Category Religion

Slick’s Transcendental Argument

Last week on
The Atheist Experience,
a guy named Matt Slick from
CARM.org
called in to present the
Transcendental Argument
for the existence of God. His version of the argument is
here.

When I read
Slick’s version of the argument,
my reaction was one that I often have when theists try to construct
purely logical arguments: as I was going through his bullet points, I
wasn’t nodding in agreement, even reluctantly. I kept thinking “well,
this is sorta-kinda-maybe true, given the proper definition and
starting assumptions”. Take, for instance, his point 1. C. ii.:

“I am alive” is either true or false.

This statement is true, but only if you define “alive” very carefully.
This is why courts spend time splitting definitional hairs: to decide
precisely where the line between “alive” and “not alive” runs or ought
to run, and by extension where the line between “legal” and “illegal”
runs. In real life, however, things can get much messier (Terry
Schiavo, anyone?). Now, Slick is free to divide the world up into 100%
true and 100% false statements if he likes, but he must then accept
that some of the 100%-true statements won’t feel 100% true.

This sort of sloppy thinking permeates the argument, which tends to
trigger my BS-o-meter.

Or take 2. C.:

Something cannot bring itself into existence.

I wonder how Slick deals with things like pairs of virtual particles,
which just pop into existence all over the place, and usually
annihilate each other a fraction of a microsecond later.

We can also apply this statement to 7. D.:

We call this transcendent, absolute, perfect, and independent mind, God.

Surely a mind is a “thing” in the sense of 2. C.. This means that God
cannot have created itself, and therefore raises the question of who
or what created God.

Don Baker, who was co-hosting The Atheist Experience on
the day that Slick called in, has a
fine rebuttal
including several points I would have made:

  • There is no universal requirement that a system of logic be complete, elegant, or even consistent. It’s just that we humans value these properties.
  • A lot of Slick’s “universal” laws, like the law of the excluded middle (a statement is either true, or it’s false) are not inherent to logic; they just happen to be true (as far as we can tell) in this universe, and in most of the systems of logic that we humans find useful.
  • Properly applied, logic is universal and absolute, but you have to be very very careful and rigorous.

In short, this version of the Transcendental argument is par for the
course, as far as purely logical arguments for God go: it looks okay
on the surface if you don’t look at it too closely, but the
construction is shoddy. The argument doesn’t tell us which statements
are assumptions for the sake of argument, which ones are assumptions
Slick thinks are obvious enough to be axioms, and which statements
follow from which premises. If this argument were a work of
carpentry, all of its angles would be slightly off from 90°, the
sides wouldn’t line up quite right, and there would be gaps between
the boards.

Color me less than impressed.

Thank You for Telling Me What I Believe

Not too long ago, I got
this reply
from one Ælfheah to a comment of mine:

‘Atheism’, for your information, does not mean a lack of religion, or, for that matter, a lack of religious beliefs. Abram was not an atheist before God revealed Himself to him.

‘Atheism’ means a belief that God does not exist. Merely not believing in God is commonly called ‘agnosticism’. An agnostic is someone who is (theoretically) prepared to believe in God if he is shown some evidence – which is of course a fallacy, given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

And more recently, S. forwarded
this article
by Sam Storms at the ironically-named Banner of Truth:

Do honest atheists exist? By honest, I don’t mean atheists who pay their taxes and keep their promises and choose not to steal or lie. What I mean in asking the question is whether or not there exists an atheist who honestly believes there is no God.
…

I contend they do not. I contend that they are living and speaking in denial of what they know to be true. I contend that they are labouring to persuade themselves of what is indelibly and inescapably inscribed on their hearts: that there is a God and that they are morally accountable to him.

(emphasis added.)

Gosh, isn’t it kind of these people to tell me what I believe? I
wonder whether they’d be happy to turn the tables and allow me to tell
them who is and isn’t a True Christian.

Storms bases his claim partly on
Romans 1:20,
by way of John Calvin, to add a bit of argument-from-authority sauce
to his argument from authority.

The other half of the argument is the venerable argumentum ad
wow:

  1. Look at the universe and the trees and stuff.
  2. Wow.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

The Bible says everyone believes in God. If anyone claims otherwise,
it must be because they’re lying, not because there’s an error in the
Bible.

