophers? Why didn't they contact me? Perhaps they didn't care, and what they said in private they would say in public? Perhaps they didn't think anything unethical was done? How does Hector account for the majority of philosopher's he contacted me not even bothering to say a word about it? Moreover, one of the philosophers who I had some extended discussion with afterward thought Hector Avalos was unethical because of his dismissing my arguments by saying, with a English accent no doubt, "You, sir, are not an expert, but a complete and utter amateur, and thus your writings are rubbish." In the interest of full disclosure, for Hector's sake, that quote was not really from Hector, that was a satirical paraphrase.

Sham rationalism

According to Paul Tobin:

“One evidence that the pastoral epistles were not written by Paul is the fact that the authentic epistles of Paul contained an imminent expectation of the apocalyptic return of Jesus (the parousia) while the pastorals give the impression of settled communities who see their churches existing into the foreseeable future.”

Tobin’s distinction between the “authentic” Pauline epistles and the deutero-Pauline epistles runs counter to the view of his co-contributor, Robert Price, who rejects the authenticity of the canonical Pauline epistles in toto. So this is yet another instance in which one contributor to TCD debunks another contributor to TCD.

“Hays defense is incomprehensible. For his attempted rationalization of I Corinthians 7:29-31, the most I can make of his claim is that when Paul says the time is “short” he means ‘shortened” and that this is somehow in opposition to the Greek concept of the eternity of the world. But this does not take away the clear sense of the passage. How could time being ‘shortened’ from infinite to finite have any bearing on Paul’s point?”

I already explained that in my original reply to Tobin, on which he is supposedly commenting. To repeat what I said before, since it didn’t sink in the first time around:

Tobin is evidently ignorant of what Paul was setting his own position in opposition to. He was opposing the view of popular Greek philosophy. On the one hand, this stressed the continuity of the world, given the eternity of the world. On the other hand, it also stressed a degree of personal discontinuity, given the immorality of the soul-–rather than the resurrection of the body. Hence the temptation to squeeze everything into this life on the assumption that because the afterlife is incorporeal, there are things you can do here-below which will be denied you in the hereafter. By contrast, Christian eschatology reversed the equation. On the one hand, this stressed the discontinuity of the world, given the day of judgment, and the palingenesis. On the other hand, this also stressed a degree of personal continuity, not only given the intermediate state, but the final state (i.e. resurrection of the body).

The Outsider Test of College Profs.

One of the revealing features of Hector Avalos is his intellectual evasiveness. He tries to create a Catch-22 situation to immunize his positions from rational scrutiny.

1. For instance, if members of Triablogue criticize his argument for moral relativism, he tries to disqualify us because we’re “rank amateurs.”

(Mind you, one non-expert can comment on the inexpertise of another non-expert. Metaethics is not his field.)

2. If, on the other hand, someone like Paul Manata solicits expert opinion regarding Hector’s argument for moral relativism, then Avalos goes behind the scenes to see if he can get their critical evaluations stricken from the public record.

3. Not surprisingly, he also doesn’t like it when I quote negative student evaluations of his job performance. Yet all I did was administer the Outsider Test of College Profs. to Hector Avalos.

Shouldn’t Avalos welcome outside scrutiny? Doesn’t his sidekick, John Loftus, constantly urge that on Christians?

4. BTW, assuming that Manata and I are rank amateurs in the field of ethics and metaethics, why is Avalos so judgmental? Wouldn’t that put Manata and me in a condition of diminished responsibility? Wouldn’t that mitigate our alleged “flagrant ethical violations?”

I’d just explain to the judge, in my best Bronx accent (e.g. "toity-toid ohn toid"):

“But, your Honor, I’m a socially deprived child of tragic circumstances. I didn’t know any better!”

Moral axioms

Hector Avalos has attempted to cobble together a response to my “Help me! Help me!” post. So let’s review some of his responses:

I. Framing the Argument

It’s important to be clear on how Avalos chose to frame his original reply. For my response to Avalos is pegged to the terms of his argument. This is how he put it:

The first one is easy to refute because Triablogue just doesn’t seem to understand even the basics of relativist ethics. Moral relativism does not deny that logic operates once you have accepted the basic premises of your ethics. Moral relativism affirms that while the initial premises of any ethical system cannot be established by absolute rationales, one can still evaluate whether an ethical system is logically following the initial premises one affirms.

