Category: Atheism

ARE CHRISTIANS EVIL?

8/16/2017

[Note: I've been invited to contribute to John Loftus's blog, Debunking Christianity. However, I will re-post here whatever I write for that site. The following is my first such post.]

Orthodox Christianity holds that those who don’t “make the cut” end up suffering for all of eternity, and this has of course been the cause of much criticism of the religion. Something that is rarely considered, however, is what this doctrine says about Christians themselves. For the Christian must of course view the eternal suffering of sinners as justified. And yet, by the moral standards most of us accept, eternal punishment is never justified – much less for individuals who aren’t really evil. Perhaps some would consider that kind of suffering as appropriate punishment for Hitler or Ted Bundy. But what about all the average non-Christians who end up in hell – people like your neighborhood atheist or Hindu? An orthodox Christian must be in favor of eternal suffering for such individuals as well. If he were to witness their being thrown into hell fire on Judgement Day, he would have to find that perfectly proper and right. Does this mean orthodox Christians are evil?

There is of course some debate regarding what the orthodox view is. Many apologists these days claim that all that talk of hell fire is metaphorical, and that eternal punishment is merely separation from God. But that doesn’t really help much. For even if the language is metaphorical, it must represent something really bad – why else use such terrible imagery? And in fact those who say that hell is merely separation from God then turn around and point out just how truly horrible that separation is. But if it is so terrible, then the problem remains: how can it be right?

One thing we might say in defense of the average Christian is that most may only be paying lip service to the doctrine of eternal punishment. They may say that they believe in the Bible, but they don’t really think about what it actually states. The doctrines of their religion are far removed from their everyday concerns. I think this is the case with most of my neighbors, for example. There are many others, however, who take their faith more seriously, who really think about it, read scripture, and seem to literally believe what it says. And it is these people that present a problem here. Do we really want to say they are evil? That would mean, for me, having to call my own grandmother (among many others) evil – and probably similarly for most of you. And what about atheists who used to believe? Did they use to be terrible people who are now redeemed?

None of that sounds even close to being right. And yet I’m not sure what the solution is. How can someone’s approval of eternal suffering be excused?

The best suggestion I have is to point out how people tend to compartmentalize their beliefs. A few weeks ago, I wrote in a comment that “If I told my neighbors I was going to sacrifice my son tomorrow in the backyard because God told me to do it, they'd call the police. Yet they regard Abraham's obedience to God as a virtue.” How can one explain this inconsistency? I think it’s because their religious beliefs are kept separate form their everyday beliefs. They apply different standards to them. If the reality of divine “justice” was right in front of them, if it was every bit as real as their everyday experiences, they would find it horrible. It is only because they keep such ideas in a separate compartment at the back of their minds that they can claim to endorse them. Thus, in a sense, they don’t really believe it.

I’d love to hear what others think about this.

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CAN CRAIG CLAIM THAT A WORLD WITHOUT GOD WOULD BE BAD?

7/24/2017

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There is an interesting inconsistency between William Lane Craig’s understanding of a godless universe and his acceptance of the moral argument for the existence of God. Craig likes to convince his readers that the atheist’s universe is ultimately a depressing, unattractive, god-awful place. But he also likes to argue for God’s existence based on the idea that moral values depend on God. Now, at first these two claims may not appear to be at odds with one another. But take a closer look at what he says about each one:

According to Craig, objective value depends on the existence of God: “If God does not exist, objective moral values… do not exist.” And since “when we speak of moral values, we’re talking about whether something is good or bad,” it follows from this that if God does not exist, nothing can be objectively bad. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., p. 172 (emphasis added)]

And yet, Craig also claims that a godless universe is really bad. He argues that it is “only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place” that an atheist “can successfully come to terms with life” in it. “This,” he goes on, “is the horror of modern man.” And he asks of is readers if they truly “understand the gravity of the alternatives” here. For “if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair.” The world that the atheist believes in is, in other words, dreadful. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., pp. 73-78 (emphasis added)]

So, to sum up, if there is no God, nothing is objectively bad… and yet that would be really bad!

