Belief in God is not "properly basic"

Stephen Law's undercutting defeater for “properly basic” belief in God held no sway with his debating opponent Tyler McNabb on last week's Unbelievable? radio show.

Stephen Law presented sound philosophical arguments demonstrating that Tyler McNabb's belief was not justified. But Tyler McNabb announced that he was nevertheless going to continue believing it anyway. Towards the end of the discussion host Justin Brierley suggested that perhaps the popularity of “properly basic” belief was that it allowed believers to continue believing while avoiding any requirement to present compelling evidence.

In as much as they have a choice (given the unlikelihood of doxastic voluntarism), I think believers can choose between belief on the basis of evidence, or belief on the basis of faith. One or the other, you don't need both. In my view, however, neither will give you a rational basis for belief in God.

http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Is-belief-in-God-properly-basic-Tyler-McNabb-vs-Stephen-Law

Direct link to mp3:

http://cfvod.kaltura.com/pd/p/618072/sp/61807200/serveFlavor/entryId/1_tum2zwcz/v/1/flavorId/1_pndt9izi/name/a.mp3

Philosophy in the pub on the radio

One of my favourite Radio 4 programmes is back for a new series. This week's episode of The Philosopher's Arms was on "Free Riders". Half an hour isn't enough time to go very deeply into a philosophical subject, so the treatment is necessarily superficial. Nevertheless, the light-hearted treatment and brisk pace is enough to whet one's appetite for more thorough study (or just studious contemplation).

BBC Radio 4 - The Philosopher's Arms

Here's a clip:



From the programme's website:

Free Riders

Series 3 Episode 1 of 4

Duration: 28 minutes

First broadcast: Tuesday 30 July 2013

Pints and philosophical puzzles with Matthew Sweet. Each week Matthew goes to the pub to discuss a knotty conundrum with an audience and a panel of experts. Free will, exploitation, sex, sexism, blame and shame are just some of the topics to be mulled over in this series of The Philosopher's Arms.
We look at the issue of 'free-riding', with Oxford philosopher Roger Crisp.
Producer: Estelle Doyle.

Here's a link to the first episode (streaming audio available for about a year):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037hmy3

Animal liberation and the problem of induction

Socratic dialogue and dramatised reportage seems an odd combination for radio comedy, but that's what BBC Radio 4 is giving us with the current series of Brian Gulliver's Travels. This week, in "Anidara", the hapless travel writer is forced to confront the vegetarian question, aka "Is it wrong to eat meat?"

Neil Pearson, playing the eponymous traveller, is just right for this role — his worldly familiarity coupled with a hint of erudition hits exactly the right note. The series (this is the second) comprises six half-hour episodes, with two more to come. Streaming audio of this week's episode is available until 12:02PM Wed, 12 Sep 2012:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mdg8l/Brian_Gullivers_Travels_Series_2_Anidara/

Here's a clip:



The series is written by Bill Dare, who explains that the show was a way of putting his philosophy degree to good use(!):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m29vt/features/bill-on-brian

The Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Sniper-in-Chief

Giles Fraser

Is Giles Fraser attending the World Atheist Convention in Dublin this weekend? I don't know what he was expecting, but he seems to have been surprised by one of the speakers, Richard Green of Atheism UK (whom I was pleased to meet at the most recent Winchester Skeptics in the Pub). Anyway, Fraser has written up his reaction in the Guardian.

What is distinctive about Atheism UK, Green insists, is that it's an atheist organisation for all atheists, including those not committed to humanism. "We cater for atheists who are not humanists," he says.

A laudable goal, I would have thought. I'm all for inclusion. But Fraser manages to look down his nose at it.

These days, atheists who are not humanists are an unfamiliar breed. Most atheists, and in particular the new atheists, regard themselves as committed humanists. Indeed, they are new in name only for they appeal back to the atheistic humanism of the Enlightenment, with its optimism about human nature and strong belief in the power of human reason and the inevitability of progress.

It's no good castigating the "new" atheists for not being new — this soubriquet was coined not by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett, but by their detractors (such as, dare I suggest, the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral).

The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps.

Three paragraphs in, and we're on to the Nazis. Well done Giles!

The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin.

Why on earth would it need to?

And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It may come as a surprise to Fraser, but Nietzsche is not the atheist God — because, well, you know, it's in the description: "atheist". Nor do atheists, or even humanists, need a belief in human beings. Speaking about belief in this way is simply a misuse of the term, much like bemoaning atheistic denial of "sin".

Richard Green's "atheists who are not humanists" could meet in a phone box. Indeed, the new atheists simply duck the challenge made by atheistic anti-humanism, believing their expensive scientific toys can outflank the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism.

Aside from the pejorative sniping it doesn't surprise me that Fraser makes a specific quantitative claim without backing it up. And who says that "atheists who are not humanists" are in favour of anti-humanism (whatever that is)? As for expensive scientific toys outflanking the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism — what does that even mean?

Thus they dismiss the significance of philosophy just as much as they have always done of theology – as if the two were fundamentally in cahoots.

