Tag Archives: Atheism

Methinks I Smell a Ruse

Posted on December 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

We don’t care what they say in order to get elected in this religious country. We care about what kind of judges they give us on the Supreme Court, because only the Supreme Court determines if we’ll have secular government . . . Don’t look to the rhetoric they need to pander to, remember what country they’re running in. I don’t care what kind of verbal obeisance they pay to religion if that’s what it takes to get a person in the White House who will give us church-state separationists on the Supreme Court.

–Eddie Tabash, 2007, to the Atheist Alliance International

 

For those that don’t know of Tabash, he is a lawyer in California and is Chair of the First Amendment Task Force for the Council for Secular Humanism. Generally speaking, he’s a very vocal activist for secular humanism.

 

The comment above was, in Doug Wilson’s words, uttered in a moment of “ill-advised candor.”  Tabash was talking about the habit of some secular politicians of parroting some “faith-community” talk in order to get elected to office.

Revealing in more ways than one, don’t you think?

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Herein Lies the Rub

Posted on September 28, 2009 | 5 Comments

Can you all just, well, get along?  Cut it out, will ya!

Juuust kidding, juuust kidding.

I’m actually quite excited about the comments to my last post.  It’s comforting to know something I said got someone out there riled up.  The discussion is mainly between two gentlemen, but still: it’s neat to see one of my posts bring out such passion.

Since the events of the summer, I have had to stop commenting on my own posts.  My new policy is that the comments section is for…the commenters.  I have my hands full enough just posting once a day.  However, once in a blue moon, when circumstances both call for it and allow it, I write a post on a comment.

I’m not going to comment on everything that’s been said.   Too broad.  Instead, I want to focus on the first comment made, by the Rambling Taoist.

The Rambling Taoist is a somewhat frequent commenter on the P.I blog.  Seems like an allright chap.  Pretty confident in his beliefs, by my lights.  Good to see him pipe up every now and then.

Here’s the comment:

What about the many primitive cultures in the world who have never heard of Christianity or have heard it but it doesn’t make any cultural sense to them? Are you suggesting that without the Christian God none of these people can be good?

If so, that’s a rather arrogant position to take, don’t ya think?

He brings up a common question: what about those that have never heard? *** (also here) It, and its derivatives, are ones that I think about a lot.  Though ultimately it has a good answer (see the link), it’s a perfectly good question to ask.

But not in this context.  The main issue I have with this comment is that it’s a red herring.

The whole post was on something totally different.  When I did, in the end, get around to commenting on the answer to “you can be good without God,” (mainly via two links), I took the issue in a totally different direction.  The comment represents a distraction from what I was mainly addressing.   Perhaps he didn’t read the links.

In the first link, William Lane Craig puts to rest the accusation:

Can we be good without God? At first the answer to this question may seem so obvious that even to pose it arouses indignation. For while those of us who are Christian theists undoubtedly find in God a source of moral strength and resolve which enables us to live lives that are better than those we should live without Him, nevertheless it would seem arrogant and ignorant to claim that those who do not share a belief in God do not often live good moral lives–indeed, embarrassingly, lives that sometimes put our own to shame.

But wait. It would, indeed, be arrogant and ignorant to claim that people cannot be good without belief in God. But that was not the question. The question was: can we be good without God? When we ask that question, we are posing in a provocative way the meta-ethical question of the objectivity of moral values. Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right side of the road or mere expressions of personal preference akin to having a taste for certain foods or not? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them, and if so, what is their foundation? Moreover, if morality is just a human convention, then why should we act morally, especially when it conflicts with self-interest? Or are we in some way held accountable for our moral decisions and actions?

Today I want to argue that if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is, if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but in the absence of God, such actions would no longer count as good (or evil), since if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God. On the other hand, if we do believe that moral values and duties are objective, that provides moral grounds for believing in God.

Consider, then, the hypothesis that God exists. First, if God exists, objective moral values exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.

The rest of the essay provides the “back-up” to this thesis.  Like this (I apologize for quoting at length):

Now it is important that we remain clear in understanding the issue before us. The question is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? There is no reason to think that atheists and theists alike may not live what we normally characterize as good and decent lives. Similarly, the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God? If the non-theist grants that human beings do have objective value, then there is no reason to think that he cannot work out a system of ethics with which the theist would also largely agree. Or again, the question is not: Can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God? The theist will typically maintain that a person need not believe in God in order to recognize, say, that we should love our children. Rather, as humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz puts it, “The central question about moral and ethical principles concerns this ontological foundation. If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground, are they purely ephemeral?”(emphasis  mine)

If there is no God, then any ground for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. After all, what is so special about human beings? They are just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo; but there is on the atheistic view nothing really wrong about committing incest. If, as Kurtz states, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion,”5 then the non-conformist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably.

