Category Archives: Philosophy

Literature, Philosophy, Reason, Religion

Why Do We Care?

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One of the most common rebuttals I face, generally from well-meaning friends, is the old chestnut: “Why do you care? What’s wrong with religion if it doesn’t directly affect you? Why can’t you leave people alone?”

This stance neatly condemns any attacks on “soft” theism/deism whilst open-endedly permitting criticism of religion that does directly affect me, or people in general.

I am constantly at pains to sculpt my position with the utmost clarity. I don’t like religion. I don’t like unfounded beliefs that have more in common with delusional fairy tales than a rational response to the universe; similarly I am compelled to wax vitriol against beliefs in the supernatural, in the pseudoscientific. But as far as religion goes, I am restrained.

Continue reading Why Do We Care? →

Introductions, Philosophy, Reason

About Knowledge

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Hey there .

It’s very late and I’m tired but I said I will have a blog by Sunday and if I don’t deliver I will OCD my brains out over it. I’m awesome like that. So please excuse my possible ramble.

In this blog I will mainly adress the Theists. I heard many of them saying that they KNOW certain things in regards to God and what they say to be “the Creation’ . Even in the recent debate between Thunderf00t and Ray Comfort, Ray said a couple of times that (unlike Thunderf00t) he KNOWS what the truth is.

I will try to argue why this claim cannot possibly hold water.

First of all, what does “to know’ mean anyway?  Can we say that we know anything at all ? I would say we can. For instance, I KNOW that there are more than two people writing on this site. I know this because I can count, I can read, I personally know more than two of them, etc. The point is, I can say I KNOW this because it is in my immediate and direct observation.

I can also say I know that Human and Chimpanzee DNA is about 98.5 percent identical. This is clearly not in my immediate and direct observation but I can still say I KNOW it because I have sufficient data proving it. All facts gathered through observation and experiment point to this conclusion, none of them point against it.

But let’s try another example. Not to long ago, if anyone asked me to define a triangle without mentioning its angles, I would have said that any given 3 points that are not in a straight line form a triangle . And I thought I KNOW that the sum of the interior angles of any triangle is 180 degrees. But I was wrong. This is true if the given triangle is in Euclidian space. But if someone could draw a triangle in the near neighbourhood of a Black Hole with such intense gravity forces, the interior angles of that triangle would NOT add up to 180 degrees. The results are very different depending on how Space bends. So suddenly, even if I was certain I KNOW something, at some point I realized that my so called knowledge was in fact a belief.  And I was wrong in my belief because I was ignorant of the data.

I still have certain beliefs. For instance, I believe that Quantum Mechanic could be eventually proven not to contradict Determinism. I don’t believe that the atoms act randomly but rather that at atomic level there might be laws we haven’t discovered yet and variables we cannot calculate. Which, imho, is not to say that the atoms are not subjected to the cause and effect rules. And I believe that (strongly I may say) because EVERYTHING in the observable Universe is subjected to the cause and effect rule. But I am willing to admit that I don’t KNOW that and there is a possibility I might be wrong. And if, at some point, all evidence will lead to the conclusion that atoms can act randomly, I will change my belief. I highly doubt this will happen, what I am trying to say is that I don’t rule out this option because I realize this is something I believe and NOT something I know.

How about God ? When you say you KNOW God is real and He created everything, what do you base it on?  On a book with origins and authors very dubious (to say the least). God is not in your immediate and direct observation and there is no collected data to support his existence. He cannot be proven through observation and experiment. So you are left with your book. And how do you know that your book is the Truth ? Because it says so in your book. Can you spot the problem with this ? (hint : it starts with a “c’ and it ends with “ircular’)

And you may say now that according to this logic, Atheists cannot say they KNOW there is no God. Which is correct and I don’t know one single Atheist who says so. An Atheist will say he does not BELIVE in a God. The difference between the logic  of an Atheist and the logic Theist is that the first doesn’t believe because of lack of evidence while the former believes DESPITE  the lack of evidence.

