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CAN ATHEISTS CRITICIZE GOD ON MORAL GROUNDS?

4/4/2022

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

“In the minds of Christian apologists, atheists cannot rationally criticize the Christian god for immoral behavior if an objective moral standard does not exist. I haven't seen a good atheist comeback on this issue. Does anyone have a good, concise, bullet-proof comeback?” — Gary M.

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The underlying argument here is that one cannot justifiably criticize something on moral grounds unless one accepts an objective moral standard; that only God provides such a standard; and that therefore atheists cannot consistently claim that the biblical God is immoral — not even when he commands genocide.

The idea that objective moral values depend on God is something that can easily be disputed, of course, and many have done so. That only God can be the basis of morality — and even that God can be a basis of morality — needs to be argued for before the above claim can be taken seriously.


There is, however, another assumption here that isn't quite as obvious, and which allows for an even easier objection to the argument. This is the idea that one cannot criticize something on moral grounds unless one believes in an objective standard of value. But that is a mistake, and there are at least two reasons why it's a mistake.

To begin with, anyone criticizing the biblical God may claim that she is presenting a problem that's internal to the Christian worldview. That is, she may say that, though she does not herself believe in the existence of objective values, the Christian certainly does, and the problem is that the Christian cannot consistently accept the immoral parts of the Bible. That this is a valid criticism can be seen from the fact that the question of apparent biblical evil is something discussed by the religious amongst themselves. This shows that, given their worldview, there is a difficulty here.

The second reason the above is wrong is more important, however. Christians who make the above argument assume that one who does not believe in an objective standard cannot reasonably consider anything to be morally right or wrong. But the fact is that there is a third alternative between, on the one hand, believing in objective values and, on the other, being a nihilist. Obviously, if I believe that values are subjective, I still believe in values — namely, subjective ones! Thus it is simply not the case that I should stop objecting to things I regard as immoral.

I have moral views which say that (for instance) torturing sentient beings for fun is always wrong. I may not believe that there is a fact, discoverable by science or by philosophical analysis, that corresponds to the statement “torturing sentient beings for fun is always wrong,” but that doesn't mean I wouldn't oppose such an action. In fact, I would oppose it with every fiber of my being.

Nor is this merely my subjective opinion. There is actually a great deal of intersubjective agreement on such issues. The vast majority of us are opposed to murder and rape, for example. And it is this kind of intersubjective agreement that allows us as individuals to intelligibly communicate with one another regarding moral questions. Thus, when someone claims that God is good, they presumably intend to say, among other things, that God does not approve of rape and genocide. It follows that the question of God's goodness, as that claim is usually understood, can be meaningfully discussed on a subjectivist understanding of morality. The supposed objectivity of values has nothing to do with it.

The religious will probably keep making the above argument until the Second Coming — in other words, forever — but the simple fact is that they're wrong to do so.


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FESER'S "THE LAST SUPERSTITION"

5/25/2021

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

Lately, there's been quite a bit of talk here regarding Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God. It might therefore be interesting to also consider an earlier work of his which covers some of the same ground, The Last Superstition. (The real reason I'm writing this, though, is that I haven't read Five Proofs, but just finished Superstition.)

​Billed as an answer to the New Atheism, Feser's earlier book is in reality a condemnation of pretty much all things modern — where by “modern” what is meant is everything since the days of Hobbes and Descartes. Feser regards the Enlightenment and all that followed as a disaster for humanity, and actually seems to regret the fact that we no longer live in medieval times. As one example of where he's coming from, consider what he says about Kant. He doesn't find everything about the old German professor bad: “His views on sexual morality and the death penalty, for example, are totally reactionary; that is to say, they are correct” (216-7). However, Kant's insistence on the autonomy of the individual and on treating persons as ends-in-themselves (as opposed to treating them as mere means), are, he says, “gruesome fortune-cookie expressions of modern man's self-worship” (219). (As Dave Barry used to say, I swear I'm not making this up. Feser really appears to find individualism repulsive.)


The central argument of The Last Superstition is that the moderns made a fatal mistake in abandoning Aristotelianism, and in particular the kind of teleological explanations found in that philosophy. It is this, according to Feser, that led to such things as abortion rights, gay marriage, “scientism and hyper-rationalism” (whatever he means by the latter), and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century that murdered people by the millions (51). However, what Feser thinks of as Aristotelianism is actually Thomism. He doesn't so much defend Aristotle's views, he defends Aquinas's interpretation of them — or maybe it's actually Feser's interpretation of Aquinas's interpretation. I say this because he gets Aristotle wrong in at least one very important respect, as we'll see.