Now, maybe one could try to defend Craig’s views here by claiming that, when he says that a godless world would be “a terrible place,” all he means is that he personally finds the idea distasteful – in other words, that he is expressing his subjective opinion about such a world, not arguing that it would be objectively bad. But to begin with, it seems clear that he means the latter – that it is a fact that a godless world would be bad. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that this is a man who regularly takes atheists to task for claiming that this or that is bad when, in his opinion, they have no basis for believing in objective values. But then by the same logic, he has no basis for claiming that things would be bad if atheists were right.

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EVOLUTON AND MORAL WORTH

6/23/2017

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Often, critics of atheism argue that if we evolved from bacteria, it follows that we cannot have any more moral worth than those bacteria – and that evolution is therefore incompatible with such notions as that of human rights.

Now, if the argument is simply that, because we evolved from bacteria, we have no more moral worth than they do, it is obviously a non-sequitur. It’s the same as if one claimed that because Adam was made from the dust of the ground, he has no more value than that dust – or that Eve is at best worth one lousy rib. However, those who make the above argument are likely to insist that evolution presents us with something different: It’s not merely that we came from bacteria, it’s that we are “just like bacteria” in certain important respects. Adam was endowed with a soul, whereas the descendants of bacteria presumably are not.

But what is it about the soul that’s supposed to make a difference? Two possibilities come to mind. First, a soul is non-physical, whereas if naturalism is true, we are purely physical beings. Second, a soul is supposedly immortal. Let’s consider each one of these in turn.

Does being made of matter make one morally insignificant? I don’t see why it should. For suppose that what naturalism says is true, so that we humans, with our consciousness, our feelings, our desires, and so on, are no more than complex arrangements of matter. The fact remains that we are conscious, that we have hopes and dreams, that we care about others – in other words, that most of what we take to be important in our lives remains. What difference can it make, then, whether the ultimate substance that makes this possible is material or immaterial? And what’s so special about non-physical “stuff” anyway?

What about being immortal? If naturalism is true, then presumably our lives are finite. But does that mean that therefore it doesn’t matter what happens to any of us? That it is therefore okay to, say, torture innocent people to death? I doubt even the strongest critic of naturalism really believes such a thing. At any rate, how would immortality change anything? If life is worthwhile, that is because the temporal spans that it is made of are themselves, on the whole, worthwhile. And if so, then that’s true whether or not life continues indefinitely.

The fact that we evolved from bacteria does not mean we are “just like bacteria”. There are characteristics that we possess which bacteria lack – and those make us morally different from bacteria.

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PRESUPPOSITIONALISM AND INDUCTION

5/3/2017

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I've previously written about presuppositionalist arguments regarding logic and knowledge. But another one of their arguments concerns the problem of induction. This is the logical problem posed by Hume of how to justify inferences from observed matters of fact to unobserved ones.

Briefly, the problem is this. Consider how you know or are justified in believing that if you (say) let go of a pencil in mid-air under normal circumstances, it will fall. Well, one thing you can point out is that in the past, unsupported pencils, as far as we know, have always fallen – and therefore, it is reasonable to suppose they will continue to do so. This is an inductive inference: from the fact that all observed A's have been B, one concludes that probably all A's – or at least that most A's – are B. However, the fact that pencils have always fallen is logically compatible with one not falling the next time the experiment is carried out, and even with none falling ever again. So how can one justify the inference?

In order to do so, one must maintain that nature is uniform in some way, so that future pencil drops will be like past ones. However, the problem is that the only evidence one has for such uniformity, it seems, is that that's what has been observed so far. In other words, the argument for the uniformity of nature itself appears to be based on an inductive inference. Induction, according to this argument, can therefore only be justified if one first assumes induction. And that, of course, is circular reasoning.

The presuppositionalists claim that atheists cannot justify their acceptance of induction – and that therefore they have no basis for believing in science, among other things. To believe in scientific reasoning on an atheist worldview, they say, one must engage in the above kind of circular reasoning. If on the other hand one starts out with the existence of a God who created a lawful world – a world that behaves in a uniform way – then one's belief in induction is justified. Therefore, only on the theistic worldview can science – as well as everyday inductive inferences – make sense.