Avalos is an avowed moral relativist. And as he just defined his own understanding of moral relativism, he is in no position to judge another person’s “basic” or “initial” ethical “premises.” These enjoy an axiomatic status.

He can disagree with another person’s ethical premises, but he can’t hold another person to his own ethical premises. For that would require a belief in universal norms which transcend individuals or subcultures. In moral relativism, morality is relative in time and place. Relative to your own culture or in-group.

All he can do is venture a “factual observation” (as he puts it elsewhere) regarding the degree to which another person is logically consistent or inconsistent with that person’s ethical premises. He can’t offer a moral evaluation which is binding on a second party who doesn’t share his ethical premises.

In technical terms, Avalos is endorsing agent relativism rather than appraiser relativism. The salient standards are the standards of the party we are judging rather than the standards of the party rendering the judgment.

For instance, in a social contract there may be rules of behavior that apply to the contracting parties that don’t apply to outsiders.

II. The Allegation

This is what he’s accused us of doing:

In that sense, it is wrong for Triablogue to claim that they represent honesty if their definition of honesty entails telling people how they will use e-mails on their blogs. If honesty means that you represent yourself factually to someone from whom you are trying to extract an opinion, then we can certainly say that Triablogue did not act in accordance WITH THEIR DEFINITION OF HONESTY.

Notice that he doesn’t quote our definition of honesty. Rather, he seems to impute to us his own definition of honesty, then accuses us of a “flagrant ethical violations.”

To make his case, Avalos has to do two things:

i) Accurately state where we think our Christian duties lie.

ii) Show that we have violated our Christian duties, as we ourselves define them.

Unfortunately, Avalos hasn’t done either one.

III. Ethical Axioms

1. Disambiguation

Avalos has a bad habit of lumping together Steve Hays, Paul Manata, and Triablogue as if these were interchangeable entities. But I’m not Jason Engwer or Peter Pike or Paul Manata or Patrick Chan. They may or may not share some or all of my ethical premises.

2. Setting the Bar

I’m going to state my ethical premises–at least the premises which seem most relevant to the issue at hand. Once again, let’s be clear on how Hector has framed the argument. As he himself has cast the issue, it’s not incumbent on me to defend or justify my ethical premises. He can’t challenge my ethical premises. At most, he can venture a “factual observation” regarding the degree to which my conduct is logically consistent or inconsistent with my ethical premises.

3. Public Truth

i) Avalos seems to have a proprietary notion of truth. He apparently views truth as private intellectual property. Different property-owners hold the title-deed to different parcels of truth.

That attitude not surprising given his elitist, authoritarian viewpoint. He’s a college prof. In his world, the prof. is the social superior, while the student is his social inferior.

Therefore, the intellectual property owner must give permission for the use of his private intellectual property. A student must seek and obtain permission to quote his social superior.

More than that, a student must declare what he intends to do with these proprietary truths. He must also furnish a list of his associations for the professor to inspect. If a student belongs to the “wrong” association, then he should not be granted access to these proprietary truths.

This reminds me of the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Different archeologists discovered different scrolls. They then acted as if the scrolls belonged to them. They would only share the scrolls with their protégés. They willed “their” scrolls to their protégés. Other scholars were not allowed to study “their” scrolls. You had to be an heir to have access to the scroll.

ii) By contrast, I generally view truth as a public commodity. Except for God, no one “owns” the truth. No one holds an exclusive copyright to the truth.

iii) There are some practical exceptions. For instance, certain truths (e.g. military technology) can fall into the wrong hands. So it’s appropriate to classify certain truths.

Likewise, there are situations in which there’s a justified expectation of privacy. That, however, needs to be carefully defined and qualified (see below).

4. Concentric Social Obligations

i) I believe that some social obligations are general obligations. They apply across the board.

But I believe that other social obligations are specific to the type of social relationship. We have some obligations to a friend that we don’t have to a stranger. We are indebted to a friend, or vice versa, because we’ve done favors for each other.

As such, it’s possible to betray a friend in a way that’s not possible for a stranger. For friendship involves an element of trust. And trust is earned (as the saying goes). As such, it’s possible to betray a friend’s confidence. You can only violate someone’s trust in a trusting relationship. Moreover, that expectation is warranted given the nature of the friendship.

ii) That doesn’t necessarily carryover to other relationships. For instance, an undercover cop can’t properly betray the confidence of a mobster, for the mobster has no right to swear the undercover cop to secrecy.