Where I am going with this is that you cannot say that you KNOW your God is real. You only BELIEVE he is real. And if you accept that what you call knowledge is in fact a belief, you will also have to accept the possibility that you might be wrong.

I’m just sayin’

Criss

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

If Antony Flew Believes In God, Isn’t That Good Enough?

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Congratulations to our two promo winners!

 

Now, this is a recurring trend in fundamentalist debate (and there are so many recurring trends . . . just so many, and it hurts a little). It’s a variation on the “Einstein believed in God, and he’s the father of science, so just . . . shut up, ok? Shut up and take it” argument.

The difference is that most of the notable figures who fundies claim to have believed in God didn’t, of course. Einstein didn’t, Darwin didn’t – claims to the contrary are supported by careful quote mining. But Antony Flew is a goldmine for the right kind of fundamentalist mindset – a notable atheist who decided he believed in a higher power after all. This, despite the possibility of his advancing years causing mental decline, is sadly – or happily, depending on your outlook – incontrovertible.

The thinking is always that, if someone like Flew can renounce atheism, surely that’s good enough for you? There are a few other names of deconvertees that occasionally arise at this point in the debate (generally, it’s around this time that fundies will start to link you to Hovind videos as well) but I can’t recall them. There aren’t very many, though. Fred Hoyle is sometimes used, as his perception of the fine-tuning of physical laws led him to theistic views.

How to defeat this argument? Simple. As with most of the logicfails committed by our opponents, the best way to rebuke is to turn it back. So if a famous atheist deconverting is proof for God . . . surely a famous theist deconverting is proof for God not existing? Douglas Adams, say. He’s famous. He used to believe the whole thing, until he stopped and listened to a street preacher and decided it was nonsense. Is that proof of God being nonexistent? No, of course it isn’t! Neither argument is worth anything; the thing is to get fundamentalists to realise that if our version is meaningless, so is theirs.

Philosophy, Random, Reason

The Illusion Of Choice, Or Maybe It’s Not An Illusion, Who Knows

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Ever made a decision?

Of course you have! You chose to visit the League today. And for this, I salute you. Except that, by visiting the League today . . . maybe you’ve killed us all. You bastard.

When you actually think about the choices, decisions and actions you’ve taken that led to your current life, many of them will probably seem unbelievably haphazard. I got to know one of my closest friends because, on my first evening at uni, I happened to go to the student bar and hang around. Crippling isolation compelled me to strike up hesitant conversation with a couple of people. I nearly didn’t go to the bar and there were dozens of other people I might have talked to instead. The last 5 or so years of my life could have been entirely different if I’d taken a second more or less to think about what I was going to do that evening.

Likewise, I got to know my other closest friend through a series of more or less random happenstances, but again things would have been very different had I not been looking to stay around for another year and he hadn’t been looking for a housemate (and I hadn’t happened to see his advert for a vacant room.) For a start, I very likely wouldn’t be here writing this.

The relationships you hold with your closest friends and loved ones are probably all based on tenuous interconnecting circumstance. Go out, or stay in? Go here or there? And maybe you meet someone pretty randomly and it becomes something special. But all the events, the choices that led to you being where you are at that moment discovering that you both love Bon Jovi, become so fractured and multiplying as you go back in time . . . it’s odd to think about.

Another example. I’ve been with my girlfriend for about a year. We met because I went into a salon where she worked. I courted her, won her and then BROKE DOWN HER FAITH. If another salon had been cheaper, I’d have gone there. Would I have met someone else? If I hadn’t been fired from my previous job, I’d never have met my girlfriend at all. And me even being in London in the first place directly results from a decision\action I took some years ago (I won’t give details) that, had I taken it 30 seconds later, would have affected nothing. I’d have never known, of course. I might still have come here, but it would have been very different.