But first, a little bit about Aristotle's views and Feser's argument.

Aristotle thought that there are four different possible types of explanation for why things are the way they are. These are the “four causes” you've probably heard about — the material cause (that out of which something is made), the formal cause (the form or pattern it takes), the efficient cause (what brings it about), and the final cause (what its goal, purpose or end is). The modern view of causation is similar to efficient causation, so the other three may sound strange. However, one can understand what Aristotle was getting at by keeping in mind that his four causes were about the ways one can answer “why” questions about things. So, for instance, as an answer to the question “why do ducks have webbed feet?”, one might say “because it allows them to swim better.” That's an explanation in terms of a final cause. So far, no problem. Where Aristotle went wrong was in thinking that there were purposes of this sort inherent in nature — in other words, that explanations of this type get to the bottom of things.

With the scientific revolution, teleological explanations came to be regarded as non-fundamental. The modern scientific worldview accounts for ducks' webbed feet, and everything else, by just explaining how they came to be. More importantly, these explanations do away with any need to postulate purpose or goals to nature. Natural selection shows how things like webbed feet (which serve the purpose of swimming), hearts (which serve the purpose of pumping blood), and so on, evolved without supposing that anything or anyone was “trying to accomplish” (in any sense of the word) those purposes. To put it another way, natural selection is blind; it doesn't have any ends in mind. It just happens — though of course what ends up happening ends up serving all sorts of purposes for the organisms involved.

It is this modern scientific worldview that Feser vehemently opposes (though that's putting it mildly). One reason he does so is that he thinks no one ever showed that final causes don't exist. Rather, early modern philosophers just decided to replace Aristotle's four causes with the modern concept of causation (by stipulation, he claims), and later their decision mistakenly came to be regarded as a discovery. Thus, there is no reason to accept the change. But that's a silly claim. What the scientific revolution did was provide a different type of explanation from the kinds used by Aristotle, one which accounted for everything that needed to be explained without postulating anything like goals or purposes to nature. And it makes no sense to postulate the existence of something that one does not need in one's explanations. That's why final causes are no longer used in science.

But Feser has another main reason for disagreeing with the modern view. Abandoning the four causes “created a number of serious philosophical problems that have never been settled to this day” (72). These include the mind-body problem, the free-will problem, the problem of induction, skepticism, the problem of grounding morality, etc., etc. However, the idea that the only possible solution to these problems is Aristotelianism (and in most cases, even the idea that it is a good solution) is obviously absurd. For example, with regards to the first, Feser argues that the rejection of Aristotelianism leaves only two basic alternatives: something like Descartes's dualism (which, using a common objection, he says is untenable because it makes the interaction between mind and body utterly mysterious) or the “immoralist and irrationalist” view of materialism (which he says inevitably leads to the rejection of the mind). But he's wrong on both counts. It's false that materialism “implicitly denies that [the mind] exists” (195). And, even though I'm no Cartesian dualist, I think the objection that it makes mind-body interaction mysterious, although a common objection, is weak. (The fact that something is mysterious, or unlike anything else we observe, does not mean it cannot be real. If Descartes's view were correct, then that would just mean that the mind and body interact in a way that's different from any other type of causal interaction we know of, a way that we do not yet understand.)

The change from teleological explanation to scientific causal explanation is the most important difference between the Aristotelian-Thomistic and the modern worldviews, so it's not surprising that Feser discusses the rejection of final causation more than the others. It is here, however, that Feser gets Aristotle wrong. This is more than a little ironic, given how he criticizes others for their lack of knowledge. He pokes fun at Dawkins and Dennett, in particular, for their ignorance of Aquinas. He also claims that many contemporary philosophers completely misunderstand Aristotle. These philosophers, he says, suppose that when Aristotle ascribed final causes to nature, he was claiming that inanimate objects have intentions and desires, as if “the moon is consciously trying to go around the sun, or... fire wants to produce heat” (70). I don't know where Feser got that impression; I've never once heard any philosopher claim anything of the sort. Maybe some put it that way metaphorically. But as far as I've seen, philosophers are well aware that Aristotle meant no such thing. Feser himself, on the other hand, misunderstands one very important aspect of Aristotle's view. And it is central to the most important argument in his book.

