Blog Posts

WHY WOULD WE REJECT GOD?

8/28/2018

[Note: One of the frequent contributors to the comments section at Debunking Christianity (where this post was originally published) is named Don Camp. That information is necessary in order to understand the wordplay in it.]

There are quite a few believers out there who argue that the existence of a Creator is obvious to all, and that the only reason atheists deny this is because they don’t want to submit to his authority. For those in this theistic camp — those who, as one might say, don this particular religious attire — God is evident from the world he created. As Romans 1:20 puts it, “his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” Furthermore, this supposedly explains why belief in some god or other is found in every human society.

Atheists, however, reject the Creator because they don’t want there to be divine judgement; they want the freedom to do as they please. Thus, they cannot accept the idea of a higher power with moral demands on them.

It is a simple explanation, one designed to convince believers that they shouldn’t bother listening to the arguments of atheists — for the arguments are merely a cover for the real reason atheists reject God: their disobedience.

But now, let’s suppose that the two premises of the argument are true — that the existence of a creator is evident from the world around us, and that some of us don’t want to obey a higher authority. Why would anyone in that case argue that there is no creator? If his existence is obvious, after all, then it is also obvious that belief in a creator who makes no moral demands on us — like the god of deism — is a much better alternative than atheism.

There are deists, and there are members of different religions who believe in gods, yet do not submit to the moral demands of the Christian deity. Why, then, would anyone be an atheist if the evidence for a creator is as obvious as this argument claims it is?

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RELIGION AND FALSIFIABILITY

8/14/2018

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Atheists have for a long time pointed out that evil makes the existence of a perfect God at least less likely, and theists of course have attempted to explain why that is not the case. One interesting aspect of this debate is that, given the way theists argue, there cannot possibly be any amount of evil that would make their God less likely. Their answers to the problem of evil aren’t designed to account for a particular amount of pain and suffering, but for whatever pain and suffering there happens to be.

The free will defense, for example, says that evil is the result of the choices made by fallen human beings (and angels), and that is meant to explain away terrible things no matter how bad they are. The Holocaust, the Black Plague, cancer, atheism — all of these things and more can be blamed on us rather than on the all-powerful being in charge. (The buck has to stop somewhere.) Or consider soul-making theodicies, which argue that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (and, come to think of it, that even what does kill you makes you stronger). Or the view that it is simply a mystery why God allows pain and suffering, but that there must be some reason which we puny humans are too dumb to understand. None of these explanations attempts to account only for a certain amount of evil, but rather for any amount we might encounter. No matter what evil may befall us, we should remain confident that there is an all-loving God who has a reason for allowing it.

But it’s not just the problem of evil, of course. The theistic worldview is designed to accommodate any criticism, no matter how factual. God created the world in six days — unless, of course, science has established that it took far longer than that, in which case it wasn’t literally six days. Noah and his family built a floating zoo — unless that’s actually based on the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh and there is zero evidence of a world-wide flood, in which case it’s just a morality tale. And Jesus predicted the coming of the Son of Man within the lifetime of some of those listening to him — only it didn’t happen, therefore he was actually talking about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. No matter what happens or what we find out, the religion remains unscathed. Theists might suppose that's a good thing. Their view can withstand any onslaught. It is unfalsifiable. But unfalsifiability comes at a price.

A view is falsifiable if it makes an empirical substantive claim — if, in other words, it states that things which can in principle be observed are one way rather than another. An unfalsifiable claim therefore is one that does not say anything about the way the observable world is. It makes no predictions.

Consider once again the existence of evil. A theist might be convinced that the current world is a better place because there is a loving God up there. But if God is compatible with any amount of evil, then that’s not the case. If next week an advanced alien civilization were to land on our planet, imprison us all, and begin using us as their food supply, most theists would say it’s all part of God’s plan. (And some would no doubt claim it’s punishment for gay marriage.) The existence of God cannot guarantee such a thing won’t happen. If God’s perfection is compatible with any amount of suffering, then we cannot expect this to be a better world than it would be without God. And if the entire religion is unfalsifiable, we cannot expect anything else to be one way rather than another, so long as we are talking about empirically verifiable matters.