Ælfheah, on the other hand, seems to want to redefine 95% of
self-described atheists as agnostics. And his definition of an
agnostic, as someone who would believe in a god if there were good
evidence, fits 95% of the self-described atheists I’ve met.

Except that he then commits the all-or-nothing fallacy:

given that God is infinite and so would require an infinite amount of evidence for His existence to be “proved”.

Okay, technically he’s right: if God is infinitely powerful, then a
feat like building pyramids like the ones in Egypt could be
accomplished either by God, or by humans, or by space aliens. Other
feats, like putting Venus in orbit around Saturn, could be done either
by a god or by sufficiently-powerful aliens, and so forth. Any given
feat could be the work of aliens who are advanced and powerful enough
to accomplish that feat, but are not infinitely powerful. So
in that sense, no evidence is sufficient to establish the existence
of an infinitely powerful god.

But at some point, the question becomes moot. If we’re talking about
aliens who can create universes, rearrange time and space like Legos,
and know everyone’s thoughts, then they may as well be gods, for all
practical purposes. If such a being were demonstrated to exist, you
might as well behave as if it’s infinitely powerful.

But of course theists haven’t demonstrated anything like that. The
argument between theists and atheists isn’t over whether the being
that rearranged stars to spell out “I am the LORD thy God” in Aramaic
as seen from Earth was infinitely powerful, or merely extremely
powerful. The argument is whether there’s any good evidence
for any gods at all.

I can see where this all-or-nothing approach can be useful: “I’ll
never get all of the bugs out of this program, so I won’t do any
debugging”; “I’ll never know everything, so there’s no point in
learning anything”.

So anyway, a True Christian™ is someone who covers himself in
strawberry jam on Fridays while singing medleys of show tunes. All the
rest of you who call yourselves Christians are just lying to
yourselves and to me to mask the shame of not liking jam.

ID FAQ 2

Barry Arrington’s
ID FAQ question 2
isn’t much better than
question 1.

2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously

Yes, they do. For simple instance, in telecommunications work, we start by distinguishing the intelligent signal from the naturally occurring noise that tends to garble it.

One obvious problem with this is that in telecommunications, we know
what signal is (whatever the customer wants to send) and what noise is
(anything that changes the signal between the sender and the
recipient).

The existence of a signal is not in doubt: people pay telecoms good
money to send it, and get upset when their signals aren’t sent
reliably. We also know that people exist, and what sorts of signals
they tend to send (speech, email, streaming audio and video, etc.),
when, and why.

“Noise”, in telecommunications and signal processing, is by definition
anything that changes the original signal at the receiver. If I call
my mom on the phone and say “Hello” but she hears static crackling,
that’s noise. If I say “hello” but she hears “oh hell”, that’s noise.
But if I call a friend and send a series of high-pitched shrieks with
my acoustic modem, but he gets a Vivaldi concerto, that’s still noise:
I’m paying the phone company good money to send high-pitched shrieks,
dammit, and that’s what I want to arrive at the other end.

The
cdesign proponentsists
(hey, there’s another good example of information being garbled), on
the other hand, want to use a recieved message (the human genome, or
bacterial flagella, or mousetraps, or whatever) to try to infer the
existence of an original signal, a designer. At the same time, since
they don’t want to admit that the designer is the God of the Bible,
they play coy and refuse to ascribe any properties to the designer.

I’ve seen a variant of the telecommunications analogy, in which IDists
pointed to archeologists trying to figure out whether a given rock was
used as a tool by prehistoric humans, or was broken and scratched by
natural (non-human) processes. But again, this is exactly backward:
archeologists not only can assume that humans existed 10,000 years
ago, but know a lot about their probable motivations (food, sex,
companionship, worship, etc.) and their limitations (any hypothesis
that involves people having three arms, for instance, is going to get
shot down pretty quickly).

IDists have none of that. They’re trying to prove magic, so they have
to use this sort of smoke and mirrors.

Obama’s Faith-Based Initiatives: WTF?

