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JOHN GRAY’S CRITICISM OF THE NEW ATHEISTS PART 2

3/18/2019

Last time around, I wrote about Gray’s claim that religion isn’t meant as “a theory that tries to explain the universe,” but is instead “an attempt to find meaning in events.” And I pointed out one rather obvious problem with this claim — namely, that many do believe in religion as a way of explaining things. But even if Gray were right about the meaning of religion, there would be a problem with his view.

The way he sees it, religion gives us insights into the human condition. In this, it performs much the same function as certain works of fiction. The myth of the forbidden fruit, for example, teaches us, according to Gray, about the “ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom” — which he tells us is more realistic than the myth found in Greek philosophy “that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected.”

Now, I don’t actually see any ambiguity regarding the value of knowledge in the biblical myth, but leaving that aside, if the story does contain an important lesson, that lesson comes at a cost. For, unlike works of fiction, biblical myths implicitly claim to be authoritative. They aren’t meant merely as the opinion or insights of some human author; instead, they are represented as the final word on such matters. After all, they supposedly come from God. But of course, that claim to be authoritative is a lie.

Even worse, many of these myths contain “lessons” that are morally problematic. The Garden of Eden story doesn't just say something about knowledge; it also implies that an individual should be punished for the crimes of his or her ancestors (all women for what Eve did, all humans for what they both did, and even all snakes for what the one in the tree did).

Those who defend religion as a valuable collection of insights argue that its critics misunderstand its true nature. But the claim that there is something of value in religion should be accompanied by a recognition of what is wrong with it. People like Gray want to represent religious belief as harmless, but in doing so they are watering down its true nature.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

JOHN GRAY’S CRITICISM OF THE NEW ATHEISTS PART 1

3/4/2019

In Seven Types of Atheism, political philosopher John Gray, who’s an atheist himself, takes the so-called new atheists to task for their “notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses.” Treating religion this way, as if it were a kind of “primitive science,” is a mistake, he says. Rather, we must understand it as allegory and myth, as a way of imparting truths about the human condition. “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” As evidence, he mentions St. Augustine’s fourth-century view that the Bible need not be taken literally, as well as Philo of Alexandria’s first-century description of Genesis as “an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events.”

Religious apologists often say such things as well. But if that’s what religions are — if they are never meant to be taken at face value — how does that invalidate the new atheists’ criticisms of fundamentalists, who do interpret religion literally? If Genesis is supposed to be just a story, then those who believe the first man was fashioned out of dirt six thousand years ago are wrong in two ways: They are wrong about what their religion is actually saying, and they are wrong about precisely the sort of thing the new atheists criticize them for, namely, their belief that this story is factual. So what is there to complain about in the new atheists’ argument? On this view, Dawkins’ and Harris’ criticisms aren’t wrong, but at worst incomplete.

And in fact, they aren’t even that. Religion is not only (or even mainly) about what sophisticated believers hold. Rather, there are different beliefs, from the most fundamentalist to the most “advanced,” all of which qualify as religious.

Gray and company think the new atheists have a simplistic view of religion, as no more than what fundamentalists say it is. Yet the new atheists do discuss non-fundamentalist views, even if rather briefly. Those like Gray, on the other hand, completely ignore the fundamentalist side. In their attempt to appear more sophisticated than Dawkins and Harris, they imply that religious belief is never about worldly facts. And that’s just not true.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

DID JESUS PREDICT THE RESURRECTION?

1/30/2019

Believers claim that the resurrection not only happened, but did so in accordance with what Jesus taught his followers about himself and his mission. And there are several passages in God’s supposed autobiography that back up this claim. For example, Matthew 16:21 states that Jesus told the disciples he must go to Jerusalem to be killed “and on the third day be raised.” And in 27:63-64, the priests tell Pilate about the prediction, and suggest that the Romans guard the tomb lest someone steal the body to make it look like it came true. Supposedly, then, Jesus’s followers expected the resurrection, and many of his enemies knew about this.

But now imagine that that had indeed been the case. What would have been the result? I think the answer is obvious: There would have been quite a few people hanging around the tomb waiting to see what would happen. Even the disciples would most likely have come out of hiding for a chance to see the wondrous event — the single most important one of their entire lives — especially if they could have done so by blending into the crowd. And Mary and the other women who came to the tomb afterwards would definitely have been there earlier.

