Several people have written in response to my previous post suggesting that I debate William Lane Craig. It’s not going to happen. Here’s why.
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He hasn’t asked me. I’m a small fish, not even on his radar, so the whole question is pointless.
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I may be a small fish, but still, a debate with a professional prevaricator and con artist doesn’t look great on my CV — the same point Dawkins has made.
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Let’s be honest, debating is a skill, Craig is well-practiced in it, and I’m not. Craig would probably ‘win’, and that’s the great lie right there: debate is a terrible way to resolve a truth claim, and a great way to flaunt some rarefied rhetorical talent. He could clobber me six ways from Sunday, and what it would show is that I’m a lousy debater, and he’s good at it; but his fans would all say it’s evidence that he’s right.
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I much prefer the written argument, because he can’t run away from his own words. One of his skills in the oral debate is the slippery elide; if someone is hammering him on one point, he’ll just skip over it to a new point. I’d rather get his words down in writing, where I can pin him down, stick a knife in the bastard, and twist it for a good long while. Longer and with more detail and rigor than is possible in a verbal tussle.
So sorry, no debate in the offing (and #1 is really the most relevant issue, anyway).
By calling yourself a lousy debater are you implying that WLC is a master debater in comparison?
So sorry that this is my first post.
hell, if the debate were to be held in writing — in, perhaps, weekly installments of no more than five thousand words or so each, let’s say — I’D be happy to debate WLC. and i’m fairly confident i could nail him to the wall and keep him there, in that format, myself.
(who am i to debate him? some anonymous nobody on the internet. but then, who is WLC to have any more authority of any sort than i? i’m sure he’d make a better oral debater than me — i have a fear of public speaking, a minor speech impediment, and an accent you might cut with a dull shovel — but in writing, i can support my words and my logic easily as well as he.)
Reason why I (were I anyone important) would never debate Craig:
He’s a barbarian and I wouldn’t want to spend any time in the same room, let alone the same stage as the man.
Nomen,
Didn’t Sam Harris debate someone in that written format not too long ago? I feel like he did, I seem to remember reading it and thinking this was a much better format for a debate.
I agree wholeheartedly that debating with Craig is just a waste of time and effort. His style probably appeals greatly to his target audience of scientific ignoramuses and religionists who fail to grasp how he uses the science of cosmology (which he readily demonstrates his lack of understanding of) as a basis to jump to a claim that a 14.7 billion year old universe ‘proves’ creation week took place less than 10,000 years ago as claimed by the Bronze Age tribesmen who wrote the world’s biggest book of lies. The only possible way to debate and defeat him might be to ask why the OT had to be re-written, editted and redacted every couple of hundred years if it was inerrant from the start.
Craig’s scattergun approach to debating makes it absolutely impossible to refute everything he says in the time allowed under debating rules. Even when he has agreed to debate a single subject he manages to use the same scattergun approach, so an opponent who sticks to the agreed subject is then (correctly, but irrelevantly) accused of failing to refute everything he said. Plus with the ignorance of his intended audience you can prove him utterly wrong and the audience wouldn’t even know it.
Katherine: +1
Craig is slippery in text too, but at least it’s easier to see the dodges and parries for what they are. Not going to help much when one considers that his audience is really people who want to be proselytized, not challenged. And that doesn’t change what seems to me as more important: debate in general is not really an environment to disseminate information, it’s a rhetorical structure, not an educational one.
Yes, he is, and his skill in “Lincoln-Douglas” debate strategy and tactics is widely acknowledged. Notw what PZ already said about skill in debate not being the same as being right.
I agree that written debate is far superior to oral debate. It’s far easier to make your point clearly and address all the issues in writing. Oral debates are more for ranting than actual exchange of information.
All very good points. WLC is a master of purple prose, but his points are pretty limited and easily dismantled. He relies on the fact that the audience probably can’t remember his exact words at the beginning of the debate when it finally draws to a close an hour later.
Sam Harris has debated WLC, to great effect IMO. There is a good live debate on YouTube, with first part at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UigeMSZ-KQ. Harris comes across as pretty laid back the whole time, while WLC seems to get more frantic as the debate goes on. I think the best thing about Harris’ technique is that he doesn’t get bogged down refuting all of WLC’s minor points, but rather knocks down the core argument.
Here’s the only way to debate one of these guys in person so as to avoid the “Gish Gallop”:
The debate rule is this: every time the theist makes a claim, the moderator stops him. The opposing debater is then given the option to refute that claim on the spot, being given ten minutes to do so. If the opposing debater refutes the claim, the theist may not use his claim any further in the debate.
The debate would be over quickly. It would only take one or two refutations before it became apparent that the theist had no ammunition in his rhetorical gun.
WLC just plain has a starting point that doesn’t deserve respect or credit in the first place. That’s a good enough reason to give out for not debating.
Which is not to say that no one should debate him, only that one has to be capable of dismantling his presuppositions.
Glen Davidson
WLC apparently is a master debater – at least to the extent that he has gone blind to his own barbarism.
“I much prefer the written argument, because he can’t run away from his own words. … I’d rather get his words down in writing, where I can pin him down, stick a knife in the bastard, and twist it for a good long while.” (PZ Myers)
Here you are:
* Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010.
Craig’s On Guard contains very helpful argument maps that can be freely downloaded from the publisher’s website:
http://www.davidccook.com/catalog/resources/OnGuard_ArgumentMaps_Images.pdf
Also see Craig’s Q&A archive:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=q_and_a_archive
I like what Aaron says at #11, with the minor caveat that all claims should be treated the same, from either side. No later weaseling out saying it was “unfair” by the theists.
Craig is not a skilled debater. His style is tediously to drag out pompous syllogisms, which his opponents ignore because they are irrelevant, and which his disciples cannot understand: the combination of incomprehension plus his loud voice makes them think he has ‘won’ the debate, and this impression is reinforced by the fact that he always declares that he has ‘won’ whether he has or not.
If anybody does succumb to his incessant badgering for debate (he seems to have nothing else to do with his time), the best technique would probably be to agree to debate him on the question of biblical morality, and then quote his own words at him, on the subject of the genocide of the Canaanites:
If anybody were to stand up and read out those words, in a debate on biblical morality, I don’t see how even Craig could announce, with a straight face, that he had ‘won’ the debate.
If William Lane Craig were to offer a debate in a written format, would you accept?
I think the faith-based’s favorite tactic is to challenge the science-based to Prove Something and then Move The Goalpost.
Faith-based people never need to prove ANYTHING since their worldview is about they Know and Believe.
An argument between a faith-based and science-based would be to present them with an oak tree, and then have them discuss it. Both would agree that it is a tree and they might even agree that it was an oak tree…and then perhaps it would turn into the F-B declaring that God made this tree for a particular purpose in a Greater Plan and the S-B discussing the genetic and evolutionary lineage of the tree.
It’s really hard to discuss something if the two sides have such disparate world views. Then it comes down to who can present the most attractive and persuasive POV. This is illuminating in terms of discovering what the individual PsOV are, but not otherwise interesting.
I wouldn’t agree that he is not a skilled debater, at least on his own terms. As someone mentioned above, he will perform his own theological version of a Gish Gallop with a little bit of pseudeoscience, pseudohistory and appeal to emotion thrown in. In front of an uncritical audience, his refusal to address the points his opponents make will get drowned out in the mass of claims he makes that the opponent simply doesn’t have time to address and can give him the victory.
OTOH, if debate is an intellectual rather than merely rhetorical exercise, then it is true that he has not show himself to be a great debator.
To “defeat” him would be difficult, but he has a set of core arguments that he nearly always uses. If the opponent goes first, they could probably use part of their opening to attack these – Give a brief overview of what he will claim and then why it isn’t so.
I find Craig repulsive – he is such a weasel. Classically for apologists he talks a lot without actually saying anything. His technique is very typically to keep talking so that no-one notices how empty his words are.
I few days ago, I witnessed him on YouTube saying it was ok for the Israelites to kill Canaanite (?) children because the kids would go to heaven, and hence the Israelites were doing them a favour. I felt like asking Craig why he didn’t routinely go around murdering children then? After all, wouldn’t Craig be doing them a favour?
And apparently, it was ok for the Israelites to perform the cynical land-grab of Canaanite territory (some things never change!) and if only the Canaanites had run away instead of defending their homes, there would have been no need for the slaughter.
Have you ever heard such sh*t?
I love Xians. They do one thing, they say another.
Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Craig. I came to him after listening to some Bart Ehrman debates.
Unsurprisingly, I agree with Dawkins. I was completely blown away by little gems such as this–I had to go back and listen to it twice:
“Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.”
Holy shit. That is about as indefensible and nihilistic as you can get. How in the hell can people argue that having a Christian belief in the afterlife makes life here on earth MORE valuable than not having such a belief? I mean, Craig IS right–heaven IS preferable to life on earth and, in fact, allowing those children to live might increase their chances not only of suffering here on earth, but suffering eternal damnation.
So killing them is a kindness. And that gift is no less valuable when God does not order it than when God does.
Personally I find him to be a lousy debater. I can see how he is convincing to people who want him to be right, but all of his arguments are so utterly empty. He also makes many false claims and uses argument from authority almost exclusively. It would be amazing to read a written dialogue between the two of you. The man truly is a moral coward and a disgrace for a human being. With his justifying genocide and what not.
Lurker: Craig might be a master debater, but I’m a cunning linguist.
…crickets chirping…
*sigh* Tough audience!
“Dear Dr Craig,
You are becoming increasingly known as ‘the apologist who defends genocide and infanticide in the Old Testament’, mainly due to your Q&A response on the question of the Canaanites.”
Dr. Craig responds:
“I’ve seen those kinds of responses, too, Peter, and find them disappointing because they fail to grapple intellectually with the difficult questions raised by such stories. Emotional outbursts take the place of rational discussion, leaving us with no deeper understanding of the issues than before we began. …”
(The “Slaughter” of the Canaanites Re-visited: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8973)
(Slaughter of the Canaanites: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5767)
Seriously Myron?
The old anything god does is ok argument?
No wait there’s more
OH so now its the Canaanite people’s fault.
This is that sophisticated theology we keep hearing about?
WLC’s justification of the killings in the bible opens the floodgates for all religious groups to oblige the commands of their god, relayed via “man”, including the genocide of another group in the name of god.
The bible was written by men about the god they worshiped, real or imaginary. There is as much proof as there is for the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that a divine entity authored the contents of the bible. It’s so obvious – every characteristic and action of the biblical god resembles the imperfections and primitive culture of ancient mankind more than the magnificence and goodness of a perfect god.
There is simply no plausible argument that can be made for the brutal acts attributed to the commands of biblical god or any other god for that matter. Anyone that thinks there is, needs a doctor not a debate.
Love to ask him the direct question if it’s true as he claims that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy and God did the Caananite children no wrong in taking their lives, would he feel joy should god similarly arrange for the death of his own two children, John and Charity, during a home invasion?
No. My reason #2, and to that I would add the Dawkins strategy in comment #17: throwing his own words back at him. It’s not a very interesting written debate when Craig writes something, and we all sit back kind of appalled at his words.
To those who say WLC is a lousy debater, I agree, but it depends on what the audience is looking for. If you’re there to listen and learn and dig deeper into the evidence, WLC is freaking incompetent and absolutely horrible, a total waste of time.
If you’re there for affirmations that don’t require you to think critically, or to watch a rhetorical ballroom dancer move through a series of predetermined steps with no art or flair, then yeah, he’s wonderful. He has his moves memorized perfectly.
Debating — so easy a caveman could do it.
By the way, this is Craig’s general metaethical argumentation:
“God wills something because He is good. What do I mean by that? I mean that God’s own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving God.
So moral values are not independent of God because God’s own character defines what is good. God is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, impartial, and so on. His nature is the moral standard defining good and bad. His commands necessarily reflect His moral nature. Therefore, they’re not arbitrary. When the atheist demands, ‘If God were to command child abuse, would we be obliged to abuse our children?’ he’s asking a question like ‘If there were a square circle, would its area be the square of one of its sides?’ There is no answer because what it supposes is logically impossible.
So the Euthyphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn’t be tricked by it. The morally good/bad is determined by God’s nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. God wills something because He is good, and something is right because God wills it.”
(Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010. pp. 135-6)
@ACN:
I think you’re thinking of Andrew Sullivan, he had a “blogalogue” with Sam Harris a while back on the subject of religion. There was some good stuff, mainly from Harris, but ultimately Sullivan just said, “Fine, I believe because I have faith,” and stopped responding. Then he goes right back to insisting new atheists are “unsophisticated” or whatever even though one of them just pwned him.
Bow to authority!
If god were real, it would be ethical to defy it.
Wow. Thanks, Myron, for affirming just how odious Craig’s ideas are.
Against WLC, going on stage, crapping on the stage floor and leaving again seems like the appropriate clean debate tactic. Alternatively, bringing in an empty chair and with an austrian accent telling him to “talk to the chair”.
You have a book coming out…
stink about it…
I’d buy a ticket or a book if you’d be willing to sign it..
@Myron
“Santa wills something because He is good. What do I mean by that? I mean that Santa’s own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving Santa.
So moral values are not independent of Santa because Santa’s own character defines what is good. Santa is essentially fat, jolly, kind, impartial, and so on. His nature is the moral standard defining good and bad. His commands necessarily reflect His moral nature. Therefore, they’re not arbitrary. When the asantaist demands, ‘If Santa were to command child abuse, would we be obliged to abuse our children?’ he’s asking a question like ‘If William Lane Craig was a good debater, would he have presented any evidence whatsoever for his side?’ There is no answer because what it supposes is logically impossible.
So the Rudolphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn’t be tricked by it. The morally good/bad is determined by Santa’s nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. Santa wills something because He is good, and something is right because Santa wills it.”
There. Just as valid.
“So the Euthyphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn’t be tricked by it. The morally good/bad is determined by God’s nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. God wills something because He is good, and something is right because God wills it.”
Wait, isn’t what he describes exactly the one prong of Euthyphros dilemma? I thought the only reason why Sokrates is able to refute it is because they didn’t have monotheism.
I’d say WLC hadn’t read his Bible, if it were not for the fact that he explicity defends the genocides ordered by God in the OT.
A claim of logical impossibility has to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Craig’s words here are empty bluster. He shows clearly which horn of the Eurythro dilemma he chooses in practice when he defends genocides ordered by God. Liberal Christians choose (again, in practice) the other horn, asserting that when God appears to be evil, as he does in much if not most of the Bible, that those parts of the sacred text are to be regarded as (some euphemism amounting to “false” without admitting it), because God must conform to their civilised ideas of what is good and right.
Myron quotes Billy Lane on apologizing for genocide: “Emotional outbursts take the place of rational discussion, leaving us with no deeper understanding of the issues than before we began.”
Because pointing out that his justification for God’s immoral behavior also fails to pass the criterion for morality of other, decent human beings is just an “emotional outburst”. You can’t be passionate about something and also use logic, apparently. Here’s a pro-tip, Craig: Just because you have a hard time being reasonable/logical and defending something you hold true for emotional reasons at the same time doesn’t mean everyone else has the same failing.
Also:
Therefore, according to Billy Lane’s own apologetic defense of God’s genocide, genocide is good, since God would never advocate anything that wasn’t. (Craig fails to actually undermine the Euthyphro dilemma with this, like he suggests he has done: He is basically saying yes to “it is good because it is commanded by God” part, and saying that the reason for this is because is God is good…which we are supposed to assume is true, I guess).
In the Bible, God did order child abuse. He ordered Abraham to kill his son. Maybe Craig skipped that part.
I know centrifuges that don’t spin in a circle that well.
Should probably rephrase “defending something you hold true for emotional reasons ” to “defending something you are very emotional about”. “Hold true for emotional reasons” suggests that the only “reasons” are rooted in deep-felt emotion in lieu of logic, which kind of defeats my point.
@Anterepro
So I still wonder what exactly his problem with Euthyphro is? Ordinarily I would say he could simply stay with the “things are good because god condones them or encourages them” and be finished. Does he want both prongs to be correct just so he can say …because god is good?
I meant, does he want both prongs to be true just so he can say “God is good because he wants good things” at the same time?
Truthspeaker: “In the Bible, God did order child abuse. He ordered Abraham to kill his son. Maybe Craig skipped that part.”
Also: -Spare the rod and spoil the child.
-Sending bears to slaughter teens that insulted Elijah.
-Lot offering his daughters up to be raped.
-Death for disobedient children (who break the 5th commandment).
I’m sure there are more. Gotta love when Christians ignore their own Bible. Same shit as that rabbi using pedophilia as a slippery slope bugbear to demonize secular morality, apparently believing (or pretending to believe) that God forbade child molestation. Of course, he couldn’t be arsed to reference a chapter and verse, and half-jokingly implied it was a fucking commandment! If only, asshole.
It is the Richard Nixon defense. If god commands it, it is not evil.
Yes, we took a poke at that text before.
Craig’s justification of the genocide summarized: death by genocide is a suitable repercussion and entirely your own fault for not running away. Killing kids is doing a them a favor, the horrors are with the traumatized murderers. And anyway it was necessary to keep the Jewish übermensch pure.
And we thought God was a nasty piece of work.
Alex: “So I still wonder what exactly his problem with Euthyphro is?”
Wild-ass guessing: The Euthyphro Dilemma suggests a failure on the part of his religion. It means that there is little logical way that God could both be known from our perspective as objectively good and offer up objectively good morals. Either the morals can be determined to be good from a human source that isn’t God, making God good but morality no longer contingent on God, or morals are essentially arbitrary, dictated by God’s whims, but at least meaning that the morals are both objective and fully owned subsidiaries of Christianity Incorporated. Neither of these pleases Craig, so he wants to pretend he has found a way to tear the whole problem down, so believers can have their cake and eat it too. The fact that he merely assumes God is good to do this little routine adds little and leads to other problems (i.e. genocide is good, as mentioned before). Who cares about confirming if He is good, we simply assert it as true! Therefore, God’s arbitrary demands are also good, because we assume God to be good. And damned if any of us could stop an apologist from pretending that they have a point.
I agree that oral debates are a horrible way to determine truth. I would like to see more web based written debates. Jerry Coyne does a good job in written debates and a decent job at oral debates. I have no doubt that Craig is a talented oral debater but I do not think he has any interest in truth. For someone from the atheist community to debate him without equivalent debate skills would only benefit Craig.
@Anterepro
haha, I think you are right. From his apology of atrocities I had guessed him firmly in the one camp, but I guess you are right, he’s realized at least a bit that that’s not such a pleasant position, and insists on having the objective goodness cake and eat it too.
Shorter response to WLC:
tl;to (tuned out).
I think Richard Dawkins above called him a lousy debater because Richard holds some kind of idealistic view of what a productive and intellectually honest debate should look like. Unfortunately, debates barely work this way because the format does not lend itself to a structured and consistent exposé of ideas in the first place.
Anterepro and Alex – I think you’re both making the mistake of looking for a consistent message from Craig about the euthyrpro dilemma. What he writes or says about it is whatever will sound good to his audience.
I’m on the “Craig’s a master debater” bandwagon because he can rattle off his arguments quickly and effectively, has a few sucker punches thrown in, and is pretty good at anticipating any replies.
But in terms of an honest discussion, I don’t think one can have that with Craig. He’s an apologist who argues with superficial plausibility. He gets up on stage in all sincerity and claims that the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection best fits that Jesus actually resurrected from the dead… clearly a man of intimidating skill in sophistry!
“Debating Craig is a little like talking to someone who is trying to sell you double-glazing down the phone. Almost any comeback from you is already anticipated, with a scripted response, and a response to your likely response. So he sounds very, very confident and polished. Spend 20 mins on the phone with the double glazing guy, and you’ll find his script allows no other ultimate response than the one he wants – “Why yes, I’d like to buy double glazing”.” – Stephen Law
Good for you. If more people would ignore him, he might go away.
“When the atheist demands, ‘If God were to command child abuse, would we be obliged to abuse our children?’ he’s asking a question like ‘If there were a square circle, would its area be the square of one of its sides?’ There is no answer because what it supposes is logically impossible.”
(Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010. p. 136)
I think there is an answer because it doesn’t follow from it being impossible for God to command child abuse that we wouldn’t be obliged to do so if he commanded us to do so. For Craig’s metaethical logic does have the implication that the statement “If God were to command child abuse, we would be obliged to abuse our children” is true even if God were unable to command child abuse.
God’s essence (nature) is simply the sum of his essential properties, i.e. of all his properties he must have in all possible worlds in which he exists. Goodness, even perfect goodness, is said to be one of God’s essential properties. What properties make somebody good? For example, no Christian theologian will deny that compassion is a morally good or good-making property. Now the question that Craigian theists have to answer is:
Does compassion make God good because it is good, or does God make compassion good because he is compassionate?
If the former, then compassion is a God-independently good property making everybody good who has it. And if the latter, then compassion is a God-dependently good property made good by God’s having it. But doesn’t this mean that any property would become good or good-making just by virtue of the good god’s having it? For example, I fail to see how Craig could plausibly deny the truth of the following counterfactual conditional:
If the good god were ruthless, then ruthlessness would be a good property making everbody good who has it.
However, Craig rejects such statements, arguing that they are not only counterfactuals but counterpossibles, i.e. counterfactuals with an impossibly true/necessarily false antecedent, and that it is impossible for an essentially good god to be ruthless. And counterpossible counterfactuals are merely vacuously true according to the standard, Lewisian semantics of counterfactuals. Craig is right about that semantic account of counterfactuals, but what he doesn’t mention is that this account is nevertheless contentious, there being many other philosophers who think that it is not the case that all counterpossibles have vacuous truth values. For example, I fail to see how Craig could deny the nonvacuous truth of “If God didn’t exist, then the physical universe wouldn’t exist”. He holds that “God does not exist” is necessarily false, and so, given his view, the statement turns out to be a nonvacuously true counterpossible, because there is a real causal and existential dependence relation between God and the physical universe.