This argument may not be quite as bad as the presuppositionalist one regarding deductive logic, but it is still a bad argument, as will now be demonstrated.

To begin with, merely claiming that the justifiability of induction presupposes some x is not so much to solve the problem as it is to ignore it. True, the presuppositionalist might argue that if induction is justified, then there must be a God. But that's not going to convince the inductive skeptic. So even if the argument worked, it wouldn't be a solution to the problem of induction.

But even worse, if the idea is that one has to accept whatever must be presupposed in order for inductive inference to be justified, then all we need to accept is the existence of a lawful world. The existence of a God who created such a world is superfluous. After all, there is no logical impossibility in the existence of a lawful yet uncreated universe. Thus, one might as well be a presuppositionalist, not with respect to God, but with respect to the uniformity of nature, and then proceed to argue in much the same way as above.

This is sufficient to show that the presuppositionalist argument is wrong. But so far nothing has been said as to why one is in fact justified in making inductive inferences. If a reasonable case can be made in favor of such inferences, it will show that not only is the presuppositionalist argument wrong, but in addition that the main premise it is based on is false.

I think a reasonable case logically justifying induction can be made. In fact, I think there are several distinct ones available, corresponding to criticisms that have been made to different aspects of the problem. Here I'll present the simplest one.

Consider again the fact that every time a pencil (or any heavier-than-air object) has been let go in mid-air under normal circumstances it has fallen – that is, that all the observed instances of such an event have been like that. What is the best explanation of this fact? Certainly not that it is mere coincidence! It would be statistically impossible for that to be the case. It seems the best explanation is that there is some law of nature that makes such occurrences either naturally necessary or at the very least highly probable. But if that is the best explanation for what we've observed, then we are justified in believing that other instances will very probably be like the observed ones. For if there is an underlying law that explains why all observed pencils, etc., have behaved in this way, then we have good reasons for holding that other objects will do so as well.

Note that this argument does not depend on induction (in the narrow sense with which the problem of induction is concerned). Rather, it is an argument to the best explanation – an abductive argument. It is not that we have observed x many instances supporting uniformity in nature and inductively infer that there will probably be other such instances. It is that the best explanation of there having been that many instances displaying uniformity is that there is an underlying principle that causes such uniformity. Thus, there is a non-circular justification for accepting the existence of laws of nature. And it has nothing to do with God.

Now, presuppositionalists might object that the above argument does not guarantee the correctness of any inductive inference, for two reasons. First, the natural laws that explain the uniformity we've observed might only be probabilistic. They do not necessarily say that the next pencil I let go of will fall, but perhaps only that it is highly likely it will fall. Second, and worse, the existence of the laws themselves has not been proven with certainty, but again only with a high degree of probability. It is much more likely that the uniformity we've observed is a result of natural laws, but it is not strictly speaking impossible that it has all been mere coincidence.

All of that is true. However, that the uniformity we have observed has no explanation is so utterly unlikely that for all practical purposes it can be ruled out. So while it is the case that the argument, even if correct, does not strictly speaking guarantee the existence of laws, it makes the conclusion so probable that we can treat it as certain. And as to the laws themselves being probabilistic, observation shows that if they are (as the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics maintains), they result in events that at the level of everyday objects are so close to deterministic that once again it makes no practical difference. Thus, while it may be true (if the standard interpretation of QM is correct) that an unsupported medium-sized object near the surface of a planet might not fall towards it, the likelihood of such an event happening is so incredibly low that it almost certainly has never happened in the entire 14-billion-year history of our universe.

Now let's compare this with what presuppositionalists themselves can say based on their argument. They believe not only that there is a creator who has made a lawful universe, but that this creator is the God of the Bible – a work they interpret literally, since it is part of God's way of revealing things to us. But in that case, how confident can they be that an unsupported pencil will fall? It's clear that their confidence level should be far, far lower than that based on the above considerations. After all, their God is the author of the natural laws, and can therefore suspend them at any moment. Worse, according to the Bible, he has in fact done so on numerous occasions: among other things, he has turned water into wine, caused a man to walk on water, and stopped the earth's rotation without bringing about the worldwide catastrophe such an event should have caused – and all that in just the last few thousand years! It follows for this reason alone that the presuppositionalist should be considerably less confident than the atheist in making inductive inferences.