But didn’t Paul say that if Christ wasn’t raised, then the Christian faith is in vain? And isn’t that a clear case of a falsifiable claim? It certainly appears to be (even if it is one that’s rather difficult to verify). And yet, apologist William Lane Craig famously admitted that, were he to go back in time and see that the resurrection never took place, he would still believe. That seems to be how most Christians feel — never mind that it is absurd, and that it flatly contradicts Paul’s stated view. Ironically, if you want your religion to be unfalsifiable, you have to admit that Jesus might not have been raised from the dead — and that everything else your religion says of an empirical nature might not literally be true.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: CONCLUSION

8/1/2018

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Having made his case for the truth of Christianity, in the last chapter Turek presents the standard explanation for why people fail to accept it, namely, rebellion against authority. We just don’t want anyone telling us what to do. Turek says that this is true of everyone, including Christians. He even admits that “quite often I don’t want to acknowledge that there is a God and I am not Him.” He doesn’t explain why, in that case, people like him do accept Jesus. Presumably, he thinks that everyone rebels, only that atheists are worse.

In addition (as is usually the case with such claims), Turek ignores the adherents of other religions. Are some people Hindus or Muslims because they rebel against the real God? Obviously not. Yet that would have to be the case in order for the argument to be correct.

The rebellion explanation of nonbelief leads to a common justification of hell, namely that it exists for the sake of those who choose to go there. If some individuals “don’t want Jesus now, why would God force them into His presence for all eternity?” But unfortunately for Turek, there is a strong tension between this idea and the claim that hell is punishment for sin, and he has a difficult time avoiding that tension. Immediately after claiming that hell is there because God respects our freedom of choice, he says that it is needed because without it, “murderers, rapists, and child abusers... will never get justice.” But of course that's a different justification for it. And if evildoers are in hell only because they would rather be there, then wouldn’t it be a greater punishment to send them to heaven instead? And are we really to believe that God won’t do anything so harsh as to force them to do something against their will, even though they deserve serious punishment? In addition, of course, such people can convert on their deathbeds. But in that case, how will they ever receive the punishment they deserve?

The other obvious tension here for people like Turek is that, in addition to claiming that God is merely respecting our wishes, they also want to claim that hell is really, really bad. It is “a place of anguish, regret, mental torment, and weeping and gnashing of teeth.” But if it is so bad for everyone who is there, then how can they also prefer it to the alternative? The only way for that to make sense is if our desire for rebellion is so great that we would rather put up with almost any pain rather than live under someone else's authority. And yet atheists, like other people, subject themselves to authority on a regular basis. No one likes it all the time, but atheists, just as much as theists, submit to the rule of law and put up with regulations from their government rather than rebel. It doesn’t appear, then, that submitting to authority is the worst thing that can happen to an atheist.

Turek also maintains that, even though it isn’t doing good deeds that gets you into heaven, accepting Jesus does make you a better person: “If we truly come to know Him, then we will do good works.” And he mentions a thought experiment from Dennis Prager to back this up: Suppose, he asks, that you found yourself in a bad part of town late at night and saw several men walk toward you. Would you be relieved if you found out that these men had just come from a Bible-study class? If so, then even if you aren’t a Christian you must admit that Christianity has a “civilizing effect on society.”

Now, admittedly, people who take the time to go to a Bible-study class are less likely to be criminals. But this doesn’t show that Christianity reduces crime. Not only is it not the case that people who merely happen to be Christian are less likely to be criminals, a similar thought experiment shows that it isn’t the fact that it is a Bible-study class that matters: Suppose instead that the men had just come from an ethics class taught by an atheist professor — or, for that matter, from just about any voluntary class. I think you should feel every bit as relieved.

