Wasting Time with Triablogue's morals-expert Steve Hays

Christian fundamentalist Matthew Flannagan wrote an article defending William Lane Craig's Divine-Command Theory (DCT).  Atheist scholar Richard Carrier wrote a rebuttal.  Steve Hays comments on Carrier's rebuttal.  This is my reply to Hays' criticisms.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Richard Carrier on the rampage

 I'm going to comment on a screed by Richard Carrier:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8708

That account was suspended but wayback still has it, here.

You have to wonder if Carrier had to much to drink when he wrote it.

Not even people who have that "higher" morality that Steve boasts for himself can resist calling names.  Surely we are idiots to deny how you have been transformed by Christ into a new creature who now avoids wrangling words (2nd Timothy 2:14).  Steve Hays has never committed that sin after he got saved, has he?

It's an attack on Matt Flanagan's Divine Command Theory. In commenting on Carrier's post, I'm not going to get into the weeds of DCT. That's Flanagan's specialty, so I will leave that to him. He can more than hold his own against the likes of Carrier.

That's quite a concession, you often don't hear hyper-Calvinists admitting the intellectual brilliance of other Christians whom the Calvinist thinks are missing the biblical forest for the trees.

But much of what Carrier says isn't tied to DCT, per se.
Before delving into the details, I'd like to make a general observation. Carrier evidently regards atheism as synonymous with secular humanism. His attack on DCT goes way beyond the negative, minimalistic definition of atheism as "nonbelief in God or gods." Rather, he proceeds as though atheism entails social obligations. 

    Theology has no salvageable theory of morality. Theists complain atheists have no reason to be moral. But in fact theists have no reason to actually be moral, as in: to elevate compassion, honesty, and reasonableness above all authority, even the authority of their own gods.

 There's nothing inherently wrong with the argument from authority if the appeal is to someone who is, in fact, a legitimate authority figure.

I would agree that some atheists try to transform the denial of god into social policy.  For my own reasons, I decline.  You also shouldn't teach children that collateral damage can be morally justified.  Some people simply aren't ready to learn certain hard truths, and will never be ready, to learn certain hard truths.

    Unless they covertly adopt a naturalistic moral theory (and most do), they are not actually moral people. They are minions. Theists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of whatever monster manufactured the universe. Or rather, whatever monster some men made up and duped them into thinking it made the universe. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever random ignorant madmen wrote their scriptures and now thumps their pulpits with sufficiently fiery claims of special divine communications at bedtime. 

Atheists are not actually moral people. They are minions. Atheists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of amoral physical determinism, which duped them into thinking their beliefs are rational. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever mindless, random natural process wired their brains and pushes their buttons. 

    I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. Theism actually has no moral theory. 

I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. Atheism actually has no moral theory.
 

    This is why.    Hannibal Lecter created the universe? He escaped from a future holodeck simulation and then used a stolen TARDIS to Make the Universe after evaporating God by discovering the Babel Fish? Oh crap. Well, I guess we better get down with murder and elegant cannibalism or else he’ll be angry with us and send us to hell. Because he is now eternal and the supreme being and made the universe. So we can’t deny, his will and character is now the ground of all morality. And, oh yeah. This all totally makes sense.Is that any more sensible than…? 

That's an argument from analogy minus the supporting argument.

Not every critique requires "argument". There IS such a thing as choosing, for good reason, to air one's opinion without giving the supporting argument.  Decisions on what to slice and what to keep are largely subjective and thus mostly insulated from criticism.  Before you provide examples, perhaps you should consider that, given your Calvinist statement of faith, whether the bible could have been written in a more clear way had God commissioned John Calvin to do the work?  Oh gee, no way, Romans 9 just makes Calvinism more obvious than Calvinism makes itself, amen?

Carrier needs to demonstrate that this is, in fact, parallel to Christianity. All he's done is to stipulate an invidious comparison.

Steve Hays needs to demonstrate criteria by which reasonable people would agree on what arguments to include or exclude from an argumentative article.  If you write a book defending the resurrection of Jesus, can we call you stupid because you "didn't mention" certain skeptical arguments?  Writing about a certain subject does not mean you are intellectually obligated to back up every last breath you take therein with argument.  Waxing polemical without argument is something we learned from the biblical authors, so don't be too skippy on the "need" to "provide argument".  And read Mark's parenthetical remark (13:14) before you foolishly insist that by providing no explanation, the claimaint puts no intellectual obligation on the reader.  Gee, "let the reader understand" is supposed to take the place of "argument" or "support"?

    A cosmic Jewish zombie named Jesus who telekinetically fathered himself by a virgin and now resides in outer space, is possessed by the spirit of a supernal ghost that is in some sort of parallel-dimensioning identical with but distinct from himself and an ancient Canaanite storm god, and promises to make you live forever in an alternate dimension if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that has eternally tainted our mammalian flesh ever since a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. So you better do what he says. 

Carrier has strung together a series of caricatures. What does that accomplish?

Probably this:  by boiling down biblical 'truths' to the irreducible cores, such "truths" tend to strike the average reader as absurdities, and thus unworthy of being taken seriously.

Since it's not an accurate description of Christian theology, how does ridiculing a caricature disprove Christian theology? Let's run through some of these descriptors:     "Cosmic" No. The Son is not a part of the cosmos. Rather, he essentially exists outside the physical universe.