Instead, according to the scriptures, no one went to see if he would come out as he supposedly predicted. Not a single person could be bothered to do so.

Why not? And why, when they found the tomb to be empty, were all of them in disbelief? Could it be that the stories of Jesus predicting his coming back to life were made up later? Could it be that some of this stuff isn’t actually true? Shockingly, the answer appears to be yes.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

RELIGION AND MORALITY

1/12/2019

It is often claimed that morality comes from religion — that without the Ten Commandments and such things, we would not know right from wrong. On this view, atheists can be moral, but only because we “borrow” our values from the religious principles that permeate society. Even some who aren’t religious, or aren’t in any sense orthodox about their beliefs, sometimes say such things. Thus, the influential psychologist Jordan Peterson argued not long ago that Sam Harris is “fundamentally” a Christian because “he doesn’t rob banks, doesn’t kill people, doesn’t rape.”

Yet there’s a simple argument that shows morality doesn’t originate in religion: If it did, we wouldn’t find anything in religion to be morally problematic. In other words, if we learned right and wrong from the Bible, then we wouldn’t find any of the moral pronouncements there to be disturbing. The religious wouldn’t struggle with how it could be that God commanded the mass killing of infants, for example. They would simply accept that as yet another instance of God’s perfect justice and goodness.

Now, one possible objection to this argument concerns the fact that the principles one finds in the Bible, at least if taken at face value, are inconsistent with one another. God says, “thou shall not kill”, yet also sometimes commands us to kill. Might this not be the explanation why we find the command to kill disturbing? No. If we truly viewed the Bible as the source of morality, the contradictions would be disturbing only in the sense that they would raise questions regarding what really should be done. We might have a problem figuring out what constitutes an exception to “thou shall not kill”; we wouldn’t be disturbed by the fact that in some cases infants can be killed in mass numbers. Moreover, there would be no reason to consider one commandment as more problematic than its opposite. If we learned morality from the Bible, then after learning of the killing of infants, we might wonder how it could be a good thing for God to command us not to kill!

Perhaps some will say that the great majority of God’s injunctions are of one type (against killing, for example), and that the problematic ones are those that appear to go against the majority. But actually, most of what God commands is rather bad, so if we go by this logic, our reactions should be the exact opposite of what they are. We should be disturbed by the fact that God sometimes commands us to love our neighbor. How could he command such a thing, when it goes against most of what he teaches?

(The Jordan Peterson claim can be seen here, starting at about 22:10.)

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

DOUBT AND THE "EVIL" OF NONBELIEF

12/16/2018

Many believers admit to having doubts. In fact, probably most do. It is so common a phenomenon that whole books have been written about it, and in The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel interviews the author of one of them, Lynn Anderson.

Strobel asks him, “Can a person be a Christian and nevertheless have reservations or doubts?” Anderson’s answer is a definite yes: “where there’s absolutely no doubt, there’s probably no healthy faith,” he tells Strobel, adding that he rejects “the ‘true believer’ mentality — people with bright smiles and glassy eyes” who never have any questions about their religious views. Strobel also mentions other thinkers who claim that “having doubts isn’t evidence of the absence of faith; on the contrary, they consider them to be the very essence of faith itself.” Neither Anderson nor Strobel, then, see religious doubt as a problem.

In another chapter of The Case for Faith, however, Strobel asks Ravi Zacharias how it could possibly be fair for a serial killer like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz — who like so many former criminals has now “found” Christ — to go to heaven, while someone like Mahatma Gandhi is presumably suffering in hell.

Zacharias’ reply is that “there are worse things than death or murder.” According to Zacharias, “the worst thing is to say to God that you don’t need him.” In other words, those who aren’t followers of Christ are effectively telling God they can do without him, and that’s worse than anything Berkowitz did. (Keep in mind that Berkowitz merely shot and stabbed innocent people at random. Gandhi, on the other hand, shockingly did not believe Jesus was God!)