As I previously mentioned, Stealing from God came to my attention when one of Turek’s fans strongly recommended I read it. This individual apparently thought its arguments should convince anyone. And he is not alone. David Limbaugh (Rush’s brother, for those who may not know) describes Turek's book as “an unassailable case for the truth of Christianity,” and many others have praised it as well. And yet, as we’ve seen, the book is anything but unassailable. In fact, its arguments are among the weakest I’ve ever read. The fault is not entirely Turek’s, though. After all, defending the indefensible isn’t easy. Turek may have done a worse job than many, but in the final analysis the arguments of more sophisticated apologists are every bit as mistaken. The problem lies with the claims themselves. If Christianity is not only true, but obviously so, as these people maintain, then it shouldn’t be so difficult to demonstrate that fact. That it is so difficult should tell them something.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: TUREK'S CASE FOR CHRISTIANITY

7/21/2018

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Having established the truth of theism to his satisfaction, Turek next attempts to demonstrate the truth of the Christian religion. He thinks this can be done provided one shows that the answer to four questions — “Does truth exist?”, “Does God exist?”, “Are miracles possible?” and “Is the New Testament historically reliable?” — is yes. And he believes he’s already accomplished the task with regard to the first two. Nevertheless, he summarizes his argument up to this point in the book, which gives him the opportunity to introduce further mistakes. For example, in his defense of objective truth, he makes several false statements, such as that “Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a five-hundred-page book filled with talk about God to tell us that all talk about God is meaningless.” (Note to Turek: It is not a good idea to present falsehoods whenever making a case for truth.)

He then moves on to the other two questions. His argument in favor of miracles starts by pointing out that everyone, whether theist or atheist, believes (as a religious blogger whom he quotes put it) “something unbelievable.” And he lists several things on each side to make his point. Among the “incredible things” believed by theists are the virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, Jesus walking on water, angels, and Jonah surviving for three days inside a “great fish.” Among those on the atheist side are “random mutations producing the raw material for new organs,” the multiverse, “speciation by unguided, natural selection,” lacking an immaterial soul, and the existence of alien life forms. I’ll let the reader be the judge of which list actually contains unbelievable things. And yet, Turek complains, “somehow just theists are viewed as unreasonable” for their beliefs.

All of this shows (what everyone who has read the previous posts in this series should already know) that Turek just doesn’t get it. But it is once he begins making his positive case for the existence of miracles that Turek’s lack of understanding really manifests itself. For, in order to show that there is no problem about God being able to “overpower natural forces” — and thus no problem with the notion of miracles — Turek makes a truly astonishing claim (though it is clear that he has no idea how astonishing it is). He argues that, not just God, but all intelligent agents can “interrupt” the operation of natural laws. The forces of nature, he tells us, can be stopped on their tracks by the actions of a human being — and that, “in fact, we do it all the time.” For instance, if an object is falling to the ground, we can catch it and thus stop the effect of gravity on the object.

This of course follows from an error in Turek’s reasoning already pointed out last time, that of making a distinction between “natural” and “intelligent” causes. For, in his view, the laws of nature merely tell us “what normally occurs when nature is left to itself” (emphasis added). When intelligent agents get involved, he believes, physics no longer completely applies. In other words, Turek failed to grasp the meaning of the physics he was taught in high school.

This is all the funnier (or sadder, depending on your perspective) when one realizes that he didn’t have to make any such claims to merely argue that a God who created the laws of nature can alter or interrupt those laws. If there were such a being, of course he could perform miracles. The real question, though, is whether we have any reason for believing in the actual existence of miracles. And in answer to that, Turek says very little. He merely attempts to explain why we never see them these days. The reason, he tells us, is that miracles have to be rare in order to have any kind of impact, and that they were more common during biblical times because people back then needed to be shown signs that they were receiving a new revelation. He also adds that the atheist’s view is much harder to accept, and in fact “takes far too much faith to believe,” because it supposes that “every miracle… in the history of the world has to be false.” Why it should take faith to believe that isn’t explained.