For this reason I conclude that Craig’s general rejection of counterpossible conditionals as vacuously true in principle is indefensible, so that he must accept the example above as nonvacuously true. Here it is again:
If the good god were ruthless, then ruthlessness would be a good property making everbody good who has it.
As I argue above, this is an inescapable logical consequence of Craig’s moral argument—and one that should strike every normal person as absurd: Any morally relevant property we normally consider as bad or bad-making would become a good or good-making property if it were one of God’s properties. For instance, if God were bloodthirsty, then bloodthirstiness would be a good or good-making property. Or, simply, if God were evil, then being evil would be a good or good-making property. But who is really prepared to swallow that perverted implication of Craig’s metaethical position?! In case you’re not, the thing to do is to reject it!
@Alex:
WLC’s strategy w/r/t the Euthyphro is to double down on “The good is what God wants” prong.
The problem is that if that’s so then what is “good” is not necessarily what human intuition tells us is good. This is how Stephen Law actually one-upped him in a debate, by arguing that all WLC’s arguments support a God who desires human suffering as well as they do a God who desires human salvation. When you disconnect your definition of morality from human moral intuition you’ve given up any warrant for believing your moral intuition is representative of God’s desires (unless you have some additional, independent source of verification for that — not likely).
In other words, WLC has picked a prong of the Euthyphro and essentially simply fails to acknowledge that doing so makes it as likely that God hates humans and wants them to treat each other poorly as that he loves them and wants them to be happy (or saved or whatever Christians think happens to God’s desired outcome for human beings). WLC just skips the step where he demonstrates that what he thinks is good is also what God thinks is good.
Of course, I prefer Euthyphro’s secret option C: no God, morality is usually determined by tradition and culture but is better when determined by the application of reason to real-world ethical dilemmas.
So Craig calmly offers an apologist justification for genocide and the murder of innocents, cunningly and circularly reasoned, and dismisses critics as offering only “emotional outbursts.” The day I don’t respond to genocide with an emotional outburst is the day I’ve surrendered my humanity.
@kel
I totally agree with you, except on sincerity, he has all the sincerity of a used car salesman selling a lemon. He knows it’s a worthless piece of shit but he’ll sell it to you anyway because his lively hood and reputation as a salesmen depends on it.
According to the propaganda, Craig’s god kills people just because he can. His attitude is basically “obey my arbitrary whims or die.” That’s more like a sadistic bully than a “compassionate, fair, kind, impartial” being.
I believe Craig comes from the Calvinist tradition, which wouldn’t see this as a problem.
Add me to the ‘Craig is a fearsome debater’ list. He’s a master of cognitive bias – the weakness of his scientific arguments is actually a strength, since he pitches at a level that makes sense to a person who doesn’t have much background knowledge about evolution. The other problem is that few people who’ve tackled Craig have enough depth of knowledge of the Bible, and they are taking on a world expert; it looks hick when you can’t immediately pick up on a Biblical quote. Craig is an old-earth Creationist who IMO probably kinda-sorta thinks that macroevolution is a reasonable hypothesis, but is too crafty to be drawn, appealing instead to obfuscation and a sense of personal incredulity:
(from http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6711)
“Even the evolution of amphibians from fish or birds from reptiles is miniscule compared to whole tree of life postulated by the theory [of evolution], for it still only involves evolutionary development within a single phylum.
By contrast, what is the evidence that a bat and a sponge are descended via mutation and natural selection from a common ancestor?”
1) He implies that the first sort of scenario, the evolution of amphibians from fish, is not macroevolution. A Craig-supporter will accept macroevolution, as long as Craig sells it as microevolution. He never, ever addresses the idea that there’s no clear divide between micro and macro.
2) He exploits the fact that hardly any layperson knows much about such venerable troopers as single-celled animals. Craig might not be able to name any extant free-living single-celled animal (with the possible exception of the ever-charismatic amoebae) but he’s unlikely to be challenged on this. Instead, he exploits the fact that the Sponge/Bat LCA is a bizarre concept, which the brain’s natural reaction is to reject.
He is genuinely erudite, and skilled at avoiding areas where there are obvious gaps in his knowledge. The best shot for an opponent is to get him to discuss an evolutionary scenario that is undoubtedly bizarre – perhaps the origin of radial symmetry in echinoderms would suit – and ask it it’s micro or macro evolution. If he says micro, play up the weirdness and extreme nature of the bodyplan shift, since it’s not most peoples’ idea of a tiny, barely-detectable change.
The ‘Children of Canaan’ thing is best left alone, because what most people on the other side will hear is an atheist arguing that the Bible says it’s sound practice to kill young children; but they already believe that the Bible sounds like wickedness and foolishness to atheists anyway.
TL:DR: Yes, we would be obliged to abuse our children, and it wouldn’t be abuse, because God is good and thus anything God wills is right. Got it.
Excuse me while I toss what I just ate for lunch.
I don’t want to get into deep devil’s advocate (erm, YHWH’s advocate) arguments here, but I still don’t see the problem. God may be the arbiter of what is good by his whim. He made us, and therefore we have exactly the moral intuition the good God wants us to have. When we find something that YHWH does abhorrent, but what we are supposed to do is determined by what the god who defines what is good has built into us as moral intuition. If it’s all up to god’s whim, there is no reason why goodness of a deed should not depend on who does it and when.
I would have thought that too, given his quote-mining and misleading presenting of his case, but former student John Loftus gives this assessment: “When it comes to public debates however, since the goal is to win them, I have suspected he fudges the truth. But this is a hard charge to make stick, since, once again, any number of cognitive biases could be working in his brain, just like they do in all other believers. Bill Craig is a good man, a good philosopher, an honest man, and my friend, even though I think he is delusionally dead wrong.”
As Craig has admitted in debate, he knows the truth through witness to the holy spirit. The arguments and evidence, as far as I can see, are a means to get people to at least consider the possibility of a reasonable belief in theism – so in time they’ll come to believe and be witness to the holy spirit too. Though I don’t know what to make of his misleading use of authorities – does he deliberately misrepresent his opponents or is that how he reads them? His treatment of Michael Ruse in the moral argument, for example, is incredibly dodgy…
One objection, Beanoglobin: “The ‘Children of Canaan’ thing is best left alone, because what most people on the other side will hear is an atheist arguing that the Bible says it’s sound practice to kill young children, but they already believe that the Bible sounds like wickedness and foolishness to atheists anyway”
So what? People taking that kind of position will just dismiss ANY criticism of their faith anyway. Fuck them. Don’t relent against William Lane Craig by ignoring one of the biggest apologetic missteps ever made just because a handful of people are prejudiced against atheists enough to ignore such criticism just because an atheist is saying it. That’s cowardly and is a clear route that, if strictly followed, will lead to atheists saying nothing at all. We have to trust that, if we clearly state our case, some people will actually have the message penetrate their skulls, instead of just reflexively denying the message because they think we’re biased/persecuting them/whatever.
@truthspeaker:
You may be right about Calvinism but Craig isn’t about to admit that in a debate. He’s a showman first so he has to make sure he keeps a nice big smiley face painted over God at all times. He has to maintain that God wants Christians to behave the way they already behave (that’s the appeal of religious belief, isn’t it? that the master of the universe thinks you’re a swell dude (that “dude” is intended to be gender ambiguous)?). So if Christians think kicking puppies and beating children are bad then God has to as well (except for disobedient children, of course; the Bible’s pretty clear about what to do with them).
Luckily for Craig, the notion that God would want people to suffer is so far beyond the pale for most believers that it’s not a question he usually has to address. I was surprised by how effective Stephen Law’s line of argument was against him and on reflection I realized that this is probably the case — as a good Calvinist he’s willing to worship a horrible sky monster that wants what’s worst for everybody but he couldn’t just come out and say that in front of the flock.
Lest anyone find themselves under the mistaken impression that Myron is arguing in good faith, I refer you to the October 20, 2011 thread Standing up to William Lane Craig, wherein Myron the Craiganite appeared – claiming to be an atheist – then proceeded to spend the entirety of the thread defending Craig’s indefensible bullshit apologia, citing Craig’s books, linking to Craig’s “well-structured” “Argument Maps,” making unintelligible metaphysical assertions, etc.
I agree that these debates can easily devolve into oratorical point-scoring, and that any viewers who approve of divinely-ordained genocide to begin with are not likely to be reasoned out of it. Still, I think realtime oral debates can force participants to clarify points and definitions that would sail past each other in written exchanges.
It never fails to astound me how believers who buy into the whole idea that God wants people to suffer for their own good completely miss how that is exactly the same mentality employed by abusers – so what if I’m hitting my kid/wife/partner, it’s totally for their own good! I can’t understand how people can see how that’s wrong for one person to do to another, but will turn around and argue that it’s totes ok if it’s God doing the same thing to humanity.
@Alex:
Yes, of course you can assume that your moral intuition was given to you by God and therefore represents his desires, but one can simply respond to that with any number of alternative hypotheses that are just as consistent with what we see in the real world.
For example, if our moral intuitions are really placed by God as representative of his own preferences, why do human beings disagree so much about what constitutes moral behavior and even what is pleasurable or painful? If the moral intuition is really our direct line to God why does the channel seem so noisy? One possibility is that God does indeed want us to suffer so he gives us all different and conflicting moral intuitions to make sure we treat each other terribly and then get confused over who is actually the bad guy. Another is that our moral intuitions are really biological impulses and virtue consists in resisting them.
This doesn’t even get into the problem that a God-given moral intuition would seem to interfere with free will. My moral intuition actually prevents me from doing some things — isn’t that a limit on my free will? Isn’t my potential virtue limited by a lack of choice in some of the most heinous moral dilemmas I could be put into?
No matter how you slice it you still have to make an assumption that your moral intuition is representative of God’s true desires for human behavior. If you’re simply asserting it’s so because it seems plausible to you you’re still not really making an argument for it.
@The Pint:
Even most of those people are just signing onto the “mysterious ways” thesis. They want to believe God’s in control so they have to acknowledge his hand on the tiller when the ship hits a baby seal but they still want to believe God is a total mensch so they apologize for him. “I’m sure he had very good reasons. He’s really a swell guy. He’ll do the right thing in the end.” Really is eery how much that sounds like a stereotypical abused spouse.
I think for theologians it is valid to say “God made us in his image. This means that in particular that our moral intuition was given to us by God. All contradictions that you might find in that can be brushed away by the remark that the critic doesn’t understand your position, followed by a one minute rants containing the words “God, free will, original sin”.
I have never understood why Christians find Craig’s arguments compelling. I tried reading “Atheist Delusions” to see what all the fuss was about.
The first chapter was all drivel of the type “I cannot believe how fatuous those atheist arguments are! A mere “philosopher” and “biologist” and “neurobiologist”, and, worst of all, “magician”, think they can refute the word of the bible? Their arguments are, of course, void, uninteresting, juvenile and fallacious.”
Of course, he never goes on to show exacly where the arguments in The God Delusion or Breaking the Spell or other similar books go wrong. Obviously because he would not be able to. He just states that they are wrong, and spices up the commentary with words like “sophomoric” and the like. It is all completely devoid of content.
And that is the best they’ve got?
Dan L.
That sounds amusing to me. Is “mensch” a Yiddish import? What does it mean in this context? (of course it means “human” in german…)
@truebutnotuseful:
Try to see the difference between presenting one’s opponent’s arguments in a fair light and defending or affirming them!
(By the way, I don’t care whether or not you believe me when I say I’m an atheist.)
Best debate format that works was one heard on Reasonable Doubt. Defined questions STRICT time limit. Immediate short right of reply.
Basically format is question 1 first speaker 5 mins. Q1 second speaker rebut 1 min. Q1 second speaker 5 mins. Q1 first speaker rebut 1 min.
Q2 …..
This actually highlights apologists lack of focus and lack of precision. Why don’t PZ and. RD consider appropriate debate formats?
QFFT
Exactly!
Craig’s use of language in his defence, and the defence of his defence, seek as much as possible to downplay the moral connotations. “Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.” The death of these children is shorthand for children who God ordered the extermination of for the crime of living on the wrong land.
@ Anteprepro:
Don’t relent against William Lane Craig by ignoring one of the biggest apologetic missteps ever made just because a handful of people are prejudiced against atheists enough to ignore such criticism just because an atheist is saying it.
This is the thing: we think like that, but they don’t. I’m not the pure of heart, and I would sorely and basely like to see an atheist beat Craig at his own game. It’s becoming embarrassing that we can’t find a rhetoric gladiator of his stature; that’s all he is, but he’s still an impressive one.
I have had the ‘you just don’t understand’ experience with a Christian friend of mine. The Biblical incident was a lesser-known bit of the NT, the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananias_and_Sapphira
Unlike the Canaanites, Ananias and Sapphira are not described as horrible, child-sacrificing idolaters with not a single redeeming feature: they are Christians who commit one quite minor act of disobedience, and are struck dead directly by the power of God.
I suggested that this was excessive. My friend explained that God has the right to strike you dead, and perhaps send you to Hell (she is not very big on Hell, like a lot of Christians in the UK), for any step that’s out of line at all, and that in Ananias and Sapphira’s case, the crime was lying. The story of Uzzah (2 Samuel 6:3-8), who leaps forward to stop the Ark of the Covenant falling out of a cart, touches it, and is struck dead by God, is also informative and potentially useful against an opponent like Craig (remember, this is a point-scoring exercise, not a quest for truth).
I don’t say that Craig’s position about the Children of Canaan is a nice defensible one. But it’s much easier to tackle than Ananias and Sapphira, or luckless well-meaning Uzzah, and it’s easy to use the Children of Canaan to get an atheist opponent to effectively say: ‘If this is true, we should kill any young child we find’. They mean it as reductio ad absurdum, but the audience won’t hear it like that, and Craig is happy to exploit this.
This looks like you’re giving the idea more credit than it’s worth. The alternatives aren’t just as consistent, or even more consistent, because there’s nothing in the “god” argument to be consistent with. It’s completely vacuous or nonsensical. We may as well replace the nonsense with whatever we like, unless there’s a meaningful replacement:
“Yes, of course you can assume that your moral intuition was given to you by [cheeseburgers] and therefore represents [the cheesburgers’] desires, but one can simply respond to that with any number of alternative hypotheses that are just as consistent with what we see in the real world.”
Since we know cheeseburgers exist and have some way of knowing about them, this is being too generous as well, but you get the idea I hope. The point is that it’s not a meaningful hypothesis, so it can’t compete or be consistent with anything.
All of this is ignoring one thing. One very important thing. Historical evidence.
If there is one person I want to see debate this shitstain it’s either Hector Avalor or Richard Carrier. Craig wins these debates on emotion and fatuous logic; he is, conversely, very weak in what the Bible actually says and what historically actually happened.
Carrier has an interesting entry on how the forgeries in Daniel 9, among others, absolutely give the game away. Moral philosophers have come up with emergent theories of morality that answer more things better than DCT. And the archaeologists from Dever on up have shown that the foundational stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition are false.
Someone needs to smack him down with facts and evidence, not sink to his level and puff hot air.
@Alex:
Yes, “mensch” is German for “man”; in a Yiddish context it should be read more like “man’s man” without necessarily all the chauvinistic overtones. A real good guy, basically. I’m not Jewish but I’ve picked up a few phrases from my stepmother. And yes, you weren’t imagining the joke — I was riffing off the fact that most of WLC’s audience probably do not believe in a rarefied ground-of-all-being style God, but in a person-like entity whose approval they can win simply by being their virtuous selves.
Regarding “we’re made in God’s image,” this phrase is really more problematic for believers than for atheists. Obviously, the believer has to make it non-literal to work at all. It has to be a metaphor — in which case the onus is on the believer to interpret it, and the interpretation would then be subject to criticism. Even then, my experience with human beings is that they’re usually petty, short-sighted, and self-centered and engage in all sorts of delusional thinking to justify their terrible behavior to themselves — and throw a fit if you try to call them on it. Human beings have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing. When we say “man is made in God’s image” how could that be anything but an insult to a being that is necessarily so good that it defines the very meaning of the word “good”?
I don’t disagree that the response will more often than not be a waffly dodge concerning God’s mysterious ways, but all I’m trying to do is point out that that’s not a real argument. If the best theists can do in response to this sort of argument is kick up dirt then I don’t feel particularly compelled to chase them into the dust cloud.
@Kel
ahhhhhhh….
He owns the lemon and no matter matter how many times it broke down on him it’s breaking down is not only part of it’s engineering but essential to it’s design and should be to you to if you want to own it to.
His line of BS is so outrageous that I find it hard to believe he buys what he sells. It sounds like the type of shit when someone plays devil’s advocate to see how far they can go to defend an indefensible position because they the like to argue and argue for the sake of arguing right.
William Lane Craig is not interested in debating. He preaches from the pulpit, no matter where that pulpit may be.
Mr. President, #31:
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Marina, #27:
According to recent (recent!? how ’bout ongoing?) events, the floodgates have always been open. Funny, though, how diplomacy insists that attempts to eliminate “the others” is always just a temporary misunderstanding.
Ohhh, my people . . .
@consciousnessrazor:
I may be, but I’m trying not to be too reductive these days. If we were talking about fundamental physics and you asked me to demonstrate the existence of quarks I wouldn’t really know where to begin. If you asked me to define quarks, I’d still be up a bit of a creek. “Perturbations of a particular quantum field,” or maybe “simultaneous perturbations of multiple quantum fields”? But then what’s a quantum field and how do they get perturbed? That’s ignoring the fact that, despite the name, QFT is not widely regarded as “quite fucking true.”
If I’m going to discuss God or spirituality I’ll give the other party the benefit of the doubt that they believe they’re talking about something in particular and that they can at least point me in the rough direction of what they’re describing in an abstract “possibility space.” Really, I don’t think we can hope to ever do better than that in any form of communication. So while I may honestly suspect that the other party is confused on one point or other I’ll at least listen to their whole argument to decide whether it makes sense.
But yeah, I’m inclined to agree that the whole idea of God is incoherent. I just try to stay open-minded in case someone surprises me one of these days. Hasn’t happened yet.
In William lane Craig’s defense of genocide, he says this:
One wonders how, if morality can only be imparted through divine revelation (as Craig seems to believe), the Canaanites were supposed to know that their culture was “debauched and cruel”. How were they supposed to know that their practices were evil? And if the Israelites came into contact with them while armed with God’s own morality, why is it so weak that it wouldn’t be able to withstand these “abominable practices”?
In effect, the Canaanites are condemned for not knowing the rules of the game. And they don’t know the rules of the game because God hid the ball from them. So really, God’s anger against them is pretty much unjustified even if you accept all of Craig’s premises. Its just God setting the Canaanites up to fail, and then butchering them for the failure he set in motion. Yeah, that’s a “kind, loving, just” entity.
Why don’t we “crowdsource” a sort of “Essential Guide To Breaking Down Craig’s Bullshit?” This is actually good timing since Loftus, Carrier, and Avalos are coming to FtB. Maybe we can make the suggestion?
They all cover overlapping areas: Loftus is a former apologist and insider, Carrier does philosophy and history, Avalos does history and text criticism IIRC. I think this is especially good because, as stated above, Craig seems weak when it comes to the historical side of the equation.
Forgive me if I’m repeating
Craig has a) What God says is moral but don’t worry he won’t change the laws to make evil moral because his nature is good
Then he has argument b) God changed the laws of what’s good to make an evil action good because he commanded it.
“I would never ever ever tell you to do something evil…now go beat that old lady with this chair leg.”
Oh, and Craig STILL needs to explain this tired old canard:
“Why does an omnimax God have to sacrifice himself to himself to stop himself from throwing the creations he knew would sin into the Hell he created for them (but never mentioned until Jesus)?”
Apologists like to lend an air of respectability to their field by giving it the trappings of academia and philosophy, but it leaves them rather open to juvenile barbs like this. The foolish things of the world confound the “wise” indeed :)
Ing,
You do know that that is a logical impossibility, right? /wlc
Questionable. Victors write the history and demonize the losers. Not that any of that even happened. The Jews were just another tribe of…Canaanites.
Even if that was happening, the babies, children, women, and likely many of the men weren’t involved. Genociding them for the actions of a few is pretty morally aberrant.
I wish Dawkins had given as honest and reasonable a list of reasons why he wouldn’t debate Craig instead of repeatedly changing his story (it won’t look good on my CV, I mean I already debated him in Mexico, I mean his justification of genocide is despicable and I’d never share a stage with such an evil man) and looking like he was scared and dishonest. The reasons PZ gives are much more honest and still perfectly reasonable and he doesn’t end up looking like he’s afraid his views are weak or vulnerable.
Fuck off, Myron. If you’re interested in seeing little Willie Craig’s arguments, you may as well go stick your head in your toilet. It will be just as enlightening to you and a lot more interesting to any witnesses.
No human being owes that odious little genocidal-god-loving William Lane Craig a “fair light”. NO one. And you pretending – or even you really believing – that you’re just such a wonderful fair and balanced skeptic – or whatever the fuck you think you’re doing here – is just goddamn boring. Fuck off and bore elsewhere.
That’s not giving them any benefit. I would say the same thing: I do think most believe they’re talking about something in particular. I just don’t think they in fact are — notwithstanding that whatever a particular thing would be if they did have a clear idea of it, it would still most likely be non-existent or not a deity. There is a difference, and it can be communicated as I’ve just done.
Bah. All of WLC’s arguments amount to different ways of setting up, “Assume my god exists,” and then going on to use that to confirm his god exists. So far, everything I’ve seen have just been different ways of smuggling in, “Assume my god exists.”