Wrong, the bible says the Son "fills all things" Ephesians 4:10, and the fact that he does so after going to the "heavens" suggests he went to a place within the cosmos.  And since "outside the universe" is about as coherent as "north of the number 4", we continue to be rational in viewing Christian theology as incoherent.

    "Zombie" No, Jesus is not an ambulatory, cannibalistic corpse with minimal brain function.

A weak criticism if scholar Carrier knew the dictionary definition of zombie and intentionally took literary license, which is likely.  If I said Jesus was a clown, Hays would probably retort that there is no biblical or patristic support for the notion that Jesus wore makeup.

Rather, he died, then was not only restored to life, but glorified, so that he now has an ageless, youthful, immortal, disease-free body. His mental faculties are fully intact.

Telling us you likely intended your criticism more for Christians than for non-Christians, as only Christians would find it the least bit compelling.  Yes, I am assuming the stupidity of the arguments for Christianity.  I'm under no intellectual obligation to provide argument for every opinion I set forth.

    "telekinetically, telepathically" Carrier uses this terminology because he thinks telepathy and telekinesis are ridiculous. Yet these are well-attested phenomena.

Telling us you are likely high on crack.  The secular evidence of such is total bullshit, we are rational to insist the studies be done while we watch in real time before we become intellectually obligated to believe any such thing is real.  Furthermore, if you were talking about "miracles" (as if you think miracles happen) I've issued a challenge to Craig Keener by email and open letter for him to show us the one miracle claim recounted in his two volume "Miracles" work that he thinks is the most impervious to falsification.  So far, zip.  I've already interacted with you before about the stupidity of claiming miracles happen in the modern world, and, characteristic of somebody who fears their bluster won't last long under cross examination, you dropped the debate after you gave your two-cents.  Perhaps you were too busy at your second job in your effort to help Engwer help fund the digitization of the Maurice Grosse's Enfield tapes so that you could then prove that poltergeists are real.  Let's just say I don't think disregarding Triablogue leaves me ignorant of any part of reality.  I choose when I'll bother with your ridiculousness the way I choose which vintage cartoons to watch during a boring moment.

    "fathered himself" I take it that Carrier is suggesting that's an oxymoron. But that ignores the preexistence of the Son.

That's right.  And because Mark wanted to prove Jesus was the Son of God, his silence on the virgin birth is less likely due to authorial intent, and more likely due to his either not knowing such stories, or disapproving of them.  Jesus also ignored issues of his own preexistence when talking to Gentiles...apparently, the canonization of the NT made Christian belief more complex for Gentiles than Jesus ever intended it to be.  We thus WORRY about "ignoring" the preexistence of the Son like we WORRY should we misquote Goldilocks.

    "by a virgin" A miracle, which functions a sign.

And assuming Matthew wrote the gospel now bearing his name, he apparently 'expected' that what he said about the virgin birth was sufficient to intellectually compel Gentiles to believe the story...despite his taking Isaiah 7:14 out of context (i.e, the more honest way of saying "typological fulfillment"). 

    "now resides in outer space" Where did Carrier come up with that?

What pre-scientific notion of the heavens did Jesus intend to encourage within his disciples when he intentionally "ascended" in their sight "into heaven"?

 51 While He was blessing them, He parted from them and was carried up into heaven. (Lk. 24:51 NAU)

 9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. (Acts 1:9 NAU)

Apparently, "heaven" really does exist "up there", a premise supported by scores of other bible verses. 

 24 Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven, (Gen. 19:24 NAU)

 20 For it came about when the flame went up from the altar toward heaven, that the angel of the LORD ascended in the flame of the altar.  (Jdg. 13:20 NAU)

Once you ask "how would these passages have been interpreted by their original pre-scientific audiences?", you know perfectly well the "heaven is up there" belief is what was held by all of the biblical peoples.  Whether you can reconcile such statements with modern cosmology is quite beside the hermeneutical point.  And only a Christian worried about biblical "inerrancy" would feel motivated to care about such a word game anyway.

The Bible doesn't say that. Does Carrier equate the Biblical concept of "heaven" with "outer space"?

Well given the bible says heaven is "up there", and means it literally, and science tells us "up there" consists of nothing more than "outer space", the answer is yes.

    "is possessed by the spirit of a supernal ghost" A ghost is the soul of a dead human being. The Holy Spirit isn't human, and never died. Indeed, the Holy Spirit isn't "alive" in the biological sense.

Like it matters.  "not alive in the biological sense" merely means "alive in an incoherent sense".  Now what, Steve?  Gonna point to the Enfield Poltergeist that Engwer spent all that money on trying to research, to "prove" that non-physical "life" can be real?  LOL.  If the voice is heard within the cosmos, why do you automatically suspect origination from another dimension?

    "That is in some sort of parallel-dimensioning identical with but distinct from himself" Carrier's attempt to parody the Trinity. A more accurate analogy would be a mirror symmetry.

Ok, Jesus sees the father when he looks in the mirror.  What are you going to do now, start the world's first Calvinist Oneness Pentecostal denomination?

    "and promises to make you live forever in an alternate dimension" If that's an allusion to the intermediate state, then it's not a physical dimension. Discarnate souls don't exist in space.

But since you cannot show that "outside of space" is even coherent, what you suggest can be safely and reasonably dismissed as nonsense-talk.