But in fact, the presuppositionalist's position is even weaker than that. For, as Michael Martin pointed out, if God can have a morally sufficient reason for allowing natural evils such as cancer and earthquakes, then he could very well have a morally sufficient reason for, say, making it the case that from this moment on pencils will no longer fall – or that they will behave in an entirely random manner. It follows that belief in the biblical God should actually create doubts regarding the justifiability of induction.

Notes:

For Michael Martin's paper on this topic, see: "Does Induction Presume the Existence of the Christian God?"

Another online paper on this is Alex Malpass's "Induction, God and Begging the Question"

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On Matt Slick's Transcendental Argument

3/29/2017

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For quite some time now, Matt Slick, the president of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), has been promoting a version of the transcendental argument for the existence of God. About a year ago, that argument was decisively refuted by Alex Malpass, a philosopher at Bristol University. In spite of this, Slick continues to maintain that it has not been refuted and that all Malpass showed is that the argument needs to be reworded. Last I heard, he is still working on an improved version.

In this post, I want to help make it clear exactly what Malpass's objections are, and more importantly, what Slick would have to do to avoid them. For understanding what Slick has to argue to avoid the objections shows the deeper problem with his entire approach.

On his podcast, Slick presented the basic argument as follows:

“...So we have 'God and not-God'. So that's called a true dichotomy. We've got either 'God exists' or 'it's not the case that God exists'... Let's take the no-God position. Can the no-God position account for the transcendental laws of logic? And the ultimate answer is, no it cannot. So therefore, because it cannot, the other position's automatically necessarily validated as being true.”

What Slick is trying to do here – as he himself has often stated – is present a disjunctive syllogism, that is, an argument with the form:

p or q
not q
therefore, p

In addition, he states that his first premise is a dichotomy – that is, that it has the form “p or not-p” – which means that it covers all possibilities, and is therefore necessarily true. That way, he has no need to argue for it.

As he states it, however, his argument is a mess, and so it takes a bit of work to turn it into a disjunctive syllogism. Taken at face value, he appears to be arguing,

1. Either God exists or God doesn't exist
2. Atheism cannot account for the laws of logic
3. Therefore, God exists.

But to begin with, this isn't a disjunctive syllogism; the second premise is not the negation of one of the disjuncts in the first premise. And what's worse is that, as it stands, this argument is clearly invalid.

To turn it into a disjunctive syllogism, we can instead restate Slick's argument as something like the following:

1. Either God accounts for the laws of logic or something else accounts for the laws of logic
2. It is not the case that something else accounts for the laws of logic
3. Therefore, God accounts for the laws of logic.

But now there is a problem with Slick's claim that his first premise is necessarily true. In the above argument, premise one is not a dichotomy. To think so is to confuse:

(A) “Either God accounts for the laws of logic or something else accounts for the laws of logic”

with:

(B) “Either God accounts for the laws of logic or God does not account for the laws of logic.”

Statement (B) is a dichotomy; statement (A) is not, for it does not cover all possibilities. For instance, it ignores the possibility that nothing accounts for the laws of logic.

Now, as it turns out, Slick actually should not be aiming at having a dichotomy as the first premise of his argument. He may think that is the way to go, so as to avoid having to argue for the premise. But as Malpass pointed out, if the first premise were a dichotomy, the argument would simply beg the question. To see why, suppose that we substitute (A) with (B) in the above argument, so that Slick would be arguing something like this:

1. Either God accounts for the laws of logic or God does not account for the laws of logic
2. It is not the case that God does not account for the laws of logic
3. Therefore, God accounts for the laws of logic.

The problem with this is that now the conclusion is just a restatement of the second premise. To say that it is not the case that God does not account for the laws of logic is simply to say that God does account for the laws of logic. In other words, the form of this latest argument is:

p or not-p
not not-p
therefore, p

But to say “not not-p” is just to say “p,” and so the argument becomes:

p or not-p
p
therefore, p

And that's not exactly a good argument.

