#10 — Cherry-Picking Allegories
Do Christians choose allegories and metaphors that accurately reflect their God?
◉ https://strasked.wordpress.com/2023/02/04/cherry-picking-allegories/
#09 — The lack of a coherent moral standard among Christians demonstrated by disparities in moral conclusions
I regularly challenge both theists and non-theists alike to present a coherent moral system and the calculus behind their moral conclusions. I’ve yet to see this accomplished.
A blogger who seems to have no name made available on his blog recently attempted to respond to my Twitter challenge for him to provide a coherent moral system…and completely misses the point by, instead of providing the rigorous calculus for moral assessment, simply offers his own emotional disposition on various moral questions I provided him, often absurdly answering, “It depends” and leaving the “dependencies” unstated. My point was the disparity between his own responses to the questions and the disparate responses of fellow Christians. He does not even begin to introduce the opinions of fellow Christians to assess whether their moral conclusions are identical to his own and whether they are employing the same assessment calculus that might allow them to arrive at converging moral conclusions.
(Parenthetically, it provides a good example of the vortex of irrationality and social hardness to which faith in the Biblical God will lead you. He “morally” concludes both homosexuals and those who have abortions worthy of being put to death, conclusions so distant from the moral conclusions of his fellows who worship the same God that his claim that he and their God have a coherent moral system is rendered more than comedic.)
He claims my error is assuming there is one answer to these moral questions, and yet he gives unequivocal responses to several that would render a differing stance by his fellows immoral. More importantly, he ends his post without any attempt to introduce a coherent calculus for assessing moral conclusions that would eliminate disparities in “moral” conclusions among Christians. This is just one more failed attempt by a theist to provide a coherent standard to assess what is morally right and wrong. The inductive evidence against a coherent moral system and a coherent moral calculus continues to grow.
https://tradreformed.blogspot.com/2022/11/cornering-market-on-morality.html
The following is a survey site that spotlights the disparities in moral conclusions among Christians: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYeRc3N60wIK8Y1Hc7rGRS8LSHj8HIZT2nyIO6I7uos/edit#gid=38320088
#08 — The Flawed Epistemology of Evangelicalism
the-flawed-epistemology-of-evangelicalism
#07 — A letter to Justin of the Unbelievable podcast on meaning
Hi Justin,
The recent replay episode of WLC highlighted the confusion around meaning and purpose.
The notion that life without God is meaningless is demonstrably both evidentially and conceptional untrue if our definitions are kept rigorous enough to prevent equivocation.
First, the false implication is that, if our emotional lives operate on a substrate of “mere” physical neurons, our emotions are experienced illegitimately, and there is something absurd about enjoying emotions. This does not follow. The joy I feel watching my children grow up is not diminished by the discovery I am wholly biological, and that my joy rides a physical substrate of biology. The suggestion that such joy is an illusion is analogous to claiming music is illusory since it depends on a substrate of air and interpretive neurons.
Second, it is absurd to claim meaning can be handed to you from a source outside yourself.
Imagine a slaveholder attempting to give his slaves meaning. He has outlined a plan for their lives and tells them that they can fulfill their purpose by submitting to his intentions. Conceptually, meaning comes only from within. Whether the ownership of the slaves is legal or illegal, meaning is necessarily limited to the mind for whom there may be meaning. Meaning cannot be imposed. Even legitimate kings or governments cannot impose meaning on their subjects. It is conceptually absurd to claim you can grant meaning to someone else. If an alleged God hands you a plan for your life, there is no intrinsic meaning in that plan. Meaning itself is intrinsically subjective and cannot be external.
Therefore, this common claim that life without God is meaningless is not only evidentially and conceptually untrue, it is an inversion of the very notion of meaning.
Meaning is intrinsically confined to a subjective evaluation, and cannot be handed down by kings, slaveholders, or gods.
If there is a God, his intentions for us remain merely intentions and would not constitute meaning unless that God was deemed actual and worthy of following by the individual.
Cheers, Phil
#06 — The Best Explanation?
Is it epistemologically proper to take the best available explanation of a given phenomenon and run with it?
https://strasked.wordpress.com/the-best-explanation/
#05 — What Reality are you Explaining?
On the odd notion Christianity best explains reality: Whence does the Christian reality emerge?
https://strasked.wordpress.com/what-reality-are-you-explaining/
#04 — Greg and Amy Rebuke an Infant Killer
An interesting comparison of 21st century Christian morality and the morality of Jehovah 2000 years ago.
https://strasked.wordpress.com/greg-and-amy-rebuke-an-infant-killer/
#03 — A Christmas letter to Justin, the Christian host on the Unbelievable podcast
Hi Justin,
Imagine an extremely intelligent man so in love with a woman and so keen on a personal relationship with her that he hides behind the curtains in her bedroom and has his friends write her a letter he dictates to them. In spite of this odd modus operandi of this very intelligent man whose actions are inscrutable to those of us less intelligent, the woman has no reason not to believe the letter. Right?