If that's an allusion to the final state, then that's not an alternate dimension, but the renewed earth.

Like it matters.

    "if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood" Most evangelicals don't think you acquire eternal life by celebrating the Lord's Supper.

Then apparently they never read Jesus' statement to that effect, which was taken so literally by many of his followers that they fell away, when in fact if it had been obvious when Jesus said it that he was speaking only figuratively (as evangelicals maintain), the statement would not likely have caused such controversy and apostasy.  Let's now consult the bible's "devil-verse":

 57 "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me.
 58 "This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."
 59 These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.
 60 Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this said, "This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?"
 61 But Jesus, conscious that His disciples grumbled at this, said to them, "Does this cause you to stumble?
 62 "What then if you see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?
 63 "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.
 64 "But there are some of you who do not believe." For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him.
 65 And He was saying, "For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father."
 666 As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. (Jn. 6:57-66 NAU)

If Jesus really did do genuinely supernatural miracles in sight of his disciples, it is absurd to think that a Christ-saying that Steve Hays, 2000 years after the fact, can still tell is merely figurative, would have caused such apostasy.  "Yeah, I know he did real miracles, but his figurative statement about eating his flesh was just too much".  LOL.

    "a rib-woman" Is there something antecedently false about the idea that God made the first woman from a tissue sample of the first man?

Fallacy of loaded question.  The concern here is what "god" did "in history", and therefore is subject to probability analysis, you don't just win merely because the allegation falls within the bounds of the logically possible.  And that's to say nothing of the growing list of Christian scholars who think the story of Adam and Eve is pure metaphor, despite the concerns of fundies that metaphorical interpretation of Adam and Eve would destroy the NT.  If Christianity's theology requires interpreting the story as historically literal, then I guess Christian theology is false.   Why would I worry about the interpretation of Adam and Eve as given by idiots who constantly took the OT out of context (Paul) as even admitted by other Christian scholars?

    "by a talking snake" The Hebrew designation is probably a pun that trades on the multiple senses and connotations of the word (snake, diviner, shining one).

And there you go again, setting up an opportunity to wrangle words and to thus disobey apostle Paul's prohibition in 2nd Timothy 2:14.

    "to eat from a magical tree" The text doesn't indicate that the tree of knowledge is a magical tree. That's like saying the ark of the covenant is a magical box, or that Moses' staff is a magical stick. Rather, what we have is a divinely assigned correlation.

I'm not seeing much of a difference.  You can make a bunny come out of the empty hat by "magic" or because God created the bunny ex nihilo after you showed everybody the hat was empty.  But since you seem hell-bent on disobeying 2nd Timothy 2:14, feel free to cherry pick your NT moral obligations.  We only expect such from those who disobey such bible passages.

These are ordinary objects. They have no special power. The result comes from God, not the object.

See above.

Is Carrier deliberately misrepresenting Christian theology, or is he actually that ignorant?

Is Steve just ignorant?  Or does he realize that "magic" in the biblical world view meant to make use of invisible people to accomplish what normal people could not?

    And lest we forget, that’s the Jesus who has nothing to say against slavery or the subjugation and disenfranchisement of women Argument from silence.

Not all arguments from silence are fallacious.  See Wigmore.  Yet you act as if "argument from silence" is all that need be uttered to reasonably view the criticized position as being fallaciously unsupported.

For that matter, Jesus said nothing against the disenfranchisement of men. It's not as if Roman rule was democratic. Most men had not vote.

Well then, Steve, what DO you think about Christians who believe God is working in them to create change in American politics, when in fact Jesus's silence about his disciples becoming involved in the world suggests he didn't want them wasting their time on "worldly" concerns?  Does there come a point when a person's misunderstanding of the Jesus in the gospels starts eroding the viability of their claim to be genuinely born-again?

    or the execution of homosexuals, other than, at best, It's striking to see contemporary atheists jump on the bandwagon of "gay rights." I don't recall atheists in the past spearheading the campaign for "gay rights." Were Antony Flew, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Mackie, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Huxley, Thomas Paine, and Alexander White in the vanguard of the "gay rights" movement? Did I miss that? How did this suddenly become a self-evident moral maxim when so many prominent atheists of yore failed to discern it? Rather, atheists waited until it was safe to champion "gay rights." Waited until they felt the wind behind their backs.

I agree with you against Carrier on this.  I'm an atheist, yet I see nothing about my atheism that means the rational next step is to support gay rights.  I have arguments against male homosexuality that are not employed by fundamentalist Christians, which show the reasonableness of viewing legalization of the act as an absurd departure from America's values and likely contributing to further complexity and thus bobsledding this nation on the way to societal collapse.  In the ancient world and before, the male who had no sexual attraction to females was likely that way due to genetic malfunction; nature selecting him for extinction.

     that you shouldn’t invite sluts and homos to legally murder the sluts and homos because that would be hypocritical (John 7:52-8:11, a forgery). The fact that the Pericope Adulterae is a scribal interpolation is hardly news. Any standard edition of the Bible will footnote that familar fact.
     Oh no, you are supposed to wait for Jesus to murder them (Matthew 3:12). i) To begin with, that text does't single out "sluts and homos."
ii) How does Carrier infer "murder" from that text? It's about eschatological judgment.

You are a CALVINIST, and you don't think killing people is part of god's "eschatological judgment"?