The thing that gets me is that, if you can so easily form a complex and meaningful relationship with someone through a chance meeting informed by countless decisions (by both parties involved, who have in themselves been affected by countless decisions of countless other people) then how many relationships are we missing? If I decided to strike up more conversations with a customer, who would they turn out to be? Is that girl there, the one who sort of smiled at me as I got off the tube, is she the One? Is she another One? How many people are there walking around that have the potential to deeply change my life that I never met thanks to some tiny choice that I probably wasn’t consciously aware of?

It’s enough to drive a man insane. Maybe my decision to write this blog will cause something to happen. Maybe Patrick Stewart will read it, be impressed, and adopt me as his son and protege.

Anyone who’s seen “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will know that it’s not a great film – but it’s one of the only films I’ve seen that actually spends time trying to grapple with the headwrenching concept of cause and effect. A lengthy sequence details all the countless tiny interconnected things that, had just one been different, would have resulted in a character not getting hit by a car. When your future can be decided by something a complete stranger does or doesn’t do, on a whim in the space of a second, that can affect many other people and events sequentially and exponentially, doesn’t life seem a bit shaky?

Since we have the glory of retrospect, it’s tempting to look at the consequences of all the things we do and think how easily different everything could have been – and to extrapolate from that all the potential pathways we can lead ourselves down. Such thinking can drive you mad, of course, because while we may have the power to make our own choices it is ONLY in retrospect that we can see the full effect of them. I could engage every one of my customers in detailed conversation today, but it was a more or less desultory comment to a customer recently that revealed him as a fairly successful award-winning musician. Do we really have any choice if we only know what we did after the event? Sure, I could do a great many things today, and all of them are possible – but it only becomes real when I DO them. All the previous branching chances collapse as soon as you do anything at all.

And it’s thinking like this that tends to lead to speculations on parallel universes, where everything gets played out, that every choice or non-choice sends the universe spinning down some different route. I personally reject such thinking, unsupported as it is by anything other than wishful thinking. My adopted philosopy is Didactylos’ “Things just happen. What the hell.” I recommend this stance to everyone.

Philosophy, Random, Reason, Science, YouTube

The Moon

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Look at this video I just dids LOOK AT IT

The glories of space.

You’ll presumably forgive my idealistic ramblings, but the moon was out when I was walking to work this morning and something occurred to me that hadn’t before. As I’ve said in a previous blog, we don’t really look at the moon and sun as anything other than constants in the sky, purely because they’re as ubiquitous as the oceans or the clouds. If we want to look at the wonders of space, we’re trained into thinking that we must seek out photos and videos  – that this is the only way we can see into the universe.

There’s something utterly haunting about a moon in orbit round a distant planet. I did my best to collect the finest space photography I could find in the video, but of course we don’t need to go anywhere near that far.

The half-shadowed moon, in the early morning light in a pale blue sky, looked every bit as beautiful and tantalising as Titan behind Saturn’s rings, or Io transiting Jupiter. It’s up there now. A whole world. Get you outside.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

The Failbox Of Moral Absolutism

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My inspiration for this particular blog is gleaned, unhappily, from a NephilimFree video. For those languishing in sweet ignorance, NephilimFree is a Youtube creationist who closely resembles something you might find hunkered under a stone. And for those about to accuse me of cheap adhom, don’t worry – the man would be as stupid and worrying if he looked like Brad Pitt and AronRa strapped together. It’s just so . . . so classic that he looks like everyone’s stereotypical image of the pale, overweight religious fundamentalist.

He made a brief allusion to moral absolutism whilst en route to some cataclysmically balls conclusion about evolution, offering it as a brief proof of God. His argument, and indeed the arguments of all moral absolutists are similar, went like this:

“We know it is evil to rape a baby. But how do we know? This inherent evilness must come from somewhere, it has to have been provided ERGO GOD DID IT HE BLOODY DID THA KNOWS”

Now, I may often make babyrape jokes, so I just want to assure you that I wasn’t making that example for lulz – his words, not mine.