Strobel approvingly quotes all of this — which means that on his view, nonbelief is worse than mass murder. How, then, can he and others like him have no issue with doubt? If failing to believe is worse than murder — if it is, as Aquinas held, the greatest sin one can commit — then questioning those beliefs should at the very least be a reason for great concern. Presumably, Strobel would view someone who doubted the wrongness of going on a killing spree as a person with a very serious problem. Shouldn’t he think of all believers who have doubts as more worrisome than that?

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

PETER KREEFT ON THE NATURE OF MORALITY

11/28/2018

In the Prager University video “Where Do Good and Evil Come From?”, religious philosopher Peter Kreeft makes so many mistakes that if you blink, you’ll probably miss some. This post points out the most glaring ones.

The video’s overall purpose is, of course, to demonstrate the existence of God by means of the moral argument — that is, that objective morality exists, God is the source of that morality, therefore God exists. But there are explanations of morality that do not depend on God. Kreeft therefore begins by criticizing these “atheistic” accounts (two of which we will look at here), before proceeding to the religious one.

Some atheists appeal to evolution as an explanation of morality. Kreeft rejects this approach by first pointing out that on such a view, morality changes — that is, evolves — over time, and then arguing that if it “can change for the good or the bad, there must be a standard above these changes to judge them as good or bad.” He uses the example of slavery to make the point, reminding us that it existed for most of human history, yet for the longest time “no one questioned it.” (Interestingly, he neglects to mention that one of those who didn’t question it was God. I’m sure this was just an oversight, though.) The idea, then, is that, just because slavery was once accepted, that did not make it acceptable — and so there must be a standard which applies independently of our change in attitudes.

This is a rather strange criticism, however. Those who appeal to evolution as a basis of morality aren’t talking about cultural changes, like the one that took place over slavery. Their point is that human beings evolved to have a particular nature, and that nature determines what for us is right and wrong. But instead of presenting an argument against that, Kreeft presents one against cultural relativism.

Perhaps he just means that the evolutionary account implies change in the long run, and so fails for the same reason cultural relativism does. Unfortunately, he then tries to argue against relativism by claiming that, if you can say that something might be accepted without being acceptable, “you are admitting to objective morality.” This, however, ignores alternatives to objective morality other than relativism. I can say that slavery is unacceptable, by which I mean that according to the standards I accept, it is wrong — even if it is accepted by some. And in saying this, I do not have to claim that the standards I go by are objectively true. In fact, I don’t.

The next explanation for morality Kreeft considers is the attempt to justify it on the basis of reason. Now, I agree that reason isn’t the ultimate source of morality. Kreeft’s way of showing that it isn’t, however, is complete nonsense. He presents two arguments. The first is that, even though criminals use reason to plan and commit crimes, their reason fails to tell them that what they are doing is wrong. But if reason were the basis of morality, that shouldn't be the case.

There are at least three things wrong with this argument. To begin with, it could be that the criminals realize that what they are doing is wrong, and simply don’t care. I’m sure Kreeft would admit that people sometimes knowingly do evil, yet he seems to forget that here. In the second place, if the reasoning they employ has to do with how to commit a crime, it has no more to do with morality than, say, reasoning about mathematics does. If the criminals aren’t reasoning about morality at all, then Kreeft certainly hasn’t shown the failure of reason to tell us the difference between right and wrong. And third, even if the criminals are reasoning about morality, it doesn’t follow that they are reasoning correctly about it. Their failure to conclude that crime is wrong doesn’t show that morality isn’t based on reason, any more than their failure to prove the Pythagorean theorem would show that geometry isn’t based on reason.

Kreeft’s second argument against this view is, if anything, even worse. He brings up the example of people who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and claims they were obviously not doing that as a result of reasoning — for risking one’s life in that manner, he tells us, is very unreasonable. But this is just linguistic confusion. The unreasonableness in this case has nothing to do with right and wrong. If morality is founded on reason, and the right thing to do in such a situation is to risk one’s life, then correct reasoning about it will show that. The fact that that’s unreasonable from the point of view of self-interest is irrelevant.