It doesn't even say God kills them.

Doesn't have to, it was addressed to Jews, who would have attempted to reconcile it with Deut. 32:39.

Rather, that might well be postmortem punishment. Not to mention the figurative imagery.
And even if God did kill then, killing isn't synonymous with murder. 

If advanced space aliens came to earth and started zapping people dead, it would be rational to accuse them of "murder" despite the technical fact that they have their own set of laws that say it is legally allowable to kill earthlings.  So the fact that murder is different than "killing" merely because it techically means "unlawful killing" is a trifle of semantics that doesn't do you much more good than proving, once again, you have no intention of obeying 2nd Timothy 2:14.  Why not just end the suspense and admit that you finally discovered a command from Paul, applicable to you, that you refuse to obey?

    if the conditions he imagines existed, rape would be ethical—namely, if it was the loving and just thing to do (and we can imagine scenarios, though Flannagan wisely avoids attempting it: like, maybe, being forced to rape someone lest, the coercer informs you, the victim will be killed instead. Carrier fails to explain why, from the standpoint of secular ethics, it would be unethical to rape someone if the alternative is the victim's death.

Shouldn't have to.  Secular ethics are necessarily relative.  Smart  secularists don't fall into the trap of pretending there's some "objective morality" out there which they aspire to.  But I have to admit lots of people are truly ignorant about moral philosophy, and yes, they will pretend as if their moral beliefs are "absolute" without realizing what that implies, or caring.

If that's a forced option, isn't allowing the victim to be murdered worse than saving the victim's life, even if that entails rape? What is the secular basis for Carrier's disapproval? In fact, Carrier later says:
     To successfully argue that “loving and just” decisions are moral requires (i) appealing to the consequences of “loving and just” decisions and the consequences of “unloving or unjust” decisions, and then (ii) appealing to which of those consequences the moral agent prefers. But DCT can accomplish neither, except in exactly the same way ethical naturalism does. Therefore, DCT reduces to ethical naturalism in practical fact. It therefore cannot be an improvement on it. So he himself stipulates that taking the consequences into account are a necessary element in ethical decision-making.

I also observe the stupidity of the anti-consequentialist camp.  What fool would ever tell a kid, in the name of moral truth, that they can be good without considering the consequences of their actions?

According to his own hypothetical, the end-result of one choice is the death of the victim, while the end-result of the other choice is saving the victim's life–albeit by rape. If ethical decision-making comes down to weighing the respective consequences, then on what secular basis does Carrier conclude that rape would be wrong in that situation?

That's a good question for atheists who think morals can be "facts".  Count me out.  I observe that moral wrongness is utterly subjective.  While I would fight off an attempted murder of myself, that too is subjective, as I really wouldn't care if the whole world agreed I should die, I'd still subjectively try to save my life and thus act against those trying to kill me.  Frank Turek is correct:  if atheism is true, morals are relative.  But Frank Turek is also wrong:  if atheism is true, then asking "who is right, Hitler or Mother Theresa" is the fallacy of loaded question, falsely assuming that because a moral disagreement exists, surely somebody has to be in the "right", or both must be in the "wrong".  Nope.  You wouldn't ask that about two wild dogs fighting over a piece of meat, why ask it about human beings, who are just more intelligent dogs?

    DCT produces “infantile” moral reasoning, not only by reducing it to obeying what someone else says God wants, rather than applying one’s own critical reasoning to ascertain what is right, but also by eliminating any stable adult motivation to be moral. As atheists well know, from all the theists who terrifyingly admit they would murder and rape everyone but for their fear of hell, this is profoundly immature moral reasoning. Where are all the theists who allegedly admit that "they would murder and rape everyone but for their fear of hell"?

This is an inference drawn after asking the question "why did NT authors want people to fear hell?  Were they trying to scare them into resisting their baser instincts?"

I haven't encountered them. To begin with, there's no reason to suppose theists in general even want to rape or murder everyone.

If you think that what people say in public is an accurate reflection of what they privately believe, then sure.

The actual argument is this: if a person would like to commit rape or murder, would he refrain even though he could do so with impunity?

My experience of other people tells me that a substantial number of them would commit various types of crimes if they were as sure as possible that they wouldn't get caught.  But for obvious reasons, few such people would publicly admit this baser instinct, because that admission has enough power to destroy marriages and friendships or partnerships.  If you need people to be honest about their dark secrets so you can record reliable data, you'll need all the luck in the world.

It doesn't imply that he in fact desires to rape or murder anyone, much less everyone. Rather, it's a conditional or hypothetical scenario. If someone happens to feel that way about someone else, would he act on his impulse if he could get away with it? It doesn't mean he normally has that impulse. He may never have that impulse.

Correct. 

    Adults reason differently: they won’t murder and rape anyone because they care about them.  There's no empirical evidence that atheists care about everyone. Indeed, there's abundant empirical evidence that atheists don't care about everyone.

I think Carrier meant to say that adults would never reason that raping a person they care about might possibly signify the rapist's "care" for them, which would then be completely opposite to the divine atrocities of the bible, wherein the fact that you obeyed god and forced a woman into marriage (Deut. 21:10-14) is all you need allege to show that such shot-gun wedding was "loving" toward her.   That is, Carrier likely meant that smart people gauge whether something is morally good or bad based upon the extent to which it causes others misery.  But in bible land, beating children to death is morally good solely because God willed it, and the god who willed it can never be evil, end of story.