That argument is stated on pages 114-6: One cannot make sense out of regularities in nature, he claims, “apart from the notion of final causation, of things being directed toward an end or goal.” In other words, it's because things are “inherently directed toward” specific ends that they behave in a law-like manner. But something cannot be “directed toward an end unless that end exists in an intellect which directs the thing in question toward it.” And the intellect that does so is, of course, God.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because it's really just the fifth of Aquinas's "five ways" of demonstrating the existence of God. However, Feser applies it not only as an answer to atheists, but as a solution to the problem of induction. Without final causation, he claims, there is no explanation for why the moon goes around the earth in a predictable manner. It could just as easily do anything else (which is why he thinks Hume, who rejected Aristotle's philosophy, thought there was a problem here). Feser is therefore arguing that all natural regularities, every causal process that can be identified by science, is dependent on final causation. But that of course means that every event, or at the very least every macroscopic event, must have a final cause. And yet, that's not what Aristotle held.

You don't have to take my word for it. The entry on “Aristotle on Causality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “Aristotle is not committed to the view that everything has all four kinds of causes. Rather, his view is that a scientific explanation requires up to four kinds of causes” (emphasis added). According to that article, Aristotle gave the example of a lunar eclipse as something lacking a final cause. Similarly, in Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, author Jonathan Barnes quotes the ancient philosopher himself saying that there is “no reason for seeking a final cause in all cases,” and mentions the fact that Book V of Generation of Animals “is entirely devoted to... non-purposeful [that is, lacking final causation] parts” of animals (118). Now, this is a problem for Feser. For those animal parts that lack a purpose (e.g., vestigial organs) nevertheless undergo causation in a regular, law-like manner, just like everything else. Likewise for lunar eclipses.

Wherever Feser got his ideas from, then, it certainly wasn't from Aristotle. Maybe it was from Aquinas, though I'm not sure (like Dawkins and Dennett, I'm pretty ignorant about old St. Thomas). But what's worse is that Aristotle's view goes against most of what Feser claims in his book. If Aristotle didn't believe final causation applies to everything — and he clearly didn't — then on Feser's view it follows that he had no explanation for the lawful behavior of nature, since that is found even in those things lacking final causation. It also means that Feser can no longer claim Aristotelianism is the answer to all of the problems of philosophy. Finally, it means that Feser's entire argument against atheists, in spite of the detour he takes through Aristotle's philosophy, really boils down to Aquinas's fifth way. In other words, it consists of the claim that the only way to account for laws of nature is to suppose that a God is responsible for them — a claim for which Feser provides no support beyond stating that, otherwise, things would have no reason for behaving in a regular, predictable manner.




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RAUSER'S MOOREAN SHIFT

5/4/2021

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

[Note: I watched some of a recent online interview with Dr. Randal Rauser — just enough to get the gist — and wrote the following about his argument this morning. I wasn't aware that his debate with Loftus was already tonight. Maybe the following will be useful for those who watch it. I should also add that there may be additional details to Rauser's argument that this doesn't cover.]

In the book God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (p. 124), William Lane Craig replies to the argument:

If God exists, gratuitous suffering does not exist
Gratuitous suffering exists
Therefore, God does not exist

by means of a so-called “Moorean shift,” in this case by arguing instead:

If God exists, gratuitous suffering does not exist
God exists
Therefore, gratuitous suffering does not exist.

(This is called a Moorean shift after the British philosopher G. E. Moore, who famously turned arguments for philosophical skepticism — e.g., that you might be a brain in a vat — around in this manner.)

What Craig is doing is pointing out that one can deny a premise of an argument if doing so seems more reasonable than accepting its conclusion. He thinks the existence of God is more certain than that of gratuitous suffering. Therefore, rather than accepting the conclusion that God does not exist, he finds it more reasonable to deny the claim that gratuitous suffering exists. Of course, we can easily disagree with Craig's use of this strategy here. The existence of gratuitous suffering (suffering that is morally unjustified and which therefore an all-powerful and perfectly good being would not allow) seems far more certain than the existence of the being himself. So there are good and bad uses of this strategy.

Randall Rauser is in effect making the same kind of move with respect to the question of biblical genocide. His central claim is that our moral intuitions tell us that a good God would never command genocide, and that therefore we must interpret passages in the Bible that appear to show he did so some other way. What he is doing, then, amounts to answering the argument which states that on the Christian worldview:

What the Bible says about God's commands is true
In the Bible, it says God commanded genocide
Therefore, God commanded genocide

by instead arguing:

What the Bible says about God's commands is true
God would never command genocide
Therefore, it does not say that God commanded genocide in the Bible.

The question, then, is whether Rauser's use of the strategy is reasonable. His claim can succeed only if it makes more sense to accept the second premise in the above argument than the second premise in the previous one. And this is exactly what Rauser believes. God, in his view, is the perfectly good Jesus, who would never ask someone to do anything evil. Rauser is therefore absolutely certain about the premise “God would never command genocide.”