I see little evidence of atheists or humanists dismissing the whole of philosophy (A. C. Grayling,  Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Law — to mention just three atheist philosophers off the top of my head). As for theology, Giles you can keep it. I've no use for your kind of theology, especially as you seem to believe it doesn't even have to be true.

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Eric MacDonald has read Fraser's peanut and dismembers it with a sledgehammer.

Is the suffering of Christians evidence for anything?

Bruce A. Little's "Suffering for What?" is the fifth chapter in Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, but I have no idea why. This first section of the book is titled The Question of Philosophy, and I can see why the cosmological argument is in it, and the moral argument. Less so the argument from near-death experiences, though a valid critique of naturalism should fit right in.

But Little's chapter isn't even an attempt at "making philosophical excuses for God" — otherwise known as theodicy; it's about specifically Christian suffering and is stuffed full of New Testament quotes. In what way is this "evidence for God" — or even an "argument for faith"?

For what it's worth, however, here's Little's thesis (or sermon — which is definitely how it comes over): Christians suffer for three reasons, the first being when they are righteous (it says so in the Bible); the second is that they are in a "fallen" world (it says so in the Bible); and the third is that they will suffer when they are "evildoers" (it says so in the Bible).

So there you have it. No hint of an argument, nor any trace of evidence bar scripture. I assume that some effort will be made later in the book to establish provenance of scripture, in the section titled The Question of the Bible, but what's presented in this chapter seems irrelevant in the extreme.

Lying about time — relaunch of the Sci Phi Show

Recently I was pleased to discover that Jason Rennie has relaunched the Sci Phi Show — a podcast looking at philosophy and science fiction. The first of Jason's new episodes dealt with lying — what it is and whether it is always morally wrong to lie. He cited a couple of definitions from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

1. To make a false statement with the intention to deceive.
2. To make an assertion that is believed to be false to some audience with the intention to deceive the audience about the content of that assertion.

Jason explained the four conditions that need to apply to the second definition in order to make it clear: the Statement condition, the Untruthfulness condition, the Addressee condition and the Intention to deceive addressee condition. This second definition is the more precise and therefore more useful one, but Jason demonstrated in his subsequent discussion that use of the term "lie" often implies a degree of wrongness. (The Stanford definition explores some of these issues.)

Whether you consider a lie to be more or less morally wrong depends on your basis for morality. If you base it on an inviolable precept such as, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," you might find little leeway to consider the philosophical niceties. As I see it, the general prohibition on lying is to do with notions of trust and the reliability of communications. It may be perfectly moral to lie in certain specific circumstances (Jason suggested several), but if lying became the norm the fabric of society would quickly unravel.

Jason's second show was about time travel, and began with a discussion of definitions of time. Defining time appears to be fraught with impossibilities; for instance, what's the answer to the question, "How long can a condition of no change persist?" It depends whether you think time is something that passes, irrespective of events that occur. Note that of all our many ways of measuring time — to astonishing accuracy — none of them is objectively measuring the passage of time, but merely counting the occurrence of extremely regular events (although that raises the question of how we know these events are "regular").

However, this is pretty simple stuff in comparison with Jason's overview of alternative theories of time and his explanation of time-travel paradoxes — highly recommended, if you don't mind your brain turning to spaghetti.

Subjective thoughts on the matter* of consciousness

Much of philosophy and theological or religious discussion seems to revolve around the idea of dualism — the mind/body problem. It's a debate that may shed some light on the true nature of consciousness.

I have an experience of my own self that it is something apart from my body, something separate, distinct from my flesh, bones and blood. It's more than likely, I feel, that my "self" is a psychological construct that my brain has created in order to process information in a way that it can perceive as a whole.

Where am I, in my body? Although I sense that I'm in my head, somewhere behind my eyes, I am also in my fingertips as they type on this keyboard. It seems that my brain has created an entire conceptual model of my essence — of "me" — that is at once the sum of all my parts, yet more. I have a concept of who and what I am, which is this entity — this identity — that I call "me", yet this is probably no more than the aggregation of a complex series of perceptual messages that are constantly being processed in my brain.

Back to the example of the keyboard: when I type, I move my fingers in a certain way to achieve the words that appear on screen. But do I, really, move my fingers? What I am in fact doing is flexing the muscles clustered around my wrists, and those muscles, being attached to the bones of my fingers (some distance away, anatomically speaking) cause my fingers to move. But am I doing even that? What causes the muscles around my wrists to flex? What I'm actually doing is sending nerve impulses from my brain to the nerves connected to those muscles.

So how far back must I go to find out where I actually reside in my body?

The answer, I suspect, is that the further back one goes, the more conceptual and abstract the process becomes. The "mental model" of the body that the brain creates — in order to operate the body — is probably just a complex synaptic relationship in some unspecific, diffuse area of the brain. This model is what gives us our sense of identity, of conscious self, when in fact there's nothing there.

No "me", no self, no soul.

I, myself, am an illusion.

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*Irony, ha!