@raven:
This doesn’t get said often enough. The Canaanites were there first; the Hebrews were the upstarts who rejected the Canaanite religion while proudly continuing to use their spoken and written languages. And then used many pages in their holiest book to brag about how they committed genocide against their ancestors. And the only redeeming feature of the genocide glorification that happens right in the beginning of the so-called holy book is that it never actually happened.
@Brian Hicks #24
*slow clap*
I got you there. Though I’m not sure how many got the lurker #1.
I’ve used ‘master debater’ before, but cunning linguist…I’m going to have to steal that from you.
Major pop culture meme fail on your part here
@consciousnessrazor:
We may have to just disagree on this. I’m willing to listen to and seriously consider arguments for God’s existence. “Deity” is somewhat open to interpretation and “nonexistent” begs the question unless you agree on a usable definition of “existence.” You can play gotcha all day using the fallacy of definition to your advantage but I find that sort of discussion tedious. I think communicating ideas is difficult and if someone wants to try to convey some meaning to me I will work with them in good faith to try to understand.
For those who would like to see, this is the video of the Oxford event of the Reasonable Faith Tour with William Lane Craig where Dawkins was invited to defend his book The God Delusion.
In his absence a panel of 3 Oxford academics responded to Craig’g critique of TGD, and the event was hosted by Prof Peter Millican of Hertford College.
http://youtu.be/fP9CwDTRoOE
William Lane Craig: Is God a Delusion? Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford October 2011
I’ll keep saying this. The more odious douchebags like William Lane Craig talk about their god, the more it looks like Cthulhu to me.
I know I could never debate William Lane Craig. The second I’m asked for a rebuttal, my pants are coming down.
Even in written debates it is possible to trick people into thinking that the part that’s wrong is “winning.” It is so easy to get distracted even in written debate. So if one were to do that. I would never debate this imbecile (WLC). He will declare victory whether it was an oral debate or a written debate. he will use whatever word salad and misquotations, and you will feel just as nauseated that people take this imbecile seriously. No thanks. Let the imbecile talk to the wall.
Would he ask me to a debate I would say go fuck yourself with your rhetorical shit. I hope it hurts badly.
Richard Dawkins, for a man who claims Craig is so unworthy of your time, you don’t half spend it throwing insults and ad hominems at him!
Why is it that you have never, ever EVER responded to a single one of his actual ARGUMENTS concerning your material in The God Delusion? He claims to have demolished your “unrebuttable” central argument and that your responses to theistic arguments are weak or even confirmatory of God’s existence (take your complete self-contradiction on the moral argument – even your 12th excuse of The Canaanites commits this fallacy)!
Why do you have so much time to insult and belittle Dr Craig’s credentials (he is a philosopher whether you like it or not, and no matter what sort of unspecified anecdotal “evidence” you claim to the contrary), yet not actually address his arguments?
If you want to have a try, you can watch his lecture response to your arguments here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP9CwDTRoOE
Simple answer to me seems, frankly, you’re afraid and know he’ll dismantle them.
And there are even some atheists who can tell, because the psychology of your reactions and the numerous, inconsistent excuses you make really do give it all away!
p.s. why did you also attack John Lennox recently? You’ve debated him three times, yet his belief of “water into wine” only undermines him NOW? Toys out of pram, this looks like.
Yup, I don’t think you should debate Craig, especially since his major platform is basically the same as the debate society I was a member of when I was a student. Hell, *I* would debate Craig, because in my debate club one had to argue a particular side according to the flip of a coin, regardless of what one believed, and I almost always won . It’s just a game, and Craig plays it well, but ultimately he’s on the losing side. Just watch his debates with Shelly Kagan and Stephen Law. However, I would love to see him debate you in writing instead of speech, as in your point #4.
Anyway, I made an argument in YouTube comments about how if Craig was serious he would be published in peer-reviewed academic journals, but as it turned out I had to concede that he was published in academic journals (no idea if they are peer-reviewed). My bad for not making sure I knew what I was talking about there before speaking. However, does anybody out there know about Craig’s academic credentials? Are they good? Are they bad? Are the journals he publishes in peer-reviewed? Do philosophers outside the Christian and theological communities take him seriously? I am curious.
NigelTheBold writes:
“All of WLC’s arguments amount to different ways of setting up, ‘Assume my god exists,’ and then going on to use that to confirm his god exists.”
No, they don’t. Can you show me an argument of his one of whose premises is “God exists”?
@Birdieupon,
Provide evidence for your imaginary sky fairy. You can’t, and nor can WLC, so all of WLCs arguments are about nothing, mere poor rhetorical aides for deluding oneself.
sorry, I meant to say
“all of WLCs ARGUMENTS are about nothing”
BTW, to be fair to WLC, I would want at least a fortnight to prepare. After all he’s a damned good debater. I would go so far as to say he was a master debater! :-)
@Alex,
Actually, I didn’t come here claiming to do that. I cam here to criticize Dawkins for his childish reactions to Dr Craig, which are completely unbecoming of an academic.
You, however, claim that Craig’s arguments fail.
Perhaps you’d like to demonstrate how? If you can, you’ll have one up on Richard!
Birdieupon seems to be laboring under the misconception that this is Richard Dawkins’ blog.
Cupcake, try here.
Birdieupon,
It is not exactly childish to point out that WLC is a immoral excuse of a philosopher who has repeatedly justified atrocities such as genocide. Rejecting to debate him on these grounds is not unbecoming of an academic.
As to why his arguments fail, there are multiple threads now dedicated to this topic, and I’m not going to make a list now and do the research to summarize what was said. If you feel that you know a particularly good argument of his that you would like to bring up here to discuss it, feel free to do so.
@Esteleth
also, that.
They all fail. Craig is an idiot.
For an example, check out the thread previous to this one. Posted today.
Craig claims animals can’t feel pain. His arguments on this one are just factually and logically wrong.
I’ve just listened to the last part of the recording of Craig’s Sheldonian speech. Incredibly, he not only repeats his outrageous defence of genocide almost word for word, but is actually applauded for doing so, If the applauders were Oxford students, I am ashamed of my university. A show of hands at the end showed that almost a hundred percent of the audience were religious, so they were not a typical student audience. I’m still ashamed of them. I’m also ashamed of the chairman, Millican, who let him repeat those disgusting words without a murmur of protest.
Dawkins doesn’t want to go slumming with the worst our society has produced. Understandable for an Oxford Don.
For one example of why, read this thread moron. Craig defends genocide and mass murder because his fictional Sky Monster god supposedly commanded it.
I realize you aren’t very bright, but genocide just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people just don’t think it is a great idea.
@Esteleth
Thank you, but they banned me the moment I dared to criticize him.
@Alex
Sorry, that won’t do. I’ve seen tonnes of responses to Dr Craig, none of which pass muster. If you think he’s wrong, it would be good to know which arguments you think do the job.
As for the Canaanites, this is NOT Dawkins’ reason for refusing. He’s given 12 excuses in total, 3 of which were made he found before he found out about the article, and the rest either while knowing or, apparently, “forgetting” about the article. He grabbed it last of all in a final attempt to hit emotional hot buttons while avoiding the intellectual issues, ironic!
Furthermore, Dawkins denies that evil exists in the first place and endorses infanticide himself (look him up with Peter Singer – Dawkins believes there are morally acceptable circumstances for killing babies).
Lastly, if Dawkins knows anything about logic, he’ll appreciate that the Canaanite story has no bearing on the arguments for theism, the historical case for the Resurrection and, most of all, the (in)validity of his own arguments. It is pure ad hominem, so either:
A) Dawkins is incompetent with logic (which means even greater need to listen to a professional philosopher like Craig scrutinize him)
or
B) Dawkins knows it’s ad hominem, yet makes the attack because he is scraping the barrel to save his own skin.
And it’s not even fooling some atheists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/22/richard-dawkins-refusal-debate-william-lane-craig
Compare Dawkins’ childishness to Stephen Law and Peter Millican, for starters. The man is running away.
@raven
“Dawkins doesn’t want to go slumming with the worst our society has produced. Understandable for an Oxford Don.”
4 Oxford Dons participated in the Sheldonian event (3 of which were atheists) so I think you need to find a new tune.
*typo:
3 of which were made before he found out about the article.
Lol @Birdieupon’s explanation as to why he (presuming he) has to bring his anti-Dawkins tirade here: he got banned!
Birdieupon, cupcake, you’re a moron and your arguments, like Craig’s are full of shit. Take a porcupine and go.
Come on Richard – Millican was a model of civility – a good exmaple of how the conversation should be conducted. Just because he doesn’t engage in the same way you do is not cause for throwing mud.
He doesn’t agree with Craig on the Canaanite issue but he can see beyond that to the fact there’s a great deal of stuff worth talking about.
These Oxford academics takes the arguments he is actually known for and engage, fruitfully. You are looking increasingly isolated when three Oxford atheist academics choose to spend the evening engaging at the Sheldonian.
Really. According to you, genius?
It doesn’t work this way.
It was the last reason he brought up
No, that’s not ironic.
Are you trying to provoke him into responding to your idiotic slander because you know he is reading here right now?
He’s a very successful scientist, so I’m sure he knows nothing about logic.
You are right, it has no bearing on the arguments for theism. It has very much a bearing on arguments for a benevolent god that is not an abhorrent monster. He knows this perfectly well.
It seems you wouldn’t know logic if it hit you with a shovel
It’s not ad hominem fallacy because he hasn’t claimed that WLCs arguments for god are wrong because of his immoral stance – he said that he feels disinclined to debate him because of it.
WLC is a dishonest immoral debate machine. Nothing is gained from engaging him on an intellectual level.
@ Elteleth:
“Birdieupon, cupcake, you’re a moron and your arguments, like Craig’s are full of shit. Take a porcupine and go.”
WOW! You’re behaving just like Richard Dawkins! No arguments or intellectual engagement at all. Just name-calling.
Incredible (but not surprising).
I see you completely ignored two current example’s of Craig’s mindless nonreasoning.
1. His defense of genocide, discussed in this thread several places.
2. His claim that animals don’t feel pain, discussed in the previous thread posted today.
You are 0/2 right now.
BTW, troll, this isn’t the beat up on Richard Dawkins thread. It is the WL Craig is an evil idiot thread.
If you are trying to derail the thread, you are a troll. Do try to stay on topic. If you have trouble doing this, perhaps your Thinking Brain Service Dog can help.
Birdieupon says:
8 November 2011 at 11:32 pm
That would be your opinion of course. I’ve seen nothing but assertions and strawmen from Craig. Still no evidence for the supernatural.
Do dolphins have souls?
@Esteleth You csurely can’t be unaware of the the fact that the ugly language and insults you model tends to drive most reasonable people well away from your brand of atheism.
Birdieupon,
I’m certain that Richard Dawkins would love being compared to an American lesbian Quaker, because that’s totally what he is.
It’s pretty hard to intellectually engage with someone as vacuous as yourself. Do you have any arguments besides, “Richard Dawkins is a meanie!” or is that it?
Oh, and it’s called “copy and paste.” It’s you’re friend when you’re not sure how to spell things, like people’s ‘nyms.
I still have a lot of respect for atheists though, because I’ve met people like Peter Millican, and Daniel Came.
he got banned!
I can see why. This one is just a troll interested in slinging insults at Richard Dawkins. Which isn’t the topic of this thread at all. The troll is also being evasive and playing xian whack-a-mole.
@justinbrierley
That’s wonderful. Of course, we have to be really careful with our language or you’ll turn super theist because we’re so mean!!! Oh the horror!!!
How vacuous of you.
I hope that I’m not the only one who can see, quite clearly, that Birdieupon and Justin Brierley are the only ones (from comment #104 on, limiting myself to the ensuing discussion in particular) making substantive and interesting points here, and that their civil comments are being met with little more than vitriol.
I have no respect for xians like justin and birdbrain. Lying trolls. This is BTW, why I left xianity. Most of us are ex-xians.
People have been abandoning the Catholic church by the tens of millions. Most likely it has little to do with militant atheists and everything to do with a fossilized authoritarian heirarchy, pointless and obsolete morality made up by Popes from nothing, and the endless child sexual abuse scandals.
That because you, like Craig, are a morally bankrupt inhuman wretch.
Because no actual human being with even the tiniest modicum of ethical decency can consider Craig’s odious arguments and not vomit in disgust.
@Eric
Are you one of those people for whom it does not matter what is said, as long as it is said in a nice tone? I have no respect for that.
I smell sock puppetry. Though I could be wrong, concern trolls are easily mistaken for sock puppetry
Alex, Tyrant of Skepsis has a point! He is the only reasonable contributor to this thread IMHO.
@raven Yes, you come across as a very well adjusted person now your’e out out of it!
Serously though, and sorry if this is Off Topic, but are you guys actually interested in engaging seriously? If this is the level of it we might as well all go home!
Probably you are.
Eric is a notorious worshipper of WL Craig who always shows up to sing hymns to his hero. It’s always pretty wacko.
They haven’t made any substantive points.
Birdbrain just dumped his animosity towards Dawkins here after being banned elsewhere.
Justin Brierly just lied.
@justinbrierley
Yes, definitively. Go ahead and present an argument.
Shorter apologist/atheist debate:
God said/did it therefore it is right.
How do I know it is right just because god said/did it?
Because god is always right.
How do I know that?
Because god told us so.
How did he tell us?
Through his revelations in the bible.
So god wrote the bible?
Well not exactly but yes.
Well what does “not exactly” mean?
I have to let god into my heart and be transformed so I can see the truth of what he revealed in the bible – that is what I have to do and what the writers of the bible had to do when they wrote the bible.
So god is just a figment in imagination – or to say in other words: god is an abstraction – just something in our minds?
No god really exists!!!!
And how do you know this?
God said it therefore it is right.
And the circle begins again!
OOOOOOKKKKKK!
This is the template for any debate. The likes of WLC will dress it up to give their logic curb appeal – but the essence is the above. No smart intellectually honest audience will score him well.
Oh, yuk, slimed by a troll. That’s all you have.
Plus a whopping lie or two.
Bingo. I mean really, why stress yourself out having to address anything substantive when instead you can take the easy route and complain about form?
@PZ It appears Peter Byrom just got banned – is this necessary? Surely you don’t want the comments page to be an interminable an echo chamber?
“Eric is a notorious worshipper of WL Craig who always shows up to sing hymns to his hero. It’s always pretty wacko.”
Right, the one who, as a Catholic, disagrees with Craig on a host of theological issues, and who, as a Thomist, disagrees with Craig on a host of philosophical issues. Oh, and I’ve mentioned this many times in the past, on this very blog. But why should I expect you to be honest or to care about the facts, right?
Frakking blockquote fail!
Yeah. Because clearly we’re all just a bunch of “yes men and women” around here. Have you ever actually read anything on this site?
Good point. Neither has said anything intelligent and on topic.
Both are being evasive and playing xian whack-a-mole.
Both are trolls.
I suspect birdbrain gets banned pretty often and sets up sockpuppets to keep their troll game going.
The Eric nym probably isn’t one of them though. There is an Eric the WL Craig fanboy who has showed up before.
Only in your delusional mind. Their points are as presuppositional as every one of WLC’s. And yours.
Justin, in PZ’s defense, I’ve been commenting here on and off (mostly off) for some time, I’ve always challenged PZ and his regulars, and I’ve never had so much as a post removed. I can’t say why (or whether) he banned Byrom, and I can’t say whether it was justified, but I can say that PZ does, in my experience, tolerate very strong, and very strongly worded, disagreement with him.
Birdieupon writes:
“Lastly, if Dawkins knows anything about logic, he’ll appreciate that the Canaanite story has no bearing on the arguments for theism, the historical case for the Resurrection and, most of all, the (in)validity of his own arguments.”
You’re right. The argument
“Craig’s moral stand on the biblical story of the Canaanites deserves strong disapproval; therefore, all his arguments for (Christian) monotheism are to be rejected as well.”
is not very persuasive, is it?
Craig’s main arguments:
1. Cosmological Argument
1.1 Leibniz’s CA
1.2 Kalam CA
2. Design Argument
2.1 Fine-Tuning DA
3. Moral Argument
3.1 Theodicy (Problem of Suffering)
4. Argument(s) against the Religious Pluralism Objection
5. Argument(s) for the historical authenticity and veridicality of the biblical story of Jesus
Jesus Haploid Christ, do you have to be such a scum-sucker, Myron ? Can’t you control yourself for just a few hours ? You need your hourly fix of licking little Willie’s ass ?
Fuck off, Myron. You give normal human beings the heebie-jeebies with your pervy adulation for that odious genocidal-god-loving WLC.
Myron.
All of Craig’s arguments are bullshit.
Seriously, they are. I say that as a non-atheist. He is WRONG and full of shit.
Very good, Myron. Can you do us the service and explain to Justin and Birdie the obvious shortcomings of WLCs arguments? You know them better than most here.
*giggle*
@Eric
Fair enough – And I know PZ does engage strongly himself – he’s been on my show and did a great job. But I don’t see what neccessitated Peter’s removal.
If you are the Craig fanboy, it’s OK.
Amuse us. Sing a hymn about him or whatever. You know you really, really want to.
Otherwise, you are just another dumb troll. This thread is about WL Craig, not Richard Dawkins. It isn’t a troll playground either.
I realize this might be beyond your ability to read and think, but this is PZ Myers’ blog. It actually has a subject picked out by…PZ Myers.
“But I don’t see what neccessitated Peter’s removal.”
Justin, I agree, given the content of Peter’s posts on this thread alone.
@justinbrierley
Enough with the OT meta discussions. On with the engaging part! Let’s rock the house with some epic Craigian sophisticated theology!
Myron, STOP RIGHT THERE.
Since you are the kind of sick fuck who thinks it’s worth looking past that, you’ve forfeited the right to be included in any human discussions.
You’re a disgusting waste of human flesh, but you could do something about it. You could grow up and realize that defending Craig’s odious genocidal master is not something you ever want to be associated with for any reason.
When you get to that point (IF you get to that point) then you’ll be welcome back into human society. If not, DIAF, Myron.
@Myron
All of Craig’s tricks are PRAT.
Add that and that the man exalts genocide as moral and I see no reason why anyone would want to share a stage with him.
Why should I want to deal with someone who says that it is moral to kill me?
Frankly, why would I even bother responding to a proclaimed philosopher who is at an amoral obedient level of moral operation?
That “I was just following orders” is wrong for man but not for God is special pleading.
If morality isn’t made for people and with human concerns then it is just blind obedience to the whims of a cosmic being due to just his assertion “I was first”. That is just one big giant nihilistic cluster fuck.
Time’s up, I go bed. Tomorrow is another day. Maybe by then, Justin and Birdie will have produced some deep and cogent Craigian arguments that will shake the very foundations of my world view.
I don’t know who Peter Byrom is, all the people I’ve banned are fully listed on the Dungeon page, and unless he’s been going by the pseudonym “pornalysis”, I haven’t banned him.
Oh, vitriol, oh dear ! Pass me the smelling salts, dear Eric. I feel faint !
@PZ Myers:
Hotshoe says about me:
“you are the kind of sick fuck”
“you’re a disgusting waste of human flesh”
“DIAF” [= Die In A Fire!]
I’m just being curious, do you find these utterances still tolerable?
PZ, Peter Byrom is Birdieupon.
@PZ Sorry his handle on here is birdieupon (has been commenting up to his last comment 127). He says he now seems to have been evicted.
Anyway, the funs over for me as its 12.45am here in the UK, and I must go to bed!
Justin Brierley is some sort of xian kook.
No wonder he flat out lied. Lies are one of their 3 main sacraments.
Completely intolerable! He went way too easy on you.
Hotshoe is blunt and honest.
Myron is creepy and disingenuous.
Knowing the tenor of this blog, who do you think I would prefer to keep around?
And yeah, you’re really creepily smarmy.
Myron is such an obvious troll too. I mean really? Myron?
I have been teaching and in meetings all afternoon, and haven’t even touched any of the settings here. No, I haven’t banned him. More likely, he’s been tossing around lots of links or using phrases that trip the godbot filter.
Dayumn, you christers are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Peter/Birdie is not banned here. Peter/Birdie was complaining about being banned on Dawkins’ site because of Peter/Birdie’s rant THERE, not HERE.
Jayzuz. Learn to listen to what your own kind actually say, even if you can’t listen to what the ebil athiests say.
“Dayumn, you christers are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Peter/Birdie is not banned here. Peter/Birdie was complaining about being banned on Dawkins’ site because of Peter/Birdie’s rant THERE, not HERE.”
Hotshoe, do try to follow the conversation. You quoted *me* (above), and I said quite clearly (in post # 154) that I didn’t know whether Byrom had been banned.
Re: Justin’s claim that he had been banned, I assumed that he and Justin had been communicating via e-mail or FB (etc.), and that Byrom had communicated to him that he’d been banned. Justin can read, you know (I believe he is, like Dawkins, a Balliol man).
“I’ve just listened to the last part of the recording of Craig’s Sheldonian speech. Incredibly, he not only repeats his outrageous defence of genocide almost word for word, but is actually applauded for doing so, If the applauders were Oxford students, I am ashamed of my university. A show of hands at the end showed that almost a hundred percent of the audience were religious, so they were not a typical student audience. I’m still ashamed of them. I’m also ashamed of the chairman, Millican, who let him repeat those disgusting words without a murmur of protest.”
Translation: WAH!!!!! WAH!!!!! WAH!!!!!
As usual, no argument, no refutation given. Just baseless appeals to emotion, bare assertions, character assassinations and emotive drivel.
Myron #169
You’re absolutely right about Hotshoe and I shall chastise him forthwith:
Hotshoe, stop being so gentle and mild-mannered to Myron. He should be properly described as whaleshit, the nastiest, most slimy mess in the depths of the ocean. He should be pounding so many decaying porcupines up his asshole that quills start coming out of his ears.