During his electoral campaign, Obama promised to keep and expand Bush’s
Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. This morning, the AP has
this story:

Obama is also telling the gathering that the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that he is announcing Thursday won’t favor any religious group, or favor religious groups over secular groups.

(More
here.)

I’m all for the separation of church and state, and all the stuff
Obama said in that paragraph, but if the Office of Faith-Based
Initiatives won’t favor religion over irreligion, why put “Faith” in
the organization’s name? Seriously, WTF? Why not call it the Office of
Charity or Office of Public Service or something like that?

I suppose one explanation is that he thinks that federal support of
charitable works is a Good Thing, but that the Bush administration’s
implementation of it was broken, but that religious overtones are
necessary for public support.

Of course, he could just rename it, as when the Department of War
became the Department of Defense, but perhaps he thinks that would
make him unpopular.

A more cynical explanation is that he plans to continue the previous
administration’s policy toward the office: have an Office of
Faith-Based Initiatives in place to suck up to the religious, but not
fund it adequately.

I doubt the latter explanation, because a) if that were the case,
Obama wouldn’t have made his comments about keeping church and state
separate. And besides, sucking up to voters is typically something
presidents do when they’re running for reelection. And as long as the
last election cycle has lasted, I don’t think it’s grown to four years
yet. Please tell me it hasn’t.

Seems Like an Expensive Way to Stroke Someone’s Ego

Right now, for US$60, you can buy a Guitar Hero III pack that includes everything you need to play, including the game and a guitar controller. For US$100, you can buy a Rock Band set that includes the game, a guitar, a drum set, and a microphone. Two reasonably-priced options for pretending that you’re performing in front of thousands of screaming fans who just want to listen to you play a flimsy piece of plastic and proffer oral sex.

The main problem with these games, evidently, is that they feature songs about things other than God. GH3 includes The Number of the Beast, and a song about the Devil going down to Georgia. And Rock Band even includes a song about someone who explicitly “doesn’t look a thing like Jesus“. How much more explicitly blasphemous can it get?

Thankfully, Digital Praise has fixed this problem by introducing Guitar Praise. (Also the problem of having songs by artists you’ve ever heard of.)

For just $100, the price of a Rock Band setup, you can buy a Guitar Hero clone (not available for any game console platform), and pretend that you’re playing to praise a magic man who’ll send you to be tortured forever if you don’t. Yay!

From the folks who brought you Dance Praise, which achieves the same ends, but more bouncing and less plastic squeaking.

(Okay, Dance Praise gets props for two things: 1) there are a couple of Andy Hunter° songs, and 2) there’s a mode where you can play Tetris with the dance pad, so it’s a little more than just a DDR ripoff.)

Some Good News From ID-Land

Bill Dembski
reports:

Judge Jones gets multiple honorary degrees, Ben Stein has his withdrawn

That’s referring to the fact that Ben Stein, the game show host who
recently narrated a movie blaming the Holocaust on evolution, was
invited to be a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, but
when it was brought to the president’s attention what an anti-science
twatcicle Stein is,
“Stein withdrew from the ceremony“.

(The word “withdrew” makes it sound as though it was Stein’s idea. I
imagine this withdrawal is about as voluntary as when a cabinet
secretary or Wall Street CEO is caught snorting blow off the ass of an
underage Thai hooker while dressed in latex and leather, and promptly
offers his resignation.)

Next, Barry Arrington proposes a
draft
for an FAQ question on ID:

1] ID is “not science”

Leaving aside the fact that that’s not a question, Arrington’s answer
is a marvel of empty fluff with a superficial semblance of substance
that rivals that of Twinkies. It basically boils down to “ID is too
science! Is too, is too!”, but he uses a page of text to say it.

He starts with an
argument from authority
(William Dembski says it, so it must be true), and ends with a list of
features that scientific research has that ID doesn’t.

And in the middle, he whines about how unfair it is that the mean ol’
scientific establishment has excluded supernatural explanations a
priori.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the mean ol’ scientific
establishment did not reject
non-materialistic/non-naturalistic/supernatural/magic explanations a
priori. It rejected them a posteriori. For centuries now,
natural explanations have been pitted against supernatural ones in
explaining various phenomena, from rainfall to the formation of
fossils to embryonic development. And natural explanations have always
won out, in the sense of being more in line with observable reality
and making useful predictions about future observations.