You have to cross a higher threshold to justifiably breach the confidence of a friend.

So one consideration in “privacy rights” in the relationship between the two parties. That’s not the only consideration, but that’s one of the salient considerations.

5. Content

Whether or not disclosure constitutes an ethical violation also depends on the nature of the content. Publishing somebody’s private health records would generally be unethical. However, there are exceptions. For instance, a guy who suffers from narcolepsy shouldn’t operate a train.

6. Deception/Concealment

i) Sometimes concealment is deceptive. However, concealment is not inherently deceptive. There’s no general obligation to exhaustively state our intentions.

Take a whistleblower or undercover reporter. He is motivated to obtain inside information which will expose a criminal enterprise. But he has to conceal his intentions to successfully infiltrate the syndicate.

ii) There are also situations when deception is both permissible and obligatory. Take the textbook hypothetical of the Nazis who knock on your door, demanding to know if you are harboring Jews.

iii) BTW, in (1-6), my position is not another version of moral relativism. I’m not saying that what is right for one culture is wrong for another. To the contrary, we have the same obligations in the same types of situations. While obligations sometimes vary from one situation to the next, the obligations are invariant in a given type of situation.

7. Different agendas

There are many situations in which the intentions of the speaker may differ from the intentions of the questioner, and that’s perfectly appropriate. Take a homicide detective who is interrogating the suspect. The intention of the suspect is to avoid volunteering any incriminating admission. By contrast, the intention of the detective is to trick him into divulging an incriminating admission. To trip him up so that he will inadvertently say more than he wants to let on.

Or take the following illustration. Suppose a bright young atheist wants to write a devastating philosophical critique of Christian theism. Pursuant to that objective, he takes courses from Peter van Inwagen. He does so because he wants to master the most philosophically sophisticated exposition and defense of Christian theism. He also makes full use of Prof. Inwagen’s office hours to closely question the professor on what he believes and why he believes it.

On the one hand, the student doesn’t lie about his intentions. He doesn’t tell Prof. Inwagen that he’s a devout Christian whose ambition in life is to become a Christian apologist.

On the other hand, the student doesn’t volunteer his ulterior motives. He doesn’t say why he’s asking these questions, or what he plans to do with the information.

Has the student atheist wronged Prof. Inwagen? I don’t see how. Frankly, it’s none of the good professor’s business why a student poses a question.

Help me! Help me!

Triablogue Caught in a Web of Deception
By Dr. Hector Avalos at 11/26/2010
How to Fight Cyber-Bullies and Win

“Caught in a web” of deception? Sounds like Hector has been watching too many old B horror films:



Delusion is standard fare at Triablogue, but this time even they have a difficult time explaining away a post that was so flagrant in its ethical violations that it had to be removed on August 6, 2010. Their embarrassing ethical fiasco left only a dead link here: Triablogue’s Dead Link.

But Avalos is, by his own admission, a moral relativist. So what would “flagrant ethical violations” amount to?

The post was written by Paul Manata, and it purported to show that renowned ethicists had demolished claims I had made about ethics and metaethics.

Which it certainly accomplished. Avalos is scared stiff.

In a very ill-conceived prank, Manata contacted a number of academic philosophers to ask their opinions about my stance on the circularity of many ethical premises, and those philosophers supposedly all refuted my position. But within a few hours of being published, the post was gone.

Manata’s post was like a snakebite from a Black Mamba. Without antivenom, one bite will suffice. No need to keep biting the victim. Just let nature do the rest.

What happened? If the refutation was so compelling and ethically proper, then why remove the post at all? And why have they kept it so quiet until now (and after I mentioned it) if they were so proud of what they did? Indeed, nothing could be a greater defeat for Triablogue than having to take a post down.

Who are the they?

On their website, Triablogue admits taking down the post and it offers these reasons for the ignominious defeat they suffered. See Triablogue’s Non-Explanation

i) How can Avalos ascribe “flagrant ethical violations” to a post when he’s a moral relativist?

ii) It wasn’t taken down due to ethical problems. It was taken down because Avalos, acting like a little pansy, contacted some of the individuals who panned his incompetent argument as a pressure tactic to censure Manata’s post.