There, Myron, I have properly admonished Hotshoe. My bill will be forthcoming.
That is all WL Craig has. Or ever has. You left out the lies and logical fallacies though.
Myron wrote:
I – for one – find them a) accurate, and b) amusing; how does that grab you?
You know, I find it funny how apologists just completely ignore anything not on their agenda. This is universal: I see it in forums, in chat rooms, on blogs, everywhere.
No one, not Craig, not van Til, not Bahnsen, not anyone, has been able to explain what I asked in the earlier post about what sense it makes for an omnimax God to go through this bizarre, partly-plagiarized rigamarole of human (self-)sacrifice. The problem isn’t even that no explanation of the Atonement makes any sense; the problem is that it makes no sense to need one.
Craig’s constant denial of evolution is perverse. The evidence is there. Ken Miller, a devout Catholic, believes it and shows why. His ignorance, willful ignorance I suspect, of anything approaching modern science is like Linus’s security blanket to him.
I can buy that Craig truly believes in what he sells, after all what he is selling is his personal witness to the holy spirit.
Where I have the problem with Craig is how he makes his case – selectively chooses the scientists and philosophers who will advance his position, and even misrepresents their views to make his case, yet even those he’s called out on it time after time he still makes those same claims the next time around. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but that his sincerity comes packaged with intellectual dishonesty.
@PZ Myers:
Thanks for the information and the compliments!
Good night!
Oops, I was wrong. I misunderstood the reason Eric and Justin were complaining about Peter’s alleged banning.
Now I see Justin says:
So apparently there’s private communication between Birdie and Justin. And apparently the reason they’re complaining now is NOT just because they misunderstood what Birdie first complained about.
Okay, I was wrong that time about why you’re dumb, christers. But you’re still dumb because you’re still fanboys of that godforsaken WLC.
Hope springs eternal. Maybe you can grow up and prove you’re smart enough to renounce genocide.
Even most of your “fellow christians” have managed that much.
Myron says:
You have previously asserted that Craig’s arguments are explicit and well-structured – why does he need some random minion to police atheist blogs and frame them for him? You’re not…him…are you? Because I’m not sure which is sadder – the idea that you are him, or that you’re such a devoted fan that you have to monitor the Pharyngula comment threads for mentions of WLC to ensure that his arguments are being framed in a manner you deem acceptable.
If that’s true, why go to the effort of trying to reassure us that you are one?
* * *
justinbrierley says:
Citation Needed.
Besides, even if the old adage that you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar is true, who wants a house full of fucking flies? Or even celibate ones.
@Hotshoe 186
In fairness, most people are not trained to defeat presuppositionalist apologetics. It’s so ridiculous and so out of left field that it leaves nearly all opponents with a permanent eyebrow cramp.
But remembering one simple thing is the key: “presupposition” is a fifty-cent word for “axiom.” When I realized that the entire house of cards came tumbling down.
The reason it appears to work so well is that axioms are by definition not subject to much deductive disproof. You have to find a contradiction with another axiom or show that its use leads to the same. Now if your opponents’ axioms are goalposts mounted on go-karts, you start to see the issue here…
Along with a few friends, I contribute to a podcast called Fundamentally Flawed. So far we’ve hosted Eric Hovind, Sye TenB, Dustin Segers, Shawn Karon and handful of other YEC and TAG presuppositionalists.
We didn’t use the standard Harvard rules debating format, we just chatted. I feel like we got to the bottom of what these guys actually believe, and more worryingly what they actually teach to children, by simply talking to them, than I’ve ever understood by listening to a formal debate type setting with William Lane Craig, et al.
This “chatty” approach is also used by Justin on his Unbelievable podcast, on the understanding that both parties seem to learn a lot more about each other by simply talking, rather than scoring points.
So I find it very confusing that Justin still hammers away on Richard Dawkins and others, via twitter and facebook, for “refusing” to debate Craig, when all he has to do is arrange to have them informally chat on his Premier Christian Radio show.
I rather suspect the reason he is reticent to do this, is because he knows they’d largely agree about the dangers of the lunatic fringe, who no-doubt make up a considerable portion of his Christian audience. So he sticks to what he knows and quibbles from the sidelines instead of cutting to the chase.
I could be wrong, after all Justin is a perfectly likeable chap. But I think he as a huge blind-spot to the fact that pre-supposing something in order to draw a conclusion from your own proposition is anathema to a pursuance of the truth. Since syllogisms and blind presumptions of this kind are the only thing Craig has going for him, the only group who gain from a debate with him, on that level, are those who already agree with him.
When your best shot at intellectualising the God of the gaps is specifically designed to avoid the really important questions, by focusing on the smoke and mirrors assumption that “if God exists” then X, Y and Z aren’t “logically impossible”, you’ve said more about your actual interest in getting to the truth than 30 Richard Dawkins ever could. Justin Brierly’s inability to accept this doesn’t make it any less of a fact.
If the question being discussed was “upon what objectively verifiable evidence do you assert that a particular God of a particular religion actually exists”, William Lane Craig’s entire shtick would be over in 30 seconds. But he’ll never debate anyone who doesn’t first agree to work within the limited framework of in-speak, theologically numb fan-fiction and the phantasmagorically small minded assumptions which he has erected for himself over the past 30 something years. It’s analogous to talking with a musician about mixing desks and effects units. It might tickle your inner nerd, but it’s got nothing to do with playing the flute.
“Where I have the problem with Craig is how he makes his case – selectively chooses the scientists and philosophers who will advance his position, and even misrepresents their views to make his case, yet even those he’s called out on it time after time he still makes those same claims the next time around. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but that his sincerity comes packaged with intellectual dishonesty.”
Kel, can you provide a specific example, preferrably the strongest example you know of? Also, can you provide a link to the context of the claim you’re judging to be a misrepresentation?
Hello, Peter/Birdie. Welcome back, glad you could figure out a way to get you reply past the godbot filters.
Now that you’re back, you can pick up your decaying porcupine. Do you require an instruction sheet for its proper use ?
Read the third part of this post – namely the bit about his quoting J.L. Mackie and Michael Ruse.
Yeah, disgust at genocide is just silly emotions. Chick stuff. Real Men know sometimes it’s necessary to exterminate an entire people, so long as Yahweh says it’s okay.
Eric comes here every so once in a while to whine about philosophers not being properly respected. Craig is a philosopher who’s not getting the respect from the commentariat that Eric thinks he should get because he’s a philosopher. Never mind that Craig is a dishonest debater who constantly lies about things he knows little or nothing about. Ignore the fact that Craig thinks genocide is good if The Big Guy In The Sky says so. Disregard the point that Craig has about as much empathy as a cockroach.* Craig is a fully paid up member of the Philosophers Guild and thus, in Eric’s eyes, worthy of respect.
*My apologies to Blattaria for comparing them to Craig.
Kel, to be clear, do you consider the following to be the strongest example you know of Craig’s misrepresenting the positions of other scholars to make his case?
Kel: “In Craig’s debate with Dr Tooley, he started off his moral argument this way: ” For example, the late J.L. Mackie of Oxford University, one of the most influential atheists of our time, admitted, [Mackie quote] But in order to avoid God’s existence, Mackie therefore denied that objective moral values exist.”
“Such a statement is incredibly misleading, as J.L. Mackie didn’t make any admission as if it was some failing of his position, rather he said it matter of factly and gave arguments in support of his position. He started out his book Ethics: Inventing Right And Wrong with “There is no objective ethics.” Nor was he holding that position in order to avoid God’s existence.”
All of Craigs arguments are wrong.
1. He is a creationist for Cthulhu’s sake. That is so wrong even most xians don’t buy it including your Catholic church.
2. The thread before this one where Craig claims that animals don’t feel pain.
3. This thread and his pathetic defense of genocide.
4. Kalam cosmology, a trivial word game.
Nice to see you’ve warmed up Eric. Start singing those hymns to Craig.
Can you point to one thing Craig has ever said that was correct? I’ve never seen anything but Craig is such an obviously faulty thinker, I won’t waste too much time on him.
Thank you, raven.
Let’s all remember it’s up to these genocide-approving suckers to prove they’re correct. Not up to any human to prove they’re NOT.
Eric:
I just don’t know enough about sophisticated sophistry to figure it out, but you so totally know what you’re talking about when it comes to that sort of thing. So, could you explain why this argument is utter bollocks?
-If God isn’t fucking ineffable, then it isn’t that according to the Bible, he raped a virgin who gave birth to himself.
-According to the Bible, he raped a virgin who gave birth to himself.
-Therefore, God is fucking ineffable.
@Esteleth You csurely can’t be unaware of the the fact that the ugly language and insults you model tends to drive most reasonable people well away from your brand of atheism.
Listen, you braindead sack of dog shit, YOU don’t determine how the fucking conversation is fucking conducted here.
YOU are the one who is taking a big steaming dump in the punch bowl of this blog with your asinine sniveling and passive-aggressive fuckfacery. You came here and made a post that was nothing but whining and hate, and then you have the fucking gall to whine when you get back what you dished out?
Fuck you.
You’re going to get nothing but abuse from now on, and you’re going to fucking take it, because you’re a dishonest, sniveling scumbag.
Take this decaying, rabid porcupine and shove it up your ass–if you can get around your stupid head stuck there, and fuck off, cupcake.
To go with consciousness razor’s question in #198, I’d like to know how spending an unpleasant afternoon hanging around on a cross and being all better a couple of days later constitutes redemption.
You can presuppose anything you want though. The darkly hilarious part of this is that people like Craig feel secure in their presuppositions (excuse me, axioms)…and then history and archaeology prove them wrong. And they just keep right on rolling.
So what does it say about apologists who shut themselves off from reality and plug their ears with presuppositionalist cottonballs and go “Lalalala I can’t hearrrr youuuu and you’re all going to heeeeellll~!” then?
Simple: it says they worship themselves. They are very philosophical idolators. Their idol is squishy and pinkish-grey and weighs about 1-2 kilos and lives between their ears.
Why genocide is wrong?
I have to say that I’m amused that in two of the four comments I’ve made on this thread, I identified myself as a non-athiest, and yet the godbothers are holding me up as an example of an evil, intolerant, vulgar atheist.
The irony, it burns.
‘Tis Himself, OM says
How dare you! I once saw a cockroach drag its wounded comrade from a burning roach motel and then administer CPR until EMTs arrived.
I doubt WLC could experience empathy if empathy grew an invisible pink uni-horn and introduced itself to the empathy center of WLC’s brain.
I dunno, sweetie, why don’t YOU give us your answer to why genocide is wrong.
“Can you point to one thing Craig has ever said that was correct? I’ve never seen anything but Craig is such an obviously faulty thinker, I won’t waste too much time on him.”
Look, this is the sort of thing that gives you guys such a bad reputation. Dawkins is, by something approaching a consensus, both rather ignorant and rather dim when it comes to philosophy, but I can think, off the top of my head, of all sorts of things that he’s said that are both properly philosophical and, in my judgment, correct. Yet here you are claiming, either ignorantly or stupidly, that you’ve never come across anything that Craig has said, in his field, in which he’s earned a PhD from a prestigious university, and in which he’s published many books and one hundred plus peer reviewed articles, that you think is correct? Come one now, that’s just obviously stupid, and not worth a serios response. All it’s worth is the treatment I’ve given it here, viz. pointing out how obviously stupid it is. If you had said, like Kel, that Craig in your judgment goes wrong here or there, you’d have a bit of credibility, but to claim that he’s never gotten a single thing you’ve seen right is just plain ridiculous, and it shows how very deluded indeed you must be.
Shorter Eric:
“Blah blah blah. Appeal to authority. Blah blah blah. No, I can’t think of a single thing I’d expect you would agree that WLC was right about.”
I don’t think it’s the best example, Eric. As TV chefs often say: here’s one I prepared earlier.
Kel, then what’s the best example?
Awesome Eric. You are really hitting those notes. Sing it guy!!! Thank Cthulhu, we were afraid you were losing your voice.
BTW, you just admitted you can’t think of one thing Craig has ever gotten right.
Many of us have contributed far more to humanity than Craig.
Craig has a hundred or so publications. All worthless.
100 X 0 = 0 I realize this is sophisticated math beyond your comprehensions but a big pile of garbage is just…a big pile of garbage.
Cthulhu, it’s a great song but it’s the wrong song. You really should try to remember which opera you are starring in. Many or most of us on this thread have Ph.D.’s and MD’s in fields far more complicated and worthwhile than Craigs. Not impressed with a mindless appeal to authority when it isn’t even an authority.
Kel, rather, is the example you provided sufficiently strong that, if refuted, it would suffice to alter your judgment of Craig’s honesty, or at least to give you pause regarding your judgment here?
“BTW, you just admitted you can’t think of one thing Craig has ever gotten right.”
I see that logic isn’t one of your stronger areas.
Eric wrote:
Oh noes! Not our reputation! Lawdy, lawks-a-mussy; whatever shall we do?
Personally I couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss for what the theological/religious philosophical community does and doesn’t approve of; I’m fairly sure PZ and Richard Dawkins don’t either.
And until they come up with some evidence to support the claims for the gods upon which they base their ‘sophisticated’ ruminations, I don’t care what they have to say either. Without it they’re just playing make-believe and pretending it’s real.
Most of what Craig says/writes is probably better addressed by someone like Deacon Duncan, anyway. As he’s been doing.
@22
Indeed! I have made this very point on the tubes of the internet many times, but Christians always come up with some BS as to why it is bad to kill children. Killing babies ensures they get to Heaven according to their religion. If a super genius develops an airborne virus which infects everyone and causes all children to die shortly before or after birth, millions more souls would go to Heaven every day. Even if such an act is a “sin” punishable by hell, shouldn’t a devout Christian do it? One soul in hell, instead of hundreds of millions (as most of those babies will grow up to be non Christians)?
Eric says:
What’s the basis of this willingness to address only the most awesomely bestest of all Kel’s possible arguments? Is the idea that if you can get your opponent to admit that a particular argument is “the best they’ve got,” then all you have to do is find a way to dismantle that one argument and then you’ve “won” the entire argument because every other argument is “weaker?”
Is that it? I’m not up to the minute on the latest in Applied Sophistry, I’m afraid.
blockquote fail.
Down to trivial insults I see.
You haven’t come up with one single thing Craig got right.
I see honesty and thinking aren’t your strongest areas either.
Babble on, Eric but I’m afraid the WL Craig worship service is over. This is getting too boring to bother with. Much like demolishing Craig’s faulty thinking. It’s too easy.
Oh, honey, you are just so sweet ! As if “we guys” care about a “bad reputation”. But you care on our behalf, oh that’s so nice of you.
You know, I think you have a great job in your future as a reputation consultant ! No, seriously, stick with it, practice some more, and I’m sure you’ll be able to make good wages teaching fools and careless atheists like us how to avoid a “bad reputation”.
Won’t that be just wonderful !
truebutnotuseful wrote:
You can never be – that’s the whole point of it. It’s like Xeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise; every time you get a step closer to revealing the lack of foundation for the claims, out comes a new one that you have to spend time demonstrating is baseless fluff. Ad infinitum.
Then they claim you haven’t dealt with the latest ‘finding’ they’ve made; ergo, the specific god of their religion must exist. Praise Jesus!
“What’s the basis of this willingness to address only the most awesomely bestest of all Kel’s possible arguments?”
Why yes, it must be sophistry, and have nothing to do with, oh, a desire to avoid wasting time writing a response to what will later be said to target low hanging fruit. But it is interesting, to say the least, that you think that’s sophistical, and not, in response to a request for the best example of a particular misdeed, the providing of an example that’s admittedly not the best.
And I see that Raven has now been reduced to calling my obviously true criticism a ‘trivial insult.’ Fine, then show me how in the world you could derive the conclusion, “Eric has admitted that he can’t think of one thing that Craig has ever gotten right” from my post #206. (No, I don’t actually expect you to do so, for it can’t be done.)
I will play asshole’s advocate here for a moment: Craig is not stupid. He’s one of the clearer thinkers among theists (which reflects more badly on them, not him) and it takes years of study and a very very wide-ranging, generalist education to take him on.
Is he dishonest? Yes. Does he spew arguments that have been disproven years ago as if they were new and clean? Yes. Is he probably a bit sociopathic? Maybe. A lot of hardcore Christians are. But he’s not dumb.
The key here is not to engage him on philosophical grounds. Presuppositionalism means you have an infinite number of infinitely-mobile goalposts at your disposal. Hit him where he’s weak: science, archaeology, etc. Occasionally you get someone like Kagan or Dennet who can take him on on philosophy, but the rest of us should stick to concrete reality.
Remember that presuppositionalism is partly a giant bluff, and that Craig himself is a showman. Think of the monorail guy from the early Simpsons episode. This is gladiatorial theater for the crowds of unthinking believers. They go to these things for validation. Call his bluff.
Ooh, snap !
Just speaking for myself, Craig is a leader of evil fundie xian death cults that:
1. Sponsor xian terrorism, a big problem in the USA.
2. Have assassinated some of my colleagues
3. Have been threatening to kill me for over one decade.
4. Threaten to kill PZ Myers at up to 1 hundreds death threats a day.
5. Responsible for killing two of my friends, dead in Iraq.
6. Keep trying to force their perversion of xianity on us.
7. Openly hate the US and want to destroy it. They are very close having already taken out the US economy.
8. Trying to sneak their creationist mythology into our kid’s science classes.
The fundies aren’t harmless. They are far more of a threat to us than the Moslems. They have a good chance of destroying the USA.
9. There’s more but how much malevolence does a religion have to show before people get tired of them.
FWIW, everyone knows the above, a matter of fact. And if the fundies don’t destroy us, they will destroy US xianity. Polls show two of the most hated groups in the USA today are fundie xians and the Tea Party.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
Maybe they should have actually read their magic book.
So provide one. You haven’t, you can’t, and you won’t.
I can tell Eric isn’t very bright or educated. If you actually look for content in his several moderately verbose comments, there isn’t anything there. Just insults and wild and goofy claims without one single data point to back them up.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Personally, I think the only way to debate WLC is to point out the verse in the bible that instructs death for nonbelievers and place a stone on his podium. Invite him to prove his devotion to his objective morality by killing you.
Safe to say the feeling is mutual, “Professor” Dawkins.
Eric, philosophy with evidence is sophistry. And if doesn’t acknowledge known evidence, it is worthless sophistry. WLC does worthless sophistry, as do you…
@Oxforddolt
*snicker*
HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE MY EXHALATION OF GENOCIDE!!! THE FUHRER WILL BE ANGRY!
Ha. You’re stupid as well as an odious genocide-approving Craig-ass-licking creep.
IF YOU could think of ONE thing Craig has ever gotten right, then obviously you would have simoly slammed it in our faces with your kind’s obnoxious “eat shit, atheists, here’s Craig being right” rather that your long-winded but petty insistence that someone else was wrong. QED.
And if you’re not too stupid to have noticed that logical conclusion yourself, then my apologies for calling you stupid. But in that case, then you pretending not to understand was you just being a goddamned troll.
So which are you, Eric, stupid or troll ?
“You really should try to remember which opera you are starring in. Many or most of us on this thread have Ph.D.’s and MD’s in fields far more complicated and worthwhile than Craigs. Not impressed with a mindless appeal to authority when it isn’t even an authority.”
Last time I checked, philosophy majors scored higher than biology majors on the GRE in every area. Overall, only mathematicians and physicists scored higher (though philosophers outscored both in the verbal reasoning and writing portions of the test). Similarly, philosophy majors are among the highest scorers on the LSAT (and they maintain this high position despite being grouped, for reasons no one can seem to explain, with religious studies majors). So let’s not pretend that philosophy isn’t a serious academic discipline that attracts some of the sharpest young minds out there.
Nice try.
Polpot, Papa Doc, and the guy who works drive through at Jack In The Box
Shorter Goldstein: I hate Richard Dawkins because he’s not a godsoaked idiot like I am.
Dude, seriously. Get help. You are not well.
Goldstine seems to have mistaken Dawkins for some supervillian. Perhaps the Mad Hatter?
Shorter Czar: I hate Ricard Dawkins because he’s smarter than I am.
“I read [The God Delusion] not long after it first came out, and i remember being unimpressed back then even though I knew nothing about the subject or about rational thinking. His double standards are amazing. This guy’s an actual joke. It’s tragic that he’s made so much money and become so famous off the back of a hoax. He’s a charlatan.”
– Atheist at Dawkins’ own university. No wonder he’s ashamed!
@Czar
Really? Goldstine if serious, is obviously mentally ill. Don’t encourage him. He needs help. He’s clearly suffering from paranoia and obsession and if taken at his word sees suicide as inevitable. What the fuck is wrong with you?
Ah yes, the unimpeachable source of “some atheist”
My girlfriend loved the book though. She goes to college in Canada.
Shorter OxfordDolt: I hate Richard Dawkins because I’m an arsehole.
Goldstein, about all I got out of your rant is that you are probably seriously mentally ill.
One of the problems with being famous and intelligent is attracting stalkers who are frequently very cuckoo.
Ask Gabrielle Giffords, congressperson from Arizona, how that works. She should be recovered enough from that bullet that went through her brain.
Congratulations! We have a winner for the stupidest thing ever said competition. You supercilious, little man.
Seriously I love putting “Atheist at Oxford” as if it’s a real citation.
“You know when push comes to shove I think I would totally fuck a goat”~Some Christian in Georgia.
To be fair, most of Dawkins’ book was just appeals to the authority of “some atheist”.
Pfft. You should see how little he knows about astrology. And don’t even start me on his ignorance of fairies!