Turek wraps up his chapter with a defense of the reliability of the New Testament in which he makes many of the usual claims — e.g., that there were eyewitnesses to the events in question, that there are non-Christian sources for those events, and so on. Some of the arguments he presents are reasonable, but at most show that there really was a preacher named Jesus who had some followers and who was the basis for the stories later told about him. There’s nothing unbelievable about something like that (though if you want to read such arguments, I recommend Bart Ehrman over anything by Turek).

He also makes the common argument that Jesus’s followers had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by making things up. And he adds that anyone who thinks “for more than thirty seconds” about it “will realize how stupid” the claim that they made anything up is. For, he tells us, they simply had no motive for doing so. All it got them was “excommunicated from the synagogue and then beaten, tortured, and killed!” But in that case, how does Turek explain the many other religious preachers at around the time of Jesus who also had followers and who also were strongly disliked by the religious authorities, yet made different claims — claims that are incompatible with those made by the Christians? Obviously, they couldn't all have been telling the truth. And for that matter, what did the Mormons have to gain by following a made-up religion that led to their being run out of town, eventually all the way to Utah? Does this mean we should accept Mormonism? Will Turek convert? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

(I had originally planned to cover Turek’s final two chapters in one post, but there was just too much in them. There will therefore be one more entry in this series.)

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: SCIENCE

7/10/2018

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The idea that the mind is somehow independent of the natural order is, as I’ve previously mentioned, at the root of all theistic thought. In most cases, this is something that appears to be assumed subconsciously. Turek, however, states it explicitly when he claims that there are two types of cause: “natural and nonnatural (i.e., intelligent).” This is already bad enough. After all, why think that minds aren’t natural entities? But what he then does with this nonsensical claim is far worse: he uses it to make a truly absurd argument against methodological naturalism.

Turek reasons that, since atheists accept methodological naturalism — and thus only believe in natural causes — they have no way of accounting for the existence of anything that is the result of intelligence. After all, intelligence isn’t natural, so how could they? It follows that on the atheist’s view, “geologists would have to conclude that natural forces (not intelligent sculptors) caused the faces on Mt. Rushmore,” and “detectives would have to conclude that Ron [Goldman] and Nicole [Brown Simpson] were not actually murdered, but died by some natural means.”

He admits that geologists and detectives, as well as archeologists, don’t actually rule out intelligent causes as explanations of phenomena. They realize that the Rosetta Stone wasn’t the result of wind and rain (though how he thinks they can arrive at such a conclusion if they happen to be atheists isn’t explained). Most biologists, on the other hand, do reject intelligent causes, he says. And that, of course, is why they conclude that the obvious design found in living systems wasn’t really designed.

But if biologists really do reject all intelligent causes, they must believe that the human mind plays no role in the world. They must therefore believe that things like the Empire State Building and the U.S. Constitution were caused by something other than human intelligence — maybe by wind and rain? Turek doesn’t say so, but something like that must follow if we accept his reasoning. It never seems to have occurred to Turek that methodological naturalists actually regard intelligent causes as natural — a very simple point that completely destroys his entire argument. Or could it be that it did occur to him but he wanted to fool his readers into thinking how stupid those like Richard Dawkins must be?

Turek doesn’t stop there. He goes on to claim that what distinguishes most atheistic scientists from those “open to intelligent causes” is that the former do not accept the principle of the uniformity of nature. This is the principle which states (roughly) that similar causes lead to similar effects. Since we do not see nonintelligent causes inscribing Egyptian hieroglyphs into rock today, “it’s reasonable to assume… they couldn’t have done it in the past.” And since we only see such things today if they are the result of human effort, “we conclude intelligent humans made the Rosetta Stone.” Atheists, however, cannot do this, as he’s already shown. Therefore, they must not accept the principle of uniformity: "scientists should look for the best explanation by using the principle of uniformity — that causes in the past were like those in the present. Scientists open to intelligent causes do that, while most atheistic scientists do not.”