After having disposed of all atheistic views in this manner, Kreeft presents his case for God as the explanation by uttering the usual nonsense: “there are no moral or immoral atoms, or cells, or genes,” he informs us, therefore morality is non-physical, and therefore it must come from outside the physical universe. At this point, the video is just one obvious non-sequitur after another, so I’ll leave it to readers to see it for themselves.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

AQUINAS'S ABJECT FAILURE

11/13/2018

There are quite a few things wrong with the first cause argument, but the worst thing about it — Aquinas’s attempt to show that the chain of efficient causation cannot extend back to infinity — is ignored by most critics. The claim that there cannot be an infinite causal regress is often disputed, of course, but Aquinas’s bizarre reasoning to the contrary is usually passed over — maybe for fear it would just be confusing to readers. Whatever the case may be, I think it’s worthwhile to be aware of it, especially given that Aquinas’s old argument is still touted by many.

The part I’m referring to is the following:

“Now it is not possible to proceed to infinity in efficient causes. For if we arrange in order all efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediate, and the intermediate the cause of the last, whether the intermediate be many or only one. But if we remove a cause the effect is removed; therefore, if there is no first among efficient causes, neither will there be a last or an intermediate. But if we proceed to infinity in efficient causes there will be no first efficient cause, and thus there will be no ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes, which is clearly false. Therefore it is necessary to suppose the existence of some first efficient cause…”

Translating from medievalese, this just says that if there is no first cause, then neither will there be a second, third, and so on — and thus no ultimate effect. But if the chain extends back infinitely, then obviously there is no first cause; there will always be others before any that we care to consider. Therefore, if the chain extends back infinitely, there will be no ultimate effect!

This is such a bad argument that it is surprising anyone ever fell for it. Aquinas is simply confusing the existence of a cause that he calls “the first cause” with its property of being first. That is, what we might label the “first” cause cannot be missing from the chain, otherwise the “second” cause would also be missing, and so on. Given Aquinas's assumptions, that much is true. But it does not follow that this event that we're calling “the first cause” cannot have a predecessor. If the chain of causation is infinite, then there is no first cause. But no link in the chain will be missing on account of that.

One can also understand Aquinas's mistake this way: he is either equivocating or begging the question, depending on how what he refers to as the “first” cause is interpreted at the beginning of the above passage. He is begging the question if by the “first” he means the cause that has the property of being first, for then he is simply assuming the very thing he is attempting to demonstrate. If, on the other hand, he is merely naming a particular cause in the chain the “first”, then he equivocates when he later uses the same term to mean the cause that has the property of being first.

Aquinas therefore has failed to show that the chain of causation must have had a beginning. As a result, his entire argument falls apart.

Summa Theologica excerpt from the Laurence Shapcote trans. (London: O. P. Benziger Bros., 1911)

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

FOREKNOWLEDGE AND EVIL

11/1/2018

The problem of evil and the problem of reconciling God’s foreknowledge with free will are usually treated as if they were entirely separate issues. But treating them that way hides the fact that the most popular theist views on them are in conflict with one another.

The existence of evil is most commonly explained as a consequence of free will. This is consistent with the biblical idea of the Fall of humanity. God gave humans the ability to make their own choices, and that means that he cannot prevent us from acting badly. However, most theists also want to say that God knew ahead of time what his free creatures were going to do – and thus knew we would be sinful.

Now, on the standard view, some free-willed beings do not ever choose to do evil. There’s at least one who doesn’t, God himself – though on the Trinitarian view, there would appear to be two other sinless personalities. Whatever the case may be, the theist must admit that it is at least possible for a being with free will to never do wrong. And even if the theist comes up with some excuse for why this applies only to God, and not to created beings, the fact remains that some humans are a hell of a lot worse than others. Most of us would not and could not ever do what, say, Charles Manson did. And some of us are far more moral than the average.

It follows that God could either have prevented all of the evil that his free creatures have done simply by creating only ones who would never chose evil, or, at the very least, that he could have prevented just about all of that evil by creating only highly moral beings. Either way, there’s no excuse for most of the evil out there.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

THE LACK OF FAITH OF THE AVERAGE CHRISTIAN

10/16/2018

Roger Olson, one of the theologians Lee Strobel interviewed in The Case for Miracles, laments the lack of faith he finds among the majority of his fellow believers. He correctly observes that in their everyday lives, they for the most part live as if God isn’t really there. Only when faced with something like a terminal illness do they turn to God. Even churches function much as secular institutions do: “Years ago, I noticed that churches were tending not to think biblically or theologically about the way they ran their operations…They’d ask, ‘Will this fit into our budget?’ regardless of any faith that more funding could come in.”