It’s interesting how a thread on William Lane Craig has become a breeding ground for the “I hate Richard Dawkins” Brigade.
@Raven
Seriously, do not give him ideas.
Since when was philosophy comparable to astrology and fairyology? Have you told AC Grayling?
“IF YOU could think of ONE thing Craig has ever gotten right, then obviously you would have simoly slammed it in our faces with your kind’s obnoxious “eat shit, atheists, here’s Craig being right” rather that your long-winded but petty insistence that someone else was wrong. QED.”
Yeah, that’s not a logical derivation of the conclusion from the content of my post, but an obviously silly attempt at *explaining* why I didn’t provide an example with some piss poor arm chair psychology. Why might I not equally be motivated by a desire to draw as many of you as possible out on the shaky “Craig has never gotten a single thing right” limb before I cut it off with my blunt fingernail clipper? Go sit in the back of the class with Raven. (Don’t worry, the two of you are sure to have a lot of company back there in no time.)
Goldstein says:
If anyone needs me, I’ll be tweezing tiny shards of irony meter from out of my eyes for the next while. Hopefully enough of my vision will remain that I can revisit this thread.
“I refuse to drink lager because it’s so not done.” -An Atheist at Oxford
@Oxford
Who at least cites with a real fucking name
“I swear some parts of Oxford are like a giant vat of shit and the students are the maggots”~Elderly Jew from Wisconsin
Sorry, Ing, you first.
I wouldn’t trust the genocide-loving William Lane Craig with a stone and my life.
You never know – maybe his heinous god really exists and would choose exactly that moment to command Craig to end my life. Or maybe WLC would think that he heard god’s command, and of course having no secular basis to exercise normal human morality and refrain from killing innocent humans, Craig would have to obey the command and kill me.
How could god-sucking Craig possibly know the difference between thinking that he heard god’s command and actually hearing god’s command ? WIthout a normal human morality to restrain himself with, he can’t be trusted with anything more lethal than fingernail clippers.
Chris Van Allsburg says:
9 November 2011 at 2:00 am
The proper place to ask that question is in a crowded police station, in a very loud voice. Off you go lad. Lets us know what the answer was.
Mister?
Advice 1: Throw out your thesaurus.
Advice 2: Seriously get help.
Shorter ‘Tis Himself, OM: hur hur theist is a stupid arsehole.
(Sorry, that was unfair. That was the substance of your posts, not some contrived contraction).
Post #261 is not written by me.
Asshole who’s imitating me, that’s something you can get banned for.
Incidentally, to show it’s not me, those with killfile should kill #261 and then notice none of my posts disappear.
That right there pretty much sums up the problem with philosophical bootlickers.
OxfordDolt, it’s not my fault you’re an idiot. So don’t whine when I merely point out the truth about you.
Either you and him are trolls upon which way to represent your little club
Or he’s serious, is clearly troubled and you feel it’s a good idea to encourage him for the sake of your cause.
Either way, really? Have some decency.
‘Tis Himself is patently absurd.
@PZ
I think Mr. Caeser and Mr. Goldstine need a good blocking. Either one is stalkerish and unbalanced and the other wants to egg him on…or they’re blatantly trolling.
Not what my scholars gown says, hur hur!
Why is anyone taking someone like Craig seriously? His skill at debate? His degrees? His reputation among his fawning sycophants?
He’s a man who is convinced of a proposition for unreliable reasons, then insists on trying to sell that idea to everyone else where ultimately his intellectual arguments don’t really matter – by his own admission.
What are we to make of someone who admitted that if provided a time machine to personally witness Jesus’ life where no resurrection happened, he would STILL believe it because somehow the warm-fuzzy in his “heart” is somehow more reliable than concrete proof showing that Jesus was a phony? Really?
I guess he could rationalize it by saying the time-travel business was some hallucinatory Satanic trick, but his “inner witness” has a zero percent chance of being mistaken?
WOW.
This is the guy that is supposed to have atheists quaking in their boots?
The man isn’t an honest broker, and he freely admits there is no future evidence or state of affairs that could ever convince him that he’s mistaken about his belief in Christianity, because his “heart” (and its experience of what he bald-face assumes can only be the “Holy Spirit”, and nothing else) just can’t be wrong.
He’s no different than any other mundane, un-intellectual believer who ultimately says nothing but “I just know in my heart I’m right” when you strip away all the extraneous fluff.
Sorry, I’m unimpressed.
Dawkins writes a book outlying objections. His haters come on and troll because apparently that’s how you show Jesus is Lord. Mildly annoy minorities.
If it actually has “NOT AN IDIOT!” written on it, I think someone may have proved a cruel prank on you.
You’ve got a scholar[‘]s gown? Wow. It must have taken you at least half an hour to find a costumer who would sell you one.
Meh. I have one and I know for a fact I’m a fucking idiot.
OxfordDolt wrote:
Uh, since it’s been misused as an argument in place of evidence to justify beliefs. Since there is as little evidence to support either astrology or fairyology as there is to support religious claims, the parallel is quite obvious – well, to the perceptive at least.
I didn’t think to mention it last time we spoke, but I’m fairly sure he’s already aware that particular fact.
Despite your lack of comprehension, I was not implying philosophy is wholly useless; quite the contrary. But it is useless when it comes to making compelling arguments about the existence of god(s) – at least until there’s some evidence to give it a foundation.
Wow this Czar guy is a pretty crummy troll. Dawkins isn’t here, yet Czar is “speaking” to him as if he is. And by speaking I mean ranting and raving like a loon, calling him as many names as he can. Then Czar calls everyone Dickheads for liking Dawkins’ book.
Obvious Troll is Obvious.
To the contrary, I was asked to get one by the powers that be at Dawkins’ university. Jolly ho!
Do you want to actually assert something first? Back it up with evidence? Or are you just waving your dick over your head yodeling for attention?
Maybe that’s how our poor dear OxfordDolt suffered his brain damage, when he tried to fuck a billy goat and got headbutted instead.
Poor boy. He’s been a dolt ever since. Oh, he can dress and wash himself, and he can even type on the computer, but nothing he types is smart; not since his “accident”.
Hence why Dawkin’s is ashamed.
And now my sockpuppet detector has exploded. You fucking trolls are making this a very expensive evening for my Internet Discourse Instrumentation! I swear to your Nonexistent Deity, if you so much as scratch my SIWOTI Gauge, so help me…
I’m an atheist, but y’all are pretty abject imo.
“Oxford Dolt once got his tongue stuck to a frozen lobster~”Some guy who works at Oxford
Just watched Sam Harris vs William Craig, “Does good come from god?’ debate. Just solidified my impression of Craig as an over- perfumed car salesman. He consistently (deliberately) misinterpreted and “straw-manned” Sams arguments. And here is the little gem; on segment nine, the last question aimed at Craig. Craig actually feels cornered for a second and his left hand trembles from the adrenalin. Very interesting. Something ain’t right with this guy. I’ll have to watch with the sound off to read it better.
Dawkins really doesn’t need us to defend him.
His record and books speak far more about his success and intelligence. He is an Oxford Don, and a famous one at that.
Dawkins has written quite a few books and some have been wildly successful. People have voted with their money, time, and eyeballs.
I’ve read a few and thought they were very good.
Going to ignore the Dawkins haters who quite likely are mostly sockpuppets of one disturbed troll.
I did see where someone aliased Tis himself, a bannable offense and a low trick.
I am writing to express my dismay and concern over Mr. Richard Dawkins, Esq.’s impulsive cock-and-bull stories. What follows is a call to action for those of us who care—a large enough number to substitute movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for drifting, and visions of a great future for collective pettiness and discouragement. To tolerate Mr. Dawkins’s hectoring, haughty hypnopompic insights simply because they’re not packaged and sold as squalid is to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present. Mr. Dawkins has been uprooting our very heritage and paving the way for his own passive-aggressive value system. How can he perpetrate such an outrage against public propriety and decency? You know the answer, don’t you? You probably also know that if we don’t do something soon, his footling, unmannerly declamations will rise like a golem with a million hands on a million throats to choke the honor out of decent, hardworking people.
Mr. Dawkins deeply believes that all it takes to start a rabbit farm is a magician’s magic hat. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the truth is very simple: I, speaking as someone who is not a beastly hooligan, support those who devote their life to education and activism. It is through their tireless efforts that people everywhere are learning that I’m convinced that Mr. Dawkins will unleash carnage and barbarity by the next full moon. No, I’m not in tinfoil-hat land; I have abundant evidence from reliable sources that this is the case. For instance, if one could get a Ph.D. in Opportunism, Mr. Dawkins would be the first in line to have one. The bottom line is that I must definitely add my voice to the chorus of those who cast a ray of light on Mr. Richard Dawkins, Esq.’s sinful, ophidian expostulations.
The theist love affair with authority, from god on down to the Oxford “powers that be,” is both fascinating and horrifying to behold.
It has? That’s quite a trick for a null position.
yes i quite agree that aliasing is really low and also bannable, that’s really abominable you should be shot and stopped quickly
So we’ve had quite a sample of WLC’s fans. We thought WLC was moronic and his followers unhinged or morally bankrupt. They sure showed us.
Goldstain, I suspect, is using some kind of drivel-generator where you enter key words and let it produce a block of wordy text.
Don’t waste your time reading it.
Did a peyote truck break down or something?
Goldstein: Atheism has never stated that it is a source for morality, other than the rejection of the immorality of religion.
In the US we don’t go in for gowns particularly much. Those in academia usually buy a gown but otherwise nobody bothers. When I got my MA I rented a gown for the ceremony. It went back to the rental place the next day.
Interesting how the best defense of Craig to be mounted here is one that rests almost exclusively on unfocused blathering of how Dawkins sux or something.
It’s almost as if they recognize that Craig would evaporate into irrelevance if he didn’t have someone exponentially more famous to do great and terrifying battle with.
It’s comments like this that start making me come around to WLC’s views on genocide *eye roll*
This is hilarious! Wow, it’s incredibly funny to watch you guys get all flustered, request evidence and arguments, and call for bans when a few admittedly rather silly posters (Oxforddolt, Czar, Goldstein, etc.) show up and give you a dose of your own medicine, viz. insults, no substantive remarks, piling on, etc.
Pharyngula is being pharyngulated, and the pharyngulites aren’t taking it very well at all. If you can’t take it…
Mister?
Raven wrote:
While that’s true, I don’t think it’s relevant. The most important thing Dawkins has done is ask the question (over and over): why do you believe in [insert religious belief] when there’s no evidence?
He – and we – are still waiting for someone to give a credible answer.
Eric
Sorry, do we go on other people’s sites and pester them?
Nice to know you’ve stopped your stupid nice guy facade.
“show up”
You think a few sock-puppet-esque mutual masturbators is something the Pharyngula folks haven’t seen before?
If so, I have a cracker for you to choke on.
Yeah, me too. If I ever had the misfortune to meet huckster Craig in person, only my fabulous atheist morals would prevent me from punching him, but I don’t think anything could prevent me from vomiting on his shoes in revulsion.
Good catch !
No worries: I’ve given Atheism a good spanking and we’ve sat down and had a good talk about it, and Atheism is sorry for being an anthropomorphised abstraction.
Now, Goldstein, if you’ll turn your attention to Dry and Foldable: those two concepts could use a stern hand.
Not to mention us literate spellers.
What, Eric? Don’t leave us hanging!
PZ!!!! Please come and ban these trolls and sockpuppetters!
Goldstein: Shut up you incompetent deceitful and egregiously offensive dullard. Oh, and before you leave, here’s a decaying porcupine, insert it into your orifice of choice sideways.
wait a second
OxfordDolt is on the one hand using his status as an Oxford scholar to (weakly) deflect accusations of idiocy
While on the other hand throwing similar accusations against an Oxford don (who studied at Oxford and may well have been a scholar himself)
um, hur hur?
I AM FURRY!
THE EVIL OF ATHISM HAS BEEN DEFEATED
CONGRADULATION
A WINNER IS YOU
@AR
I’m pretty sure there’s just Eric and one other now
“Sorry, do we go on other people’s sites and pester them?
Nice to know you’ve stopped your stupid nice guy facade.”
Oh please. I’m sorry, but yes, I do find it rather funny when the bully starts crying about how bad bullying is when *he* gets bullied. Now Oxforddolt, Czar et al are precisely the theist mirror image of you folks — big on insults, big on ganging up on others, and remarkably short on substance. Now yes, I agree, there is the issue of virtual geography that makes them a bit more reprehensible than you are, but not much.
I didn’t say that Dawkins is an idiot, did I? Let’s be fair.
Wait! Not until Eric finishes his thought!
What, Eric? If we can’t take it, then what?!
Goldstein #294
Citation needed.
You’re obviously confusing atheism with something else, possibly stamp collecting or motorcycle racing.
What logical gap is that? Is the fact there’s no evidence for any god(s) so terrifying you have to pretend there is such evidence?
What are you talking about? I’m an economist and an atheist. I see little relationship between the two fields and I have some knowledge about both.
You and the mouse in your pocket share a nightmare?
You’re one of those people who want to establish an theocracy?
Craig doesn’t care about evidence.
If his arguments for Christianity are crappy, it’s just because he’s lousy at arguing, not that Christianity is indefensible.
According to him, Christianity is still true no matter what intellectual, logical or philosophical arguments are made or not made.
If Craig ultimately cares so little about his own arguments and the influence they may or may not have on others accepting his conclusion, why should his opponents even bother with them?
He wants you to feel the “Holy Spirit” in your “heart” and accept Jesus, so all the other philosophical stuff is ultimately meaningless – the apologetic arguments and the public tangling with atheists and apostates are just a form of ministry for him.
He’s a carnival barker.
I find it incredibly amusing how reviled Dawkins is.
a) You’re not being smart for believing something with no evidence
Then we have Mr. Craig
B) You’re going to be tortured forever in God’s personal rape camp, and it’s a good and just thing because you are so horrible a being of pure love wants to see you skull fucked by demons!
Yawn, has Eric presented any evidence (like scientific evidence) other than unsubstantiated claims that WLC is right? I don’t think so Tim…
Ing: good to hear. The creobot over on the ZOMBIE thread may need my attention now.
And I for one welcome our God-fearing immoral assholes!
That’s it guys, you show us how belief in a divine arbiter of objective morality doesn’t make a split lick of difference in how you behave!
Tit for tat! Turn the other cheek! An eye for an eye! Do unto others!
SHOW US GOD’S LOVE!
That’s preposterous
*twirls mustache*
I do find Goldstein funny.
So sue me.
What’s the matter? God won’t help?
Pray for it.
I’d like a ban on the guy who aliased me. Is this unreasonable? If so, how so?
@AR
He’s just preaching. Ignore him, kill file if you have it. He’s not going to actually engage with anyone
@Goldstein,
TLGFYU
“Wait! Not until Eric finishes his thought!
What, Eric? If we can’t take it, then what?!”
You have to explain everything to some peoplel I see.
Why, if you can’t take it, then it won’t be tooken. And, as we all know, if *it’s* not tooken….
Eric says:
You would find a request for evidence just hilarious, wouldn’t you.
Our medicine? Please provide your best evidence that Pharyngulites go to comment sections of other blogs and violate their posted rules. Your VERY BEST evidence. No second-rate crap.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Well, neither YHWH nor Jesus were originals. Why should their supporters be?
Goldstein, get a grip.
Actually I have to say that I doubt this troll(s) is actually a WLC fanboi. It seems more likely from the general clownery of this performance that someone at 4chan or some other piss dumpster site decided to troll us for lulz.
“I’d like a ban on the guy who aliased me. Is this unreasonable? If so, how so?”
I agree, that’s perfectly reasonable.
I mean, it’s not even standard for the worst twits we usually get
“TO PROVE GOD IS REAL AND LOVES YOU, I WILL TAKE A SHIT IN THIS SALAD BAR!”
WHAT? THEN WHAT?
C’mon, Eric: I just might find my faith again if you can find it in your heart to explain these great mysteries.
Why would you deny me my possible salvation?
Hey, asspimple, that’s the best you have, a few “silly posters” on your side.
Not even one single sentence where Craig has gotten a single thing right. If you had that, you would have already pulled it out, crowing victory.
So, sure, you might as well splooge all over your screen about us being pharyngulated. It’s the most pleasure you’re going to get in a day …
Goldstein #335
Not only tl;dr but tp;dr (too pretentious, didn’t read).
“You would find a request for evidence just hilarious, wouldn’t you.”
Context. Please, is this so difficult?
Eric has shown he isn’t very bright or educated.
Now he is showing his good old xian hate.
The three sacraments of fundie xianity are hate, lies, and hypocrisy.
Unfortunately he doesn’t seem bright enough to come up with a coherent lie. So far it is just mindless babbling, WL Craig worshipping, and trivial insults.
I’m sure he has xian hypocrisy down though. That is the easy one for them.
@Eric
I kind of don’t want the guy who makes creepy nazi associations talks about suicide and rambles incoherently to fixate on me like he’s doing. That really unreasonable since he’s either obviously trolling or mentally ill?
As is what’s happened to this thread since the anti-Dawkins brigade showed up. Goldstein, seriously, get help.
Oh, no you don’t! Not until you fill in those ellipses.
Save your breath, chico, you couldn’t afford all this.
Eric wrote:
Well, apart from the asking for evidence to support their claims, you could say that – but, considering that’s really the crux of the issue at hand, its absence is more than a little significant.
I’m rather amused by your attempted dig at a lack of ‘substance’ – particularly because, as you well know, you could shut us up in a second by presenting us with something of actual substance, i.e. the evidence upon which Craig (and, presumably, you) bases his claims. But you seem to avoid that no matter how often it’s pointed out to you.
These assclowns, not so much. But that’s what the banhammer is for.
Now, you’re speaking my language.
atheism23 isn’t my safe word. Is it yours?
Goldstein says:
9 November 2011 at 3:32 am
No, atheism simply states that there are no gods. It has not argued anything. If anything religion (organized superstition) has positioned itself as the ultimate authority. See the Nicean synod.
Atheism does not argue anything. You’d like it to but it doesn’t.
And yet atheists exist and thrive.
And yet the religious right embrace “social Darwininsm”*.
Who exactly is “our” (we?). Sorry you feel that way.
So what happened to that freedom that you contemplated? Is it only for you and yours?
* I really dislike the term, but once in a while it drives the point home.
@ Goldstein
I knew Galileo.
Galileo was a friend of mine.
You, sir, are no Galileo.
Well, I see you assert three things in quick succession without any references.
Those are not arguments…is that really the best you can do?
Isn’t that scripture in a nutshell?
Just spent a few minutes killfiling all of the trolls on this thread.
SHIT! I just figured out who Golddar here reminds me of! The Ultimate Warrior.
@AR
Wow all one?
He’ll just add a new number to Atheism and spam more.
“i.e. the evidence upon which Craig (and, presumably, you) bases his claims.”
As we know, Craig doesn’t base his claims on evidence. REAL evidence, I mean.
Getting goosebumps and a quickening pulse and getting caught up in the frenzy of group-dynamics when someone makes an altar-call doesn’t count. Craig would call that business the “Holy Spirit.” I don’t, however.
Oh, and when the same thing happens to Muslims, that’s a Satanic counterfeit.
Cause I say so.
So there.
Not that Goldstein cares, but the language of the Ju/’hoansi isn’t a “click language”; it’s a language with a few consonants that happen to be clicks.
See what you miss when you’re trying to felch a god?
Eric says:
Certainly. Once you have provided “your best evidence that Pharyngulites go to comment sections of other blogs and violate their posted rules. Your VERY BEST evidence. No second-rate crap.”
The only reason one could possibly have for not debating William Lane Craig is utter cowardice and the foreknowledge that if an atheist were to enter into a debate the result would quickly become ineluctable destruction. After Craig used the Ontological Argument, the debate would simply be over. Even Bertrand Russell, a philosopher much more accomplished than you, acknowledged it to be both sound and valid, and the subsequent work of philosophers such as Plantinga has solidified the OA as effectively irrefutable. In conclusion,
A family walks into a talent agency. It’s a father, mother, son, daughter and dog. The father says to the talent agent, “We have a really amazing act. You should represent us.”
The agent says, “Sorry, I don’t represent family acts. They’re a little too cute.”
The mother says, “Sir, if you just see our act, we know you would want to represent us.”
The agent says, “OK. OK. I’ll take a look.”
The father says,
“First I come out, wearing a tuxedo, playing Brahms. Just as the music reaches a crescendo, my wife in an evening gown runs on stage and undresses me before dancing provocatively on top of the piano.
Just as I finish playing the song with my cock, my wife strips and does a backflip off the piano in a split on stage. Once her naked ass hits the floor, my 7 year old daughter and 13 year old son rush on stage juggling flaming lawn darts. My wife does a handstand and catches the lawn darts in her cunt, she then manages to queef them out, making her the third part of this juggling act.
The queefs force her to squeeze out a few turds, which I eagerly start smearing on my naked body, which arouses me quickly. Once I’m fully aroused my daughter and son take turns blowing me while my wife straps on a monstrous dildo and begins reaming each child while i ejaculate in the eyes of my offspring.
Once I cum, I run into the audience, shit-covered body still sticky with cum and grab my parents and in-laws to involve them into the act. I strip them all nude and instruct them to start a circle jerk while screaming racial slurs. So my mother and father-in-law start screaming, “Fuck the niggers” while mutually masturbating, and my father and mother-in-law begin diddling one another and chanting, “I hate spics and jews!” Once they reach a geriatric climax, my wife uses their ejaculate to lube up her fist which she uses to start fisting me.
As my asshole is violated, I start playing double dutch with my kids, and once they get tangled in the ropes, start a torrid 69. All the sucking and slurping cause my in-laws and parents to get aroused again and they start sodomizing and fisting one another.