In Christian ethics, by contrast, you should treat people justly even if you don't care about them personally.

Except that in a Calvinist's mind, God might have predestined you to commit the sin of acting unjustly toward another person, which, because it was infallibly divinely decreed, turns the unjust act into a just act, since the god who ordered it is necessarily good in all that he does, meaning god's act in forcing people to sin is a morally good act. 

You treat them justly because that's the right thing to do, and not because you care about their wellbeing. You may treat them justly in spite of what you think of them.
     on DCT, you can’t decide God is “evil” and thus to be defied, not obeyed…no matter how evil God is If an atheist came to believe in the existence of an evil God, would he defy him? That would be pretty foolhardy.

Not any more foolhardy than Jews of WW2 who preferred death over respecting Hitler.  He may indeed have had the power over their lives, but they were not irrational to decide that wearing the badge of martyrdom was better than conforming to an evil dictator's will. I'm not seeing a whole lot of practical difference between fighting Hitler to the death and fighting the biblical god to the death. Especially given that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment in the bible has a high degree of falsity to it, so that fighting the bible god becomes about as fearful as punching snowflakes.

    He never responds to Sinnott-Armstrong’s actual point: which is that either moral facts are wholly unknowable on DCT (and therefore DCT entails we can know nothing about morality, and therefore by definition cannot ground any morality), or they are knowable by virtue of observable properties apart from DCT. But if they are knowable by virtue of observable properties apart from DCT, then they are already sufficiently moral by virtue of those properties. So we don’t need DCT. In what sense are "moral facts" "observable properties"? In ethics, we apply moral norms to concrete situations. Moral norms or ethical standards are not observable properties. Rather, they are ethical criteria by which we evaluate events or contemplated courses of action.
     Even if God exists, indeed even if a loving God exists, this is of no use to us in ascertaining what is and is not moral. Because He simply isn’t consistently or reliably telling anyone. Which begs the question.

No, Carrier's contention about God's inconsistent revelation is not the fallacy of begging the question, as there is plenty of good reason to suppose there is no god, or that the god is very inconsistent in how he communicates his will to human beings.  Carrier is speaking from what he observed in past research. Gee, Steve, if you make a statement in support of Calvinism, but you don't follow it with an 800 page book of arguments thereto, does that mean you have "begged the question"?   Do you seriously think its "wrong" to give your opinion without providing argument to back it up? 

Actually, you didn't support your contention that Carrier "begged the question"...so does that make you guilty of the same fallacy?  Must people ALWAYS follow their statement of belief with an argument before they can correctly avoid "begging the question"?  Obviously not.

    So all we have left is the ethical naturalist’s best alternative: an increasingly well-informed moral agent who cares about herself, and a body of advisors who care about her (crowdsourced knowledge, tested and accumulated from past to present). That’s the best you get. You don’t have access to an omniscient advisor. So you have to make do. And that means caring about whether you have enough information (about yourself and the world), and caring how to make the information you get more reliable, and caring whether you are reasoning from that information without logical fallacy or cognitive error. That’s the only way to get closer to the truth in matters of morality. Phoning God simply isn’t an option.  How does that rise to the level of moral realism?

That's a good question for an atheist who aspires to moral realism.  Count me out.

    Notice that this is Flannagan’s moral theory, minus the primitive hocum about sky spirits.
 In classical theism, God is not a "sky spirit." In classical theism, God subsists outside the physical universe.

And "outside the physical universe" is no less incoherent than "sky spirit".  If your god is so wonderful that human language fails to do proper justice, you might concede that words are not always good enough for you to convey to skeptics your other-worldly ideas.  Have you ever tried telepathy?

    DCT is therefore unlivable, even if it were correct. It puts moral truth inside an inaccessible black box, the mind of one particular God, whom we cannot identify or communicate with in any globally or historically reliable or consistent way. We therefore cannot know what is moral, even if DCT were true. Which assumes, without benefit of argument, that we don't have access to divine revelation.

Not necessarily.  The disagreements of Christians over morals would make it reasonable to assume that there is no more god concerned to resolve those disputes than there is a god who cares about resolving disputes between the ACLU and Trump.  Especially given that many Christians in such debates are not morons, but are skilled in apologetics and are serious about their faith.  That is, it doesn't even matter if you are a genuinely born-again Christian sincerely seeking god's will, not even THAT is enough to break into that black box and discover what moral god wants you to follow.

This is even worse for Calvinists like Steve Hays, who say God wants the world to believe He doesn't want them to commit adultery (revealed will, the Law), but that God secretly wills all adulterous acts before they take place, and wills them "infallibly".  You know, the parent who says "don't eat the cookies before dinner", but then sets up everything to increase the odds as much as possible that the child will disobey this and conform to the parent's "hidden" will...then when and if the child disobeys, the parent punishes the child for engaging in the disobedience that the parent secretly intended the whole time.  THIS is "god" according to Steve Hays.  And he seriously thinks atheists should view such a large bucket of morally duplicitous horseshit as some type of "threat".

    The supernaturalist is stuck in the exact same position as the ethical naturalist: attempting to ascertain from observable facts what the best way is to live. It's not the same position if the theist relies on moral intuitions which have their source in natural revelation whereas the atheist relies on moral sentiments that have their source in social conditioning and amoral evolutionary psychology.

