The beam in thine eye and dogmatic projection

So Chris Bolt accuses me of dogmatism. Whether I am actually dogmatic, however, cannot be deduced from the blogpost of mine that Chris references. My blogpost is 116 words long, not counting the link to the Unbelievable? audio stream, so Chris must really, really want to believe it contains dogmatism. What I actually wrote about Hell was that I could think of an alternative explanation for believing it was real — alternative, that is, to its actual existence. I did not claim — dogmatically or otherwise — to know that Hell doesn't exist. Chris, on the other hand, does claim to know that Hell exists. He writes:

Hell is incomprehensibly awful. I am deeply troubled by the thought of people going there, but they will, and they do. However, it is the wicked who go to hell, and they deserve the punishment they receive there.

This isn't a suggestion of a possible alternative view, nor is it speculation on different interpretations. It's a claim of knowledge based on nothing but scripture — otherwise known as dogmatism. Go read his piece, then see if this slightly altered version of one of his eight paragraphs (of nearly a thousand words — that's a response ratio approaching ten to one) wouldn't be nearer the truth:

One might question how Chris is so dogmatically certain that hell exists. Of course it does not matter how certain Chris feels he is with regard to the alleged existence of hell if hell doesn't in fact exist. It does not matter how strongly opposed one is to the existence of terminal cancer if one has it. One’s beliefs do not affect such states of affairs. The cancer is going to win out in the end. So also Chris’s opinions about hell do not matter in the end if hell is indeed a fantasy. It would serve Chris well to give more critical thought to how he knows that hell exists.

In short, Chris dogmatically claims that Hell exists, while accusing me of dogmatism for merely suggesting an alternative explanation for belief in it.

A heartfelt invitation to believe

Occasionally as an atheist I come across the saying, "It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in God." This, of course, is usually spoken or written by someone who does in fact believe in God. Sometimes this person claims to have been an atheist in the past, but is no longer, so I might question their sincerity when they now claim to have less faith then they did before.

I would suggest they look into their heart and examine their innermost convictions. Though they outwardly profess a belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator-agent, despite never seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling or otherwise having any compelling evidence — physical, historical, documentary or scientific — for the existence of this agent, I contend that they do not believe in this agent. They know in their heart that this agent does not exist. They are, in effect, in denial about the agent's non-existence, and therefore suffering cognitive dissonance when they proclaim their faith.

To all those in denial about their unacknowledged atheism I offer this simple challenge and invitation. Does the truth matter to you? Does the reality of the external world present itself to you in a way that allows you to represent it to others in the same way — as real? Does what counts for you as "real" depend on whether it can be verified by others, and by yourself, on a repeating basis?

If so, I invite you to accept the reality of the universe into your heart as your only reliable, repeatable measure of truth.

And the truth will set you free.

Naturalism vs nihilism, brimstone and fire

In the fourth chapter of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, titled "Naturalism — A Worldview", L. Russ Bush III begins by defining naturalism, and contrasting it with the pre-enlightenment view of origins, but couched in distinctly transcendent phrasing, such as:

"'Naturalism' is the belief that in the final analysis, nature is all that there is, and that 'nature' is essentially unmodified by anything other than itself. In other words, nature itself is thought to be the ultimate reality."

And:

"Naturalism affirms no God except the god of impersonal, nonliving, undesigned physical chemistry."

See what Bush does there? He characterises the naturalistic worldview as belief in a god of some kind. I've seen this tendency before* — it's as if the theistic mindset cannot conceive of a worldview that doesn't contain some ultimate thing, which even if it's not a god, is certainly god-like.

There's an unsophisticated creationist slant to this chapter. Bush asks how personalities can arise from something essentially impersonal, how life can arise from non-life. "Energy dissipates," he says. "Complexity changes by simplifying." He argues for the improbability of abiogenesis, and the improbability of the evolution of simple cellular life into complex multicellular life — using the word random rather more often than the phrase natural selection. He also diverts unnecessarily into an irrelevant concern about how — in the naturalistic view — reason was not present in the beginning, and yet it is present now. Next, of course, he gets tied up in an argument about intrinsic truth, illustrating once again the theistic obsession with absolutes.

Truth, however, is not something that exists in some transcendent realm, in and of itself. Truth is merely a description applied to facts and knowledge. Like reason and logic (and indeed morality), truth has no existence of its own.

Bush's argument against naturalism is basically that it's self-refuting, because in the naturalistic worldview, he says, nothing can be known as objectively true, and therefore that must include naturalism itself. Bush ends his piece in typical fire-and-brimstone fashion, quoting Genesis and decrying naturalistic nihilism.