My wife at this point has completely started dry-heaving, so she vomits all over my ass and my back. I line up each of my family members who take turns licking the chunks of spew off my back and out of my ass.
By now my children have to defecate so I tell them to shit in each other’s favorite orifices. My son, ever the trooper takes a thick, dense shit in his sister’s vagina while my daughter shits in my son’s nose.
My young daughter also conveniently starts her menstrual cycle shortly thereafter, and the menses and boy-shit in her cunt make for great lube, as each of my in-laws begin fucking my daughter. My son, blinded in shit, heads back to the piano and does his best Stevie Wonder impression while my wife runs back into the audience to grab a toddler from the crowd.
She begins stuffing this child into her vagina, while my parents begin screaming how she’s possessed by Satan and start performing a nude exorcism on her. The power of christ compels them to kill the toddler, which also makes it easier to cram into my wife’s lovehole.
By now, I’m so horny and aroused that I start fucking the dead baby inside my wife while my young son starts licking my asshole and fingering his paternal grandparents. My in-laws finish abusing my daughter and start wrestling each other, which culminates in a huge powerbomb through the piano bench. The impact shatters my mother-in-law’s hips, leaving her crippled.
The strain of the throw caused my father’s bad heart to seize, and he collapses in a heap on the stage. As he gurgles and foams at the mouth, my daughter runs over and begins rubbing her shit covered pussy lips all over my crippled mother-in-law.
My wife grabs the wooden shards of the piano bench and begins playing her father’s dying body like a xylophone. My son pulls his tongue out of my asshole and begins sucking his dying grandfather’s cock.
I diall 911 and call for the paramedics who revive my father-in-law and then take turns fucking my daughter and eating the menses and shit out of her tight cunt.
Once he’s conscious we all assemble in a large circle holding hands and chanting gibberish before launching into a rousing group impression of ‘A Downs Syndrome’ perspective on the horrors of the holocaust, 9/11 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
As we’re moaning and screaming, my son runs off-stage to get the family dog. The dog runs over to my crippled mother-in-law and begins peeing on her. Once the dog finishes leaving her in a puddle of piss, my daughter stops blowing the paramedics to light the dog on fire.
The dog yelps and howls before collapsing. My son runs over to fuck the burnt corpse while screaming, “White is right!”as my daughter begins goose-stepping around the stage, squeezing shit out of her cunt and offering Nazi salutes to the audience.
My father-in-law begins raping my father, claiming that he’s doing it for the forgotten Vietnam vets and POWs. My mother puts my crippled mother-in-law on her shoulders as I put my wife on my shoulders and we play a game of naked chicken.
Once my son finishes fucking the dead dog. He takes the pieces of the piano bench and begins crucifying the corpse. Once the dog is hung like jesus, he begins weeping at the foot of the cross, saying, “Why my god have you forsaken me?”
My daughter mounts the top of the crucifix, using it as a wooden dildo. My parents, my in-laws and my wife join hands at the center of the stage and start singing “The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music”
I grab the lawn darts and shove one up everyone’s ass before heading back to the piano to finish off the show with a rendition of Freebird.”
For the longest time, the agent just sits in silence. Finally, he manages, “That’s a hell of an act. What do you call it?”
And the father says, “The Aristocrats!”
Well, I’m sold.
So by which god’s name do I kill the heretics?
Ing: yeah, that’s the problem with sockpuppets. PZ might have to ask for an IP ban.
Who the heck trolls with the cliched dirtiest joke ever?
I wanted something FUNNY. Sheesh.
Eric, you must believe the Ontological Argument.
So, tell me: how do I know which god commands me to cleanse the Earth of unbelievers?
Trolls?
We’re waiting, sharpened swords at the ready, as it’s been done since humankind first knapped flint.
WHICH GOD AND WHICH UNBELIEVERS?
“So, tell me: how do I know which god commands me to cleanse the Earth of unbelievers?”
Ask your “heart”, like Craig does.
Foolproof.
Today WLC converted over 40 atheists to theism…sadly it was worship of the dark god Tezarakpazuleon. The cult sacrificed over 20 children before US rangers were finally able to take the compound
Heart?
Quetzalcoatl it is then!
So, I should ask Craig’s heart?
Er, isn’t he still…won’t he be needing it?
Theology sure makes one ask oneself the difficult questions.
Just so I’m clear, this thread is just an iteration of The Aristocrats?
OT since this thread has died the troll death.
The fundie xian female slavery-forced birth attempt has so far failed.
Update: Personhood, this race is called! With half the precincts in, good guys lead … No 58%, to Yes 42%, up by over 50,000 votes out of about 344,000. Stolen from Zingularity, FTB.
This is about the best proof the gods exist, I’ve seen in a loonnngggg time.
They chose Mississippi because it is the most backward state. Who knows, maybe they are getting tired of being poor and ignorant.
Goldstein, I think the dirty joke was better.
You meant to write ‘Intelligence’. Abstractions with whom one is conversing deserve to be capitalised, at least.
Quetzalcoatl: Does that mean we get to rip out creationist’s hearts now?
My thoughts exactly. As a nihilist with anger issues, the last thing a thinking person wants to do is ask me to listen to the voices in my head.
Idiot theists: if your god truly cared about you, he’d have warned you about people like me.
Erline Price & Goldstein
I call POE. No way to tell if their incoherency is real religion or satire.
No. The Aztecs used obsidian knives. Very sharp.
Ripping is so gauche.
I’m not sure which is more cringe-inducing – that rendition of the Aristocrats or the assertion that the ontological argument is worth anything beyond the dirt in which it was initially scratched.
Google some choice phrases. It’s pretty easy to tell their incoherency was a cut ‘n’ paste.
Pomo generators are a dime a dozen.
Yes, we get it already.
You allege, assert and ask everyone to take your anti-thought experiments at face value.
Fuck off…and the geriatric horse you rode in on.
Technically, true. But you did use an appeal to authority, wherein the authority in question can also be claimed – perhaps more legitimately – by the person you are criticizing.
So I’ll concede that error, while still maintaining that you are a hypocritical fuckwit.
Actually, it occurs to me that since William Lane Craig defends genocide on Biblical grounds, he probably hews more closely to the Bible than most Christians, you know, the non-psychopaths who naturally abhor genocide, do.
William Lane Craig is the One True Christian we’ve been seeking all these years!
I almost have respect for WLC, having seen what his supporters (or whatever they were) spew.
I’m glad to be someone’s worst nightmare, though.
I wonder if Goldstein would mind if I moved into his neighbourhood.
I’d pop by to borrow a cup of sugar. He’d not sleep for a week with the night terrors I’d induce by my mere godless presence.
Unless, of course, he was lying.
Thanks again, Eric, for acknowledging these theists that are no better than us.
Why do you think god failed to instil them with the objective morality everyone’s raving about?
Damn, damn, screwed up the blockquote.
OxfordDolt, err, OxfordTroll, you can tell what I meant so I won’t repeat it correctly just for your benefit.
Fuck William Lane Craig. And that goes double for those of you who “believe” WLC has anything interesting or important to say. Because god-sucking Craig at least has an excuse – he’s doing it to fleece money out of the rubes. You pumpkinheads, though, are just doing it as volunteers, and boy, is that dumb dumb dumb.
Looks like the fun’s about over and I’m tired, so catch y’all on the flip side. Or not – hope springs eternal. Maybe you’ll grow up before you come back.
Brownian says:
Duh Brownian… really?
Brownian: True, very true. I’ll need a cyberobsidian knife then.
Oh, thank every nonexistent god ever imagined ! Oh, happy day. Our mothers and sisters and daughters have been saved from the goddamned christian slavers. Way to go, Mississippi. We support you in dragging yourself back from the dark ages.
Raven, thanks so much for posting this update. I caught your post just as I was leaving. Now I can go away joyfully.
One true christian hoggling?
I know the bable says “love thy enemy” but its always lovely when they post scat porn as proof of their fine christian morals.
Are you chiding me, No One?
I’m sorry if I insulted you by implying Goldstein’s cut ‘n’ pasting wasn’t obvious. Here’s one source.
I thought you were legitimately confused. My bad.
I’d be worried about being bored to death first by a lecture regarding how much despair it causes him that Atheism is encroaching on his Sweetness.
Well, I’d do it in person. How’s he going to rip off other writers with me in his doorway, all hirsute and swarthy and menacing like I am?
I LOL’D.
Fuuuuuuuuuck…
This has me longing for the return of erichovind and his murmuring merry morons. But I did learn something here; the people who following a proudly ignorant creationist argue better than people who hate Richard Dawkins.
(Going completely off topic, notice that the insults directed at Dawkins still does not obtain the sheer lunacy and hatred that Rebecca Watson has received. Though the crack about Hitler, Stalin and Mr Dawkins come close.)
Brownian says:
De nada…
(Meta. And a moment to change into asbestos underwear)
Folks, I haven’t read through all this thread, but you’ve gotten totally the wrong idea about Myron. I’ve been having pleasant informative exchanges (and sometimes cordial but occasionally vehmement disagreements) with him over on the-brights.net forums for about three years now.
Firstly he does yeoman work in digging up references to serious detail on things we discuss, frequently otherwise, in abject ignorance. His cites of SEP and other sources are almost always educational and usually pertinent.
Second he’s a philosopher …(I don’t think he teaches professionally, but I gather he has had some formal education in it) and, yes sometimes a little obtuse in the way he approaches things, but he generally is serious and looking at issues from the philosophers POV. It’s sometimes reporting on examination of an elephant with a microscope and it can take a while to grasp just what animal he’s talking about, but he’s serious and almost always speaking from a grounded and defensible (though occasionally wrong, IMO) position.
And he is not a native English speaker.
In the three or more years of frequent exchanges with him, despite occasional misunderstandings I don’t think he’s ever misrepresented his position nor willfully misrepresented any sources or arguments.
We’ve gone over WLC a few times on brights… Myron approaches Craig’s arguments from what he considers an honest perspective … that Craig *could* be right. We start cold (and with good reason) from the other side of the line, but someone judging Craig’s debates would perforce have to assume good faith on Craig’s part and the possibility that Craig’s god could be real. From that perspective WLC does win a good many of his debates, and not just from his fans’ view … by having his points lined up and presented coherently; his opponent may be more right, but those without ancilliary knowledge have no way of knowing that if that side of the debate itself is not coherent, consistent and well presented.
As PZ points out WLC may be lying pond scum, but as a debate performer he’s damned good lying pond scum, and the mechanics and tools of performance in debate aren’t different than in any other domain: if you have the tools and equipment ready and know how to use them, you’re going to do much better than someone without the right tools and less practice. Craig has the tools for debate shiny and placed in neat array and has long practice using them.
— TWZ
I was sitting here reading Goldstein’s hilarious buffoonery and just roaring with laughter when suddenly I realized . . .
. . . he’s channeling Irwin Corey!!
Now I’m laughing even harder because Irwin Corey is my spirit guide!!
OOOHHHHAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHEEEEEEE
I’m not sure but I think he just might have gotten away with putting one over on us. If so, I’ll give him a point if for nothing else than tireless effort.
Priceless! Even if transparent in its excessively self conscious and florid inventiveness, Goldstein is one for the ages, I tells ya.
Go, Goldstein! Please don’t stop. I gotta have more! MORE!!!!
Craig bashing doesn’t impress me ’cause he’s such low hanging fruit.
This dude, for example, represents a far tougher overall challenge than Craig, yet is totally ignored around these parts.
I wonder why.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
Wow. That was….. Really boring.
Anybody want to get in on the blog pool on how many new inhabitants of the Dungeon there will be when PZ gets through cleaning up?
In contrast to Goldstein, the . . . hangnailed keymasher responsible for comment 418 is Brobdingnagian in its errant perception while being Lilliputian in its inventiveness.
Otrame: From the looks of it, one or two. It would appear that most of the work was done by a master sockpuppeteer who eventually descended into hoggling.
Goldstein…
Isn’t he like one of the most famous internet trolls?
name rings a bell.
Yeah, it looks like he could be Adam Goldstein, a well known troll associated with 4chan.
Garden variety trolls, cluttering discussion with pointless noise. BORING.
Newsflash: you don’t sound like you’re even arguing your beliefs, and it shows. The only reason people here are giving you any credit at all, is because of Poe’s Law. That is, the side you’re pretending to argue FOR is so full of stupid that it makes you look legit.
You’re deliberately acting like brainless retards in hopes of annoying other people. What’s wrong with you?
@ smelly: “I am like a tiger descended . . .”
That’s nice, Tigger.
(It’s a well known fact that life forms from Alpha Centauri never mass more than three grams and they tend to dissolve rather messily in oxygen rich atmospheres.)
Now, why don’t you go get Goldstein and tell him to come back, eh? There’s a nice kitty.
OT but this is a bummer.
Russia’s sample return probe to Phobos is stuck in Earth orbit. That rocket engine on there, she no come on.
Apes? You said you was tiggers. Apes is from Earth, tiggers is from Alpha Centauri, ‘member?
And, “brobdignian”? Perhaps it is you should stroll through a dictionary or possible read a bit of Swift?
Well, it’s been a real hoot. Too bad it’s all wound down. I think the janitors are waiting to clean up. I’m to bed. See you ’round, kid.
Pretty much sums this entire thread up.
For starters, even in that example I mentioned, Craig merely misleads about Mackie’s motivations. The misuse of Ruse’s position, however, serves as a good example of where Craig is deceptive in how he uses sources. If you want to take the Ruse example, go ahead.
I can dig up more later (For instance: “I should point out that in some of Bill’s writings, he’s quoted a lot of my writings, and he’s taken them out of context, as I’ll show in a few minutes, because what he’s saying I’ve changed my mind to, I don’t agree with.” – Bart Ehrman) but I’ll be happy enough if you just show how Craig isn’t misusing Ruse’s position in order to advance his own argument.
Dr craig once responded in essay form to my best arg for atheism as part of his q&a. I think his response was obviously insufficient. http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8779
Like I said, it was something I had already written. But where have I accused you of targeting low-hanging fruit before?
Refuting one out of the many examples won’t make the problem of Craig’s dishonest tactics dissolve, but it would help me understand where Craig is coming from. For example, in his 2nd debate with Massimo Pigliucci, he claimed that all atheist claims of the monstrous nature of the old testament God are taken out of context. Given Craig’s impressive credentials and his defence of the Canaanite baby slaughter, I don’t know how it could be seen as anything other than a disingenuous debate strategy.
So even if you can show the validity of one, that doesn’t show the validity of all. I’m not trying to wriggle out of saying “Craig is a fair and honest debater”, merely trying to go where the facts as I see them are. Finding one wrong example would weaken my position and show I should be more charitable in my interpretations, but it’s not being a very good thinker to base a position on a single example.
Also,
1. If God is a myth, then Craig’s arguments are fallacious.
2. God is a myth.
3. Therefore, Craig’s arguments are fallacious.
Some serious philosophy right there…
Wow, the moment I step outside just a little bit to take a nap, the whole thing implodes with a mix of incoherent Dawkins haters, one of whom even has a GOWN, 4chan trolls spamming yardlong deranged crap, and in between all of that and a few intellectually disadvantaged WLC fans who keep yammering on about how no-one engages their position while themselves remaining completely without substance, a few tone trolls scold Pharyngula for using bad language. Sleeping was a better use of the time after all.
Perhaps Craig appears convincing to the converted but when I see clips of his performances on YouTube I find them to be incredibly boring. He’s operating at about 5 fallacies per minute, stringing them together so fast and into such elaborate chains that nothing he says passes any kind of critical threshold. You could literally spend a day dissecting his fallacies and still not cover them all. I imagine this kind of Gish galloping is exactly why Dawkins & others simply don’t see the point of debating him.
“Perhaps Craig appears convincing to the converted but when I see clips of his performances on YouTube I find them to be incredibly boring. He’s operating at about 5 fallacies per minute, stringing them together so fast and into such elaborate chains that nothing he says passes any kind of critical threshold.”
A basic written summary of Craig’s pro-theistic claims can be easily shown to be flawed by – for example – any of the regulars who post here, but he still somehow “wins” all these debates.
Typical of a guy who’s good at the technical aspects of the live debate performance but who is backing a terrible horse when it comes to substance.
..and most importantly, if Craig ultimately cares nothing for his own intellectual arguments (as they are NOT the reason he’s a Christian and have zero influence on his remaining so), then why should his opponents bother to engage them?
I see that the Templeton Foundation’s initiative to put a computer in the hands of every idiot is finally having an impact on the internet.
Hey, everyone! I hope you weren’t having too much fun conversing with atheism23, Czar, ATHEIST, TheOxfordTroll, and Goldstein, that tag-team of mutually self-congratulatory Dawkins-haters, because they’ve all been deleted. It turns out that all of them were one person stroking themselves in Florida.
Why is genocide wrong?
Does evolution teach the survival of the fittest, and the strongest animals destroys the weak? So, what’s wrong with that?
Wow, all of them one person? Impressive. My guess was two individuals.
Ooh, surprise not, that there was sockpuppeting going on. The idiocy was consistent.
Dear Chris Van Allsburg,
The theory of evolution is an accurate scientific description of how new species arise in nature. Why would you think it is a guide to how we should organize society or treat our fellow humand and animal beings? That is not what science does.
Because murder is wrong, and genocide is murder applied on a much broader scale…
That’s making the naturalistic fallacy. That it’s a rule of nature (it’s a bad misrepresentation of evolution, but that’s besides the point) doesn’t mean it’s acceptable or desirable practice between each other.
You must be a religious fool, who forgets the gold rule, or only thinks it applies only to your fellow delusional fools. It applies to everybody. So, the question is, do you want to be killed for someone else’s idea of racial purity? If not, you don’t do it to others. Simple.
Did I just accidentally respond to a troll? If so, apologies.
Kel,
Since when is “don’t feed the troll” an imperative on pharyngula? :)
I thought the MO was “let them asplode”.
If Chris wants a society where the “strong destroys the weak”, he can collect a bunch of like-minded people, move to an uninhabited island and see how that works out. Of course we don’t know whether Chris will qualify as “strong” or “weak” yet, so just roll those dice and see how it goes. Chris could be wielding that sword, or could just as easily be slaughtered on the edge of one.
Sounds like a great idea for a stable, lasting society with great accomplishments and happy citizens. Volunteers?
They might have been two people – Goldstein + the other lot — but that they came from the same location and formed a mutual admiration society was something of a giveaway.
Also, there were hints that they might be the same idiots we called the “Kansas trolls” several years ago: a small inbred group of fundagelicals who spammed many atheist/evolution sites under a flurry of pseudonyms. There was some lay preacher moron and a kid with a boyfriend or girlfriend on a crusade.
Anybody remember them? They were notorious in Kansas, apparently. Any Kansans know if they left the state for Florida?
Chris van Allsburg,
You creobots are always such ignorant lackwits.
If you have to ask that, you’re probably a psychopath. It’s wrong because it deprives people of their lives and causes immense suffering. If you need a further justification for finding that wrong, then you’re definitely a psychopath, like William Lane Craig, who thinks it’s only wrong in cases where God says so.
No. It doesn’t. This is wrong on at least three levels:
1) “Evolution” doesn’t teach anything; it is a natural process which has no intentions, nor the ability to communicate.
2) Neither does the theory of evolution have any implications for how we should behave. The theory describes and explains how the living world came to be as it is; it does not prescribe anything at all. Your belief that it does simply demonstrates your ignorance and stupidity for all to laugh at.
3) “The survival of the fittest” is a phrase of Herbert Spencer’s (and not Darwin, as most creobots think). If interpreted in the way you have done, as meaning the physically strongest survive, it is simply wrong: that kind of fitness requires a lot of resources to maintain, and less physically strong animals may be at an advantage for that reason. Even if taken in that sense, of course, it says nothing at all about the strongest animals destroying the weak. If interpreted as meaning “Those best adapted to their environment (i.e. those who best “fit” that environment), are most likely to survive.” it is true: that kind of “fitness”, however, can and does include cooperativeness and altruism.
Why is it that sockpuppets always immediately start complimenting each other? Don’t they realize it’s a dead giveaway?
Indeed, myeck waters. If they waited a few days it would be more subtle.
Listen to Alex, he’s so smart!
Goldstein…
Isn’t he like one of the most famous internet trolls? – Ichthyic
Nah – he’s the one who wrote The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Ha, called it with the 4chan trolls.
So to be fair to WLC good chance those people weren’t even his supporters. Which if you think about it makes sense considering they had nothing to say about him.
“Here’s the only way to debate one of these guys in person so as to avoid the “Gish Gallop”:
The debate rule is this: every time the theist makes a claim, the moderator stops him. The opposing debater is then given the option to refute that claim on the spot, being given ten minutes to do so. If the opposing debater refutes the claim, the theist may not use his claim any further in the debate.
The debate would be over quickly. It would only take one or two refutations before it became apparent that the theist had no ammunition in his rhetorical gun.”
Should be standard debate form.
I saw August Berkshire do something similar: he and his opponent worked out ahead of time a series of sub-questions on the larger theme of the debate, and the debate was a series of these questions followed by 3 or 5 minutes for each person to address the question. It kept the discussion moving and didn’t allow anyone the latitude to go wandering off into weird digressions.
Have you noticed that physics teaches that gravity causes an acceleration of falling bodies, such that falling only a relatively short distance can produce a lethal impact? So, obviously, physics teaches that I can throw Chris Van Allsburg off the roof of my building.
Both sound rational and like they can be fairly implemented for both sides, and like it could help cut down on the flash, concentrating audience attention more on substance. It would be nice if this were the standard debate form, but I suspect it would be difficult to get any debater who depends largely on rhetorical flash to actually agree to it. A pity.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said this, but it seems to bear saying again: do not engage Craig on fuzzy philosophical generalities. Presuppositionalism is not philosophy; it’s sleight-of-hand. Attack his soft underbelly instead, with science, archaeology, and meta-ethics.