(There is a more general problem here that Malpass didn't get into, namely, that anytime there is a logically true statement in an argument – like “p or not-p” – it can be removed without altering the argument's validity. Logical truths are not really needed to make arguments go through. This is why the first premise above is redundant, and that all that Slick would be arguing in this case is “p, therefore p.”)

So what can Slick do?

Well, he could try to keep (A) as the first premise and simply stop claiming that it is a dichotomy. However, he now needs to provide us with reasons for accepting that premise.

Let's consider that argument again:

1. Either God accounts for the laws of logic or something else accounts for the laws of logic
2. It is not the case that something else accounts for the laws of logic
3. Therefore, God accounts for the laws of logic.

This first premise is really just saying that something accounts for the laws of logic (whether that is God or not). The argument would therefore be clearer if stated as follows:

1. Something accounts for the laws of logic
2. But if God did not exist, nothing would account for the laws of logic
3. Therefore, God exists.

What Slick must do, then, is show that something must account for the laws of logic (as well as that without God, nothing would). And that's the deeper problem that I alluded to at the beginning.

Now, as Slick himself has said, what he is referring to when he talks about what accounts for logic are the “necessary preconditions” for the existence of logical truths. Or, to put it another way, what must be the case if there are to be logical truths.

One mistake Slick and other presuppositionalists make – though they are certainly not alone in this – has to do with how they understand the relationship between logical laws and that to which they apply. Given the way he argues, Slick must maintain that a rock (say) would not be identical to itself without something else, namely the “law of identity,” making it the case that the rock is identical to itself. But that's simply confusion. That rock is that rock, and that's all it takes for it to be identical to itself. There doesn't have to be in addition a logical truth that brings this fact about, and which in turn has to be accounted for.

Presuppositionalists then compound their mistake by imagining that the logical laws can only exist in the mind of God – which if anything is an even greater confusion.

Logical laws merely describe what must be the case. And since the truths they describe are necessary, there is nothing that they depend on, or even that they could possibly depend on. So not only is God not needed to account for them, but to think that God can account for them is incoherent. Slick's entire approach, then, is misguided.

If I had the opportunity, I'd ask Slick if he thinks it is even conceivable that logical truths could fail to hold. Does he, for example, think that (in a godless world) a rock might at the same time both exist and not exist? Or that it might be the case that all human beings are mortal, and that S is a human being, but that S is not mortal?

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IS EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS SELFISH?

2/8/2017

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Nonbelievers often appeal to evolutionary explanations to account for the existence of moral behavior. For example, we human beings care for our relatives because those who are related to us share much of the same genetic material; we are usually nice to others because then they will be nice to us; and so on.

Such explanations make good sense, even if they are not always quite this simple and straightforward, and even if there are areas where uncertainty remains. But unfortunately, some critics continue to misunderstand the basic idea behind them.

Consider the following criticism of Dawkins by one of the many authors who wrote responses to the new atheists a few years back:

“...Dawkins fails to recognize that none of [his] examples of 'morality' represent classical selfless altruism. In each case, the altruist has a vested self-interest in the action, a self-serving motive... the atheist version of morality implies that we only do good when there is something 'in it for us'.” (R. C. Metcalf, Letter to a Christian Nation: Counter Point, p. 9)

This author is not alone. I've come across the above criticism several other times, both in print and on the internet. And yet the objection completely misses the point.

According to these critics, the evolutionary account of moral behavior fails to explain altruism because it claims that the underlying reason for it is self-interested. Thus, they say, on the Darwinian view, those who are helpful to their neighbors aren't really being selfless: they only do it so that the neighbors will in turn help them.

That, however, is a misrepresentation of the view. What these critics don't understand is that the evolutionary account is an explanation of why we have feelings of empathy. The underlying reasons for our behavior that the view refers to are not the reasons we give to ourselves for acting. Rather, they are the reasons why we are naturally predisposed to act in the ways that we do.

To see how ridiculous their criticism is, imagine what they would say regarding a mother who goes hungry so that her child can have enough to eat. On their misunderstanding of the Darwinian account, this mother is not really being selfless. Instead, she has the self-interested desire that the genes she has passed along to her offspring flourish. But of course the Darwinian view does not claim that we make conscious calculations of what's in the best interest of our genes!