The basic tenet of moral absolutism, (or moral objectivism\objectivity) henceforth referred to as MA to save me a great deal of tedium, is that certain things are universally known to be good or bad. To everyone. Popular examples are rape and murder. We all KNOW it’s wrong. William Lane Craig, that spectacularly fatuous but annoyingly eloquent apologist, made a similar argument when debating with the then atheist Anthony Flew.

This argument is, I need scarcely point out, the supremest ass.

For a start, NephilimFree fails to take into account that, whilst the majority of people would certainly regard the rape of a baby as morally repugnant, some people would not. Namely the people who go around raping babies in the first place. And this is completely ignoring hypothetical situations where the rape of a baby would save a great many people (I freely confess being unable to think of many such situations, but say you have a man who takes 20 people hostage and demands a baby to rape in exchange for the safe release of his hostages . . . is babyrape then still immutably wrong? How many people would have to die before the rape of one baby is outweighed by multiple murders? And so on.)

The world is not as starkly black and white as MA-ists would have us believe. There are clear trends that show what actions are, by and large, considered to be good or bad by humanity in general – but there is no standard, no consensus, no one list of good and bad that every single person could agree on. The shades of grey number into the practically infinite. The trouble is that MA-ists tend to – in fact, are quite naturally compelled to – see the moral compass from atop their own cultural magnet. Nephilim and WLC, to take my two examples, are both American Christians living in the hallowed grounds of the Western civilised world. I’m sure they would recoil in horror if lectured about the scarification rites of various tribal cultures and groups, which are by my standards barbaric. I’m sure they would be repelled, as I am, by the ritual cutting of Muslim children’s heads during Ashura. I would take such acts to be considered immoral more or less across the board, outside  the cultures that practice them – but there is no absolutism here. The people that perform such ritual incisement and scarification are not isolated sociopaths, they are merely operating from a different perspective that they consider to be entirely justified. Note that I’m not condoning such things in the slightest, just demonstrating that what we may call barbaric child abuse is a way of life to a large number of people.

Of course, I have to wonder how Nephilim and WLC regard circumcision. Personally, I find it abhorrent – the mutilation of a child’s genitals, against their will, in the name of some unprovable deity. I often wonder how the nation (whichever nation, mine is the UK) would react if news surfaced of some religious cult who, inspired by their scriptures, ritualistically cut off the left earlobe of all newborn boys. I imagine there would be outrage. However, circumcision is carried out en masse, every day, every minute – the forced removal of part of someone’s body. The only authority it has is antiquity, and of course that argument would lead us back to treating women like possessions (unless you’re in a religion where you already DO treat them like possessions, which saves time) and enslaving people who have a different skin pigmentation. Authority is no kind of argument, and it seems the only defence circumcision has – claims that it significantly improves health are bogus. The decision should lie with the individual, unforced by external pressure.

If two of the largest religions in the world practice genital mutilation, how can there be moral absolutism?

There can only be moral absolutism in small groups – probably the only way you could get a handful of people who would take identical stances on every single moral issue you could raise. Of course, I’m not talking only about things like rape, murder and mutilation. I’m talking about the little things, decisions on whether or not to lie\go home early from work\not do something you were told to do, and so on. I’m sure Neph would say that only the big issues matter, but if you’re talking about MA then you can’t have it just for the major issues. It’s not as if these absolute morals break down once you get into pettier concerns of lying and cheating. If one thing is absolutely right or wrong, everything has to be. So out of 100 people, 100 might agree that babyrape is wrong – but 26 might think it’s ok to steal to provide money for medicine (and 4 of them think it’s ok to steal just to provide money for themselves). 14 might think it’s ok to cheat on their partner. A further 7 might think homosexuals are sinful. 32 might have no problem with circumcision. And for every person who is ok with such a stance, you might have people who take the opposing view whilst doing something themselves that others consider to be immoral. And so on, and on, and on. The Pope, ensconced within his fortress of deceit, thinks that homosexuality is objectively wrong – and this man is the head of the Catholic church. Nice going, guys.