The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic world view is underscored by two implications of that world view: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists, who regard man as a purely animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being (call it soul or mind or what have you), then he is not qualitatively different from other animal species. For him to regard human morality as objective is to fall into the trap of specie-ism. On a materialistic anthropology there is no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. Secondly, if there is no mind distinct from the brain, then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic make-up. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. But without freedom, none of our choices is morally significant. They are like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. And what moral value does a puppet or its movements have?

So, to bring it back to RT’s comment: RT and Neil had an interesting conversation on one sense of the question, but this was not the sense I was focusing on in my post.  What I was hinting at is that without the actual existence of an actual good God that bestows dignity and intrinsic value upon human beings and who’s very nature is the standard of good, saying “you can be good without God” is nonsense.  Good has no real meaty meaning.  Heck, if there is no God, then saying “you  can be good with God” is equally nonsense….at least not in the sense of  “good” that is normally meant.  In the absence of God, Christian, atheist, and Taoist alike might *think* or *claim* they are acting good, but that’s silly.  All they can claim, rationally, is something like “I can behave in such a way that is beneficial to my species/social group/person,” or “I can behave in such a way that my genes and the force of human evolution command my neurons” or “I can behave in such a way that I personally think is good and that I personally like,” but that’s it…and that’s not much to cheer about.

I’ve commented on this before, and each time, someone tries to take the conversation quickly off the rails by claiming I’m saying that no one can be good without belief in God.  This is not the case I’m making.

Secondly, RT throws out another red herring by suggesting I’m being arrogant.  Name calling is not an argument.

Again: in my post, several things were at issue.  One of them germane to the comments was the truth of the proposition “you can be good without God.”  Rather than make a comment about the case I made, he made a comment about my character, which was off topic.

For the record, he might be right: I might be very arrogant and puffed up.  I might be incredibly self-righteous.  But that’s a distraction; I might be a pompous jerk, but that doesn’t make my claims false.

There’s no need for me to defend my character against moral judgments; I’ll let the people that interact with me on a daily basis speak into my life as to what needs pruning.  In this blog, we should stick to the arguments.

Anyone want to comment on the actual case I’ve made?

***if needed, use the same ID and password on both: ID–pugnacious; PW–irishman

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Atheist Bus Campaigns

Posted on September 27, 2009 | 18 Comments

A little PR never hurt anybody…at least that’s what some atheist groups are thinking.  But, it could come back to haunt them (more on that later).

Back in the summer, a kerfuffle arose in several places around the country.  Atheist groups advanced an advertisement campaign, in some cases going so far as to sue for the ability to put their advertisements on buses and park benches.

Though it’s been a while since the controversy erupted, it is still instructive for Christians:

Can I take exception with everyone in the video?  Can I do that?  I’m not a big fan of *any* of the answers Taylor or Binder gave, and I’m definitely scratching my head at some of the questions Doocy asked.

Where to start.  How about with Taylor?  Let’s start with a little in-house critique.  I think I know what Taylor was getting at, but rather than making a cogent point about the atheist belief system, he instead came off as reactionary and defensive.  For example, why in the world would he be offended at the atheists attempting to engage in a little PR in the public square?  That is the exact same freedom he no doubt would clamor for his own church goers, so I’m bewildered as to why he took umbrage with Binder’s group doing the same thing.  So what if it turns out to be an attack on Christianity?  That’s the nature of the public square: somebody throws down a gauntlet, another picks it up, and both sides duke it out to see which idea can take the heat.  He could have taken time to refute the idea, but instead he made a psychological point about the motivation behind the idea (an “attack from the left”), and it’s not even clear that it was a good one.

He almost approached making a good point when he talked about the atheist group using the inalienable rights spoken of in our founding documents to “make a mockery about God,” but it was jumbled and confusing.  I take it that he was making a point about atheists “borrowing capital” from a theistic worldview.  In other words, anything like a “right” to “freedom of speech” is based upon the intrinsic dignity of human beings.  Sacks of meat that behave in complicated ways aren’t bearers of rights.  Where do we get that intrinsic value from?  Not from the particles, natural selection, or random mutation.  Not from the cosmos that atheists insists is all there is, was, or ever will be.  Not from convention or a social contract or the herd morality.  We get it from God.  For atheists to use that right to argue against God is for them to bite the hand that feeds.