The first one is easy to refute because Triablogue just doesn’t seem to understand even the basics of relativist ethics. Moral relativism does not deny that logic operates once you have accepted the basic premises of your ethics.

Moral relativism affirms that while the initial premises of any ethical system cannot be established by absolute rationales, one can still evaluate whether an ethical system is logically following the initial premises one affirms.

If that’s how he defines moral relativism, then why does he disapprove of the “genocidal passages” in the OT? After all, as long as OT holy war is logically consistent with the initial premises of the narrators or warriors, then there is no ethical lapse.

Likewise, why is Avalos so defensive about the Dinesh D’Sousa’s effort to link the Holocaust to atheism and Darwinism? Once again, as long as the Nazis were logically consistent with the basic premises of their value system, there would be no ethical violation even if atheism and/or Darwinism were the culprits.

Triabloggers affirm to live by truth and honesty, and they were shown not to be doing so.

Avalos hasn’t shown that we were shown to be unethical. He hasn’t shown that Manata’s conduct was logically inconsistent with the initial premises of Manata’s ethical system. Nor mine.

The second reason Triablogue offers is where a blatant untruth or lie is found. I can thoroughly document this untruth if they force the issue and they seem to assume that I don’t have at least some of the relevant e-mails from these philosophers that Triablogue has. Since I do not want to add to the time or trouble caused by Triablogue to these professional colleagues, I have decided not to identify them.

Once again, what’s the “blatant untruth or lie”?

For now, I can say the following:

1. Manata was unable to refute my arguments on his own, and so he sought to use an appeal to authority to refute me.

i) That’s a false dichotomy. Manata refuted them on his own as well as garnering the refutation of others.

ii) Since Avalos is the one who constantly appeals to authority by playing the credentials card, that’s simply a case of calling his bluff.

iii) Avalos said Paul Tobin consulted him before Tobin posted his initial reply to me.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/08/truth-by-definition.html#2815213430833304714

Therefore, by Hector’s own yardstick, Paul Tobin comes up short. “Unable to refute” my arguments “on his own,” he turned to Avalos for help.

2. The philosophers contacted by Manata were given a version of my arguments filtered through Manata, and so they did not evaluate my arguments from my own writings. What Manata gave them were already tainted and distorted versions. Thus, these philosophers were not really evaluating my arguments at all.

As I recall, what Manta gave them were direct quotes from Hector’s chapter in TCD.

3. When I contacted these philosophers to warn them of what Manata had done, one of them responded and reported the following:

A. Manata represented himself only as a student working on something Avalos had written in connection with a course Manata was taking.

B. The philosopher contacted by Manata was not even told about Triablogue and was not asked to say something for publication on that website.

i) Wrong! Manata was not doing this for a course on ethics.

ii) But notice the point-blank contradiction. On #3, Avalos quotes the professor without any indication that he sought or received permission to quote his private email statement in public.

Yet then, on #4, Avalos faults Manata for doing the very thing which Avalos just did on #3! So did Avalos just commit a “flagrant ethical violation?”

C. That philosopher subsequently asked that his comments be removed, and Manata agreed to remove all of the others, too.

And how is it “flagrantly unethical” for Manata to comply with their request?

D. Triablogue, not I, censored the post when Manata realized that his juvenile prank had boomeranged on him. After all, Triablogue controls the website, and so how could I censor it?

Now Avalos is playing dumb. Yet he just admitted that he was the one who tried to get the post taken down by contacting the quoted sources.

Indeed, it’s a backdoor admission on his part that Manata’s post was so devastating to Hector’s fragile reputation that he had to use strong-arm tactics to try to get it removed from the public domain.

So, either Manata lied to these philosophers about his intentions, or he was not telling them the whole truth about his intentions. Manata used their work for a purpose at least some of them did not intend.

Well that’s rather silly. To take a really obvious example, historians and biographers routinely quote from or publish the private letters or diaries of famous individuals from the past. They didn’t obtain the permission of the decedent before they made this information public. Is that a “flagrant ethical violation”?