Now, the premise which states that in the Bible God did command it does seem pretty certain too, of course. After all, one can read words to that effect in Deuteronomy 20:16-18 and elsewhere. But Rauser argues that, contrary to appearances, the words there must not mean what they say. To suppose they do is inconsistent with the absolutely certain principle that God would never command such a thing — hence his explanation that perhaps those words are hyperbole, or even that they are irony meant to imply the exact opposite of what they say.

The first thing to note about Rauser's argument is that it cannot have any force against someone who does not accept that the Bible is the word of a perfectly good God. Obviously, the nonbeliever's claim is not that there is a God and that he commanded genocide; it is simply that the character referred to as “God” in the Bible commanded genocide. And there is nothing unbelievable about the claim that an ancient people's mythological deity did such a thing. Seen this way, the claim “God would never command genocide” isn't at all certain.

Rauser's argument might best be interpreted as aimed at believers who are struggling with those difficult biblical passages. It is applicable to atheists only as a way to defend the internal consistency of the Christian worldview. But even seen this way the argument is extremely weak. It is much more reasonable (though still problematic) for a believer to suppose that the words attributed to God in those passages aren't actually God's words than to interpret them the way Rauser does. The idea that the passages do not mean what they say reeks of desperation. And there are other problems with his overall argument. His main reason for claiming God's perfection and the impossibility of God-commanded genocide is the supposed perfection of Jesus. Thus, in God or Godless?, he says that “Jesus's whole ministry was directed against the in-group/out-group dichotomies that make evils like genocide possible” (p. 58). But the biblical Jesus wasn't perfect, and Rauser's claim is simply false. In Matthew 15:22-28, for example, Jesus refers to Canaanites as dogs, and initially refuses to heal a Canaanite woman's daughter. That doesn't sound like the Jesus Rauser believes in. One might even argue instead that Jesus's attitude toward the Canaanites goes some way toward explaining the genocide commands. For a believer, that is a more honest, even if more troubling, way of arguing for the internal consistency of scripture.




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April 1st POST

4/1/2021

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​I'm here today to announce my conversion to Christianity. For several years now, I've been blogging at Debunking Christianity, and before that at my own site, arguing against what up until recently I saw as irrational beliefs. But last night, God spoke to me, and I am now saved! 

It's not that I hadn't looked for Jesus before. In fact, I spent several years trying to find Him; I searched high and low, everywhere I went; I went to the famous "Chicken Church" just outside of Tampa (see picture above) — after going to a Church's Chicken by mistake (stupid GPS); I looked in lost and found boxes, under the couch cushions, and on every piece of toast I made; I even read The Bible for Dummies from cover to cover. But until yesterday, I had never heard that all I had to do was ask God to reveal Himself, and He would. So I tried it, and much to my surprise, He came into my heart.

​At first, I thought it was just heartburn, but then I heard a voice! And this wasn't like most of the voices I hear in my head. This one was deep and well-modulated, more James Earl Jones than Morgan Freeman. So I immediately knew it was God. I fell down on my knees (though, to be perfectly honest, the scotch I was drinking at the time might have had something to do with that) and began speaking in tongues.

After telling me to shut the hell up, He told me that He loved me, quickly adding, “but I'm not gay — that would be a sin.” Which was a big relief!

So now I'm here to tell all of you to repent, lest you end up in the eternal Hellfire prepared for Satan and his minions, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, followed by (the truly horrible part) dentist appointments to fix those teeth! Forever and ever. Amen.



[An April Fool's joke originally published at Debunking Christianity (and in imitation of some of the proselytizers who frequent the site)]
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THE PARADOXES OF DENYING INFINITY

3/24/2021

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

It is common for theists — especially those familiar with the Kalam Cosmological Argument and William Lane Craig's defense of it — to deny the existence of actual infinities. And since the question of infinity recently came up in one of the comment threads at Debunking Christianity, I thought I'd re-publish an old blog post on this, with minor modifications.

It consists of two parts — the main blog post, plus (for those who want to delve a bit deeper into the issue) an addendum on the solution to Zeno's paradox:



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Although it may be surprising, no claim I've made has been criticized more by the religious than the claim that there are actual infinities. Every time I so much as mention infinity, someone goes out of their way to "inform" me of the errors of my ways. And yet there appear to be clear cases of infinity all around us. For example, every time you move, you go through an infinite number of subintervals: You first go half of the way, then 3/4 of the way, followed by 7/8, 15/16, and so on, covering what is obviously an infinite series. Nevertheless, you are able to complete the motion.