Turek makes many other crazy claims in this chapter. Among the more amazing is that only those who believe in actual design in nature can accept the field known as biomimetics, which models machines on biological systems (since “we’ve discovered that ‘Nature’ does it much better than we do”). Thus, “being open to design will advance, not hinder, technological progress.” I guess if you don’t believe biological systems were intentionally designed, you just cannot model machines on them — though why that might be is, once again, left unexplained.

Turek's criticism of science shows, even more than the rest of his book, that he is dealing with concepts he just doesn't have the ability to handle. Parts of it read almost like a satire of creationist thought. He concludes by stating that “science rightly understood can point to our Creator, who has the answers” (emphasis added). But then why don’t religious scientists simply ask the Creator to give them all the answers? Why bother doing science at all?

Next time: the concluding chapters

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: EVIL

7/2/2018

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In chapter five, Turek repeats some of the points he made on morality. Nonbelievers are being inconsistent, he says, when they complain about evil, since on the atheist view there is no evil. His argument for the latter is simple, and can be restated this way:

1. Evil only exists as a lack of something – it is a deficiency of good.
2. So evil only exists if good exists.
3. But good only exists if God exists.
4. Therefore, evil only exists if God does.

I’ve already criticized the third premise a couple of posts back. The other premise this argument depends on is the first one. But this premise Turek simply asserts. Like many theists, he seems to think it’s just obvious. I personally don’t think it is obvious at all — and certainly not any more so than the opposite claim, that good is the lack of evil.

Having made his case that evil is actually evidence for, rather than against, God, Turek then proceeds to the actual problem of evil. For, even though he maintains that evil cannot count against God’s existence, he does admit that there is still a puzzle as to why a perfectly good and all-powerful being would allow it in the first place — as well as why he would issue what appear to be evil commands, like the slaughter or the Canaanites.

Unfortunately, Turek’s excuses for Biblical evil are so bad, they're laughable. Among other things, he points out that Yahweh didn’t merely order the deaths of Canaanites, “but also of thousands of Israelites for idolatry.” In other words, the fact that God was willing to have many of his own chosen people slaughtered too shows that he wasn’t as bad as all that! Turek also informs us that “people never go out of existence, they just change locations” and so God is “perfectly just to move you from this life to the next life at any age he chooses.” This, of course, raises the question why murder is wrong. Turek doesn’t address that, however, other than by claiming that we aren’t allowed to “play God.”

As to the evils in this world, such as disease and natural disasters, Turek argues that “in our fallen state, communing with God and becoming more like Jesus often requires pain… Some people will never lay down their arms and surrender to Christ unless they are first awakened by pain and suffering.”

Notice the reference to our fallen state. We live in “a fallen, broken world where bad things happen.” And why is that? Because of “a freewill choice of Adam,” of course. This is supposed to get God off the hook: it’s all really our fault. Or Adam’s fault, perhaps. But what this still leaves unexplained is why sin should lead to a “broken world.” That it does so is God’s choice, and fault. So as a solution to the problem of evil, this one fails miserably. (I also wonder why it is Adam’s sin, and not Eve’s, that led to our fallen state. Fundamentalists don’t deny that Eve was every bit as sinful, so they’re not in any way making excuses for her. What they implicitly deny is that her sin counted the way Adam’s did. But this is just sexism. Eve sinned first, but since she’s just a woman, it’s not as important.)

Toward the end of the chapter, Turek makes the surprising claim that “Christianity has a reasonable explanation for evil and a solution to it. Atheism has neither.” But why should atheism need an explanation (much less a solution) for it if given atheism there is no such thing as evil? Which, after all, was the point Turek made earlier. This echoes the mistake in the previous chapter, where he argued both that according to atheism, nothing is right or wrong, and the killing of mentally handicapped people is right.

An earlier blog post on the reverse problem of evil:
MORALITY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 2

6/7/2018

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As expected, Turek criticizes atheists for expressing moral opinions, for on his view that’s inconsistent with atheism. If without God there can be no objective morality, then on what basis do atheists condemn wrongs? Unless, of course, they are once again "stealing from God."