That is a perfectly good point, but I’m giving the most charitable interpretation of Taylor I can, and his red herring about an “attack from the left” distracts from the point considerably.

On to Doocy, the Fox News man.  His first question was to Binder: “you don’t believe in God, yet you sued to put God in your ad.  Why?”  What a silly question.  He wasted an opportunity.  Rather than asking a good question, like, “if God really doesn’t exist like you believe, what is ‘good’?” or some variant, he coyly suggests that it’s strange for the atheists to talk about or make advertisements about a being they don’t believe in.

It’s not strange at all, especially given the goals that Binder mentioned.  If their goal is to suggest that you don’t need belief in God to be good, fine.  Nothing incoherent about that.  It’s ultimate soundness is another question I’ll touch upon later, but there is nothing strange about mentioning, in an ad, a being the atheists don’t believe in.

By harping so much upon how “offended” some Christians are by the campaign, Doocy and Taylor unwittingly play into the faux tolerance trick, thus hamstringing Christianity.  Key to the gospel is sin, an offensive concept if there ever was one.  If human beings aren’t guilty of sin, then the gospel becomes a mere private taste, and church a social club.   If saying someone is wrong (the atheist bus campaign suggests Christians are wrong in some of their key beliefs) makes the atheists intolerant, where does that leave Christians?

Bible friends, rather than focusing on being offended, when instances like this arise, view them as opportunities.  The atheist groups responsible for such advertisements might think they are making good PR for their cause, but they are actually giving Christians a wide open door to engage both them and others on truth.

First, read up a little on the Christian worldview.  Listen to a few podcasts on apologetics.  Take a class or two at a reputable conservative seminary in theology.  Then, when you see the advertisement out in public, enter into discussions with those around you.   Is it really true that “you can be good without God?” ***  What does good even mean in the absence of God to ground the good?

The resulting conversations will result in fruit for the Christian worldview, but not so much for the atheistic worldview.

Christians have no reason to fear these open doors for the same reason we have no reason to fear attending a debate on such topics as God’s existence or the resurrection of Christ.  The Christian worldview, when presented against others, stands tall.

You see, if Christians take that attitude rather than an attitude of offense, this bus campaign could turn out to backfire on atheists.

***you need an ID and password to access the article.  Use these: ID–pugnacious  PW–Irishman

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The Only Wise, Perfect, Omniscient God

Posted on September 14, 2009 | 2 Comments

The Rambling Taoist is a frequent commenter on this site.  By and large, I like having him as a commenter.  Though I disagree with him, it makes things interesting and it’s what the market place of ideas is all about: bring your ideas, lay them down in the arena, and see if they hold up.

In the context of whether the Christian worldview is true or not, he referred me–quite a while ago–to three of his own posts.  To be fair, these three posts don’t make up his only objections, nor, I take it, are they even necessarily his best objections to the worldview of Jesus.

I answered one a few weeks ago.  Here’s an answer to the second post.

Let’s first nail down what the objection is.  Thankfully, RT has quoted it in a nice, compact paragraph:

What did God do during that eternity before he created everything? If God was all that existed back then, what disturbed the eternal equilibrium and compelled him to create? Was he bored? Was he lonely? God is supposed to be perfect. If something is perfect, it is complete–it needs nothing else. We humans engage in activities because we are pursuing that elusive perfection, because there is disequilibrium caused by a difference between what we are and what we want to be. If God is perfect, there can be no disequilibrium. There is nothing he needs, nothing he desires, and nothing he must or will do. A God who is perfect does nothing except exist. A perfect creator God is impossible.

(HT: evil Bible)

Here’s the argument, laid out in a syllogism:

1) God, on the Christian view, is perfect.

2) If something is perfect, it needs nothing else.

3) If something is perfect, there is nothing it must or will do.

4) Since God is perfect, He needs nothing and there is nothing He must or will do.

5) Therefore, God did not create.

I leave out the part about God existing “before” creation, since that is a muddy concept.  What does the arguer mean by eternity “before” creation?  Since creation is the moment when space and time came into being, this is phrased somewhat awkwardly, and I’m not clear what the objector is getting at.  At any rate, I don’t think one needs to have a good theory of time nailed down to understand the objection.

As it is stated, the argument, really, isn’t even valid, much less sound (valid=conclusion follows deductively from premises.  Sound=the argument is valid *and* the premises are true).  The conclusion, premise 5, doesn’t even follow from 1-4.  An additional premise is needed.  Let me supply it here:

6)  Creation arises out of either a need, an obligation (“must”) or an act of will.