If one looks at the comments section of the relevant thread (Triablogue’s Non-Explanation), one also sees another blatant contradiction in the following exchange:

MICHAEL SAID:
Sorry, are we able to know why the post was taken down?
11/16/2010 6:16 AM
STEVE SAID:
Well, I didn't take it down, so that's not for me to say.
11/16/2010 8:18 AM

So, on the one hand, Steve Hays tells us he knows that ethical violations were not the reason the post was removed. On the other hand, when asked by Michael why it was taken down, he can only meekly retort that “I didn’t take it down, so that’s not for me to say.” A pusillanimous answer if I’ve ever read one. After all---Couldn’t he even ask Manata?

i) Where’s the “blatant contradiction”? For that matter, he hasn’t even established a previous “blatant contradiction,” much less “another blatant contradiction.”

ii) Assuming my response was “pusillanimous,” what’s so bad about pusillanimity to a moral relativist like Avalos?

iii) Avalos is fallaciously assuming I didn’t know the reason. However, I didn’t say one way or the other. That’s the point.

Why did Triablobue not issue an explanation about their dead link that was only up for a few hours? Didn’t their own readers deserve an explanation? If Hays was willing to say that it was not taken down because of ethical reasons, why couldn’t he tell us the reason it was taken down?

No, they don’t deserve an explanation. I don’t owe them an explanation for what I do, and they don’t owe me an explanation for what they do.

This isn’t like an annual meeting with stockholders on how we invested their money or used the company car.

In any case, it really does not matter whether I am a moral relativist or not.

When an accuser hurls the charge of “flagrant ethical violations,” it certainly matters if the accuser turns out to be a moral relativist.

What matters is that at least one of the moral authorities that Triablogue consulted thought Triablogue was violating HIS ethical standards, not just mine.

i) To begin with, we only have Hector’s word to go by. Why should we credit the hearsay testimony of an avowed moral relativist?

ii) Moreover, even if that were true, so what? Remember how Hector just defined moral relativism?

The first one is easy to refute because Triablogue just doesn’t seem to understand even the basics of relativist ethics. Moral relativism does not deny that logic operates once you have accepted the basic premises of your ethics.

Moral relativism affirms that while the initial premises of any ethical system cannot be established by absolute rationales, one can still evaluate whether an ethical system is logically following the initial premises one affirms.

So, by his own definition, even if (arguendo) Manata violated the moral code of the unnamed professor, that wouldn’t make Manata guilty of a flagrant ethical violation–for what’s ethical or unethical is internal to each individual’s moral code. Unless Manata has the same moral code as the unnamed professor, a moral relativist like Avalos can’t judge Manata’s morality by an outsider’s standard of conduct. In moral relativism, as Avalos defines it, these are incommensurable. What matters is consistency with your own moral premises, not consistency with a second party’s moral premises.

From there, Triablogue’s attempt to whitewash their ethical lapses just gets worse.

Notice how Avalos steadily builds on a series of false premises.

Indeed, the main thing they have left is to assail my supposed “social inferiority” complex due to my economic and ethnic background. Actually, I am not ashamed at all of my background, and I have written on my background quite frequently.

To the contrary, he clearly looks down on his folk Pentecostal roots.

The removal of the post suggest that he is not a fighter, but rather a cowardly cyber-bully who runs when challenged. He may have been the hapless fellow cowering in the alleys when the big boys came looking for him. After all, he was the first to run to these philosophers when he could not handle the argument on his own. Why is that not described as being a “little pansy”?

Notice that Avalos is resorting to emotive appeals to shame Manata. But remember that Avalos is a moral relativist. So his coercive rhetoric is toothless.

The rest of the comments by Parsival38 (aka Steve Hays?) on the thread are simply rehash. This person, by his own definition (peer reviewed journal articles), has no standing in epistemology or ethics, and so he is not even able to judge whether I am competent in those fields. Hays is not in a position to say who is or is not an epistemologist.

i) That’s ironic. Avalos is a “minimalist” in archeology, yet he identifies me as the pseudonymous commenter, even though he offers absolutely no evidence to substantiate his identification.

ii) One doesn’t need to be an epistemologist to know the Avalos is not an epistemologist.

The idea that Prometheus is not a scholarly press is also simply nonsense. The books by Prometheus are reviewed by recognized scholars in recognized scholarly venues (e.g., Review of Biblical Literature), and so it shows that other scholars do recognize their books as scholarly.