Turek begins his case by pointing out that in the absence of an afterlife, there is no ultimate justice. As Richard Dawkins (who agrees with this part of the argument) put it, “in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice.” But if there’s no justice, Turek reasons, then neither is there any injustice — so how can Dawkins criticize, say, the actions of pedophile priests?

This, of course, is yet another example of Turek’s poor reasoning. He interprets Dawkins as claiming that the concept of justice has no application, when what Dawkins is in fact saying is that the world is ultimately unjust: We cannot expect good people to be rewarded and evil doers punished. And that has no bearing whatsoever on the issue of moral objectivity.

But supposing one does in fact deny the existence of objective moral principles: Is it inconsistent in that case to approve of certain things and disapprove of others, as Turek and so many others insist? Is it true that on the atheist view, the murder of a child has “no more moral significance than wearing white after Labor Day,” and that as a nonbeliever, “you need to suppress your most basic moral intuitions”? Not at all. That morality is not objective in no way implies that we do not have moral views, or that it is illegitimate to have them. I don’t believe in objective moral principles, but that doesn’t stop me from having opinions as to what should or shouldn’t be done.

The really strange thing about Turek’s overall argument is that, after claiming that on atheism nothing can be right or wrong, he goes on to describe the morality that he believes in fact follows from the Darwinian worldview — which of course is the view held by just about every atheist:

“If you follow the Darwinian principles consistently, you get the kind of moral outworking that [philosopher] James Rachels suggests.”

But if according to atheism there are no moral principles, as Turek maintains, then there cannot be any principles on an atheistic Darwinian perspective. Turek is confused once again. Even worse, he misrepresents Rachels’s views so as to make them look really bad. He quotes the following passage from Rachels' Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, claiming that the doctrine being discussed is the Darwinian one:

“What are we to say about [certain brain-damaged individuals]? The natural conclusion, according to the doctrine we are considering, would be that their status is that of mere animals. And perhaps we should go on to conclude that they may be used as non-human animals are used — perhaps as laboratory subjects, or as food?”

Turek then asks his readers if they think he is “making this up,” adding: “Who could believe there’s nothing really wrong with such horrible acts? Atheists. [And] not just Richard Dawkins and James Rachels…”

I’m sure Turek’s readers were convinced more than ever of the evils that atheism and Darwin’s theory lead to. And yet Turek is in fact — whether intentionally or not — “making this up”! The doctrine that Rachels is considering in the above passage is not Darwinism at all, but rather “the idea that humans are in a special moral category because they are rational, autonomous agents” — a view that Rachels rejects in part because it leads to the above consequence! And Turek either knew this, in which case he is lying (in a chapter on morality, no less), or he could easily have checked by reading the two preceding pages (184-186) in Rachels’ book, in which case he was negligent (which also carries with it moral culpability).

Near the end of his chapter, Turek mentions that he often asks atheists, “If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?” He insists that to answer “no,” as many do, is entirely unreasonable. But it isn’t. To be a Christian isn’t merely to believe in the truth of its doctrines. After all, the devil and his minions presumably believe in the Jesus story, yet aren't part of the flock. To be a Christian, one also has to live in accordance with its doctrines. It follows that anyone who has moral objections to the religion can’t be a Christian, even if they come to the conclusion that the story is true. Turek, however, is so blinded by his assumption that God is the basis of morality that it never occurs to him that someone might have moral reasons for disagreeing.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 1

6/1/2018

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Continuing with Frank Turek's book, Stealing from God:

What can one say about a chapter informing us that “morality isn’t made of molecules,” and that attempts to stump nonbelievers by asking such questions as: "What does justice weigh?", "What is the chemical composition of courage?", and (my personal favorite) "Did Hitler just have ‘bad’ molecules”? It’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll begin by addressing the underlying argument Turek uses tying morality to God.

Unsurprisingly, Turek maintains that in a godless universe, there can be no objective moral principles. Now, I happen to agree with that — but then I also think that there cannot be objective morality in a universe with a god. God’s got nothing to do with it.