I think you missed the point:  You cannot have a "Christian morality" unless you cite observable "facts" to support such morality.  DCT doesn't merely get up, shout "I'm correct", then walk away, as if the report came hot off the plates from Mt. Siani. DCT'rs do indeed cite to what they regard as "observable facts" to justify it.  Otherwise, Flannagan's articles on DCT would not require more than once sentence.

    But we cannot demonstrate that the “God” (or “ideal agent”) we have thus modeled in our mind or intuition is the “one true” God or not, except by appeal to natural facts that require no actual God to exist. Which disregards theistic proofs that appeal to "natural facts."

So? There IS such a thing as regarding your presuppositions as so settled that you can be reasonable to rely on them when debating people who disagree with them.  Such as you just did by pretending that the theistic proofs were some sort of formidable obstacle that Carrier was fearfully avoiding.  You "disregarded" showing that such theistic proofs were powerful.  Shame on you.

    Otherwise, we cannot know the God informing the intuition of Islamic suicide bombers is the incorrect God.
 If Muhammad appeals to the Bible to vouch his own prophetic credentials, when, in fact, his message contracts the Bible, then he's falsified his own claims.

Stick with the subject, Hays.  Carrier wasn't talking about Islamic suicide bombers who cite the bible to justify their crimes.  He was talking about how, if we have no reliable to way to discern the "true" god's morality, then whether god is or isn't inspiring the Isalmic suicide bombers is not the kind of question that can be resolved, therefore, the DCT'rs who think it can be resolved, are incorrect.  His larger point was that DCT lands us at a dead end, proving itself to be useless.  If god refuses to specify which religion is true, in a way that people can agree on, why would it matter than the moral goodness of an act is rooted in his nature?  Jesus stayed dead, so if there really is some "god" out there, you have no reason to think he would be more angry with atheists than with you.  Worse, if Christianity is false, the first god-option you'd likely exercise is the god of Judaism.  But if Christianity is false, that means its use of OT scripture was false, which means Jesus wasn't the real messiah, whcih means the god of the OT probably views Christians as promoting idolatry. Go ahead, Steve, how often in the OT does god display wrath against "atheism", and how often does he display wrath against idolatry?  or did you suddenly discover how late you are for church?

Of course you will pretend the bible is more reliable than the Koran and extremist Muslim theology, but I would argue that because your god committed so many 'divine atrocities' in the bible, you cannot realistically deny that Isalmic suicide bombers are reflecting the morality of your Christian god. 

Worse, as a Calvinist, Steve Hays also believes that God infallibly predestined any and all bombings caused by suicidal converts to Islam.  That is, when we look at the worst evil in the world, we are seeing things that God thinks are morally good.  After all, if God is morally good by nature, whatever he approves of must also be morally good, since by nature such morally good God would not approve of morally bad acts.  This gets Calvinist Hays in more trouble, though, because Hays will say God's expressed hatred of certain 'bad' things is merely god's "revealed" will, and you cannot really know whether such expressions are telling you the actual truth about God's hidden will.  I've been saying for 20 years that Calvinists are idiots if they wish to take part in DCT discussions.  The Calvinist God's distinction between good and evil is an absolute farce, and a misleading one at that.

    And the most important turning point here, is where theists simply can’t defeat Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma from 2400 years ago.
 i) Even a secular ethicist like Richard Joyce has argued that the Euthyphro dilemma is a failure:
http://personal.victoria.ac.nz/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_2002_euthyphro.dilemma.pdf
ii) Likewise, in a book which Flannagan recently coauthored with Paul Copan (Did God Really Command Genocide?), they devote two full chapters (chaps 13-14) to the Euthyphro dilemma.
So Carrier has his work cut out for him. He can't win the argument by taking intellectual shortcuts.

Sure, there's always the 'mysterious ways' third option, but even if the ED isn't a logically necessary deduction, the fact that it reasonably justifies atheism is enough.  Because we are people, we aren't going to maintain objective neutrality toward the truth of a highly improbable conclusion merely because it doesn't go all the way and become logically impossible.  We are going to live as if those things that are highly improbable are logically impossible, despite the fact that these are different things.  What is the practical difference between "i don't care about your idea because it is too improbable to deserve consideration", and "I don't care about your idea because it is logically impossible"?  In the real world, NONE.

    Because for DCT to be true, what Flannagan needs to say is, “we should obey whatever character God happens to have,” which would mean, we should all be the mass murderers that the God of the Old Testament actually wants us to be. Which begs the question of whether Yahweh is a mass murderer.

Probably because Carrier expected his readers would already know that truth.  Hays' word wrangling attempts to trifle that God's demand that children be massacred (the Flood, 1st Samuel 15:2-3, etc) is something other than mass murder (all because it cannot be "murder" if the lawgiver has authorized it) merely fails to intuit that Carrier was using "murder" in the colloquial sense of killing.  You'd be a fucking idiot to reply "which begs the question whether god's killings in the bible were unjustified" since even you yourself often make points without providing supporting argument.

    Or admit the Old Testament God is a demon the worthy of any horror film villain himself, and somehow convince everyone that we are lucky enough that that God just happens not to exist. (Oh wait. Atheists are already doing that.)
 How do you disprove the existence of a Being who, if there is such a God, exists outside the physical universe?

