So, here’s the key quote:

“This is the most powerful argument I’ve ever heard. She simply walks you through… not through the argument against God, but why she herself came to this decision ([that God doesn't exist]) and why this was the right decision for her.”

This is an often used tactic employed by atheists that are committed, but haven’t had the time or fortitude to dig deep into the arguments. So, they end up falling back on cliche’d, “God is an emotional crutch” rhetoric. But, instead of just coming out and saying that, he’s obscuring that idea behind some relativism language: “this was the right decision for her.”

Now, if God doesn’t exist for you, then he doesn’t exist for me either. We both live in the same world. And, if I believe he does exist then I’m either (A) ignorant or (B)playing emotional make-believe games. Those are the only two options I’m left with, given his view. But, it’s obvious that he is compelled by the personal journey type aspect of this lady’s story. So, He attempts to soften the logical blow a little by bringing in the “…for her” bit on the end. But, the message is still crystal clear.

What he is logically saying is that theists believe in things that aren’t real. On his view, we theists play make believe games. But, he’s going to be kind and not judge us for it since he’s saying that it’s simply a personal decision. That’s like saying it’s a personal decision whether or not to believe that polka dotted rabbit people from outer space live inside of coke machines and deliver cokes out of the hole when I put in my money. Of course that’s not a personal decision. If you believe that, you are insane.

Now, just as I did before, let’s re-package what he said into a syllogism to more clearly expose the relativism:

1. God doesn’t exist.
2. Julia Sweeney realizes this.
3. Therefore, God doesn’t exist for Julia Sweeney.

Again, the conclusion is not sound. In essence, he is arguing for conditional existence based on mental awareness of the truth of a proposition. That’s complete nonsense, and I doubt that’s what he even intended at all. It’s probably just force of habit on his part. He’s not stupid. But, when you employ relativism, that’s what you are left with. Nonsense arguments disguised in emotional sophistry. Evidently that type of thing qualifies as the “most powerful argument” he’s “ever heard.” Jeez. When it comes to the God argument, he really needs to dig a bit deeper than a stage performance by a lady that had a hard life. I hate that she had hard times, but that really has nothing to do with whether certain objects exist or not. The existence of things in the real world are not conditional upon the emotions of a lady on stage.

It’s readily obvious when we look at the natural world that it’s particulars are meant for certain applications or activities. Like the character John says, “Milk does feed calves and dung does not.” Now this concept is an important one that regresses to greater ideas like intelligent design. It’s also a crucial point of connecting the material world with religious ideas. Indeed, this might be the crux of where the physical meets the metaphysical in human understanding.

Take homosexuality for example. The reason for rejecting it amongst religious and non-religious alike is a belief that it is “against nature” in some way. That phrase is tossed out a lot, and it simply means that engaging in homosexual acts is an abuse of the way the body was designed to work. Sex is a proper use of the body as it’s designed, but homosexuality is a use of the body in a way that violates it’s obvious design. It’s akin to feeding your calves dung instead of milk. You can claim all day long that they are both just secretions of a cow, but in a few days you’ll have a dead calf on your hands.

In short, the anthropological application of teleology brings an undertone of morality with it. It’s inescapable. Any time you bring oughtness into the philosophical mix, it’s going to require a judgement of the violation of what ought to be. That’s why I said earlier that teleology is the crux where physics and metaphysics meet. It also marks a turning point in this series of posts where I am taking simply theistic arguments to something more concrete about who that theistic personality may be.

I could go on and on about the problems I see with Peart’s worldview, but this statement was a little surprising even for him. I have to wonder what he means by “this stuff is going on in both localities”. What exactly is “this stuff”? Nothing in my Christian faith gives me the slightest inclination to hate muslims. I’ll tell you what does give me the inclination to hate muslims though: when they chop American reporters and construction workers heads off. But that has nothing to do with my faith. If by “this stuff” he means “malevolent” faith then he is ignorant of the facts or just doesn’t want to see them. Equating a faith that prays for muslims to change with a faith that sends peoples heads home in baskets for changing is naive.