Turek is — again unsurprisingly — also a proponent of the modified divine command theory. This is the new and supposedly improved version introduced as a way to avoid a problem with the older theory. Only it doesn’t.

In the original version, something is good because it conforms to God’s desires. So kindness is good because God desires us to be kind. But that means that if God desired the exact opposite, the exact opposite would be good. If he desired us to kill one another, murder would be right. And a divine command theorist cannot escape this by claiming that God only desires what is good (and thus would never desire murder), for that implies that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God.

In the modified version, something is good because it conforms to God’s nature. So love and justice are good because God is loving and just. But now the exact same problem arises: If God were hateful, hate would be good. And once again, a divine command theorist cannot escape this by claiming that God’s nature is good (and thus could not be hateful), for that implies that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God.

Proponents of the view might object that God is necessarily the way he is — so that it is impossible for him to have had a different nature — but that misses the point. (And if that objection worked here, it would work for the original version as well: One could as easily maintain that God couldn’t have desired anything other than what he does desire. So why invent a new theory to avoid that problem?) The reason this misses the point is that it fails to address the underlying question: What makes something good? Is it because it conforms to God’s nature irrespective of what that nature is, or is it because it conforms to God’s good nature? If the former, then the original problem remains. If the latter, then goodness doesn’t depend on God. For in that case, there must be something that makes God’s nature good other that it simply being God’s nature.

We can also understand the problem this way: In order to find out what is good on the modified divine command theory, we must first find out what God’s nature is, and then adjust our behavior accordingly. Now, we may think that we already know what that nature is. But if tomorrow we discover that, actually, God is by nature a liar, not only would we have to regard truth-telling as evil, we would also have to now do the opposite of everything he commands. After all, that stuff about him wanting us to love our neighbor would have been just another one of his deceptions.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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Stealing from God: Intentions and the Laws of Nature

5/23/2018

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So far, we’ve covered causality, reason, and information in Turek’s C.R.I.M.E.S. acronym. But there is another “i” he mentions: intentionality (by which he simply means the characteristic of having intentions, rather than what that term means in the philosophy of mind). Acting intentionally is acting with purpose, or toward some goal. Most of this section of the book, however, is concerned with a more fundamental idea: That there are goals or purposes in all of nature. This is an idea that Turek learned from religious philosopher Edward Feser, who in turn got it from Aquinas. In fact, it’s the basis of Aquinas’s fifth way of proving the existence of God.

It’s easy to find purposes within living things. The organs of animals serve certain purposes for their owners. But what about in the nonliving world? What purposes or goals could possibly be found there? I was initially surprised by Turek’s basis for claiming that even inert matter is “directed toward an end.” The reason he offers is simply that nature behaves in a regular, law-like way:

“Electrons reliably orbit the nucleus of their atom; atoms consistently form certain molecules but not others; and planets follow a precise orbit — they don’t fly off into oblivion or start and stop randomly.”

But what could this possibly have to do with purposes or goals? Turek never says, but in The Last Superstition, Feser explains it this way:

“In each case, the causes don’t simply happen to result in certain effects, but are evidently and inherently directed toward certain specific effects as toward a ‘goal’.”

In other words, the fact that every time water reaches 100 degrees C at sea-level pressure, it begins to boil means that it “aims” at boiling under such conditions. Or so Feser and Aquinas claim. (Feser says that Aristotle also claims this, though I don’t think that’s the case. But I don’t want to get side-tracked here. I merely mention this because the entire argument is based on Aristotle’s concept of a “final cause,” by which Aristotle meant that for which something exists. Thus, the final cause of a hammer is to pound nails, the final cause of the heart is to pump blood, and so on. According to Aristotle, not everything has a final cause, however.)