At best, there are trends. Some of the trends are stronger and more widespread, but none are immutable. I cannot think of a single thing that everyone would agree on as being completely and universally bad, something from which moral absolutism could be derived. I put this question to my girlfriend, and she suggested “Destroying the world?” Sadly I can imagine that you’d easily find someone to do it, if they had the chance.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

A Debate With A Vague God Enthusiast

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Haven’t blogged for a bit, so I’m storming back with a long one. In addition to that, I have a larger than average blog post for your delectation.

My girlfriend and her friend ended up talking about God, and my name got mentioned – presumably because I’m just that awesome. My GF, as someone who’s pretty much had her faiths eroded by my niggling arguments (“Shall we get some wine? Also, why would an all-powerful God allow evil to occur?”) wanted her friend to talk to me on the subject. She prepared a short argument and I emailed her my response.

Something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d emailed her was that she is, apparently, very stubborn and will never let go of her beliefs. Which renders debate more or less meaningless, but hey – who knows?

 

“What is sense? Why can’t open minded thoughts help you accept a possibility of a greater power/energy source named as god?”

I think my GF gave you the wrong impression of my perspective on this issue. I accept the POSSIBILITY of God, or a higher power, simply because it would be scientifically hypocritical to state with certainty that it could NOT exist. Until every iota of the universe has been catalogued, which is almost certainly something we will never do, we cannot posture with certainty on such matters. To state something CANNOT exist is a faith-based position, albeit anthetical to faith IN a God, and as such is a position not often adopted by intellectuals.

So, I can accept the possibility. But with a complete lack of any positive proof, there is no point considering it further. An inability to disprove something is not adequate proof FOR it, otherwise you would have to give equal credence to absolutely every unfalsifiable hypothesis anyone ever makes. Along with your concept of God, you’d have to grant the equal chance of everyone else’s concept of God, along with all supernatural claims. This is without even going into the logical paradoxii that arguments for God tend to invoke, which I’ll go into a bit later..

“Why can’t there be a god?”

I’d need to know more detail about your concept of God to answer this. However, in general, God creates more questions than it answers. Simply using God as a catch-all answer to the mysteries of the universe is unrealistic, because you then have to explain God. You end up with paradoxii of omnipotence, problems of free will, problems of omnicognisance. So tell me more about your perception of God – is it conscious? Insensate? Does it have a specific purpose? What powers does it possess? Is it immortal/eternal/invincible? Is it limited in any sense?

Until I have more detail, though, the simple answer is there COULD be a God – but it’s so vastly unlikely, so internally inconsistent and contradictory by most human accounts, that there’s no point in pursuing it. As we on the internet say, pictures or it didn’t happen. The onus of proof is ALWAYS on the other side to substantiate God – NOT on me to disprove.

“By opening your mind and thoughts you accept possibilities, by accepting possibilities you become more knowledgeable, and by being more knowledgeable you are naturally more intelligent.”

Accepting possibilities is fine. It’s what drives scientific endeavour and progress. But you don’t actually become more knowledgeable until you have proved these possibilities as something workable. There’s some famous quote, I think from Richard Dawkins, which is more or less “Be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls out.” Wondering how things work and having a spirit of enquiry keeps discovery constant; however, that is no reason to hang on to the impossible or the unworkable. The historical precedent is that poorly understood natural phenomena attributed to the supernatural (for example, the various cultural pantheons to whom natural forces and processes were attributed via individual deities, as opposed to monotheism where a single entity controls everything – this seems to be what you’re postulating) eventually become explained by scientific means. The age of simply hypothesising something which sounds about right is long gone. The age of empiricism demands proof, repeatable observation, before a possibility becomes workable. Otherwise the whole thing simply collapses in disarray under the weight of countless “possibilities” which can only be accepted because they cannot be completely disproved.