When I turn to the Prometheus catalogue, here are some of the “scholarly” titles I find:

The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve
Philip D. Harvey
Foreword by Nadine Strossen, president, ACLU

Eight Keys to Greatness: How to Unlock Your Hidden Potential
Gene N. Landrum, PhD

Chocolate— A Healthy Passion
Shara Aaron and Monica Bearden

Lessons of the Locker Room: The Myth of School Sports
Andrew W. Miracle Jr. and C. Roger Rees

Simpsonology: There’s a Little Bit of Springfield in All of Us
Tim Delaney

Seinology: The Sociology of Seinfeld
Tim Delaney

Infiltrating Red-State, White-Ass, and Blue-Suit America
Harmon Leon

A Solstice Tree for Jenny
Karen Shragg

Hooking Up: A Girl’s All-Out Guide to Sex and Sexuality
Amber Madison

S & M: Studies in Dominance and Submission
Edited by Thomas S. Weinberg

Armed Robbery Orgasm: A Lovemap Autobiography of Masochism
Ronald W. Keyes and John Money

The Breathless Orgasm: A Lovemap Biography of Asphyxiophilia
John Money, Gordon Wainwright, and David Hingsburger

Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress
Magnus Hirschfeld, MD

Dirty Talk
Diary of a Phone Sex “Mistress”
Gary Anthony with Rocky Bennett

Raw Talent: The Adult Film Industry as Seen by Its Most Popular Male Star
Jerry Butler, as told to Robert H. Rimmer and Catherine Tavel

However, I’ll happily grant that Hector’s Prometheus’ titles are fully the equal of these.

Moving along:

August 6, 2010 should be remembered as the date when Triablogue saw its own work as so inane, juvenile, and ethically incoherent that it had to erase it from the world.

How is Manata quoting some professional ethicists on the quality (or lack thereof) of Hector’s argument for moral relativism inane, juvenile, and ethically incompetent?

Manata, who usually trumpets even the slightest supposed victory, has kept quiet this long about it because he knows his defeat was as definitive as it gets in the blogosphere.

To the contrary, Avalos, by his own admission, was so afraid of Manata’s post that he tried to silence his critics. And the fact that he’s still running scared from a deleted post is a self-witness to his professional and intellectual insecurity.

Finally, it will not matter even if Triablogue does post responses purported to come private communications with philosophers. With Triablogue’s credibility with at least some academic ethicists now in tatters, it is clear that supposed quotes and refutations from philosophers posted on Triablogue cannot be taken at face value.

The accuracy of the quotes is evident from the fact that Avalos felt so threatened by them that he went to such lengths to suppress them.

Unless those philosophers post it on their own websites or write it in their own publications, nothing on Triablogue said to come from private communications with philosophers should be trusted to be what Triablogue claims it to be.

Only somebody as panic-stricken as Avalos would resort to these transparent disclaimers.

1. Given Triablogue’s professed adherence to high ethical standards, did Hays ever request that Manata show him the correspondence he sent to these professional philosophers?

As far as that goes, I’d take Manata’s word for it.

2. If he Manata did share such correspondence, did Hays ensure that Manata represented himself and his intentions truthfully to these philosophers?

Manata’s declared intentions were to ask them to evaluate Hector’s argument for moral relativism. Which they did, much to Hector’s acute embarrassment.

3. If Manata did not represent himself truthfully, will he be censured, reprimanded, or forced to issue some sort of apology? Will Triablogue issue an apology or explanation for this sort of misrepresentation?

Since there was no misrepresentation, no apology is even in order.

I actually did not respond to this prank publicly until Parsival38 (aka Steve Hays) trolled the DC site with further personal attacks in the thread to a November 10 post on DC (Avalos Profile).

I await Hector’s evidence that I’m Parsival38.

The problem with the Triabloggers is that they sometimes become inconsiderate of the time professional colleagues have to expend undoing their pranks. Triabloggers think that universities and professors are in the business of settling every argument that they cannot handle themselves. Thus, when it becomes clear that they have no respect for taking the time of colleagues, then it is time to expose them for what they are.

i) By that standard, Paul Tobin can’t handle the arguments on his own.

ii) To judge by some student reviews of Hector’s job performance, the more time we divert from his work, the better for all parties concerned:

Hector Avalos

Name: Hector Avalos
School: Iowa State University
Location: Ames, IA
Department: Religion

**********

Dr. Avalos is very biased and intelligent. He does provide more than one viewpoint, however he seems to miss or mistake obvious possible explanations about the materials (Bible.) Whether he does this intentionally, or on purpose it is hard to say. I feel he is a good person, but I feel bad for him because he seems to harbor a great anger towards some things that happened during his childhood church experience. Told us stories that confirmed his bitter recall of those times. Has a good heart tho.