Using this as an example of an actual infinity raises the question of Zeno's paradox, however, and some of the aforementioned critics have done just that. According to Zeno, since this series of intervals never ends — since there are an actual infinite number of them between any two points A and B — one can never go from A to B.

Now, other than agreeing with Zeno that all motion is an illusion, there are two basic alternatives available to us here. The first is to agree that there are an infinite number of intervals but to claim that we can in fact move across all of them. The other is to deny that there are an infinite number of intervals.

It is often said that an infinite series is one that by definition cannot be completed, since (after all) it has no end. But that isn't the case. Consider the principal claim that the religious finitists (i.e., infinity deniers) insist on making, namely that the past cannot be infinite. They do so by arguing that an infinite series of events could not have already taken place, as that would mean it has been completed. But why can't an infinite series of past events occur given an infinite amount of time? If there is a time for each event, and there are an infinite number of times (or moments), then there can be an infinite number of events. (My favorite example here is one that is credited to Wittgenstein: imagine coming across someone who says “...4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Finished!” and then explains he has been counting backwards from eternity.)

We can resolve Zeno's paradox, it seems to me, once we see how the infinite series that it involves is also one that can be completed. However, the solution is a bit complicated, so I'll leave it to the end of this post. First, I want to consider the other alternative, that of the finitists.

There is more than one way to be a finitist about the number of intervals in a line segment, but the one that appears to be favored by the religious is to argue that the number of subdivisions involved is only potentially, rather than actually, infinite. That is, these individuals claim that there are an infinite number of possible subdivisions in that one could in principle keep dividing a line segment forever. However, since one could never finish the task, there never could be an actual infinite number of intervals there.

The problem with this is that it treats the intervals as something created by our actually dividing the line (at least mentally). That is, it assumes that when one is talking about each part of the line in question (its first half, the 1/4 that follows that, and so on), one is talking about parts that have already been marked off from the rest. But that is not what Zeno's paradox is about. The first half, the one fourth that follows that, and all the other intervals that Zeno is referring to are geometrical parts that are present in the line whether anyone takes notice of them or not. In other words, they are already there. It's true that we could never actually mark off all of them, as it would take forever, but that's irrelevant.

A second way of arguing that a line does not contain an infinite number of intervals is to claim that the line is not infinitely divisible, not even potentially — that is, to claim that there are smallest parts that cannot be divided further even in principle. But that too is highly problematic. For then what one is claiming is that there are segments of a line that are not zero sized and yet that have no further parts. But if one of these spatial "atoms" isn't zero sized, that's because there is some distance between one end of it and the other — which in turn means the two ends must be distinct. And that contradicts the claim that it has no parts.

Finitists object to infinity by claiming that it leads to paradoxes. And yet what these examples show is that the rejection of infinity introduces paradoxes as well. One individual I debated online on this topic — a defender of the above potential infinity view — actually maintained that the two halves of a line do not exist until someone divides the line in half. Now, I admit that there are unresolved paradoxes of infinity. Philosophers and mathematicians haven't yet worked out all of the issues on the subject. But I find the existence of infinity paradoxes more acceptable precisely because they involve infinity — a concept that our minds have a hard time grasping. It's very easy for or intuitions to go wrong whenever the infinite is involved. I'm not willing to accept, however, that my intuition that the two halves of a line exist prior to our dividing the line could be wrong!


THE SOLUTION TO ZENO'S PARADOX


It is often claimed that Zeno's paradox is dissolved once we realize that the sum of the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …. is 1. But that would be the solution only if Zeno's claim were that the series does not add up to 1, or that, given that the series is infinite, the distance from A to B must itself be infinite — and that doesn't seem to be what Zeno was claiming. Moreover, even if he was claiming that, it doesn't matter, since we can see a different problem — namely, that in order to reach B (never mind that it is clearly only a finite distance away), one must complete an infinite series. That is what appears impossible.

But it isn't. Above, I claimed that at least some infinite series can in fact be completed. For instance, given an infinite amount of time, an infinite number of events can occur. So some infinite series can be completed given infinite time in which to do so. But in fact it doesn't necessarily take an infinite amount of time. Aristotle pointed out that, obviously, the time it takes to move from A to B can also be divided into its first half, its next fourth, and so on. Thus, there are an infinite number of subintervals of time in which to cover the infinite number of subintervals of length between A and B. The situation is therefore analogous to the one in which an infinite number of events occur in an infinite amount of time: in both cases, there is a time available for each event in question to take place.