That is the nature of science, of course. It operates on inductive reasoning, on extending an assumption from a necessarily limited sample group. However, deductive reasoning – which begins from an axiomatic statement and is thus considered to be more reliable than inductive logic – is never grounded in the real world. Only logical and mathematical constructs can be axiomatic. A famous deduction is “All are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.” However, this deduction relies on inductive empiricism for its axiom. The only way of looking at the world and the universe is by the scientific method; only abstracts, like logic and maths (human constructions) produce axiomatically true results – and these results are definitionally divorced from the real world.

“Where did the first energy source come from?”

We’re working on it 🙂

We don’t know. The origins of the universe are pretty trippy to consider. However, given the aforementioned historical precedent of supernatural explanations being superceded, it’s reasonable to assume that we will eventually know – and not knowing NOW doesn’t mean we will NEVER know. Also, not knowing the origins of the universe is comparatively simple when compared to using God as an explanation and then trying to work out how God created itself, or all the other attendant problems with using God to explain anything.

“Do humans have any energy source beyond physics? Why? Why not?”

If human beings have an energy source beyond physics it’s pointless to even speculate as it necessarily wouldn’t be something we could even detect. If we could detect it, it would be an aspect of known physical laws and not metaphysical or supernatural in nature. So, no, humans do not have an energy source beyond physics because the question doesn’t have any actual meaning – you’re asking to verify something which definitionally, as soon as it is verified, STOPS being beyond physics.

“Bear in mind that without self-evidence there is none. With no evidence, you rely on belief. Therefore proof is belief. If belief is your source of proof why can’t you believe in god and use belief as proof.” (I nearly pooped myself when I read that argument.)

That’s a little too much of a logical leap though. Proof is NOT belief. Proof is proof. Belief implies some kind of dependence on the believer for continuation, and gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. Scientists don’t rely on belief or faith, and neither do the things the scientific method discovers.
Your argument dictates that, if belief is a proof, EVERYTHING is real and possible. Jeremy, the unicorn inside Jupiter who controls gravity (but only in this solar system) is real because I have belief in him – and thus proof. And, of course, the concept of God that I believe in that forces all possible Gods to NOT exist (including yours) must be real, because I have belief.

Belief is not the source of proof for scientists, or for me. Repeatable, observable testing and evidence is proof. Proof that is consistent with all previously gathered research. Using belief as proof not only invites a great deal of confusion, it’s demonstrably untrue, and it indicates a lack of any REAL proof for claims. If your proof is belief, you are admitting that you have no concrete evidence on which to go on.

 

So now, we wait . . .

Philosophy, Reason, Science, YouTube

Radio debate “Evolution”: djarm67 vs Dr Steve Kumar

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A couple of days ago, Mrs djarm67 was told that a local radio station was going to host a speaker who would confront the “New atheism” movement and evolution. I took the info on board and began listening to the station to get some more info, e.g. when and who. This proved to be a mildly irritating experience within itself as my musical tastes are stimulated far more easily by a combination of prog-rock and hybrids of grunge, psychedelia or various brands of metallic funk with at least a short term residence in the Phrygian mode. This exercise was made somewhat more pleasant with the lubrication of a blend of Hunter Valley Cabernet Merlot. Eventually, it was revealed that the event was to occur not just on the Sunday night but would utilise frequency modulation of the VHF electromagnetic spectrum. The proponent gracing the airwaves at that time to “confront” this new atheism and evolution would be Dr Steve Kumar.

Heard of him?

Neither had I.

So began the extension of my love affair with all things online. I began to investigate the “who” behind the scheduled event. Who is this Dr? A Dr of what? Where did he get his doctorate? Was it legitimate or Hovindesque?