But here again, I just don’t understand why he is trying to equate strife between east and west with Christianity vs. Islam. When have we even heard Christianity mentioned in the whole middle eastern mess, except that time that the American state department stepped in to try and stop Afghanistan from executing a convert to Christianity. I don’t remember any such reciprocal action ever being needed.When he says “both would probably be insulted by the comparison” he is right. The difference is when the muslim mob in Europe and the middle-east get insulted they riot, kill cops, stab documentary film-makers to death in the street, blow up car bombs, etc. When Christians get insulted we just take it on the chin like we have been for the last 2000 years.

He goes on:

Here we go again with the same old refrain that some people “need” religion to make them feel better. Let’s see, what would make me feel better is polka-dotted fairies, so I think I’ll believe in them so I’ll indeed feel better. Like anyone believes in something they know is false just to make themselves feel better. That’s not just unadulterated arrogance. It’s impossible. You can’t believe in something you know is not true. That’s not how the human mind works Neil.

I generally stay away from people who set themselves up a notch higher than everyone else, based on some intellectualism. They are usually the biggest hypocrites you will meet. Neil speaks of “malevolent” faith, as if the ultimate good is just to be happy and nice to everyone without actually “believing” in anything. Yet, if you read his books, it becomes evident that he looks down his nose in judgement at half the population. My advice to that kind of person is just to go on and live your life how you want, and leave the moral judgements to those that don’t think of themselves too highly.

In the last part of this series of posts I looked at the mind as a non-physical object. If there is anything non-physical in the universe then a purely physicalist/materialistic explanation of reality is inadequate. I argued that the mind is the defeater for physicalism. This time around I want to dig deeper into that by looking at an argument made popular by C.S. Lewis. It’s commonly called the “argument from reason”. Victor Reppert has spent much of his career exploring this part of Lewis’s work so I will take a lot of info from his writings.

The basic argument from reason goes like this:

1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
2. If naturalism is true, then all thoughts can be explained as the result of irrational causes.
3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no thought is valid.
4. But, if that is so, then the thought “naturalism is true” is not valid.
5. Therefore, naturalism cannot be both true and validly thought.

Number one depends on the belief that thoughts are rational events. So if they can be fully explained by irrational causes such as electrical impulses or chemical interactions then they are not valid thoughts. Remember Liebniz’s thinking machine? He said you can’t get rational events from a machine built from irrational components. That is the assumption underlying #1. I don’t see a way around this one since thinking that your thoughts are irrational is pretty self-defeating. You might disagree with Liebniz but at your own peril I think. That would require demonstrating a way to produce rational though from non-rational components. That’s going to be a tough one.

Number two just explains the naturalistic understanding of mental events. A naturalist or physicalist will say that mental events are just biological neural net type systems and are fully explainable by a study of the brains chemical interactions or electrical patterns. They will say that when we observe a set of electro-chemical events taking place in the brain, that we are actually seeing the “thought” occur in front of our eyes. This is very hard to swallow though. If that is the case, then thoughts in the human brain are just like logic events inside a computer system. But data in a computer event is meaningless to the computer itself. The data it acts upon “represents” information. It uses the data structurally, not rationally. That was covered last time though. Let’s move on.

Here is the first conclusion. Number 3 is the logical conclusion of #1 and #2. Let’s say it this way: “No thought is really a thought if it can be fully explained biochemically, but if naturalism is true, then all thoughts can be explained biochemically. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then there are no real thoughts.” And this is exactly what physicalists say. Take this quote from Daniel Dennett:

“The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God’s-eye view might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed — by evolutionary processes — to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings — their discrimination and delectation — is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign “user-illusion”.”