Now, this at first may not seem sufficient to solve the paradox. We can imagine Zeno objecting that, just as there is a problem with completing the infinite series of intervals between A and B, there is a problem (given that the span involved contains an infinite number of temporal intervals) with the passage of time from moment T1 to moment T2. But it is easy to answer such an objection. We can begin by noting that the infinite number of subdivisions (whether of temporal or spatial intervals) adds up to the span in question. That is (to consider the spatial case first), we already know that it is the distance between A and B that contains the infinite number of intervals we're discussing. So there is no question about there being a point B, only one about how one can arrive at it. Similarly, we know that it is the span T1 to T2 that has an infinite number of temporal intervals. So once again, there is no question about the existence of T2, only about how it ever can arrive. But now one can see that the above objection really makes no sense. Because for there to be a time T2 is the same thing as for it to eventually arrive! It is incoherent to claim that there is such a time and to also claim that it can never get here. (It would be as incoherent as to claim that there is a point B and to insist that it is nowhere.) Therefore, Zeno cannot reasonably object that it is impossible for the time between T1 and T2 to transpire. It would be like saying that the distance between A and B does not exist.

(I am not, incidentally, claiming that Zeno wouldn't say that. In fact, as a disciple of Parmenides, he would say precisely this about the distance — and might, faced with the above considerations, say the analogous thing regarding the time span. But none of this is relevant to the paradoxes, which take as their starting point the fact that there are distances and durations, before attempting to show that such an assumption creates a problem.)

Given that T2 will eventually be here, it follows that there is in fact one temporal interval available for moving across each interval between A and B (all the way to and including B). The fact that both the number of line segments and the number of temporal intervals is infinite is no more problematic than the fact that in a universe without a beginning, the number of past events and the number of past moments are both infinite. In both situations, the availability of a time for each event to occur in is all that is needed to avoid paradox.

One final note: Above, I stated that one could never finish the task of dividing the distance between A and B into an infinite number of intervals. However, in principle, someone could in fact do so — just as we can, and do, go through all of these intervals in moving from A to B. The someone in question would simply need to perform the task at an ever increasing rate — e.g., by making the first division in 30 seconds, the second in 15, the third in 7.5, and so on, so as to complete the task in one minute flat. As Bertrand Russell once said, the impossibility of performing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time is merely “medical.” ​
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MONOLATRY

10/15/2020

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

It seems obvious that the ancient Israelites were not monotheists, but instead practiced monolatry, the worship of one god combined with a belief in existence of other gods. This is the best explanation of the first commandment's “no other gods before me” as well as of Psalm 86:8's “there is none like you among the gods.” But there are also events described in the Bible that suggest belief in other gods.

One that is particularly interesting is mentioned in the book Bible Prophecy by Tim Callahan:

In 2 Kings 3:27, when Moab is under siege by the Israelites, the king of that city sacrifices his firstborn son to the god Chemosh. As a result, “there came a great wrath upon Israel,” and Moab was spared. Now, why would there be a great wrath upon Israel if the only god in existence were Yahweh? It makes no sense for Yahweh to be angry with the Israelites for what the king of Moab did; if anything, he'd be mad at the king, and give Israel a victory. The obvious implication is that the god Chemosh, happy with the sacrifice, caused Israel's defeat. And yet this account was written by an Israelite, and included in their scriptures. This can only mean that the Israelites believed Chemosh was real. It also implies (even more shockingly) that they believed Chemosh had the power to do something that Yahweh didn't stop — and perhaps was unable to stop.

This is obviously a problem for any fundamentalist who interprets the Bible literally. But it is also a problem for every other modern-day Christian or Jew. Why would the one true God, who didn't want his chosen people to worship other deities, be okay with his followers believing these other deities existed? Worse, why would he allow them to suggest as much in their holy book? Isn't it far more likely that the Israelites were worshipping a false god (just like all the other ancients were), and that the monotheistic God that evolved from that false god is therefore also a fictional entity?

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FAITH AND EQUIVOCATION

9/22/2020

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[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

Whenever someone is defending faith, or is arguing that faith and reason are compatible, they should be asked which of three common meanings of the term they are thinking of. If the exact meaning of the word isn't made clear, it is almost a given that their claims will deteriorate into a mess of equivocation.

When challenged to provide evidence for the existence of God, most theists reply that their belief is based on faith. This makes it clear that, in this context, “faith” means belief without evidence. This meaning of the word also applies to the claim that faith is needed when the evidence isn't conclusive. Or in other words, when the believer says that reason can only take one so far, and one must make the decision to believe.

