Dan's response # 3

Just a quick note to our readers. I’ve switched from referring to Caleb in the third person to addressing him in the second person. This change was made to give my responses a more conversational appearance. Caleb has stayed with addressing me in the third person (which is OK by me). The change may make the debate sound a bit strange, but I hope it won’t distract from the interesting conversation.

Let me first address your claim that I insist you have blind faith. I have not stated or implied that you have blind faith. In fact I accept our assertion that faith (as you practice it) is inductive inference. The point of my argument, and the reason I supplied a link to a story about a couple that relied on “faith healing”, is to point out the broader understanding of the word. If the couple that tragically relied on “faith healing” over actual medical care did not in fact have “faith”, then I would have expected you to point this out. Instead you said “they had faith that God would heal them.” Perhaps you were being sarcastic, but it seems to me that you are saying that these “crazy people” were making a perfectly rational inductive inference.

Evidence or not, the fact that faith is considered a virtue and is promoted by the Bible has not been challenged. Also not challenged is that faith, even by your definition, is the opposite of doubt. It was the assertion that Christianity promotes doubt that I am contesting.

Regarding morality and the system by which I evaluate whether an action is moral, you ask, “Where does Dan’s set system come from?” Then you conclude, “It simply comes from Dan.” Although I am providing my understanding of morality based on the common notion of the term, I am not the source of the “set system” by which to evaluate what is moral. In fact I am advocating an objective (versus your subjective) standard. By using reason and evidence we can best determine which actions increase or decrease well-being. If the Christian God is the source of morality, then morality is by definition subjective, and not necessarily tied to well-being.

You also said, regarding Numbers 31:17 that I “…think(s) God is acting cruelly” and that I used this verse “for its shock value.” Actually I think that the Israelites were acting cruelly, and that, along with many Christians, they rationalized their behavior by appealing to their imagined deity. Indeed I do use this verse for “shock value”. It is shocking because if hacking to death women and children, and hauling away the virgins like stolen property can be rationalized as “moral”, then it’s hard to imagine what would be “immoral”. It’s also interesting to note that your first excuse for the Israelite’s behavior was that they faced a “pursuing army”. But when I pointed out that the atrocities occurred after the Midianite army was defeated, the excuse became that the virgins were taken for their own good. How noble of the Israelites to take in these poor orphaned virgins, when it was the Israelites that killed their defenseless mothers, brothers and sisters… making the girls orphans in the first place!

Numbers 31 exposes the type of naked rationalization that occurs when moral responsibility is divorced from the consequences of one’s actions. Is it any wonder that every type of bigotry, hate and violence has had a religious sponsor? In addition to promoting genocide, the Christian Bible explicitly endorses the discrimination of gays, treating women as property, and slavery. The Bible is the last place we should get our morality. If you’re a Christian reading this… please read the Bible. Don’t just read it selectively, but read it cover to cover. Then decide for yourself. Fortunately for all of us, most Christians no longer take seriously the Biblical calls to stone to death disobedient children (Deuteronomy 21:18) or to punish someone for wearing two types of fabric (Leviticus 19:19).

You also muse “I would be interested to see that if I could give Dan enough evidence that abstinence until marriage increases well-being if he would become an advocate for such a cause?” The answer is yes, I would. But that’s because evidence is critical in determining well-being, and thus morality. But for you, the evidence is completely irrelevant. I shouldn’t matter for you if abstinence before marriage increases well-being, because well-being isn’t part of your equation for morality. In fact as long as you believe that God commands it, the evidence could point to consequences completely contrary to well-being and the action would still be moral.

In referring to my understanding of the transcendence of logic, you mistakenly claim that I have “accepted a transcendental cause for transcendent laws.” This is an error in ascribing a prescriptive sense (cause) to a descriptive term, which you go on to repeat throughout the rest of your response. I’ll come back to this, but you next accuse me of redefining the term atheism. I agree with you that the most common dictionary definition of atheism is a claim that there is no God. But you and I, and most atheists I know, understand that a positive claim of non-existence (of anything) is not rationally sound. In fact the Christian conception of God is not even coherent, so it would be nonsensical to claim the non-existence of something that cannot even be rationally defined. By the same token it is not rational to claim the existence of the same incoherent concept. It would be like arguing over which is faster, an invisible pink unicorn or a yellow quantum whisperer. The only rational position is to seek a coherent definition of God and then to withhold belief until evidence is available for that “thing”. To accept that the Christian God exists is simply an irrational (dare I say it) leap of faith.

I understand that you are a Bible believing Christian, and there are certain attributes of God that you likely hold. Yet my desire for you to describe these attributes comes from my wish to address your definition, and not some straw-man version of your beliefs. I’ve recently heard three different definitions of omnipotent from three different “Bible believing Christians”, so I had no desire to waste my time debunking someone else’s version. Fortunately you have given me the following definition of the Christian God; “all knowing, all loving, all powerful, unchanging, and perfectly just creator of the universe who has revealed himself in time, thought, and history and in the person of the God/Man Jesus Christ.”

If Numbers 31 demonstrates God’s “love”, then we need go no further debunking this alleged attribute. As for all-powerful, you already said that “I don’t fully understand it…”, but then go on to state that “saying that God cannot sin does nothing to limit his power just as saying that God cannot make himself not exist would [not] limit him.” I can’t fault you for not understanding how God could be limited by sin and logic and not limited by sin and logic at the same time. It’s a direct contradiction and inherently incoherent. What I do fault you for is asserting a contradiction as fact.