**********

Claims to be valid because he is "impartial" to subject material, yet clearly, and vocally, is against or unfavorable toward material presented. Professor Avalos has a distinct presuppostion that orders his manner of teaching, yet refuses to recognize his own bias.

**********

His broken English does nothing to strengthen his typically convoluted arguments. Class is ridiculously easy, however, if one has been exposed to works such as Atheism for Dummies.

**********

He is EXTREMELY biased against all religion, but if you know that going in, he makes you think.

**********

He has all the wrong answers to all the right questions.

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=469479&page=1

The village idiot...I mean...atheist

Bozinski in the house, Haze. Steve Haze imagines there is a contradiction between citing Scripture and citing appearances.

Smokey the Strawman.

There is no contradiction. The appearance of the sun's movement was recognized first -- as can be elucidated by plenty of examples from ANE writings prior to ancient Hebrew writings.

No one denies the appearance of solar motion to a ground-based observer.

Based on the appearance of the sun's movement (and the earth as stationary) some general cosmological ideas arose, including the idea that the sun was created after the earth, to light it, and that it moved above the earth daily.

Really? How does one infer from apparent motion that the earth was made before the sun? What's the logical or even causal connection?

ANE writings (including the Bible) explicitly mention the sun moving and also hastening to return from when it first arose.

How does one infer that the earth is flat because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? If the earth were flat, wouldn't we expect solar motion to alternate between one side and the other? If it sets in the west because it stops when it hits solid ground (like a meteor), then the only direction it can go is to reverse course.

Geoplanar oceanography

According to Ed Bozinski, Bible writers and ancient Near Easterners generally were rubes and hicks who all thought the earth was flat because they didn’t have access to satellite photography. They had to go by appearances, and to all appearances the earth was flat. (Or so goes the argument.)

Well, let’s consider a simple counterexample. Anyone living on the coast is in a position to register a correlation between the lunar cycle and the tidal cycle. Indeed, if you were, let us say, an ancient sailor or fisherman, you’d have a practical incentive to take note of that correlation.

As we all know, tidal action involves a complex set of motions which include a spinning spherical earth in relation to the sun and moon–as well as other variables.

But just imagine trying to create a geoplanar model of the tides, where the dry land is swimming in a saucer. It wouldn’t take a knowledge of satellite photography to realize that this is not a terribly realistic model of tidal action.

Although ancient observers would lack the detailed information to know what, exactly, is the correct theory of tidal action, they already had enough information to know that a flat-earth or triple-decker universe could not account for tidal action.

There’s a difference between knowing that something is wrong, and knowing the correct alternative. We can often know that something is wrong before we know the right answer. Indeed, knowing that something is wrong is frequently the spur to exploring alternative explanations.

Incidentally, although I haven’t studied the subject, I assume the Nile river is a tidal river near the coast.

Little pansy

On the one hand

Avalos says,

As an atheist, I don‘t deny that I am a moral relativist (TCD 232).

On the other hand

Avalos says:

RE: Triablogue. Here again, Parsival shows non-expertise. On August 6, 2010, Paul Manata of Triablogue tried to supposedly expose my non-expertise in epistemology and metaethics. But Triablogue had to take the post down due to flagrant ethical violations brought to their attention by the persons they were quoting in the post. Did Parsival not hear about that? So how much of an expertise in metaethics was shown by the operators of Triablogue if they themselves had to delete a post due to ethical problems?

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/11/dr-hector-avalos-interviewed-by-iowa.html#comment-97277709

i) How can Avalos ascribe “flagrant ethical violations” to a post when he’s a moral relativist?

ii) It wasn’t taken down due to ethical problems. It was taken down because Avalos, acting like a little pansy, contacted some of the individuals who panned his incompetent argument as a pressure tactic to censure Manata’s post.

I think Hector’s basic problem is that he suffers from a social inferiority complex. He’s ashamed of his humble origins. Ashamed of his lowly background as a poor Mexican preacher-boy. Ashamed of the lower class Pentecostalism he used to espouse. When you’re trying to impress the faculty at Harvard Divinity School, that’s not the sort of thing you want to be reminded of.