The religious often also use this meaning of the word in criticisms of atheists, as when they claim that it takes greater faith to be an atheist, or that atheists believe in materialism on faith. This is when faith is described negatively as “blind faith.” However, when they themselves are accused of believing without evidence, they almost always begin claiming that faith means something like trust instead. They make analogies between having faith in God and someone having faith in their doctor's abilities, or something similar.

Now, one problem with this as an explanation of what is going on when people have religious faith is that trust, when rational, is based on evidence. It is a judgment one makes based on incomplete but hopefully adequate information. But a more serious problem with treating religious faith as if it means trust is that it doesn't make sense when faith is what makes one believe in God. For that faith is itself supposedly faith in God — and obviously one cannot trust God unless one already believes that God exists.

The word is also used in a third sense, to mean a particular doctrine or set of religious beliefs. Now, it should be a simple enough matter to keep this meaning separate from the others, but unfortunately the religious sometimes fail to do even that. For instance, in the introduction to his The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel replies to the claim that faith is believing without evidence by setting out to discover “once and for all whether the Christian faith can stand up to scrutiny.” He doesn't seem to realize that, in defending the Christian doctrine this way, he's not defending believing on faith, but is instead defending believing a particular faith on the basis of evidence. The fact that the word “faith” is used to mean both what one bases one's religious beliefs on, and what the specific contents of those beliefs are, causes Strobel and many others like him to conflate the two ideas. But perhaps this is intentional: For what they want, after all, is to claim both that there is adequate evidence and that one must have faith to believe in God — even though that's a contradiction.

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IF THE SHOE WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT

8/27/2020

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What Christian wouldn’t be incensed by the following statement, especially if informed that it was made by a professor of philosophy at one of this nation’s venerated institutions of higher learning? The statement, ostensibly an attempt to explain the real reasons underlying the religious beliefs of millions of our fellow citizens, appears to be purposely disrespectful:

“Christian belief,” this professor declared, “does not arise from assessment of evidence, but from stubborn closed-mindedness; it does not have its origin in the desire for knowledge but in arrogance and contempt. Christianity is the suppression of truth by hatred, the outgrowth of small-minded prejudice. In short, it is bigotry that is the mother of belief.”

Even strong atheists might admit that this goes too far. No wonder so many religious individuals feel as if they’re under siege. These days, it really does seem that there’s a war on certain types of belief.

Many among the religious who would be offended by statements like the above are, however, perfectly happy with similar pronouncements provided they come from their own side. They complain about biased professors whose hatred of faith is clearly evident, but in turn ignore — or even applaud — religious intolerance aimed at nonbelievers. As an example, consider the fact that the above statement is in reality a paraphrase, and that the original actually reads as follows:

“Atheism is not the result of objective assessment of evidence, but of stubborn disobedience; it does not arise from the careful application of reason but from willful rebellion. Atheism is the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality. In short, it is sin that is the mother of unbelief.”

My paraphrase consisted essentially of changing it from a statement about atheism to one about Christianity, along with the replacement of its abusive epithets by reasonably equivalent ones so as to make it all “fit.” The tone in the original is every bit as rude and obnoxious. The only difference is which side it’s on. And yet, this passage is the central thesis of a book that has been praised by many believers.

That book, The Making of an Atheist, by James Spiegel, a philosopher who teaches in a small religious university in Indiana, goes on to say that the atheist has a “depraved mind” that blinds him to God and ethics, [p. 54] and that “precipitated by immoral indulgences,” he “willfully rejects God.” [p. 113] According to Spiegel, atheism “is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts.” Reason is not involved. “For the atheist,” he says, “the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience.” [p. 11]

Positive reviews by readers on Amazon praise the work as “thought-provoking,” “impressive,” and “profound,” and suggest that it really explains the mind-set of nonbelievers. What would these people say if the shoe were on the other foot?

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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IS GOD JUST?

8/18/2020

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[Another summer re-run published at Debunking Christianity.]

We nonbelievers claim that a perfectly good, loving being would never have created hell, but according to most Christians we are simply wrong. God is loving, they say, but he is also just — and justice demands that evil-doers be punished. Without hell, after all, where would the Hitlers, Stalins, and Ted Bundys of this world end up? In heaven?

This is a common argument, which means that many must find it persuasive, but my guess is that those who do simply haven't given it sufficient thought. It's very easy to see the flaws in it.

To begin with, hell isn't only for serious evil-doers: standard Christian doctrine maintains that we are all deserving of eternal punishment and that anyone who doesn't accept God's offer of salvation ends up there. A second thing to keep in mind is that even the worst evil-doers aren't necessarily sent to hell — not if at some point they become sincere believers. Ted Bundy, for instance, claimed to have accepted Jesus before being executed, and if that's true then on the standard view he did end up in heaven.