So basically, thoughts as traditionally defined do not exist. They are just illusions. What’s really going on are biochemical and electromechanical events in the brain that are responses to environmental inputs. We just see them as thoughts because they reside internally and are approximately semantic in nature. Maybe it’s just me, but I always question a philosophy that relies upon all of humanity being somehow delusional. It’s the same way with Frued and Bertrand Russell. I am skeptical of there theories that nobody understands what is really going on except them. The rest of us are just “wanting” so bad for something else to be true that we trick ourselves into believing it.

Number four turns the argument to address it’s self-refutation. This is the achilles heel of all non-rational explanations for rationality. You just can’t explain things that way without undermining your own argument. If there are no such things as real(a.k.a rational) thoughts then the the thought that “naturalism is true” is not rational. Pretty straight-forward.

The conclusion(#5) is obviously that naturalism can’t be both true in reality and valid in theory. A philosophy that is in that predicament is in trouble. Evidently Lewis modified this argument somewhat after his debate with Elizabeth Anscombe(a catholic philosopher). Reppert says that the argument was modified as such:

“Lewis’s revised argument begins much the same as the previous argument, distinguishes between connection via cause and effect and connection by ground and consequent. The key passage, to me, is on page 16 of my edition:

“But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event, it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?”

What Lewis claims is that if there are reasons to believe something, if naturalism is true, they would have to be irrelevant to the actual production of beliefs. No one could ever believe in naturalism because there are good arguments for naturalism.”

This is similar to what I explained in the description of #2 above. It’s more of a refinement than a change, and Anscombe later commended this change as a sign that Lewis was an honest philosopher and wanted to be sure he got things right. Next time I want to delve into Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism”. It might be the most powerful argument against naturalism in the modern era.

In the first part of this series of posts I became convinced of some form of supernaturalism based on 5 arguments. Four of the five arguments have to do with the mind and so that’s what I want to explore this time. The idea of a non-corporeal mind linked somehow with a physical body has been the dominant understanding of human personhood for millenia. A strict physicalist view of the world is really a very recent development. When I say “strict physicalist” I am speaking of people like Daniel Dennet. Christian “monists” also refute a mind-body dualism but they should not properly be called physicalists.

The main obstacle for physicalism is that aspect of the mind that is intentionality, or aboutness. This is that peculiar property that minds have but nothing else that exists has. For example, when you ponder a word problem you are thinking about what the answer might be. You daydream about going on vacation. You set off to the store with the intention to buy some curtains for your house. It is this quality of your thoughts to be intent upon, or about something that requires your mind to be non-physical. This problem is explained by Leibniz in his following example:

“One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the
same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.”

–Leibniz(zle), Monadology (1714)

Physicalists will refute Leibniz by saying that it’s simply a matter of not knowing how the brain works yet. They will contend that many things in the past were thought to be spiritual or magical but were later explained by science and seen for what they were. This isn’t the case here though, because the mind-body problem is primarily a logic problem, not a scientific one. We can’t even conceive of a possible world in which physical objects are about other things. It’s logically incoherant to think of a baseball bat being about something. However, it’s not impossible to envision a baseball bat thinking about something if it had a mind. Silly maybe, but not impossible. The mind is the only thing that makes any logical sense as a purveyor of intentionality.

In his example, Leibniz is trying to get across that it’s not simply a matter of not being able to see inside the mental machine that makes it impossible to understand. Even if we could get inside the machine, which we routinely do with modern neurology, we would still have no idea of how it’s doing what it’s doing, because the qualities we are looking for are in the “substance” of the machine instead of being produced by any physical workings of the machine. This notion is commonly referred to as substance dualism. In other words, minds are mental because they are minds.

According to Nolan and Whipple, Descartes believed that it is easy to mistake the workings of the mind for physical processes since being embodied obscures or confuses the two. You could say that we are too close to ourselves to see the distinction. This is primarily a function of the causal relationship between the physical and mental substances such that hitting your finger with a hammer causes a mental state of pain to ensue. We would routinely attribute the pain to a physical state, but pain is a subjective mental state. Where is the pain? The nerves in your finger are firing but the pain is not in your finger because pain isn’t the type of thing that can be in a finger. There is a reason that their is no such thing as a pain meter. It’s not the type of thing that can be measured physically.