Similarly, it isn't that we are nice to a neighbor because we think that they might in turn be nice to us. We have evolved to be nice – to have the altruistic feelings that we have – because it is to our benefit to have those feelings. Thus, we do not perform selfless acts only when we realize there is “something in it for us.” We perform them when we have the altruistic motivation to do so – a motivation that, as it turns out, is usually good for us to have.

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HOW DOES AN ELECTRON KNOW WHAT TO DO?

1/27/2017

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The above question was asked by religious apologist Dinesh D’Souza during a debate with Christopher Hitchens. The overall context makes what he meant clearer:

“The universe obeys laws… If you think about it, that’s very strange. If I’m driving my car, I can follow laws: I see a stop sign, I come to a halt. How does matter obey laws? How does the electron know what to do?”

Although this type of argument is ridiculous, it is not uncommon. Because laws in the legal sense are prescriptive rather than descriptive, there are some who assume scientific laws are as well. Thus, the electron must somehow be made to follow the laws of nature – and why it does so in that case requires an explanation. But of course the electron does not obey the laws of physics in the same way that we obey traffic laws. The laws of nature do not inform nature on how to behave; rather, they inform us on how nature in fact behaves. They describe the regularities that we find in nature.

There is a deeper question here, however – one that is somewhat more reasonable than asking how the electron knows what to do – and it concerns the existence of the regularities themselves. Why is it, some ask, that there are laws of nature at all? Some see in this fact a reason to believe in a creator who planned the universe this way. Perhaps that's what D’Souza had in mind.

But the laws merely describe the way things happen to be. Scientists observe nature and come up with laws that allow us to predict, at least to some extent, what will happen in given situations. The universe is at least near-deterministic (that is, at the level of ordinary objects, at least, it behaves in an essentially deterministic way, so that if you have the same cause, you get the same effect). If the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then at bottom the universe is not causally deterministic, and an electron (among other things) in fact behaves somewhat randomly. Thus, using an electron as his example probably wasn’t the best idea D’Souza has ever had.

Whether the universe is causally deterministic or not, there is no basis for asking why, in any ultimate sense, it is the way it is. Scientists can search for more fundamental laws, of course, but eventually they will reach some brute fact or facts about reality: that is just the way things are, period. If the universe is completely deterministic, then that just means that the principle “same cause, same effect” is true. If not, then that means the principle isn’t strictly true. And if the universe were considerably more random than quantum mechanics suggests, then that would mean we would not be able to come up with as many laws, and would be less able to predict things. But no matter what, to suppose that a creator is needed as an explanation makes no sense. To insist that an explanation is needed is to maintain that any regularity in how things behave could not simply be the way reality happens to be – and that just doesn’t follow.

What’s worse, a creator cannot possibly provide the supposed explanation anyway. For a creator would himself have to behave in an at least somewhat lawful manner in order to do anything – and thus there would have to be laws that applied to him. To posit a creator as an ultimate explanation for the existence of laws therefore doesn’t work – it merely passes the buck.

Religionists ignore this because they view the mind and its behavior as “magical” – as requiring no explanation whatsoever. This – as I point out in the final chapter of The Truth about God – is the central mistake made by the religious (and unfortunately still unconsciously made even by most non-religious people). That is why D’Souza casually mentions the example of his stopping at a stop sign, as if that is not in need of any explanation.

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JACLYN GLENN MENTIONS MY BOOKS (AND IT'S NOT GOOD)

1/10/2017

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A few weeks ago, I sent copies of my books to a handful of bloggers and one YouTuber, Jaclyn Glenn – the latter because I found out that Jaclyn sometimes does videos where she opens her mail. (For those who don't know, Jaclyn is one of the most popular atheist YouTubers, with close to half a million subscribers.) So imagine my surprise today when I learned that she not only featured the books in a recent video, she also dismissed them as religious trash!