But he's missed the boat. Naturalism doesn't have to be objectively true (in fact nothing does). It only needs to be true in practice. Notions of absolute truth, once discarded, leave open the possibility of determining what hypotheses about the natural world fit with what we already know, and testing them. This is how science progresses. So far, it seems to be working.

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A version of this chapter is available online:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbgod.aspx?pageid=8589952728

*The Alpha Male Monkey — Matt Arnold:
http://matt-arnold.livejournal.com/184102.html

Presuppositional gymnastics

The following is a reaction to an email exchange between Paul Baird and Sye Ten Bruggencate, posted on the Unbelievable? discussion group prior to today's Unbelievable? programme in which they took part. I've now listened to the show and have only this to add: I came across Sye's website 18 months ago — I thought the argument presented was bogus then, and I think it's bogus now.

The presuppositional argument seems to be predicated at its root on one basic premise — that absolute laws of logic exist. This does indeed sound as if it's true. Without logic we can't know anything is true. Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" would not stand up without logic. But to say that the laws of logic are "absolute" may be misunderstanding the nature of reasoning. To get an inkling of why this might be, consider how the universe would look if there were no such thing as logic. If we couldn't rely on logic to enable us to understand the world, what would the world look like to us? Would it look like anything at all? Isn't even our very existence as conscious entities completely impossible without the existence of logic? In this sense, the existence of logic may in fact be "properly basic" — and consequently we have no need to search for its origin (because, being properly basic, it doesn't have one).

Unfortunately for those unbelievers who engage in discussion with apologists of the presuppositional variety (as well as with those who simply borrow from presuppositional apologetics), any reasoned argument — it can be about anything at all — tends to be met with the rejoinder that the unbeliever surely has no way of knowing how anything is true, because he or she has no absolute logical standard on which to base their "reasoned" arguments. This is extremely tiresome, as it's a debate-stopper. You can't argue with someone who denies that you have any basis for using reasoned argument. Of course, while the unbeliever has no basis for logic, this doesn't however apply to the the apologist, who claims that absolute laws of logic come from God. This claim, like many put forward by apologists, isn't backed up by evidence — it is simply asserted.

Christian apologists in particular may claim that their absolute moral or logical authority is revealed in the Bible, but to do this they have to use the circular argument that the Bible is true because it says it is true (in the Bible). Challenge an apologist on this and they will reply that it's perfectly acceptable to use the Bible as its own authority, because the unbeliever is using logic to verify that logic and reason work, which, the apologists claim, is also circular.

Using logic and reason to verify the truth of logic and reason is not circular, however, if logic and reason are properly basic.

Some apologists of the presuppositional persuasion do seem prone to moralizing from on-high. Maybe this has something to do with their preoccupation with absolutes. In many discussions you are quite likely to see such apologists passing high-handed remarks about the unbeliever's eternal soul, about how the apologist will nonetheless offer up crocodile prayers in the apparently earnest wish that the unbeliever finds God and relents of his or her wicked ways. And if that fails to impress (as it surely does), there will likely be more crocodile regrets that the unbeliever is destined for Hell. All this extraneous nonsense is irrelevant to the debate, and acts as an annoying and alienating smokescreen.

Tiresome is what I called it above, and if I see it in an online discussion or debate it will discourage me from contributing, because I know that the presuppositional mindset is pretty much impregnable — as it is meant to be. Presuppositional apologetics is a field that appears explicitly designed to defend faith from rationality by attempting to undermine the basis for rationality itself.

Here's a (fictitious but typical) example of an effort to undermine rational argument:

Apologist: "Do absolute morals exist?"

Unbeliever: "No."

Apologist: "Are you absolutely sure of that, or is it merely your opinion?"

Disregarding the obvious false dichotomy of that last question, you can see where this is going. If the unbeliever replies that he or she is not absolutely sure that absolute morality doesn't exist, the apologist can continue to claim that it does. If however the unbeliever claims to be absolutely sure that absolute morality does not exist, the apologist will go on to enquire where the unbeliever's absolute knowledge comes from. Swap out morality for logic (or science, or truth), rinse and repeat, and the argument will stall before ever advancing to the field of human instinct, shared values, social cohesion, evolution, kin selection or any other discipline that seeks to explore the modern basis of ethical behaviour.

But the laws of logic are not absolute — in the sense of being separate from the universe. It seems likely to me that "logic" is an emergent property of matter and energy. If the universe didn't exist, neither would the "laws" of logic. That the universe is susceptible to rational analysis doesn't have to be proved; logic isn't contingent, it isn't based on anything.

Logic is properly basic. It just is.