By pointing out that "outside the universe" constitutes an incoherent concept, and therefore, is sufficiently false as to intellectually justify those who choose to infer that it is positively false.

What would count as evidence for his nonexistence?

Well given that the place he exists doesn't even qualify as coherent thought, none.

    The commands of a loving and just person is a conceptual category that does not require that person to exist for their commands to be loving and just. If it is good to obey such commands, it is good regardless of whether they are fictional or real. To the contrary, good commands involve social obligations. We have no social obligations to fictional characters. Nonentities cannot oblige us.

If it is good to obey a man's advice "don't steal", that would generally remain a good idea even after the man dies. So he doesn't exist anymore, but that doesn't mean his advice suddenly becomes a bad idea.

    or not punishing rapists by legally ordering them to continue raping their victims (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). That's an inept misinterpretation of the passage. It is dealing with a hypothetical situation in which sex could either be coercive or consensual. There are no witnesses. A Jewish judge has no independent evidence to determine if the sex was coercive or consensual.
In that culture, loss of virginity made a single woman far less eligible for marriage. So the law represents a practical compromise: either a shotgun wedding or financial compensation in lieu of marriage.

Gee, Steve, where does that passage allow for the other option of "financial compensation in lieu of marriage."?

 25 "But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die.
 26 "But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case.
 27 "When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her.
 28 "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered,
 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days.
 30 "A man shall not take his father's wife so that he will not uncover his father's skirt. (Deut. 22:25-30 NAU)

Looks to me like this is no "either/or", but a "both/and", i.e., the man must BOTH pay financially AND marry her.

You also overlook that because not much more is stated, the "marriage" would then authorize the sexual union, and the burden would be on you to show that further sexual activity was prohibited.  That is, the rape victim would be expected not to resist the rapist-husband's attempts at sex after marriage.  Some apologists scream to high heaven that this marriage would not authorize sex, but then that means God thought that depriving the rape victim of the joy of sex for the rest of her life was the best thing to do, which is obviously stupid under the popular Christian belief that the sexual joy evinced in Song of Songs was something to be aspired to by all married believers.  And God depriving the victim of this joy certainly opens the fundies' mind to the prospect that the bible god probably is a bit more sadistic and callous than Sunday's well-wishers give him credit for.

    As I commented for Loftus in The Christian Delusion (p. 101), “any rational would-be rapist who acquired full and correct information about how raped women feel, and what sort of person he becomes if he ignores a person’s feelings and welfare, and all of the actual consequences of such behavior to himself and his society, then he would agree that raping such a woman is wrong.” That's willfully naive. Serial rapists know how raped women feel, which is precisely why they rape them. They hate women. The psychological damage is intentional. How women feel is a presupposition of the serial rapist. He aims to inflict maximal harm.

I agree, Carrier got this one wrong.  He has far more faith in humanity's basic goodness than I ever would.

Greg Welty says nothing that embarrasses bible critics

James Anderson has a post about Greg Welty's book Why Is There Evil In The World (And So Much Of It?) (Christian Focus Publications, 2018).  I reply to this review:

Why Is There Evil In The World (And So Much Of It)?

Posted on 8 June 2018  

Having been closely involved in the editing process, I’m thrilled to see this book finally in print. The title reflects what may be the most common reason people give for rejecting the Christian faith and doubting the existence of God. It is indeed a critical question that demands an answer.

If you know any atheists who cite God's allegedly evil acts as reason to think he doesn't exist, count me out.  Being evil hardly implies non-existence.  There is an exception for the god that is hawked by specifically Christianity, since the god of the bible is defined with logically incompatible properties (i.e., he calls himself good, but does things that qualify as evil under any other definition, and the "his mysterious ways" and the "as, creator he has the right to do whatever he wants" excuses, pretending that God is always the special exception to human reasoning whenever you think it convenient to say so, do not suffice.

The appeal to mysterious ways is not accepted when the Christian hears it from a Christian 'heretic' or "heterodox brother",  so fairness demands they be consistent, and not expect us atheists to find the excuse very compelling either.  The appeal to God's rights as creator is fallacious, as we would not hesitate to call a man evil if he exercised his "right" to throw away all of his 17 year old son's possessions merely because yes, he had the right to do so.  As father he had the "right", but if he didn't explain himself and show that doing so was necessary to preeempt evil or achieve a greater good, and if the possesions were typical things like clothes, radio, bed, etc, the mere fact that he had the "right" to toss them out would not stop us from concluding such father is an asshole (one of modern America's many euphemisms for "you are evil").  You will say God is the special exception to the rules of human reasoning whenever you deem it expedient to carpt that way, but in doing so you a) aren't showing atheists to be fools and b) you foist no intellectual obligation upon the atheist to agree that "god" is indeed an exception to all reasoning that would otherwise make him look evil.

But isn’t it one Christians have been answering for centuries? Yes, of course.

No, they have simply appealed to God's mysterious ways, and Frank Turek pushes the ripple-effect answer, not realizing that in moral analysis, anything at all that helped create a moral good is therefore also "good", or at least logically qualifies as such whether we wish it so or not.  I'm pretty sure America's general stupidity in the moral department means they are still a long way from being willing to be consistent and honestly admit where moral relativism logically leads.   Nobody said typical American morality was the least bit consistent.