I found many examples of duplicates of his bio (marketing brochure) which attested to an awesomeness clearly in excess of anything I could hope to muster. Finding out what he was a doctor of or where he got it proved difficult and I actually had to rely on his introduction on the radio programme itself to educate my ignorance that I would be dealing with a “Doctor of Philosophical Theology” if I chose to enter the field of battle.

Here is Dr Steve Kumar

Dr Steve Kumar
Dr Steve Kumar

I did find a reference which indicated he had received his doctorate from the same “California diploma mill” as disgraced NZ MP Bernie Ogilvy (who I believe claimed to possess a law degree from an institute which did not even have a law programme). A brochure promoting the “Eleventh annual European summer study session of the International Academy of apologetics, evangelism and human rights” lists Dr Kumar as “Faculty and Advisory” alongside a conspicuous William A Demski. Post-interaction with Dr Kumar, I found another reference which indicated that the institute in question is the “California Graduate School Of Theology” (a worthy member of the Wikipedia “List of unaccredited institutions of higher learning”)

So here I was. An anonymous YouTuber with dreams of “League of Reason” blogging prowess about to confront some (apparently) world renowned Christian apologist who was a doctor no less. I had never been involved in a live radio debate previously. When responding to those on forums or my YouTube channel, I have the luxury of being able to research an answer prior to responding (a luxury not present in the heat of the battle which is talk back radio). I set up my tape recorder, turned on the radio and reached nervously for the phone. Here is the result.

This debate is split across two YouTube videos. Please watch both as I am a blatant video view whore. Oops, I mean I think you will enjoy them both. I’ve included accompanying images and video footage which I hope you will find humourous.

Evolution debate: djarm67 vs Dr Steve Kumar Part 1

Evolution debate: djarm67 vs Dr Steve Kumar Part 2

In addition, for those who frequent PZ Myers blog; Pharangula, I have included a Cephalopod treat for you.

DJ

Philosophy, YouTube

Christian Apologetics

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Normal people are annoyed by Christian apologetics, a fact which in having never been acknowledged by Christian apologetics, more or less proves the point.

I wonder why.

  • Is it that Christian apologists don’t realize that saying something differently is not different from saying something twice?
  • Is it that Christian apologetics is apparently one of the few fields in which excellence is in no way correlated to competence?
  • Is it that Christian apologetics seems entrepreneurial?
  • Is it that Christian apologists are soporific on their best days?
  • Is it that Christian apologetics seems more about theatrical competitiveness?
  • Is it that Christian apologists demonize what they don’t understand?
  • Is it that Christian apologetics seems to cavalierly borrow definitions from every important field of scholarship and then redefine them into uselessness?
  • Is it that Christian apologists seem transparently unpleasantly solicitous?
  • Is it that Christian apologetics seems to attract repugnant human beings with bizarre attitudes towards taxation?
  • Or is is that Christian apologists in an effort to make Christianity seem simple make it look simpleminded?

The answer is, of course, yes.

But, I think that the essential frustration that is Christian apologetics is a foolish and impatient insistence on the primacy of belief in the existence of God, the historicity of the Resurrection, and the belief in Biblical literalism, a triptych which only Christian apologists accept wholesale and even most Christians have difficulty swallowing entirely.

I will concede, of course, Christians should ultimately take comfort from the Resurrection, or, at least, a sense that the overcoming of death affords the life everlasting, and Christians should look to the Good Book as the written back bone of the religion and belief that that book is special among other books, although I doubt that that is literalism.

And I can accept that behind most Christian beliefs, God is a necessary prior condition and that belief in God is, in this sense, theologically proper, but “belief,” as most people use it, is different from the charismatic, Earth-shaking, life-altering, problem-solving “belief” that Christian apologists will pity you for not having.

God, the Resurrection, and the Bible form a sort of self-reinforcing argument around the proper Christian, with historical method, extra-Biblical research, and philosophy floating off in the distance, to be tapped if necessary.