OK, so back to the prescriptive/descriptive error. You said “Unless there is a being that sustains the governing laws of the universe…”. The term “being” will quickly dissolve into meaninglessness when pressed, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment. The main problem is using terms like “sustain” and “govern”. Both of these terms imply an intentional cause. And why not? You’ve already decided that there is an intentional agent; why not give him something to do? But when scientists speak of the laws of physics, they’re simply describing how mass and energy interact. What they’re not saying (as you are) is that the laws control how mass and energy interact. You make the same mistake with the so-called uniformity of nature argument when you state, “proving something would never actually prove anything since the same experiment could be conducted with different answers every time.” This assumes that the universe is inherently non-uniform, and that something must impose uniformity. But non-uniformity isn’t even a coherent concept. What would a non-uniform universe look like? More importantly, why would it look that way? If you said that matter wouldn’t interact at all, then isn’t that simply a description of another way that matter would behave? Isn’t that just another form of uniformity? What if you said that non-uniformity meant that gravity would sometimes be attractive and sometimes be repulsive? But what would be the cause for the switch? Would this cause be imposing non-uniformity? And on what basis would you select non-uniformity as the default when everything in our experience points to uniformity? Uniformity is axiomatic because without it you end up down a rabbit hole of contradictions.

At the end of your string of prescriptive/descriptive errors, you posit “an immaterial, universal, unchanging mind.” I understand “mind” as a description of what brain does, but saying that there is a mind devoid of a brain is like saying that a rock is incredibly brave…it just doesn’t compute.

The statement “logic is a process of the mind, which means it is conceptual by nature” we’ve already covered, and it makes the classic TAG error of confusing our understanding of logic (its conceptualization) with logic itself. You also give a hint of seeing how logic can be prescriptively applied when you say “If (logic) was of a human mind then it would vary from person to person.” Indeed, we can apply our understanding of logic to test our arguments, and here it does vary from person to person. But again, this is not logic itself.

You also said that “by no means do I suggest that logic or any other law come before God.” I agree, you suggesting exactly the opposite. By saying that “God’s mind” produces logic, you are saying that God comes before logic. How else could He have produced it? I still don’t see an answer to how God produced logic, or if God was logical in the process.

In saying that “the fine tuning of the universe show intentionality” you are displaying what is called hyperactive agency detection… a perfectly natural, evolved trait that takes some discipline to overcome. Maybe more interesting is the fine tuning argument itself. It fails on many fronts, but the most straightforward is that the odds of the appearance of life (that’s apparently what the universe is tuned for) is a post-diction. In other words, it’s a supposed prediction of something that we already know has occurred. The odds of anything that has already occurred happening are exactly 100%. For example, I can make the case (just as the fine tuning argument does) that the odds of me writing the letter “A” are so small as to be impossible. First, I picked the letter random, so the odds start at 1 in 26. Now multiply that by the odds that the particular sperm from my Father would meet with a particular egg from my Mother to create me. Multiply the odds that my parents would meet, and marry, and that they would come from the particular sperm and egg from their parents, etc, etc. The odds become incalculably small in no time. Yet there it is… the letter “A”. Now imagine the solar system 5 billion years ago. There’s no life anywhere, and the earth hasn’t even formed yet. Would you say that the universe is obviously tuned for life? How could it be?... there’s no life! But it’s the same universe, with the same laws. Post-dictions are nonsense.

You suggested that I didn’t know why we should be concerned with the well-being of others. I don’t know where you got that idea, but I do believe that our well-beings are interconnected, and as social animals we all do better when we practice compassion and concern for each other. In fact, I agree with you that God wrote right and wrong “upon our hearts”. I understand this metaphorically, however, as in the fact that we have evolved traits that give us a moral sense, and generally encourage behaviors that foster group cooperation. I makes good evolutionary sense that groups that cooperate are more likely to survive then groups that don’t.

Perhaps where we can find the most common ground is where you state:

 “Scripture tells us that we have these [laws] because they are a reflection of God, so much so that they alone are enough evidence for those who are seeking. Romans 1:19 says, “Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

You have eloquently stated my position, and substituting the metaphorical language, you get:

“[Nature] tells us that we have these [laws] because they are a reflection of [existence], so much so that they alone are enough evidence for those who are seeking. Since what may be known about [existence] is plain to [us], because [nature] has made it plain to [us]. For since the [emergence of the universe nature’s] invisible qualities – [its] eternal power and [all-encompassing] nature – have been clearly seen, being understood form what [is], so that people are without excuse.”

Your previous response finishes with a flourish of misrepresentations of my positions. First;

“Dan has stated in previous debates that because knowledge comes from his senses and that his senses could be wrong it’s totally possible that Dan is wrong about everything.”

False. I’ve said that I could be wrong about everything that I claim to know. It would be meaningless to be wrong about the axioms which I don’t claim as knowledge.

Second, “He insists that logic is the only axiom.”

False. I’ve never made this claim, and in fact I have stated that “I exist” and “my senses are provisionally valid” are just some of the axioms to which I hold.

Finally the strange idea that without absolute certainty we can’t have any knowledge at all. We can have psychological certainty, as in a belief held with such conviction that its falsity is unimaginable. But that’s not what we’re talking about. You are insisting on logical certainty… certainty without the possibility of error. This is an illusion. Even your claimed knowledge of God, which comes to you through your fallible senses, has no path free form the possibility of error. You could understand something simply by applying logical principles (without sensory input), but even this process is prone to error in the application of reasoning.  Even, for the sake of argument, if you had an omniscient, omnipotent friend that told you something, you couldn’t be certain that the friend’s information was correct because you would have no way of verifying that you weren’t being deceived. Does this mean we’ve given up knowledge? No. We simply recognize that knowledge comes with degrees of certainty based on the available evidence.

The idea of absolute certainty may make you feel good, but you’re just kidding yourself.