How about for humans who apparently need to make a decision about whether the Bible is an actual personal letter to us from a God standing next to us, longing for a relationship with us? We also have no reason to doubt this God’s method as this inscrutable God is so much more intelligent than we are. Right?
The last podcast on the Christmas narrative seems to have had the wrong focus. It is as if we are sitting on the edge of the woman’s bed, arguing over less-than-clear passages in the letter from the man standing a yard away behind the curtain. Do you not think that only the most credulous woman would be focused on the letter instead of testing the alleged reality of the admiring man a yard away?
Do you not think apologetics is wholly dependent on tying the common emotional yearnings of humans to the notion of a God, making the notion that a God allegedly standing next to us would write a book to be known somehow more believable to those needing to believe?
Cheers, Phil
#02 — William Lane Craig’s absurd claim on the destruction of science
If it is possible that being can begin from non-being, that would completely destroy science. Right? Whether you are or are not a scientist, you might chuckle as I did upon hearing this odd claim. However, William Lane Craig appears to be entirely earnest in this absurd assertion. So in the interest of the less scientifically literate who may first suppose this claim about the destruction of science must somehow be true, let’s do a quick take-down.
- There are myriads of unexplained effects science is currently exploring. Yet, science remains and progresses. The lack of an explanatory cause has not even come close to an existential threat to science.
- The track-record of natural explanations far outperforms the track record of supernatural explanations. Instead of gnashing our scientific teeth over every effect for which we currently have no causal explanation, we simply stick to the enterprise of science, fully expecting we will again find a material cause.
- If we discovered that the universe or something else did not have a cause, how would that ever destroy science? We would simply assess and categorize all causeless effects the best we could based on their domains and features, and continue looking for causes in the domains in which we’ve had a long history of uncovering causes. Why would inductive inquiry suddenly fail in everything if it were not everything that was causeless? Is WLC suggesting there is some trigger attached to the discovery of a single causeless effect that would render the universe suddenly incoherent?
- Most scientists have the epistemic humility to admit that they do not know and likely cannot know many things. Does this destroy science in any way? Why would the possibility that something or everything is uncaused if, to date, the web of natural causation appears quite robust? It would take the actual absence of causation to destroy the project of science, not the mere notion there may be some things without a cause.
- WLC posits that God is causeless. Has this destroyed science to any degree?
I’m completely flabbergasted and baffled at Craig’s claim. Did I misunderstand it in any way? It appears to be yet another apologetics assertion invoked to wrongfully paint unbelievers as ideologically confused and to bolster the faith of intellectually entrenched Christians who will not ponder Craig’s claim to even the slight depth it takes to dispel it as nonsense. Craig wants to feed the faithful the nonsense that the cautious process of science would fail if there were uncaused effects. Abject absurdity from the lips of a sufficiently educated apologist that justifies the suspicion of mendacity.
Transcript: From episode #216 of the Unbelievable podcast
“If things could come into existence uncaused, if being can begin from non-being, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything doesn’t come into being without a cause. And that affirmation would completely destroy science.”
#01 — A letter to Justin, the Christian host on the Unbelievable Lennox debate podcast
Justin, both you and John Lennox have implied that seekers can limit their search to only those ideologies that offer the meaning, hope, and purpose of the sort that Christianity offers. Is this not dishonest? Would an honest seeker of truth a priori exclude as false all possible conclusions that do not fulfill human desires? Would turkeys on the turkey farm exclude as impossible the horrifying notion of Thanksgiving? Wouldn’t popular turkey sentiments, if parallel to Christian argumentation, make a turkey Heaven more plausible? Hope is a powerful marketing device for theism, but is it honest?
Transcript: Justin on Unbelievable (2008 Dawkins/Lennox debate)
“But I think that most humans believe they’re meant for than that, more than just reproducing, and getting by, earning money, you know, to pay for the food to eat, to go to work, you know how things work. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking most humans, if you’d like, in their souls yearn for more, for purpose, for significance, for some type of ultimate reason. An atheist may say well, there isn’t one, life is simply what you make it, you know, for yourself, but I just think that leaves most people feeling cold, quite empty, and like it or not, that will always be a problem for atheists. People don’t want that to be the ultimate conclusion. Maybe it’s not an argument for God, but I can help but feel Pascal was right when he said ‘we are all born with that God-shaped hole within us, and we feel incomplete until it is filled.’”
STR Asked... 