It’s entirely possible that I’m missing some other problems with the form of the argument.  If you see something else, go ahead and point it out.

Now, about the truth of the premises:  I agree with 1 and 2.  Premise 3 is where the objector starts to go off the rails.   First, the word “must” is ambiguous.  God, being perfect, always acts in accord with His nature.  For instance, He cannot sin, so on that definition of  “must,” He is still perfect yet “must” refrain from sinning.  This is not an external constraint or obligation forced upon Him; rather, He is simply acting in accord with His own nature.  Nothing strange there.

Second, why assume that perfection means there’s nothing one *will* do?  I don’t see the connection.  Certainly, a perfect being can do something simply as an act of will, simply because He, well, wants to?  Only if every action arises out of some need should we deny that, but I see no reason to think that action automatically implies a prior need.

It is certainly conceivable that a human being could do something as an act of sheer will.  Might not happen a whole lot, but it’s possible and the concept is coherent.  No reason to think, therefore, that God, the Ultimate Perfect Being, could not create in the same vein–as an act of free will, unconstrained by any need.

From there, the argument unravels.  Indeed, the Christian view of creation is that God, being a trinity, did not create to fulfill a need in Himself.  It is not the case, for example, that God created because He was lonely and needed someone to love; that was and is fulfilled within the perfect loving community of the trinity itself.  The Bible teaches that God created as a) a way to spread His glory, and b) an act of love on our behalf.  God does not need more glory for Himself; still, He chooses to spread it as a free act of grace and love to us.  He condescends to us, in other words.  This is the bottom line of “grace,” and giant intellects have been trying to fathom the depths of that since man was man.

A second argument goes as such:

A God who knows everything cannot have emotions. The Bible says that God experiences all of the emotions of humans, including anger, sadness, and happiness. We humans experience emotions as a result of new knowledge. A man who had formerly been ignorant of his wife’s infidelity will experience the emotions of anger and sadness only after he has learned what had previously been hidden. In contrast, the omniscient God is ignorant of nothing. Nothing is hidden from him, nothing new may be revealed to him, so there is no gained knowledge to which he may emotively react.

We humans experience anger and frustration when something is wrong which we cannot fix. The perfect, omnipotent God, however, can fix anything. Humans experience longing for things we lack. The perfect God lacks nothing. An omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect God who experiences emotion is impossible.

Again, the original author states hasty premises.  Without getting into too much detail, I see no reason to assume that emotion automatically means one is surprised.  Things indeed might play out like that a lot with humans, but it doesn’t always.  Why think that a being possessing an emotion means that he just gained new information?  I have emotions, sometimes, by reflecting upon knowledge I’ve possessed for quite some time.  In these cases, it is not true that my emotion arises out of gaining new knowledge at the particular point in time I have the emotion.

This also assumes a particular view of God and time.  There are a variety of views of time that don’t run into this issue at all.  They are too complicated and numerous to catalogue here; just note that this argument assumes that God is and always has been a tensed being, and this is far from obvious.  To be fair, the author should at least mention the view of time he is assuming here and note there are alternatives.

So…I guess I find these arguments  unpersuasive as well.

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Is He Risen?

Posted on September 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

Listening to a debate between Michael Licona and Dan Barker on the resurrection of Christ.

Not the best debate I’ve heard on the subject, but I’m still learning a lot.

HT: Apologetics 315

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Near Death Experiences

Posted on August 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

I just finished listening to a lecture by Gary Habermas on Near Death Experiences.  I’m not quite sure that the testimonies give a ton of weight to the theistic worldview, but they are interesting, nonetheless.  The testimony of atheist philosopher A.J Ayer is especially interesting.

HT: Wintery Knight (I think)

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The Berkeley Group

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 5 Comments

Youth ministers, here’s a stat with which you are probably already aware: 70-80% (depending on the study) of youth who are Christian in high school are no longer Christian by the time they graduate college.  In other words, our youth are leaving the faith in droves.

Why?  The answers are many, but the most common answer might surprise you.  In the most comprehensive study ever done on the spiritual lives of American teenagers, sociologist Christian Smith found that the most common answer given as to why youth leave the faith is some variance of  “it didn’t make sense to me anymore.”

This is not a lack of fun, nor a lack of relevance, nor a lack of relationship or moral leadership, although the Lord literally knows many of our youth programs could use more of all that.  Rather, this is lack of preparation.  Though there are some bright spots in the Church currently, overall our youth are not being trained and prepared to think through the many challenges to their faith that they are bombarded with on an almost daily basis.  From evolution to relativism to the hook up culture to attacks on the Bible, numerous challenges chip away at our ill-prepared youth until “it doesn’t make sense to me anymore.”

The thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way.  Christianity has awesome and satisfying answers to all these challenges and more.  The Christian worldview can beat the pants off of any other worldview out there in terms of logical consistency, relevance, amount of evidence in its favor, etc.  It’s just that our youth are typically not exposed to those things for one reason or another.

Enter Brett Kunkle.  It’s Brett’s job to train up youth in just that way.  From time to time I highlight him on this blog; that’s because I’m a huge fan…huge fan.  The Church needs guys like Brett at this stage.

courtesy of str.org

courtesy of str.org

I just received a newsletter in the mail from him.  In the letter was a testimony by 17-year old Capistrano Valley Christian School student that Brett had been working with.  Rather than blather on about it myself, I’m just gonna quote the letter verbatim.  It’s pure gold:

It’s a beautiful thing when two high school clubs of opposing viewpoints can come together and debate issues in a public setting and in a friendly manner.  It is also quite rare.  However, this is exactly what happened just three and a half weeks ago at Capistrano Valley Christian Schools.  It all started with a trip to U.C Berkeley.

In the fall of 2008, twenty-four students from Capistrano Valley Christian Schools began training with CVCS’s Sean McDowell and STR’s Brett Kunkle.  These training sessions were vigorous and challenging but worth more in each of our lives than any words could express.  On March 10, 2009, we embarked on an intellectual and spiritual journey that totally “rocked our worlds.”  After debating atheists and interviewing Berkeley students on topics all over the board, we returned as different people.  This spiritual and intellectual roller coaster was the best time of my life, as it was for many other students.  I saw my friends gain confidence and stability in their faith but most importantly, I saw high school kids gain a passion for what they believed.

After Berkeley many kids wanted to keep making a difference in the world.  I began a club that was simply known as the “Berkeley Group,” for anyone who had attended the trip and wanted to keep being involved in apologetics.  One night I was on the phone with another club member, Suzie, attempting to plan things for our group to do.  We wanted to put on an event to get high school kids excited about apologetics.  We decided that a student debate would be an amazing draw for a young audience.  We partnered with the Free-thinking Atheist and Agnostic Kinship (FAAK) student club from Capistrano Valley High School and decided to charge admission for the event, which we would donate to charity.  We began to plan.

After many meetings with Mr. McDowell and much communication with FAAK, we decided to discuss three topics related to God’s existence: intelligent design, morality, and  the resurrection of Jesus.  With the stage set for an intense spectacle, publicizing began in earnest.

From our Berkeley club, Steve took Intelligent Design, I took morality and Christie took the resurrection of Jesus.  After a few weeks of additional preparation for each category, we were ready for the debate!  The format of the debate was a five-minute opening statement for each side, a five-minute cross examination and 20 minutes of question and answer time with the audience.  Lastly, there was a final three-minute closing statement from each side.  The auditorium was packed as more than 300 students and adults attended the event.  The feedback from the debate was overwhelmingly good and our Apologetics Club is looking forward to similar events next year!  I guess the final point I can make on this subject is that Berkeley prepared us and began a movement in our school’s students that will last for years to come.  As Brett told us on the trip: “The Berkeley Mission is normal Christianity.”

My heart warmed when I read this letter.  Notice a few things.  First, as a result of the trip, the students became interested participants in their faith. Look at the language the student uses to describe his experience: they returned “different people.”  The journey “rocked (their) worlds.”  The students “gained a passion” for what they believed.  They “gained confidence and stability in their faith.”  These are things every youth leader longs for in his/her students, yet so many strive so hard only to see a lack of depth in the youth.  Maybe brief results, but far too often they are not long lasting.

I am not trying to knock the job youth workers do…far from it.  They work so hard and put up with so much.  This is an experience that a wide swath of youth leaders have in common.  If not, the stats I cited above still speak for themselves.

Also notice the interest in the debate: 300 plus packed an auditorium.  In my experience, every time something like this comes up, the interest is incredibly, off the charts high.  It is totally false that apologetics and philosophy (the more intellectual pursuits of the faith, in other words) are irrelevant and that people just aren’t interested anymore.  Quite to the contrary.

My point is that the training guys like Brett offers tends to get a bum rap, but it should not be so.  What youth leader doesn’t want highly engaged students of the faith?  These are not a bunch of brains-in-a-vat that are ready to shoot you with their moral argument bazooka.  These students are alive lovers of Jesus–body, mind and soul.

We need more of this, not less.  You can support Brett by going here.

**I changed the names of the students…just in case.  :)

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