This all leads me to a belief that if there is a supernatural mind at work in each of us, then if there is anything else supernatural out there, there is a pretty good chance it’s rational. I hope to refine this further next time by exploring Lewis’s Argument from Reason.

Whether or not you believe this really depends on your theology. Specifically, what does your religion say about how you get saved. Catholocism would definitely require active practicing of it to be saved. Since the sacraments are pretty much required, specifically “Last Rites”, I don’t see how you could be saved withouth such participation.

Most orthodox protestant denominations of Christianity take the requirement for salvation directly from Christ himself. He says in John 3:14,15 “But even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” There is nothing about the practice of any religion in that statement. If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, that’s it. Without getting into too much theology, I’ll just say that I think it’s probably a safe bet to just take Jesus at his word. I’m on safe ground with that.

The question then becomes: What about people, like “tribes in the rain forest”, who will never know or hear about who Jesus is? This time we will have to get theological since this is a response to one of the claims of protestant orthodoxy directly. The Christian claim goes like this:

1. Man exists in a natural state of rebellion against god (sin nature)
2. Justice requires this sin to be paid for (judgement)
3. Therefore, God judges the unbeliever based on his actions and adherence to God’s law (condemnation)
4. But judges the believer using Jesus sinless life as a substitute to satisfy the law (salvation)

In this scenario, those who don’t hear about Jesus aren’t treated unjustly. They are under condemnation because they sinned, not because they don’t know who Jesus is. Jesus is the route of salvation for those who are already condemned of their own accord. Imagine for a moment that the 9/11 attackers had not died in the attacks and were all caught by police. They are swiftly found quilty by a jury and await sentencing. Now the judge in this case was merciful and wanted to take the punishment for the attackers on their behalf, but only if they repented of their actions before sentencing day. Two of them heard about his offer and accepted his substitutionary gift. One of the other attackers had heard about this also but said he would rather die than repent before this American infidel judge. The rest of the attackers didn’t hear about the judges offer. Now, you can see what is going on here. Where is the injustice? Their isn’t any injustice.

The problem in people’s mind is not so much about injustice though. We all know that if their is a God we are surely to be guilty before him. The problem people have is with God’s benevolence. We think that if God is loving, he wouldn’t send anyone to eternal punishment without a cut and dried chance to choose first. But we know that not everyone will have that chance, so this leads some to the belief in what is known as the “middle-knowledge” argument.

Middle-knowledge is the view that God knows what the outcome of all conterfactuals will be and bases his election of those who are saved on that knowledge. A counterfactual is a proposition like “If Dave was a preacher instead of a System Administrator, his church would probably be empty.” Any time you think of a set of circumstances that might lead to a possible outcome, that is a counterfactual proposition. If God then knows the answer to the counterfactual proposition, “If Zulu tribe A in the rain forest were to hear about Jesus then ____ would happen.”, he would base his salvation of those individuals on what he knows the outcome to be. If he knows 4 people in the tribe would believe, he would save those 4 people.

That’s because it is cop-out BS, but I wouldn’t put it so harshly. A lot of Christians adhere to some type of a middle-knowledge view not to win an argument, but because our sensibilities about God’s benevolence almost demand that we believe it. I’m sympathetic to this, but I just don’t think it’s necessary. God is just, which is demonstrated by his punishment of sin. He is also loving, which is demonstrated by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. I don’t see a lack of universal availability of forgiveness as diminishing that benevolence at all.

He’s exactly right. And that’s why religion has become so absurdly irrelevant in some areas of modern life. It makes a mockery of the sacrifices of the church fathers, reformers, and missionaries who died for a reason. Wishy-washy doctrine doesn’t get you killed. Doctrine gets you killed when it hits other people in the heart, and that doesn’t happen when their is no right or wrong and God is nothing but love. Anyway, more to come later.