Of the thousands of times they’ve been tried, supernatural
explanations have never worked. From there, it’s a small step to the
conclusion that supernatural explanations don’t work.

And that is why scientists reject explanations that involve magic. Not
because of a hard-headed pre-commitment to naturalism, but simply
because magic never works.

Irreducible Complexity Still Not Disproven… Wait, What?

The story so far:

Back in 1996, when Intelligent Design was in its infancy (and pretty
much indistinguishable from today’s Intelligent Design), Michael Behe
defined an irreducibly complex system as:

composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to effectively cease
functioning.

Recently, the Disco Tute
presented the bicycle
as an example of an irreducibly complex system, on the grounds that if
you remove one of the wheels, it doesn’t work anymore.

Carl Zimmer
responded
with a video of someone riding a bicycle with only one wheel. So
presumably bicycles aren’t irreducibly complex after all.

Now DonaldM at Uncommon Blithering
presents
this bizarre counterargument:

if you look closely at the photo you’ll notice it isn’t
just the front wheel that’s missing from this bicycle, but the entire
front wheel assmembly, including the handle bars and wheel
frame.

So, um, I guess the point is that if you remove exactly one part from
an IC system, it doesn’t work, but you can remove a whole bunch of
parts from an IC system, and it still works. Wait, what?

Elsewhere in the same post, Donald asks:

Perhaps the good Dr. Z would be so kind as to provide a
bibliography listing all the peer reviewed scientific research studies
that provide the detailed, testable (and potentially falsifiable)
biological models for any of the IC systems that Mike Behe
described in his ground breaking book Darwin’s Black
Box.

Might I suggest that Donald start with the articles and books about
blood clotting and the human immune system that were literally piled
up in front of Behe on the witness stand at the Dover trial? There’s a
good boy.

I’d like to remind him that “nuh-uh” is not a rebuttal.

Merry War on Christmas Eve!

I can only assume that BillDo took heed of my strategy paper on the War on Christmas™, because here‘s what he’s moaning about now:

“The latest gambit by the anti-Christmas Czars is to flood public parks with a vast array of cultural symbols. For example, at the Fort Collins Museum in Colorado, in addition to a nativity scene and a menorah, they are displaying the Indian Diwali Festival of Lights, the Thailand Buddhist celebration of Loy Krathong, the Chinese Lantern Festival, African-American Kwanzaa, Muslim Ramadan, and the Scottish Hogmanay festival.

“It is insulting to Christians and Jews to dilute their long-standing holidays in a country founded on Judeo-Christian principles by turning public areas into a junk-yard clutter of cultural artifacts, and that is why only the nativity scene and the menorah should be allowed in the same place at this time of the year. The real goal of the cultural fascists is to water down the meaning of Christmas (and to a much lesser extent Hanukkah) via contrived competition. Let the others find another spot or another time to display their symbols.”

In other words, “it’s our country, and our holiday. We’ll share with the Jews, but the rest of you can just fuck off.”

No word from the Indian, Thai, Chinese, African-American, Muslim, or Scottish communities on how they feel about their culture being dismissed as “junk-yard clutter”. (Besides, I thought Scotland was Christian, and celebrated Christmas. Maybe BillDo resents them because they’re mostly Protestant. And besides, Hogmanay is a new year celebration. Is Bill going to lay claim to New Year’s Day now as well?)

At any rate, as I sit here admiring the Christmas tree and listening to Bing Crosby, with a Christmas LOLcat on my lap helping me type (and, incidentally, preventing me from getting up and getting the glass of egg nog that I want), yes, I am diluting the True Meaning of Christmas™.

If you didn’t want other people enjoying the secular stuff that’s been glommed onto your religious holiday over the centuries, you shouldn’t have made it so much fun. So now all the kids are playing in your sandbox. Whatcha gonna do about it?

I know what I’m going to do about it: pick the cat off of my lap, get a glass of Christmas cheer, and use it to dilute Christmas some more. And maybe water the tree with Bill’s tears.