Is your mouth open?
@Eric:
While you’re trying to figure out how your buddy Craig could misrepresent the arguments of his fellow Christian Ruse here’s another example of WLC’s rampant dishonesty in service of Christ:
http://debunkingwlc.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/john-barrow-on-the-big-bang-singularity/
He’s been talking about the “singularity at the beginning of the universe” for years — this is a theoretical prediction made by Stephen Hawking in work he did in the 70’s I believe. The problem? Once theorists started taking into account quantum effects in cosmological models the necessity of a big bang singularity disappears. Most physicists do not believe such a thing existed. Hawking himself has acknowledged that his earlier work no longer represents our best idea of what happened at the beginning of the universe even in his book for lay audiences, “The Universe in a Nutshell.”
So why is WLC still citing Hawking on this? Why is he still presenting it as factual?
@Eric:
That’s two, you’ve responded to none so far. I think you should explain why it’s not dishonest for WLC to misrepresent Ruse’s arguments and cite out-of-date theoretical work by Hawking. And then in the interest of fair play you should try to point out something WLC has actually been right about as people have been asking you all the time you’ve spent in this thread.
The REAL shock here is that Adolf Oliver Nipple and smellyatheistarguments aren’t also sockpuppets.
Wow, I forgot about those two, Sally. This thread is really infested with some bad stupid.
Sally
Are they?
Evolution is a biological theory about how life changes through time.
It has nothing to do with religion or how to run a society.
It is a descriptive scientific theory, not a prescriptive principle for running a society. This isn’t a hard concept to understand.
Genocide and murder are wrong because we humans decided it was wrong.
It certainly didn’t come from the bible. The guy who invented genocide, with the largest kill record on a percentage basis, was the OT god. During the Big Boat event, he poured water on everybody until all but 8 people were dead. Much of the OT is the (mythological) story of how the ancient Jews genocided the Canaanites and stole all their women, land, and stuff at the direction of and with the help of their god.
The xian god doesn’t have a problem with genocide. We do though.
Pharyngula is to sockpuppets as a dryer is to socks.
@Eric:
Ha! Missed this one before! It is absolutely adorable that you have decided that the GREs are the final word on the “who’s smartest” pissing contest.
Looking back through the thread, Eric, you’ve been pretty blustery but I don’t see where you’ve made a single substantive point about anything. Kel even gave you what you were asking for — an example of WLC’s dishonest — and you refused to respond. Well, not quite. You refused to respond unless Kel promised to become another WLC bootlicker if you were able to rebut the point effectively. (We all know how that would have gone: “I gave you a totally plausible reason why WLC would misrepresent Ruse!” “I don’t find it plausible for reasons X, Y, and Z.” “Well you’re a poop head!”)
Why don’t you save the shit talk until after you’ve justified it through your top skill, eh buddy?
raven says:
In other words civilized humans have developed moral codes that are superior to those found in the Bible. WLC would have us lower our standards to meet those of his god.
Jodi –
Jodi, come back ! Come back and explain why any human should care what Edward Feser has to say, about anything.
I already looked. Edward Feser is just more of that craptastic christer nonsense about the Five Ways that if Aristotle was right, then god follows …
To quote John Jermey – who is a far tougher overall challenge ;) –
I wonder why so-called christians like the huckster William Lane Craig and Edward Feser can’t ever show us any actual evidence of their Christ’s connection to our lives. I call them out on their heinous immorality and state that if they really believed in their Christ, they wouldn’t make their fortunes telling lies in Christ’s name.
Too bad they’ve scammed Jodi into thinking any of their sophistimicated filozofy is somehow a challenge to us.
Feser? Bwaaw-haw-hawwww! His speciality is well-nigh unbelievable prolixity – presumably in the hope that any opponent will give up or die of boredom before getting to the point, but he’s just another Thomist dittohead. No-one takes Thomism seriously anymore, except Catholic pholisophers for religious reasons. If you’d care to present one of his arguments at less than book length, we’ll be happy to demolish it for you.
Okay, Craig’s arguments as I understand them are:
1. Look at the trees! Thus God.
2. THINGS EXIST. Thus God.
3. I think Jesus rose from the dead, thus Yahweh.
4. OBJECTIVE MORALITY. Thus God.
I refute these.
1. Look at the cancer! And if evil has a purpose, look at my slightly too long nipple hair!
2. Nah, nah they don’t. Okay, fine, they do. But some things do not exist. Why would an all powerful god not create everything possible! If I were a god, I would totally make some awesome things, like a giant fire-breathing ant army. Or, a bird OR OMG DRAGONS! Dragons don’t exist. Thus no god.
3. I don’t. Biblical evidence bores me.
4. I think it’s fine when people are gay. You do not. I think it’s wrong when people commit genoide even if commanded by god. You do not. Objectively, I am correct. Your god is a poor guide. Goodbye.
If anyone wants an interesting take on the problems with divine command theory the web comic OOTS has a villain that may be a subtle or unintentional take down of the idea.
He is classified as evil because he is against the gods will…specifically their will that his race has the sole purpose of being canon fodder for good races and their entire existence is to die at the hands of a noble hero.
His plan is to unleash an eldrich horror that can kill gods to hold them hostage to renegotiate the place of his people in the cosmic plan.
And if Feser becomes the focus, then it’ll be Alvin Plantinga we’re ignoring. And if we focus on Plantinga, Richard Swinburne whom this site ignores. And some kook will inevitably show up extolling the virtues of Kent Hovind…
Looks great in orange?
Thomism and evidentialist apologetics are a joke. The reason presuppositionalism is so popular these last couple of decades is that science has narrowed down to gaps for Yahweh to hide in to a ridiculous degree.
That being the case, all the creobots have left is “Yeah? Well…well…well without my specific and one true definitely real and totally not evil God, uh… you wouldn’t even be able to debate me because logicpresupposesGod! Hahaha! You lost before you even opened your mouth! Checkmate atheist (oh God I’m so lonely…).”
Kel:
That’s Sophisticated Theology for ya. It’s only the Sophisticated Theology we’re supposed to know about when we aren’t looking at it. When we are, it’s an easy target, and sooo obviously Unsophisticated, that we should know that the Real Sophisticated Theology is right over there, if only we had to courage to address it. It’s Whack-a-mole, where the moles that get whacked obviously weren’t Real Moles. It’s a Shell game, where the scammer cries do-over if we find the ball, because we would’ve needed to cheat to get it! The Theology is always Sophisticateder on the other side. And never where we are currently looking. We’ve got a lot of fence-hopping to do, ladies and gents! Because, surely, it couldn’t be that the people we are talking with are dishonest and putting us on a wild goose chase. Nope.
In fact, it is such a remote possibility that these people are dishonest to the core, that I will defend their honor and explain this phenomenon by proposing a novel explanation.
Schrodinger’s Theology (or the Heisenberg Sophistication Principle): It is impossible to measure both a concept’s logical sophistication and its pertinence to religious ideology. Whenever you discover the logical sophistication of a concept, the wave function collapses, and it loses all possible connection to religion. Whenever you discover its relevance/consistency to religious ideas, the concept’s logical sophistication is unidentifiable. Only in a state where such concepts are not observed can they be both sophisticated and theological. But, as soon as it is observed, it must become either one or the other, and cannot be witnessed as both to any human observer at a single point in time. It is only the cutting-edge theologians, who have studied concepts in the Aether using the most technologically advanced ideoscopes, Bibliophonographs, and theometers, that have discovered individual concepts that emit both theo waves and sophistication pulses. Why God would choose to Intelligently Design (TM) the theopologetics of his very own religion to only be observable as both sophisticated and theology to theologians is just another great mystery to be resolved in the prolific theology laboratories and observatories across our nation.
Shrödinger’s Theology explains so very, very much.
Now, could you please explain Subscriber Trunk Dialing?
If you don’t start with God, you don’t get to God. Read Craig’s standard debate forwards and backwards, and backwards it makes much more sense. If you start with God (or in Craig’s case, witness to the holy spirit) then work back, the resurrection, morality, fine-tuning, and the origin of the universe make sense in light of Craig’s explanations. Read it forward, and the only argument for God is that there’s no naturalistic way to explain the empty tomb/resurrection appearances.
If you don’t start with God, you don’t get to God. Presuppositionalism at least has the advantage that the conclusion follows from the premise…
Anteprepro #447
+1
You guys have been doing a GREAT job very concretely honing in the vacuous and fallacious (circular, presuppositionist) arguments of the likes of WLC.
I tried in my feeble way in my #145 to add my vote to the better eloquence of my philosopher travelers here.
It really really strikes me that you do not need god to explain anything useful. You can construct some thought system that uses god (the concept) to be effective for real or even just in the marketplace, but that is no more then saying one might build a school of thought and action based on Star Trek that has value of some sort.
But god is NOT necessary to get somewhere useful in thought and action – too much no god required very useful stuff running around. And that is also like saying we do not need Star Trek to be innovative – we just do not!
But we DO need real science and science like thinking – period. We do need a SCIENTIFIC treatment of ethics and sociology and naturally physical stuff and whatever REALLY impacts us and must be decided.
That is so obvious – and right – but I am sure WLC would debate me into the ground given the right audience. I am not articulate. What I’d have to resort to is this: OK live only on what GOD gives you via his revealed word – eschew all science and technology otherwise past, present, and future and see how that works for you. Probably gets you to heaven sooner – so should sound OK to the likes of WLC to try that experiment.
Yes, it’s strange that it’s so obvious to me and you that “if you don’t start with god, you don’t get to god” in Craig-type arguments, and so completely invisible to those who already are soaked in god. They just can’t see it, as fish can’t see the water they’re swimming in. They can’t subtract god from their background assumptions and then re-evaluate the argument, starting at the beginning, and find out that it does not really lead in any convincing way to god.
Now, I suspect that Craig knows – has known for years – that his arguments don’t really lead to god, because I suspect that Craig is actually a fraud who will say anything to continue to make his living fleecing the believers. I don’t know, maybe he honestly had a vision/experience of the resurrection and salvation and really did try to work backwards to what that would imply for god’s role in our universe. Or maybe not.
The believers I do credit with genuinely trying to follow his argument, only with the invisible step of “assume god” which is necessary if you try to work forward from “everything that begins to exist has a cause” …
Even the very basic notion that god would have created the universe to begin with looks meaningless to us, unless you do as they do, start at the end (resurrection and salvation) and work backward. Why would god create universes ? Really, why ? It doesn’t make sense. God is not a child playing on the beach who will create sandcastles just for playthings. And you can’t legitimately get away with assuming that it’s “god’s inherent nature” to be creative. As if god’s inherent nature to give birth to universes is like chicken’s “inherent nature” to lay eggs (which by the way is a characteristic only inherent after millions of years of evolution led to it as a temporarily successful solution to a life problem. Did god evolve? ).
God had to have had a reason and a plan – well, they do say “it’s all part of god’s plan” – but what does it even mean for a changeless, eternal being to have a plan ? God’s work had to be pointing towards some fulfillment – but why would an omnipotent bring anything into existence in a state of less than total fulfillment ? Just power up the desired outcome at once, without having to go through any intermediate steps. It doesn’t make any sense.
No, the only way it makes sense is, as you say, if you start at the end.
Resurrection. Why ? Because god chose to redeem us.
Redemption. Why ? Because we fell into sin.
Sin. Why ? Because we foolishly ignored objective morality.
Objective morality. Why ? Because god’s moral nature imbues the universe with objective morality.
God’s nature. Why ? Because, umm, god, that’s why.
Umm, god ? Yeah, god, that’s it.
Well, I admit I probably skipped a few steps in there somewhere. So do the believers.
—“God’s work had to be pointing towards some fulfillment – but why would an omnipotent bring anything into existence in a state of less than total fulfillment ? Just power up the desired outcome at once, without having to go through any intermediate steps. It doesn’t make any sense.”—
Correct. Why have this elaborate soul-filtering mechanism called Planet Earth in the first place? What’s the point? If you truly don’t wish for anyone to suffer Hell, just create everyone you want in Heaven in the first place. Problem solved. Nobody’s in Hell, nobody sins, everybody’s happy.
Our current state of existence is completely ridiculous if you presume Christian Theism from the outset. But Craig’s fellow travelers simply can’t see this because their mental orientation is so god-focused that the absence of god (as a simple presumption in order to try a thought experiment) simply doesn’t compute at all for them.
Only when you see it from the outside can you recognize it as the man-made, culturally contingent Rube-Goldberg mental framework that it is.
These last few long responses are nice and meaty :) Truth be told I am horrible at philosophy and have very little self-confidence, so it’s nice to see others coming to the same conclusions and explaining them.
I think I also gave Craig too much credit. There is, I suspect, a lot of “well he has a PhD and I’m just a sarcastic woman with a geology degree, what do I know?” at play here. And he probably exploits that to the hilt.
But I do wonder, what’s the best way to counter his BS on the resurrection? The other arguments can be shown to be circular or otherwise fallacious from first principles, but the fact is that we don’t have eyewitness evidence to the contrary for this one. Carrier, Avalos, etc have done some good work on it, but I’m not bright enough to absorb and correlate it all.
1) We don’t have eyewitness PERIOD
2) eyewitness evidence is the worst kind of evidence imaginable.
3) The same standards of evidence prove UFO abduction.
Hazuki:
Hazuki, you are stressing yourself out more than you need to. When it comes down to it, despite WLC’s bluster, they don’t actually have decent evidence for their positive claim, and nowhere near sufficient evidence to rule out the Swoon Hypothesis (Jesus didn’t actually die, just seemed like it) and other alternatives in favor of believing that the resurrection happened. And this is all when you give them the benefit of accepting the New Testament documents as credible evidence. Without those blatantly religious documents, written decades after the fact by obviously biased sources, with no contemporary support from unbiased sources, there is NO case for the resurrection. With them, there is only a paltry one. We don’t need contrary evidence. We don’t need to prove the negative. They have tragically failed to prove their own case, and elevate the fantastical truth claims of their document above any other myth. We don’t need hard evidence contradicting the resurrection, because there isn’t any hard evidence supporting it.
Hazuki, what I would say about the resurrection to people who believe it is “And you believe THAT ? Hee hee hee. Dead people don’t rise up except in zombie movies, you fool.” Because, really, what’s their evidence that it DID happen or ever COULD happen ?
But seriously, we can think about why we don’t take their claim of resurrection as necessarily true.
True, we don’t have eyewitness evidence that counters the resurrection. No one reports seeing Jesus dead and staying dead, no one reports going to the tomb a week later and finding Jesus’ body back in the tomb with another week’s worth of decay visible.
So what ? Why would we expect that kind of evidence ? We don’t expect that evidence for any death, not just the death of some rabble-rousing preacher in Galilee. Even assuming Jesus lived and was executed, we don’t expect some Roman bureaucrat to doublecheck the grave and file a two-week-still-in-grave certificate, so when that certificate is NOT in the official record, it’s NOT a sign that Jesus’ body was unexpectedly missing and the Romans covered it up to prevent the nascent christians from making a big deal over it ;)
This is one situation where the idiom “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” really rings true. We don’t have any evidence that Jesus stayed dead after his death, but our lack of evidence on that point doesn’t suggest anything other than that he did indeed stay dead, unremarkably dead, and no one (official) noticed anything unusual. Absence of evidence of his body is not evidence that his body was absent, magically gone due to his resurrection.
See, in order to think that Jesus’ disappearance from the tomb (more or less as reported in the gospels) means anything at all, anything in the least out of the ordinary, first you have to convince me that
1) he lived in the first place (okay, I’ll grant that; it seems likely enough; but remember not all scholars accept that there was a human man we can legitimately name “Jesus”; we’re already making a concession to the christian fairytale to accept the real existence of Jesus as a man who lived at that time. How many more concessions will they demand before we can say, wait a minute, this fairytale is too unbelievable)
2) he was crucified (yep, I’ll grant that too, if he was pissing off the Romans by inciting rebellion, they might have crucified him)
3) that he was laid in the tomb according to the story (problematic, Roman customs suggest otherwise for criminals, but granting it solely for the sake of argument and moving on …)
4) that the confused story told by the four gospels of Jesus’ body gone from the tomb is substantially accurate (absolutely contradictory in some details: who went? when? was there a man inside? outside nearby? who told the other apostles ? but conceding the basic story that Jesus’ body was definitely gone from where the apostles left it and none of them admitted knowing where it went/where it had been moved …)
5) there is no better explanation – consistent with natural causes for Jesus’ body to be out of the tomb – than to assume it must have been reanimated by god supernaturally.
And note, the christians don’t get to win on this point just because you don’t have a “better” explanation that satisfies them. They’re the ones trying to base their whole religion on the idea something extraordinary MUST HAVE happened. The “better” explanation only has to satisfy us, the doubters.
So conceding for the sake of argument that Jesus lived, was executed, body moved to a known tomb, body not in said tomb a few days later, can we visualize any natural explanation for the body being out of the tomb ? Of course, what a ridiculous question !
Maybe Jesus was almost as big a deal as some of the stories say, and some Roman detachment moved the body the same night it was placed in the tomb to prevent the crazy cult from using Jesus’ bones as signs of martyrdom and stirring up rebellion in his name. Oh, the christian says, that explanation doesn’t satisfy them, since the Romans never did anything like that, knowing that if there were more rebellion, they could just crack down harder. So what ? Which is more likely, one Roman commander acting in an unusual manner, or all the laws of physics being overturned by a dead body being reanimated.
A similar answer would be that the Jewish temple authority moved the body, for a similar reason, with thoughts of preventing Jesus’ followers from making some kind of holy place out of his grave. Did the authorities do that ? I don’t know. I know it’s more likely than the laws of physics being overturned.
Again, maybe a small group of Jesus’ followers moved it because they heard rumors someone was coming to desecrate the body or steal it, and they wanted to protect it. Maybe they planned to tell all the apostles later, but when they saw how excited everyone was in discovering the empty tomb, they decided to keep their secret and go along with the excited story about a “miracle”.
Maybe they had made some kind of deal with the Roman guards to get Jesus down before he actually died, pretended he was dead just for the evening, and they sneaked him out of the tomb that night to heal in some secret location.
Well, those are all explanations assuming that the body was actually gone when the witnesses looked. But what if it wasn’t even gone ? What if that part of the story was a mistake or a lie ? The christians say “oh no it couldn’t be a lie, christians wouldn’t lie”. Hee hee. Why not ?
None of the gospels were recorded by an actual eye witness (even assuming that eye witness testimony is valuable and convincing, which it isn’t really, but hearsay witness a generation later is totally unconvincing) and there are a lot of mistaken memories, confusion, or outright manipulation of the truth that could have crept in before the first written version thirty years after Jesus died.
Suppose one group of real apostles had figured out that they got better meals and better cups of wine as they traveled through the small christian communities and told that story about finding the empty tomb, even though they had never found an empty tomb. Yeah, maybe they felt a little guilty about telling a lie, but they were happy to be wined and dined for it. That story could easily spread from village to village, accepted as true, and who could prove otherwise ?
Even if there were some other remaining apostles who knew the tomb had not been empty, how would their truth chase out the scam ? How would the “good guys” stop peasant villages from believing what they wanted to believe, that someone had died to give them eternal life, and the proof was that some wandering apostles came to testify they had found the empty tomb !
Similar arguments apply to all the gospel fairytales about witnesses who saw Jesus (in person, whatever that means) after the supposed resurrection.
The stories are contradictory, which even the faithful christians can’t explain. There are possible natural explanations which don’t require supernatural intervention for why someone might see Jesus after he (supposedly) died. And again, we don’t have any eye witness testimony, we don’t have any idea whether any of the real apostles even claimed (while they themselves were still alive) to have witnessed Jesus at all – only that someone a generation later used their names to claim that they had reported miraculous visitations back then.
I can claim that your grandma had a miraculous visit from the Virgin Mary. Did she ever tell anybody that ? If you heard me making my claim about your grandma, how could you prove I’m the one telling lies ? If I have any reason to lie about it, then I’ll just respond to you that, sadly, you must not have heard your Grandma tell about the day it happened, or maybe you just forgot, but she told me and I remember what she said about how beautiful Mary’s blue robe was. Who is going to be believed, me or you ?
The gospels stories of the resurrection are no different than me making claims about your grandma, thirty years after.
Too long didn’t read version:
what Ing and Anteprepro said.
Yep, and not only that, hundreds of times more people have claimed personally to have been UFO abducted than ever claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus body. So even by the ridiculous christian gospel standard of evidence, they have to admit that UFO abduction is hundreds of times more likely to be true !
FWIW, 15 million USains report having been abducted by UFO aliens, 5% of the population. A lot more than the number reporting on jesus’s resurrection.
The resurrection is just a story like Hercules slaying the 9 headed Hydra.
If you actually compare the details of all the gospel versions, they are very different. It is a fictional account found in a work of fiction.
One of the stories that really indicated the NT and resurrection was fiction was the Zombie uprising.
In one of the gospels, 500 people rose from their tombs and went into Jerusalem.
There is no independent account of 500 Zombies lurching around Jerusalem. They would have been seen by thousands of people and made a huge impression. Even today that would be the story of the millennium.
It is only in 1 gospel, didn’t even manage to make it in elsewhere in the bible.
Seem to be hitting some sort of spam filter, will try to link over a few posts
David Hume – Of Miracles is a fairly comprehensive refutation to the validity of a claim of a miracle; effectively where Carl Sagan’s “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” comes from.
Craig vs Ehrman debate transcript – Ehrman does a good job at elucidating the historical method and of what the sources can really tell us.