I guess on the theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity I should be pleased. And I did find the whole thing humorous. But still, I wish she had actually bothered to look a bit closer at the damn books. After all, the blurb on the back of The Truth about God is by the well-known atheist John Loftus.

Instead, Jaclyn literally judged that book by its cover. I must admit it does look religious (which was intentional, so as to capture the attention of believers). Thus, I can understand her mistake, up to a point. Nevertheless, I hope she corrects the mistake. If she were to do so, it would mean even better publicity for the books than I had originally hoped for.

So how about it, Jaclyn?

Jaclyn's video, at the point my books are featured:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-hO3z989c&t=1m47s

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FOLLOW-UP TO PREVIOUS POST

12/5/2016

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On my last post, I pointed out that the universe could not have come from nothing, where that is interpreted as the universe coming from a prior state of nothingness. Such a thing can be ruled out because the very idea of a prior state of nothingness is a contradiction in terms.

But of course the claim that the universe came from nothing can also be understood as the claim that the universe did not come from anything. Here, I want to consider this interpretation further (since for the most part I ignored it last time around). As it turns out, these two ways of interpreting “nothing” lead to results that are as different as they can be.

To better explain things, I'll use a means I haven't tried before, that of an imaginary dialogue between a theist and an atheist:

Theist: “Atheism is obviously false, since it claims that the universe came from nothing. But nothing can come from nothing!”

Atheist: “But atheism doesn't claim the universe came from nothing – at least not in the way you obviously mean.”

Theist: “Well, if there's no God, what did the universe come from, then?”

Atheist: “Nothing.”

Theist: “Ha! You're contradicting yourself! You just said atheism does not claim the universe came from nothing!”

Atheist: “What I mean is that the universe did not come from anything. There isn't anything from which the universe came.”

Theist: “But that's what I'm claiming is impossible. If what exists did not come from anything, then it came from nothing. But if you start out with nothing, then how can something ever arise? Answer me that!”

Atheist: “Not coming from anything is not the same as coming from nothing, if by that you mean from a prior state of nothingness. In fact, the latter is necessarily false and thus impossible, whereas the former is necessarily true – and therefore the only possibility.”

Theist: “Well, at least I agree with half of that: the latter is impossible. As I've said, if you start out with nothing, you will never get something.”

Atheist: “That's not the reason I say it's impossible. It's impossible because the claim that you 'start out with nothing' is already problematic, as it implies that at some point there existed a state of nonexistence. It also implies that there was a state before there was time. For these reasons, the claim that the universe arose out of a prior state of nothingness is necessarily false.”

Theist: “But if you think that, why do you claim that the universe did not come from anything? The two sound the same to me.”

Atheist: “When you ask 'where did the universe come from if there's no God?', you're really asking 'where did everything come from if there's no God?' But now, since in that case we are talking about everything that has ever existed or ever will exist, there is by definition nothing else – and therefore nothing else for it to come from. It follows that the universe did not come from anything. And that is the case whether the universe has existed for an eternity or began existing some finite time ago. Either way, it did not come from some prior state; it simply exists. So, at the risk of being misunderstood, from now on when someone asks me whether the universe came from nothing, I'm going to answer 'Yes – anything else is impossible!'”

Theist: “Well, I still maintain the universe could not come out of nothing. What I believe is that God created the universe out of nothing!”

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THE REIFICATION OF NOTHING

11/22/2016

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“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

One often hears critics of atheism argue that the universe could not have come from nothing. Now, atheism does not actually imply such a thing – not in the way these critics mean. An atheist may believe that the universe has existed from eternity past, for instance (although that's not the only option, as we'll see below). But that's not what I want to discuss here. What I want to address instead is a mistake that these critics, as well as some atheists who respond to them, make – namely, the mistake of treating nothing as if it were a something. Or, to put it another way, the mistake of reifying nothing.

When critics of atheism claim that the universe could not have come into being out of nothing, they are claiming that what exists – that all that exists – could not have come from nothing. What they mean by nothing, therefore, is nonexistence. Nothing is the absence of anything at all. (In fact, one of the complaints many had about Lawrence Krauss's book A Universe from Nothing, is that what he meant by “nothing” wasn't really nothing.) But even though they are talking about the absence of existence, they then talk about it as if it at some point existed.