With God, the Resurrection, and the Bible firmly believed, a sort of trickle down effect occurs and things like charity and forgiveness come on-line. Church attendance, a prayer life, family life, and vocation follow.

I criticize this because, from everything that I can tell about God and how Christians, as his children, should in themselves be, belief or faith in God is only properly meaningful when adjoined to other otherwise good activities of mind or body and sometimes is even subordinated.

A Christian who cannot argue that love is good without mentioning God cannot argue that love is good.

It is an irony of theology that Jesus, who preferred to teach in the non-literal, would be followed by the literal and unimaginative.

And the Resurrection, I think, reveals its own series of problems of historicity, which, while are lessened by faith, are not alleviated entirely by faith and we are left with something that is as meaningful as an historical fact as it is meaningful as a metaphor.

I propose, therefore, an inversion of the Christian apologetic method, one that reflects the difficulty people have in accepting those three crowns of theology and, I think, even anticipates that while most Christians disagree about the method of Biblical interpretation, for example, few Christians argue over the importance of love.

God, I think, would be happy if we practiced the Fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

There is no law against them and surely no God would be pleased by a systemic apologetic that includes them as a mere footnote. And the lessons of the Sermon on the Plain are themselves challenges and we need apologists to help us make sense of them and guide us through them and not ignore them.

As I write this, I wonder what God thought when David danced before Him with all his might? Was He pleased by the dance? Or the might?

Thomas Merton said: “The fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You.”

And surely even if one does not believe in God, the fact that one desires to pleases God. And, then, even if one doesn’t have that explicit desire, the fact that one desires truth and goodness, must also please God.

God asks for belief without seeing (John 20:29). Surely God is not the lesser when the faithless sing, in their way, hallelujah.

Philosophy, Reason

Kicked Out For Saying “There Is No God”

6 Comments

Here’s a funny thing.

I say funny . . . it’s actually only funny in the sense that a really fat guy trying to get down some stairs is funny. Granted, it’s pretty funny, but there’s an undercurrent of pathos.

My girlfriend got kicked out of her maths class a couple of days ago for saying God didn’t exist. When people expressed righteous anger at this perspective, she challenged them to prove God did exist. Some people got angry and her tutor sent her out – not only because she was “offending” students but the tutor as well.

My only suggestion to her was not to state “God doesn’t exist”, as then we occupy that dangerous faith-based stance; but to state “There is a chance, but it’s merely a logical necessity dictated by the deductive nature of empirical observation.” Although it didn’t sound as if anyone in her class was aware of such subtleties. No, they were simply offended that someone had disrespected their faith.

As my GF said, she’s just as offended by assertions that man should not lie with man, or that a rapist could go to heaven if he repents. In fact there was a whole bunch of stuff she only thought of saying afterwards, as is often the case with impromptu debates. Her tutor actually used the “prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is sort of like punching a kitten in the face. As we all know, the correct response is “Oh, so you are granting equal probability to Ra, Thor, Neptune, trolls and djinn then? You can’t completely disprove them, do you believe in them? Do you believe in Allah? I hear he’s very popular.”

There often isn’t a very good answer to that question. When some street preacher said I was accountable to God, I asked him why he wasn’t accountable to Allah. His answer? Sidestep.

Magnificent.

The annoying thing is that when Christians get removed from classrooms for telling children they will go to hell, it gets in the papers and the poor child is raised on the shoulders of giants. It’s religious intolerance, apparently, to stop someone inflicting mental bullying on someone else.
If my GF complained, I can’t see it getting too far. It is the believers of the world who hold some kind of nebulous high ground, and I don’t know why.

The thing that made me especially sick were the intimations of violence to my GF from other classmates, which frankly makes me want to fly down there and beat them like naughty puppies. Can no-one see that as soon as a position has to be protected from debate by violence and censorship, it’s lost the game?