In my own words – Basically: the resurrection violates how the world works so we have reason to think it didn’t happen, the positive case is based on weak evidence (at best), and those arguing for the case have a strong theological imperative to answer the historical case in just one way…
[it seems the problem was linking to a pdf]
link.
Not quite about Craig, but the problem of presuppositions in historical analysis. If you’re already arguing to a conclusion, how much objectivity can you have?
And the fundies eat themselves from within. Hee hee. Couldn’t happen to a more-deserving bunch of people.
Part of me is fascinated that there’s even such a debate going on. Who would even consider Mt.27:52-53 as being literally literal? I’d suspect most people, even most committed Christians would respond “well, of course” to any attempt to argue against that being historical.
Then again, part of me just wants to yell kook fight! Then just sit back and watch and laugh at the absurdity as it unfolds.
Everyone, thanks for the replies :) I tend to forget, having been raised Catholic, that the “conservative maximalist” position vis-a-vis the Bible texts simply isn’t true.
I know that Mark 16:9, pre-resurrection, is the accepted end of what most scholars believe is the first Gospel (IIRC there are some hypotheses that an Aramaic Matthew is earlier, but it doesn’t explain why the Matthew and Luke that we have is so heavily plagiarized from it…).
And seeing Licona in hot water over the zombie uprising absolutely made my morning, LOL. Somehow I keep forgetting about that little episode. Like the GOP, the fundie loonie fringe’s worst enemy is itself. I love watching people like that rip each other to shreds *evil laugh.*
So, has anyone here read The Christian Delusion or The End of Christianity yet? Need to order copies of it when I finally have some money. If anyone has, I know there are chapters in them especially on this one point. Are they any good?
That’s right, start off with a lie in approved godbot fashion. Russell does record having very briefly thought the ontological argument was sound; but he soon recovered his senses. As for Plantinga, his version relies on a transparent switch on the meanings of “necessary” and “possible” in mid-argument.
I found myself wondering if the Chris Van Allsburg @#202 & #408 was the same individual as the illustrator and author, Chris Van Allsburg.
However, after looking at the commentator’s gravatar enlarged, and finding a picture of the author and illustrator online, I am reassured that the two persons are almost certainly distinct and share only the name.
The OA has also been used with force by some kid named Robert Hamburger to support the existence of ninjas.
@468/KG
Thank you! I am so tired of hearing creobots trot out that bullshit about Russel saying the ontological argument is sound.
The quote they mine is part of a larger story Russel told which has precisely the opposite meaning. He does not find it sound, and was relaying that he once did. IIRC he says he was walking down the lane flipping a tin of tobacco in his hand at the time.
As to Plantinga, yes, his version hinges on the old “possible therefore probably” fallacy. Plantinga is a brilliant man but he loses all perspective when it comes to theism. And he’s squeezed out a few real turds too, especially the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.
The flaw in all ontological arguments is that they give undue privilege to the observer. Plantinga spun some long, convoluted analogy about a security camera and an office breakin to try to illustrate his version of it, but his formulation and Anselm’s still have the same basic problem.
Existence is not a property. It is a prerequisite for the possession of properties. When we say $THING does or does not exist, we are saying “I have in my mind a concept I call $THING, with certain properties. I believe that there is something outside my mind in substantial agreement with these concepts.”
That’s funny – it’s a godbot lie I hadn’t heard before; and I thought I must have heard practically all the commonly repeated ones by now.
To be a bit more speciifc about Plantinga’s version of the OA, one formulation of his argument (he likes to spin it out at far greater length to conceal its flaws) is as follows:
1. A being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good in W; and
2. A being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3. It is possible that there is a being that has maximal greatness. (Premise)
4. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.
5. Therefore (by axiom S5) it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.
6. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.
Now in 1, the sense of “possible” is clear: it means there is a (logically) possible, i.e. consistently describable world in which a being fitting Plantinga’s definition of “maximal excellence” exists. But this cannot be the sense of “possible” used in 3, because what is asserted to be possible there, requires us to consider all logically possible worlds at once.
Another slightly more technical way of showing the argument is not sound (it can be formulated to be valid i.e. so the conclusion follows from the premise) shows that the premise, 3, is question-begging, if it is formulated assuming that the “possible” in 3 does mean “True in at least one logically possible world”. The argument is formulated within the modal logic S5, in which “Possibly necessarily P” is equivalent to “Necessarily P” for any proposition P (not everyone accepts this axiom as reasonable, but that’s by the way here). Then 3, the premise, simply states that a being of maximal greatness necessarily exists i.e. exists in all logically possible worlds; thus the “argument” starts by assuming the truth of its conclusion, that a being of “maximal greatness” exists. Its initial plausibility (to some) depends on the fact that this sense of “possibly” is not the everyday one, so we tend to slip into interpreting it in a much looser way than the argument requires.
I’d question hazuki’s statmeent that Plantinga is brilliant. A man who can come up with ludicrous tosh like his supposed evolutionary argument against naturalism must have considerable reserves of stupidity to draw on.
No discussion of the merits of the OA is complete without a mention of Ciaphas’ refutation:
1) It is possible to conceive of a refutation of the ontological argument that is greater than any other argument.
2) An argument that exists is greater than an argument that does not.
3) Therefore the greatest refutation of the ontological argument exists.
4) Therefore the ontological argument is wrong.
But what about Quantum Consciousness Materialization Of Stuff Because I Think About It?
Here is my argument:
Jesus God was all these powerful waves and by the time the Romans came to give the Jews Pax Romana they were thinking so hard about a savior god that they collapsed the god wave and then actually observed a resultant Jesus making Him a reality.
Then the quantum induced reality was perturbed by observers hostile to the observation and this forced the wave form to become a sick (dead) reality which then reformed momentarily to a live reality because people hoped really hard which then re-assumed its original quantum waveform state in greater glory in greater wave-form land.
I propose that this makes a lot more sense than a OA or the tripe WLC passes off as logic. It is grounded in science! At least as I want to understand it!
Nobel Prizes graciously accepted. Thank you.
@473/KG
Thanks…I needed that. I couldn’t follow some of the more technical things too well but seem to have gotten the gist of it.
Is this really all the two golden boys of apologetics have? Do they really not know how vacuous these arguments are? They must, being so well-schooled in philosophy. Argh, makes me paranoid we’re missing something here :(
I’ve been in Kansas for a number of years, but it sounds like this was probably before I joined Pharyngula. So I’m not really sure who you’re talking about. I could do a bit of digging, though.
It was. They were around for a while. Used to hit a number of websites and blogs. Not much content, lots of teh dumb.
According to Mr. Loftus WLC does not want to debate him, there are witness who assure that Dr. Craig’s greatest fear is to debate a student, and John Loftus is one of his former students.
“[I]t must be conceded that not everyone who understands and reflects on [the ontological argument’s] central premise — that the existence of a maximally great being is possible — will accept it. Still, it is evident, I think, that there is nothing contrary to reason or irrational in accepting this premise. What I claim for this argument, therefore, is that it establishes, not the truth of theism, but its rational acceptability. And hence it accomplishes at least one of the aims of the tradition of natural theology” – Alvin Plantinga [emphasis added]
Yeah, as opposed to the unacceptability of batshit insane theism, which is what I argue.
Unfortunately, I don’t have Plantinga’s credentials – or his philosophical mumbo jumbo – but what I claim for my argument is that it’s at least as likely to be true as Plantinga’s.
More likely to be true, if we’re allowed to consider the evidence, as filtered through our “unreliable” naturally evolved brains and senses ;)
Plantinga is not as much of a repulsive degenerate as William Lane Craig is. That’s a high bar …
Yeah, Plantinga seems a lot more honest than Craig, as if he’s actually a philosopher first and a fundie second. And I’m glad he at least admits that, above.
But he’s still conflating Yahweh with the Philosopher’s God! Why? Does he really think the two are the same? How in heaven does he bridge the gap from a “maximally excellent,” it’s-not-batshit-insane-to-think-it’s-possible-this-exists God to, well, Yahweh? That’s what I don’t get. His arguments are great for Deism if you don’t look at them too hard, but Yahwism…?
Also, what exactly is S5 and how does it make his premise 3 any more possible? If I understand this right his definition of “possible” here is “does, in fact, exist in some world we can imagine.” Isn’t this the same mistake all presuppositionalists make, privileging their own mind and senses far beyond what’s warranted?
I just don’t understand.
It seems Plantinga’s new book might be a bit dishonest in its presentation – perhaps Eric can shed like on Plantinga’s misrepresentation of Ruse while he’s explaining Craig’s.
I think the thread may have dropped some comments…
Anyway, KG and others, I really appreciate your taking the time out to talk about these things here :) Plantinga uses a lot of specialized language and it’s dizzying if you’re not conversant (e.g., his special definition of possible in P3 above).
How DOES he warrant his assertion that a maximally-excellent being definitely exists in one or more possible worlds?
S5 is a modal logic, which means a logic that deals with concepts of possibility and necessity. (There are more types of specialist logic than you can shake a proposition at – temporal, deontic, probabilistic, imperative, epistemic, non-monotonic, multi-valued, fuzzy… They are all designed to capture apparently valid modes of reasoning which “ordinary” formal logics – the propositional and predicate logics or calculi – do not. Often, these specialist logics are controversial.) There are a number of different modal logics, which differ in the axioms (starting assumptions) they use. S5 is named after one of its axioms, also called S5, which allows you to remove all but the last of a sequence of modal operators (the modal operators are “possibly” and “necessarily”*) from the start of a proposition. This means that in S5, “Necessarily possibly necessarily necessarily possibly Elvis is alive” is equivalent to “Possibly Elvis is alive.” Modal logics are infernally tricky things, because the operators have multiple possible (hah!) interpretations. (I used to work on spatial logics, and a completely consistent and indeed useful interpretation of S5 is to treat “possibly” as meaning “somewhere” and “necessarily” as meaning “everywhere”!)
The point is, in any given argument, you have to stick to the same interpretation throughout. This is just what Plantinga doesn’t do. My favourite interpretation of modal logics is in terms of what’s called possible world semantics, where “Possibly Elvis is alive” means that there is a consistently describable** universe in which Elvis is alive – which, obviously, there is – but in the everyday sense of the world, “Possibly Elvis is alive” would generally be considered false by sane people, because we have enough evidence to be sure he died, and people don’t come back to life. “Necessarily”, in this interpretation, means that in any consistently describable universe, what it applies to is true, so “Necessarily, 2+2=4” is true, but “Necessarily, Elvis is alive” and “Necessarily, Elvis is not alive” are not. This is the interpretation Plantinga relies on for his point 5; butif the same interpretation is used in his point 3, the premise turns out to be just a stronger form of the conclusion (asserting God’s existence in all logically possible worlds and so begging the question), making it unsurprising that the conclusion follows from it. But its form disguises this fact, and its plausibility derives from the fact that we tend to interpret “possible” in the everyday sense, meaning something like “We don’t know that it’s not the case that…”
* In formal contexts, the natural language terms “possibly” and “necessarily” are replaced by a diamond and a square respectively, which can help to prevent the everyday uses of those words contaminating your thought processes.
** “Consistently describable” is a somewhat tighter criterion than “imaginable”: it means that given a description of a universe, all the logical consequences of that description are mutually consistent. In some cases, people can imagine a world that is not, in fact, consistently describable, because we don’t and can’t instantly appreciate all the logical consequences of an arbitrary set of statements.
…my head exploded.
But, still, no matter what modal logic he uses isn’t he still overprivileging his own thoughts and senses? How does he know that any universe he can “consistently describe” actually reflects anything in reality?
This is all very obscure, and it makes me a bit suspicious. If he needs to couch his arguments in these terms, it says rather bad things about a being that’s supposed to be omnipresent.
…and it still doesn’t explain how he justifies belief in Yahweh, as opposed to a genetic Deist-type God. I can see his arguments being useful for that, but not any for of Yahwism, especially not with the archaeological and textual evidence we have counter.
A classic piece of misdirection by Plantinga – though quite probably, he fools himself rather than being dishonest in this case. (I’m not sure this is so, because of the care he takes not to frame 3 in a form such as “Possibly, God necessarily exists”, which would make it clear what’s going on.) Anyone who actually understands the premise, must understand S5, and hence the fact that the premise actually asserts that God exists in all logically possible worlds, the “Possibly” just being empty noise. But this is a far stronger claim that the claim that God exists, which Plantinga is trying to make “rationally acceptable”: it asserts that “God does not exist” is in the same logical class as “2+2=7”.
Well, I don’t know Plantinga’s personal psychology – whether, for example, he is subjectively certain God exists, or is desperately trying to persuade himself of something which he seriously doubts. Nor do I think it matters when we consider his argument. As for how he gets from the deracinated “being of maximal greatness” to Old Nobodaddy, I neither know nor, I must admit, care, since the first stage of the proposed journey, to the “being of maximal greatness”, turns out to be just a theistic circle-jerk.
KG, how do I get to be as well-read and certain about these things as you? I hate being so paranoid about missing something in one of these peoples’ arguments and suspect I’ve been permanently damaged due to hellfire and brimstone threatening.
Really it all boils down to this: “One measurement is worth a million expert opinions”
Philosophers can pull their wangs and dazzle their admirers with ways of looking at things that require PhDs in some sort of obtuse logic.
Me – I say show me the beef or I ain’t playing.
Sorry for you. Damaging children with threats of hell is why Richard Dawkins has called religious instruction “child abuse”. It might have been more damaging to you than actual physical abuse would have been. I don’t have any advice as to how you fix it, and the damage does make it hard to stop worrying “but what if they were right, what if I’m wrong and I’m going to burn”. How could you not worry ?
Well, I think the answer to that is already in your grasp, because you’re already aware (on a logic level, not on a feeling level, maybe) that YHWH they believe in cannot logically exist. Can’t possibly be an immaterial being who is beyond our comprehension and simultaneously be an interactive deity who talks to people, manipulates the physical world to answer prayers, and performs “real miracles”. We would have physical evidence; that behavior would leave at least some aftereffects that we could find and study, even if we didn’t/couldn’t catch YHWH in the act. NO evidence, therefore definitely no activist YHWH-type god.
Since YHWH does NOT exist, absolutely cannot possibly exist as described, then neither does its supposed threat of hell. Gone. Gone as if it had never existed – which it never did, except in the minds of victims of corrupt elders who wanted a more effective threat to control others’ lives than merely “obey or I’ll hurt you”.
When you set aside worries about the non-existent hell, then you may give yourself permission to stop being “paranoid” about Plantinga and his cronies’ arguments for the existence of god. Because, even if they’re right, and there is some kind of deity which exists in obedience to their logic, then so what ? At their best, all they’ve gotten is some kind of disinterested abstraction that may have somehow set our universe in motion but which has been conspicuously absent ever since. They still have all their work ahead of them to get as far as an interventionist god who cares for what you use your genitals. And in fact, they cannot ever get that far, no matter how hard they work, because an interventionist god is flatly contradicted by the real world physical evidence.
The reason (as far as I’m concerned) to argue against Kalamity Craig is not that I’m afraid he might be right and his logic might validate Christ. No, it’s that Craig’s so-called logic aids and abets the christian-Sharia currently afflicting our societies; the odious Craig defending his genocide-loving god encourages christian terrorists to act “in god’s name”.
Now I suspect that arguing against Plantinga et al can stop listeners from carelessly accepting generic-god beliefs which lead indirectly to that Christian-Sharia. As Kel noted, what Plantinga intends to accomplish is to make it rationally acceptable to consider theism seriously. I don’t want anyone on the planet to start taking theism seriously, even a little bit. So I’ll argue against it. But I won’t be too concerned if we don’t totally destroy the “sophisticated” philosophy, as long as we keep people from making the illogical leap from philosophical deism or theism to “god hates fags” etc.
Religion poisons everything. Including any philosophy it touches. Relax – you’re fine!
Just remember,
1. Either 5 + 7 = 13, or God exists
2. 5 + 7 != 13
3. Therefore, God exists
is a perfectly formed syllogism. That is if you accept the premises the conclusion necessarily follows. Defenders of the TAG might think that argument works, but most of us would just roll our eyes at the attempt at sophistry.
Generally speaking, Hume was on the money when he wrote this: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
I adore jogging my personal cleaning enterprise. It is the finest however the most difficult factor I have ever done. Every day there is a new suprise. But there is practically nothing much better than having cleaned a residence .
Just to quickly elaborate on my previous post, I do find it odd that there is a retreat to philosophy in order to establish an interventionist deity. It seems quite at odds with the belief of a God playing a role in this world, and that one can know God through means completely external to fact and reason.
There may be arguments that point to something Godlike, and for that there are professional philosophers to debate. But religion as it is believed and practised relies very little on philosophy, for laypeople and philosophers alike. The design argument is the main exception to this, as I think the “evolution wars” demonstrate, and one place where it’s worth coming to terms with the logic and evidence. Some form of moral argument may be worth considering too, if for nothing else than the propensity to frame the moral discussion in terms of divine command.
This paper by philosopher Michael Martin is worth a read. Knowing what the arguments can show is as important as knowing what the arguments are.
Kel, Hotshoe, KG…thank you. You’re definitely right about the gap between what the head knows and what the heart knows. And it’s nice to see other people besides me pointing out that a) you can’t quantum-leap from the Philosopher’s/Deist’s God to Yahweh and b) using philosophy to “prove” an interventionist God in the face of lack of evidence is skeevy.
It frightens me to no end that some 3 billion people are Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim. As awful as this sounds, I now have no choice but to think that the Abrahamic religions are a social problem. We may very well end civilization or set it back hundreds of years over them, and for what? A genocidal Canaanite throwback? No, the Bride of Christ is a battered spouse if I ever saw one, and it’s my own (thankfully fairly minor) experience with abuse that opened my eyes fully to that.
For me it’s always been the question of morals that kept me wondering. Where do morals come from? “How can something so powerful not be of divine or at least higher origin?” I thought. I’ve been getting help with this, and the evolutionary explanation actually explains far more than any divine command theory does. But I’ve seen, read about, and experienced horrible things, and part of me always wonders where the justice is.
You flatter me! Just being 57 probably helps – I’ve had a lot of time to read and think! With regard to issues of logic and (parts of) philosophy, they are part of my academic background (though I never specialised in either, I did my doctorate in artificial intelligence, and later worked on spatial logics, as I mentioned). From what I’ve read of your comments, you know a lot more about the historical claims and background of Christianity than I do, or most others here (CJO and Owlmirror are exceptions). In general, we seem to have at Pharyngula a very good mix of expertise on all the areas relevant to refuting Christian claims.
I suspect you’re right about the damaging effects “hellfire and brimstone threatening” have had on you; although my parents were slightly-more-than-nominal Christians when I was young, I was never subjected to that kind of abuse (the general line of the relatively mild religious indoctrination I got was that only extremely evil people went to hell, so I never thought I could end up there). I hesitate to advise you, but cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which focuses on training the client into healthier thinking habits, might be worth trying – but make sure you get a non-religious therapist! As far as Plantinga and company are concerned, I would be inclined to focus on two thoughts:
1) If there were any sound logical proof of the existence of a creator, it’s most unlikely that it would have been overlooked in two millennia of concentrated searching.
2) None of the alleged proofs, even if sound, would establish anything in the Christian doctrines concerning sin, hell etc..
Well, if there isn’t justice, wanting it to be won’t change anything. Wanting it is fine, but we’ll have to come up with a way to be just ourselves or else it isn’t going to happen. I thought it had to do with how we ought to behave in the first place, so I don’t know why anyone would expect someone else to do the work for us….
Anyway, you’re not alone there. I know a lot of people confuse the deity question with the morality question, but it’s just a state of confusion. I know you’re just using a metaphor, but think of it this way. When you ask “where do morals come from?” (or justice, knowledge, etc.) do you ever consider the possibility that they actually come from a real location in space-time? I don’t, because it simply wouldn’t make any sense. It would be like asking “where is the number four?” and believing this is some kind of deep question mathematicians have been struggling to answer for millennia. Likewise with “from whom does morality come?” Does not compute. You can’t get there from here.
@497
Yes, I’m beginning to see that…the apologists just bluster a lot and for all that I’m a 6′ woman in Doc Martins I’m not self-confident at all and fall for arguments to force and authority far too easily. They’re just so confident, and they’ve got PhDs, and they’ve been doing this for longer than I’ve been alive…
@498
Actually I think we can point to many places in spacetime where morals come from. The evolutionary explanation, which has very strong correlation if not outright deductive causation, predicts that they would emerge from minds as can make use of them. We’re descended from apes, social and very intelligent animals who have shown (see e.g., Fouts and de Waal) either a well-developed morality or a counterfeit so close as to be indistinguishable. So, in my opinion, based on studies like these we cannot help but be moral; it’s built into us on the genetic level, or at least the machinery is.
Gah. I’m obviously not claiming we don’t exist in space-time. If you say morality occurs in human beings (or other sentient beings) but not in other regions of space-time, that doesn’t mean the location actually makes any difference. What matters is the matter, so to speak: the contents in some particular region, how specific particles are interacting. We need to know what it is and how it happens, not when or where.
@500
Ahh, okay. Got it. Hm…well, we still have the problem of other minds to contend with here, since we can’t get right inside another person’s mind. But fMRI or similar technology should at least expose which areas of the brain are at work in different types of moral processes, and if it shows similar patterns will at the very least show that there’s something a) universal and b) partly organic going on here…
The problem of other minds isn’t a problem. We’re not brains-in-vats, or p-zombies, or any other weird monstrosity philosophers dream up. That is to say, I really don’t understand what you’re saying here.
First, does morality need to be “universal”? In what sense, and how could that jive with it being an evolved trait? Second, it’s simply laughable that we don’t have evidence mental processes are at least partly organic. If they aren’t entirely organic, then that evidence should be presented and not assumed to be a realistic possibility.