For instance, if it is claimed that the big bang was the absolute beginning, these theists imagine this to mean that first there was nothing, and then a universe popped into existence from this nothing. As William Lane Craig put it, “if originally there were absolutely nothing – no God, no space, no time – then how could the universe possibly come to exist?” The nothing in question here is treated as if it were the state that in some sense existed prior to the big bang. And that is literally nonsense.

Unfortunately, however, many atheists, rather than rejecting this notion of a nothing that is a something, reply to these critics by claiming that the nothing is in fact the sort of thing that a universe could arise out of. This is not what Krauss did, by the way, since – as already pointed out – his “nothing” isn't really nothing. But there are other atheists who argue that, because literal nothingness has no properties, one cannot rule out a universe popping into existence from it. Here's how one such atheist – a philosophically sophisticated YouTuber that I usually agree with – put it:

“If a condition of absolute nothingness had been the case at some point... there'd be nothing – literally nothing – to physically prevent something from springing into existence out of nothingness... [and thus] no reason why it could not happen.”

In other words, if what we are talking about really is nothing, these atheists say, then there isn't anything in it to rule out a universe coming into being. To claim that this would, for instance, violate conservation laws, is to claim that we are not really talking about a state of nothingness – for in such a state, there would be no laws of conservation, or anything else.

Now, it is undeniable that if there weren't anything in existence, there would be no laws of conservation. That's not what I'm disputing. The problem I have with the above is that it implicitly asks us to suppose that the state of nonexistence in question (call it N) at some point existed. It asks us to imagine it being the case that what there was at some point was N. And that is simply nonsense; it is a contradiction in terms.

It is, however, nonsense that is very easy to fall into. And the reason is language. Notice that the most natural way to talk about nothingness is to say things like “a state of nothingness,” or “the situation in which there is nothing.” But a state is something (isn't it?), and for there to be nothing suggests that in that case there is nothingness. But that's simply linguistic confusion. By definition, a state of nothingness has never existed and never will exist.

Now, if such “nothingness reifyers” are asked whether they actually believe that nothing is something most will presumably answer no. It is as obvious that to say “nothing exists” is to say “there isn't anything that exists” (and not to say “there is nothingness that exists”) as it is obvious that the King in Through the Looking Glass is confused. Nevertheless, the reifyers treat nothing as if it were a kind of thing.

Something cannot come from nothing not because it would violate conservation laws, but because nothing isn't a thing from which something can come.

This does not, however, mean that the only possibility is that the universe existed from eternity past. Provided it is possible for time itself to begin, then it is possible for (say) the big bang to be the absolute beginning – meaning that nothing existed before. And by “nothing” here I mean nothing – not even space or time. If there was empty spacetime prior to the big bang, then we are no longer talking about there being nothing prior to the big bang. For to claim that spacetime existed is to claim that spacetime has an independent reality, and thus that it is a “something.” (Note also that in that case one can no longer argue that there would necessarily be no conservation laws.) But if there really was nothing before the big bang, then the universe did not come into being out of this nothing, since there never was this nothing for it to come out of. Rather, the universe simply exists – just as it does if it has existed from eternity past. The only difference is that it has not existed from eternity past, since time itself began. Thus, a universe that begins at the big bang remains a possibility.

Now, some might complain that this is a distinction without a difference; that to say that the universe has simply existed from the moment of the big bang just is to say that it popped into existence out of nothing. But there is a difference. The universe did not “pop into existence.” It did not come into being from some prior state of things, as there was no prior state of things. And so there cannot be a question as to whether or not it could have been prevented from coming into being.

Notes:

The Craig quote is from
www.reasonablefaith.org/the-existence-of-god-and-the-beginning-of-the-universe

The YouTube quote is from the following video at the Ozymandias Ramses II site – a site that I highly recommend in spite of disagreeing with this particular argument in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7UZnJ5KACY&t=272s&index=18&list=PLSO-KqpXp4gc_BIaXxKRuxLmaU7wVhAUi

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FOLLOW-UP TO PREVIOUS POST

THE REIFICATION OF NOTHING

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