(Of course, from a Christian standpoint, poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Joseph and Mary were poor. Jesus was poor.)

Ed Bozinski

Let’s begin with some gems from Bozinski’s blog:

Geocentrists remain hopeful even in this heliocentric age because as Gerardus Bouw (Ph.D. in astronomy, president of the Association for Biblical Astronomy and the country’s leading proponent of geocentrism) puts it: "I would not be a geocentrist if it were not for the Scriptures.”… "Both the anthropocentric theory of inspiration and the phenomenological-language theory are forms of accommodation where God is said to accommodate his wording to the understanding of the common man.

Which reminds me, Evangelical theologian Ben Witherington wrote this in Bible Review in 2003:

"In the late 1960s, my car broke down in the mountains of North Carolina, and I had to hitchhike. . . . I was picked up by an elderly couple driving an ancient Plymouth. After a little conversation, I discovered they were 'Flat-Eathers [sic.],' by which I mean they did not believe the world was round.

"Honest.

"I pressed them on this and asked, 'Why not?'

"The elderly man's response was, 'It says in the Book of Revelation that the angels will stand on the four corners of the earth. The earth couldn't have four corners if it was round.'"

http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2010/10/does-bible-teach-geocentrism.html

1. Now, anyone with a functioning brain could see what is wrong with this type of argument. But Bozinski is blind to the fact that this type of argument contradicts his underlying argument.

i) Bozinski has argued that Bible writers teach an obsolescent view of the world. And they teach that antiquated view because they lack the scientific resources to know any better. All they could go by back then were appearances, and on the face of it (so goes the argument) they seemed to be living on a flat, stationary earth.

ii) However, when Bozinski cites modern geocentrists like Bouw, Sungenis, Selbrede, &c., they don’t subscribe to geocentrism because they think their senses select for geocentrism. Rather, they subscribe to geocentrism because they think that is what the Bible teaches.

iii) Moreover, they don’t subscribe to geocentrism because of their scientific ignorance. Rather, they subscribe to geocentricism in spite of well-known scientific arguments for heliocentrism, as well as scientific arguments against geocentrism.

iv) Furthermore, notice how Bouw explicitly opposes geocentrism to a merely “phenomenological” description. Yet, according to Bozinski, the phenomena are exactly what Bible writers and ANE writers were going by. All they had were the bare phenomena, which allegedly single out geocentrism.

Same thing with a flat earth. They supposedly believed in a flat earth because the earth appeared to be flat. That’s what they had to work with.

Yet when Bozinski tries to fortify his underlying argument by citing modern geocentrists (or even flat-earthers), they stake out that position in defiance of mainstream science and mainstream theology alike.

Even the hillbillies he cites via Witherington don’t believe the earth is flat cuz it looks just plain flat. That’s not the reason they gave. Rather, it’s based on how they interpret the Bible.

v) By parity of reasoning, if Bible writers taught geocentrism or the flat-earth, that would be despite, and not because of, the prima facie evidence. So Bozinski has upended his initial argument.

2. Let’s take another example of Bozinski’s fried circuitry. He appeals to writers like Bouw and Walton as if their positions were equivalent or complementary. Ye even if they both think the Bible teaches geocentrism, they have divergent rather than convergent reasons for that common conclusion.

Walton thinks that Christians ought to take the Bible at face value. However, what he has in mind is what would be the face-value meaning of Scripture to the original audience (as he understands it). He’d fault Bouw for reading the Bible through the tinted lens of Bouw’s blinkered fundy tradition, rather than recovering the lens of the original audience.

For Walton, “face value” is culturebound. What’s the face-value reading for one culture isn’t interchangeable with the face-value reading for another. For what we take to be the face-value meaning of Scripture is deceptively value-laden. We often bring unconscious assumptions or filters to the interpretive process.

My immediate point is not to evaluate Walton’s own position, but just to point out that superficial agreement between Walton and Bouw conceals incommensurable hermeneutical strategies. You can’t intelligently cite both Bouw and Walton to prove Biblical geocentrism (or flat-earthianity), for any similarity is strictly adventitious.

But, of course, that would require Bozinski to be a rational rationalist.