That average Christians don’t usually expect miracles, and that churches run their business based on realistic expectations rather than counting on supernatural intervention, is disturbing to Dr. Olson. Nevertheless, he believes he knows the reason why: “You see, there’s a certain unpredictability with the Holy Spirit, and we mainstream evangelicals have come to love predictability. We don’t want big surprises. We don’t want to open the door to something that will really shock us, because we can’t control it.” In other words, according to Olson, people behave as if God isn’t there because they don’t like the idea of something that is out of their control.

This explanation fits in with the general Christian message about humility. Olson points out that he can guess fairly well what a particular congregation believes by the kind of cars he sees in the church’s parking lot. “The more prosperous and educated we are, the more likely we are to substitute our own cleverness and accomplishments for the power of prayer.”

Olson has correctly noticed many of the behaviors of his fellow believers. His analysis of the reasons for that behavior, however, is almost completely wrong. The real reason has nothing to do with being afraid of the unpredictability of God.

Human beings are practical by nature, which means we are basically rational with respect to our everyday needs. After all, an individual who, rather than actively searching for food, waited for manna to fall from heaven, wouldn’t last very long. This explains why, when it comes to practical matters, most of us behave pretty much realistically. Usually, it is only with respect to things that are out of our control that some of us turn to imaginary beings for help. People don’t pray for food to appear on their plate: they use their naturally-evolved abilities to find it. A terminal illness, on the other hand, is something that we can do nothing about – and so the only thing left (other than acceptance of the facts) is to hope for a miracle. And of course in the middle of a famine, many will pray for food. Many also turn to magical thinking when it comes to less drastic things – such as finding love – provided, once again, that these things are to a great extent out of their control.

So it’s not that we “don’t want big surprises,” nor that we are prideful in our “cleverness and accomplishments.” It’s that we naturally do whatever we need to survive and flourish, and only turn to magical help when our abilities fail us. This explains why the more prosperous we are, the less reliant we are on God.

I once used the example of a car breaking down to make this same point. No one prays to God when their car doesn’t work: they go to an auto mechanic. Though he doesn’t realize it, Olson is like everyone else in this respect. One of the examples of a miracle he gave Strobel was of how one time, when his car broke down and he didn’t have the money for the repairs, someone “miraculously” gave him the money. “It was what I needed,” he says. But why didn’t he expect God to skip the need for the auto repair shop, and just fix the car directly?

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

THE LATEST FROM RAY COMFORT

10/3/2018

In a recent YouTube interview, evangelist Ray Comfort somewhat surprisingly admitted that certain things in the Bible – things like the talking snake and Jonah and the whale – are “crazy,” and even “intellectually offensive.” This doesn’t mean he’s becoming more enlightened: Comfort fully believes that the stories involved are veridical. However, he has an explanation for why these things happened.

According to Comfort, God “chose foolish things to confound the wise.” Those who have too much intellectual pride to accept such nonsensical-sounding stories will reject them. But those who are sufficiently humble will believe them in spite of their better judgement – and that’s what God wants. As Jesus said, you must become like little children to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Thus, instead of concluding that the crazy stories must be false, Comfort thinks we should suppose that we are being intentionally misled by God, as a test of our humility. This makes Comfort’s deity a bit like Descartes evil demon. It is also reminiscent of Philip Henry Gosse’s view that God created the world a few thousand years ago with “pretend” fossils already in the ground.

I guess as far as Comfort is concerned, being humble means having the will to doubt even our strongest convictions. A man living for three days inside a whale seems crazy, but if we don’t have any pride in our reasoning abilities, accepting such nonsense is easy! But now, if we are to be this skeptical about what we can be sure of, shouldn’t Comfort be skeptical of his “knowledge” that the Bible is God’s word? Or that any of it is true?

Link to Comfort's interview on YouTube

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]