One therefore cannot justify hell on the grounds that evil-doers must be punished. But more importantly, can one still maintain that God is just given this doctrine? Does it make sense that all of us are deserving of eternal punishment, or that those who accept Jesus are forgiven?

Let's begin with why everyone supposedly merits eternal damnation. One common reason offered for this is that God, due to his moral perfection, has standards that are so high that no one is good enough to meet them. Even if you are a saint, you aren't perfect: at the very least, you've probably told a few white lies. And that, the argument goes, makes you bad enough, in God's eyes, to merit the worst form of punishment.

But now consider an analogy. Suppose a father finds out his teenage daughter lied about when she returned home from a party: she said she was back by 10 (as she was supposed to have been) even though she didn't actually make it home until 10:15. By the above logic, if this father punished her by chaining her to the basement wall for a week and giving her a hundred lashes a day with a belt, that would show that he has very high moral standards. His standards still wouldn't be as high as God's, of course, for the Lord demands far worse punishment for the girl, but they would nevertheless be much loftier than those of the majority of parents out there.

As to the second question — whether those who accept Jesus's offer of salvation deserve to be forgiven — consider that while Bundy is experiencing eternal bliss, any non-Christian who spent her entire life helping others and doing nothing but good deeds still goes to hell. All I can say is that if you think that's right, you have a very bizarre sense of justice.

The heinousness of this entire doctrine is somewhat mitigated by the (nowadays rather common) claim that hell isn't as terrible as advertised. Maybe it just means annihilation. Or perhaps it means spending eternity apart from God (which, however, is still supposed to be a very undesirable thing). But no matter what one says about it, the basic idea remains entirely unfair. Believing in Christianity — or in Islam, or any other dogma — does not make one the slightest bit more ethical than not believing, and thus cannot be a sound basis for distinguishing those who merit forgiveness from those who do not.


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IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT THERE ARE NO GODS?

5/29/2020

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I was recently involved in an online discussion in which a reason I hadn't previously seen was offered for preferring negative to positive atheism. (By negative atheism, I mean the mere lack of belief in any gods, and by positive atheism, the belief that there are no gods. And the fact that one usually needs to explain this is one reason I prefer the traditional terminology.)

There are better and worse reasons for being only a negative atheist. But the one that was argued by my opponent in the discussion was pretty weak — and if it is accepted by others who call themselves atheists, they really should be aware of that.

Briefly, my opponent's argument was that one should only believe when there is evidence; that there is no evidence that there are no gods; and therefore that to positively disbelieve in such beings is completely unjustified.

I suspect some might accept this argument as a result of thinking of evidence exclusively as direct evidence. One can have direct evidence that there are horses by, for example, seeing some. But one cannot have direct evidence that there are no unicorns by seeing none. This, however, ignores indirect evidence. And there is plenty of that regarding unicorns.

One is justified in positively disbelieving in unicorns when one knows certain things about this supposed creature — for instance, that the earliest reports of it were based on long-horned animals depicted in profile (and as a result showing only one horn), as well as on descriptions of rhinos to ancient Greeks who had never seen them; that the spiral tusks of narwhals were sometimes found on beaches and thought to be unicorn horns; that no unicorn or unicorn skeleton has ever been found (which would be very unlikely, given that it is supposedly a large animal); and so on. All this points to the unicorn being a mythical creature — and as that is by far the most likely conclusion, it is reasonable to hold that unicorns aren't real.

Similar kinds of things can be said about gods. There is evidence that gods are human inventions, and even reasonable explanations for why human beings invented them. There are things we know about our existence (e.g., that we are evolved, physical entities) that make the existence of beings who are like us in many respects (e.g., having minds much like ours), yet exist in a supernatural realm or have supernatural powers, extremely unlikely at best. There is the fact that no god, and no act of a god, has ever been observed (there are of course supposed exceptions to this, but the best explanations for them do not require positing any deities) — yet for all of the gods that humans have believed in, this absence is as much of a problem as the absence of unicorns is for unicorn belief. Finally (though of course I wouldn't expect people in general to know this), there is the argument which I made in The Truth about God, that on the traditional meaning of “god”, a god must have libertarian free will — which rules out their existence if libertarian free will is impossible because there is no middle ground between the determined and the random.


Now, one does not have to accept any of these points as conclusive. And one might have other reasons for being a negative atheist. But to claim that positive atheists are mistaken because there is no evidence against the existence of gods is unreasonable.


[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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