The problem is that the above is at best a very misleading way of putting it. I don’t know why anyone would want to describe the fact that water always boils under conditions C as water having the “goal” of boiling under conditions C, or “aiming” to boil under such conditions. But if one does so, one can’t then use such a misleading description to conclude that therefore there must be some intention behind it — which is what Aquinas, Feser and Turek proceed to do. For, as Feser further explains:

“…it is impossible for anything to be directed toward an end unless that end exists in an intellect which directs the thing in question toward it. And it follows, therefore, that the system of ends or final causes that make up the physical universe can only exist at all because there is a Supreme Intelligence or intellect outside that universe which directs things toward their ends.”

Aquinas’s argument, then, is basically this: There are causal laws in the physical universe such that identical causes lead to identical effects. This means that someone intends those causes to produce those effects. Therefore, God exists.

And so the whole thing really turns out to involve intentions. But the problem, of course, is that the mere fact that there are causal laws doesn’t lead to this conclusion at all. There is nothing incoherent in the idea that the world just is law-like, so that whenever conditions C are present, effect E occurs. It doesn’t follow that the effects must in that case be “aimed at” by anything, or be the “purpose” of the cause in question. Hence, it doesn’t follow that someone must have aimed them.

And even in those cases where it makes sense to talk of actual purposes existing in the nonconscious realm — such as in the inner workings of organisms — there is no reason to talk of intentions. Nature is capable of producing such organization without anyone having planned it beforehand. Aquinas never heard of Darwin. Feser and Turek, however, have no excuse.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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STEALING FROM GOD: TUREK’S FLAWED INFORMATION ARGUMENT

5/14/2018

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In chapter three of Stealing from God, Turek asks us to imagine walking along a beach and seeing the words “John loves Mary” scribbled in the sand. We would never think that a crab making random marks on the ground was responsible. And the reason we wouldn’t, he says, is because “John loves Mary” contains information: That’s how we know that someone with a mind was responsible. But, Turek goes on, DNA also contains information. In fact, it contains far more information than “John loves Mary.” Therefore, we should conclude that a mind was responsible for it as well.

There’s just one problem with this argument: The reason it makes no sense to believe that “John loves Mary” might have been scribbled by a crab is not because it contains information. Rather, it’s because it is extremely unlikely at this level of complexity for an accidental pattern to end up matching a given pattern — just as it is extremely unlikely for a shuffled deck of cards to come out in perfect suit order. It is because of this that we can conclude that the scribbles contain information, and not the other way around.

Scribbles in that particular pattern do not necessarily mean what we take them to mean. If, by some amazing coincidence, we saw a crab actually scribbling such a pattern, it wouldn’t be informative — at least not in the same way. We could not conclude, based on such markings, that there is someone named John who loves someone named Mary.

So Turek has it backwards. We don’t start with the fact that there is information, and then conclude that a mind is responsible. Rather, we start from the fact that such a pattern was almost certainly created by something with a mind (as anything else would be extremely unlikely), and then conclude that it therefore contains information.

But, someone might counter, when it comes to DNA, we already know that it contains information. After all, DNA is basically a complex biological “program” — one that, in the words of Bill Gates, is “far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” So doesn’t it follow in this case that a mind must have been responsible?

Not based on Turek’s argument. We may conclude that if a particular pattern was created by a mind, it contains information. But that doesn't mean we can argue in the opposite direction, from the fact that a pattern contains information to the conclusion that it must have been created by a mind. One could, of course, appeal to something else. One might use some version of the argument from design, for example — though that, too, can be refuted. But that’s not Turek’s strategy. Instead, he insists on claiming that atheists would never believe that a pattern like “John loves Mary” could occur naturally because it contains information, and thus are inconsistent when they believe that DNA occurred naturally. And that’s just false.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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WHY WOULD WE REJECT GOD?

RELIGION AND FALSIFIABILITY

STEALING FROM GOD: CONCLUSION

STEALING FROM GOD: TUREK'S CASE FOR CHRISTIANITY

STEALING FROM GOD: SCIENCE

STEALING FROM GOD: EVIL

STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 2

STEALING FROM GOD: MORALITY, PART 1

Stealing from God: Intentions and the Laws of Nature

STEALING FROM GOD: TUREK’S FLAWED INFORMATION ARGUMENT

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