Exploiting Personal Tragedy to Advance Ideology

You may have heard of the tragedy of Jesse Kilgore, the college
sophomore who commited suicide after, as
WingNut Daily reported,
reading The God Delusion and having a crisis of faith.

Now, just when you thought the Disco Tute couldn’t sink any lower,
they’ve produced a
melodramatic episode
of their Intelligent Design the Future podcast about this
(the “melo” part is literal: the whole ten-minute episode is
underscored with soft minor-key acoustic guitar and piano music, so
that it sounds like a cross between a eulogy and a soap opera). It
presents the same story that the WND article does: that Kilgore was a
good Christian kid who went off to a secular college, where a
professor either assigned, or challenged him to read The God
Delusion. After Kilgore went out to the woods and committed
suicide, his father found the book under his son’s bed, with a
bookmark on the last page.

The narrative is that Jesse Kilgore killed himself because he read
Dawkins’s book and lost both his faith and his will to live. Yes, it’s
as bad as I make it sound. If you thought the WND article was sleazy,
this is worse.

Now, I don’t know why Jesse Kilgore decided to end his life. No one
life can be summarized in an article and a ten-minute show. I’m sure
there was a lot more to him than we’ve seen. For all I know, he got a
girl pregnant and couldn’t live with that. He didn’t leave a suicide
note, so we’ll probably never know for sure. All we have is
speculation, mostly by grieving friends and relatives.

With that out of the way, the ID the Future show is a treasure trove
of wingnut tropes: we’ve got Good Kid vs. Bad College; Brainwashing
Professor; Reading Opposing Ideas Will Poison You; and many more. For
a group that keeps insisting that they’re not creationists, they seem
to have borrowed an awful lot of ideas from
Big Daddy.

There’s the assertion that Jesse felt alone because he was one of the
only Christians on campus. The school that he was attending,
SUNY Jefferson Community College,
is in northern New York state (unless, of course, both WND and IDtF
got it wrong, which is not something that can be excluded). I can’t
imagine any college campus in North America where most of the
population isn’t Christian.

Then there’s the notion that the nameless biology professor was using
his authority to tell students what to believe. From what little I’ve
seen of religious homeschooling techniques, I suspect that this is
projection: these people teach their kids that “these are the facts,
and they’re true because I said so”, and can’t imagine teachers
leading students to conclusions by showing them the evidence. And in
my experience, the latter is far more common on college campuses than
the former.

PZ Myers put it best (paraphrased from memory): “We don’t teach
students that the sky is blue. We teach them how to go outside and
look up. And yeah, if they come from an environment where they were
told that the sky is green, that’s likely to cause problems.”

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Jesse killed himself
after reading The God Delusion, therefore he did so
because of it. Classic
post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The subtext, of course, is that learning is dangerous. So don’t go
getting any ideas about going to college and exposing yourself to
foreign ideas.

In fact, this theme is repeated several times: Jesse is said to have
been a fervent debater and defender of The Faith; he went to a secular
school because he wanted to challenge himself; everyone was sure he
could withstand anything secular academia could throw at him.
Throughout the piece, foreign ideas are talked about in the same terms
one would describe a disease.

Well, I’m sorry, but if your ideas can’t survive contact with reality,
they’re not worth holding on to. I’d say the lying taint-pustules at
the DI should be ashamed of themselves for promulgating such crap, if
I thought they could feel shame.

Me? Pissed? Oh, just a tad.

(See also
Ed Brayton’s post
at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

(Update, Dec. 19, 18:49: Oh, lookee! I beat that hack, O’Leary, to this story.)

War on Christmas

Carnival of the Godless
Dear Fox News pundits and assorted wingnuts,

I assume that this year, as has become tradition, you will once again be talking up the War On Christmas™. Since I am a liberal godless atheist who supports both separation of church and state and the ACLU, presumably this makes us enemies in this war.

So I thought I’d let you know how I plan to wage war on Christmas.

Oh, I know, giving information to the enemy is usually treasonous, but Christmas is the season for giving, so what the hey. Pull up a yule log and I’ll tell you all my plans. I won’t even make you eggnog-board me.

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