P.S. – I know that some middle-knowledge proponents probably choked on their lunch when I gave the above explanation of it, but I just don’t want to get into the whole idea of how evangelism plays in to it and all that for now. I think it all boils down basically to how I described it anyway. I’m definitely open to other arguments though.

He’s right. Hell isn’t a place or a thing. It’s non-physical just as heaven is. Hell is just a place of non-corporeal existence that is cut off from the presence of God. It’s not a “belief system” either. I am pretty sure you require more than one belief before you can call it a belief system. The other part about no good without evil is kind of a misappropriation of principles. You have to be careful about applying too many language constructs to base metaphysical ideas. If there was no such thing as darkness, we could still see light just fine. Just ask Alaskans. I bet some of them forget there is even such a thing as darkness sometimes. The perception of light and dark might be altered but not the reality of them. In the same way, a world where everyone’s actions were evil all the time would be an evil world. The absence of anything morally good would not mean that the formerly evil actions are all of the sudden morally neutral.

The only thing that good and evil require is a standard by which to judge which is which. It is the Christian contention that the standard is innate and therefore exists objectively and independant of the perception of it. I think this is a safe and reasonable position to take, seeing as how most base morals(don’t kill, rape, torture) are seemingly universal. I’m not just splitting hairs here. This is an important point. Good and evil don’t depend on one another but on a common moral metric.

Half-right. I would say it this way. If there were no hell, the only religions left would be the ones that nobody takes seriously anyway. There is a reason that the only religions that are taken seriously by a large number of people are the ones that include an idea of punishment for sin. Why would I believe in a religion who’s theology didn’t match universal moral intuitions? Everyone knows that killing babies for fun is wrong. If my theology didn’t include punishment for that act then why would I take it seriously? Christianity would certainly not exist since it’s foundational precept is Jesus saving us from that punishment. I’m not sure what that gets you though. That’s like saying, “If there were no such thing as sausage then my favorite food wouldn’t be sausage.”

Please! Not the old science is based on fact, religion is based on “faith” thing again. That’s scientism rearing it’s egotistical head. I guess it makes atheists feel better about themselves to think that they are the only reasonable ones that exist. Religious folk on the other hand all go around dreaming up things they would like to believe and then set about believing them so they can feel better about their cosmic Papa. I take offense to statements like that.

Nobody believes something that is absolutely without proof. They might be mistaken about the proof or it’s accuracy, but they still believe it to be proof. The reason people make statements like that is not because their is no proof for God, but because only certain types of proof are allowed to count for anything in their view. Philosophical arguments are not allowed. Likewise, any science that concludes with anything other than strict naturalism as an answer is not allowed. Just ask Michael Behe how easy it is to get peer review when your research points to supernaturalism.

Also, that description of faith is just totally wrong. Faith describes a secondary belief that results from a set of primary beliefs. If you define it any other way you are not talking about faith anymore. What he is talking about in the quote above is what we all know as “blind faith”. The two couldn’t be more different. For instance, if you had studied a certain set of chemical interactions for 10 years, you would be shocked if the resulting experiment didn’t produce your expected results. You would be shocked because faith had crept in. Not because you really wanted the experiment to work, but because all of the science behind it made sense to you, and demanded a certain result. On the contrary, blind faith just makes up whatever it wants and that is pretty silly.

As an example of faith being a result of other, more primary beliefs see my two previous posts on Agnosticism:

• Mere Agnosticism – Part I
• Mere Agnosticism – Part II

Christian philosophers have come on strong in the last 20 years. There are now theistic philosophers in many major philosophy departments around the world. This is not because philosophers like to make up things and then believe them. They are compelled by the evidence. Just ask Anthony Flew. I’m out of room for now but I will post some more later. Actually the rest of what he wrote is the part I’m most interested in. Particularly his mention of the “middle knowledge” argument.