There are many fine works already available on this issue, both ancient and modern, and Welty acknowledges his debt to them. But I think this book fills a particular niche at this time. So many contemporary books on the problem of evil fall down in one or more of the following areas:
 They don’t pay close attention to what the Bible actually says about the nature and origin of evil and suffering in the world, and how they fit into God’s purposes for his creation.

The only mystery in the problem of evil is how so many Christians can read their bibles for decades and still miss what's obviously implied by God causing horrific evils in Deuteronomy 28:15-63.  Moses sure doesn't talk about God's relation to evil the way your local Christian pastor does, amen?

They end up taking positions that aren’t theologically orthodox (e.g., denying God’s omnipotence or omniscience).

I would advise Christians to worry whether a theological proposition is biblically justified, not whether it happens to harmonize with "orthodoxy".  As open-theist Christians have shown, there are biblical texts that contradict the "orthodox" doctrines of God's omnipotence and omniscience.  This notion you carry aaround that you "need" to reject any interpretation of a bible verse that would cause it to contradict something else in the bible, merely arises from your belief that the bible is inerrant.  Since even most Christian scholars deny bible inerrancy, and since needing to harmonize anything a person said with everything else they said is not even considered a justifiable hermeneutic by anybody outside those involved in funamentalist religious, I have intellectual justification to accept Deuteronomy 28:15-63 on its own terms, deny the interpretation that harmonizes it with anything Jesus taught, and conclude that such passage really does contradict other biblical teachings.

And don't even get me started on how Copan and Flannagan's "semitic exaggeration" excuse (to get away from God's commanding his people to kill "everybody"), opens the door to the genuine possibility that the tendency of Semitic exaggeration also infects those bible verses that declare God to be omnipotent.  How do you know, admitting the ancient Semitic mind exaggerated things, whether their statements about God were also somewhat exaggerated from what they truly believed?  Perhaps the laudatory nature of the Psalms on God's wonderfulness was never meant to be taken any more literally than the husband's expression that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.  Well gee, classical theism requires all such biblical phrases to be taken in a plain literal sense.  Are you quite sure these ancient Semitic biblical authors weren't speaking in an exaggerated sense when extolling god's alleged virtues?  Do you have criteria for knowing when an ancient semitic author is speaking in exaggerated terms about his god and when he isn't?  NO.

They engage in philosophical speculations that aren’t tethered to (and sometimes go against) the teachings of the Bible and the creeds of the Christian church.

That can only be a good thing.  Get out while you can, fool, especially given that christianity's "danger" alarm can be proven to be about as dangerous as kittens playing with bubbles in Candyland.  Why put yourself through the torture of fundamentalism when there is no compelling reason to?

They lack clarity and precision at the very points where clarity and precision are needed. They serve up a big fat waffle-burger instead of a lean filet.

No doubt having something to do with the fact that they are genuinely born-again and sincerely ask God to guide them as they research biblical theology, right?  In other words, not even being born-again and sincerely seeking god's will, is any guarantee that you will avoid drawing heretical conclusions.  You'll excuse me if I don't want to be employed with a game-playing asshole boss like that.

They’re written by authors who lack theological and philosophical training, and who aren’t conversant with the vast scholarly literature on the problem of evil.

No brain-training needed.  See Luke 12:11-12. Just start babbling, and the Holy Spirit will move through thee.

They’re preaching to the choir: helpful for those who already believe, but failing to grapple with real concerns of skeptics.

And whether Christians have any divine obligation to worry about answering "skeptics" is fairly debatable, since because nobody in the NT is debating a "skeptic" or "atheist", it could very well be that Jude 3 carries an implicit qualification, consistent with the rest of the NT, that you are only obligated to defend the faith from other false "believers".  Paul's blind presumption of the divine nature of scripture is all over the NT, and gives the impression he never had anything of a scholarly nature to argue in front of 'skeptics' or "atheists".  I dare you to try and refute me from Acts 17.  Gee, I never knew that running away from a debate challenge after you give your first speech (Acts 17:33) constituted giving "scholarly" argument.   Nothing in Paul's Acts 17 speeches would qualify as scholarly; but they certainly qualifies as preaching to the choir.  You either agree with Paul's presumptions, or he moves on to other people.  Going back and forth would likely create a dispute about the meaning of words, and thus is probably what he would consider "word-wrangling" which he forbade (2nd Timothy 2:14).

They’re either too long-winded to keep the reader’s attention or too cursory to satisfy the reader’s concerns.

Blame it on the Holy Spirit, who can allegedly "cause" any Christian believer to pay attention to anything He thinks they need to pay attention to.  See God exercising similar overriding power in Ezra 1:1. Blame it on God.

And I'm sorry that you appear to believe that the modern Christian's ADHD is something that cannot be solved by anybody except Christian authors employing attention-getting methods of discourse and other known psycholoical tricks intended to keep one's attention.  One wonders how Christians before the age of electricity manged to be edified by those long boring sermons we see in the church fathers.  They couldn't watch it YouTube, so apparently, all hope was lost.

They’re too dry and technical for the layperson.

same answer

Why Is There Evil In The World? avoids all these pitfalls.

You could have simply directed the reader to Deuteronomy 28:15-63, that's the end of the debate about why your kids get kidnapped, or you suffer a mental abnormality, or you become so hungry you start viewing your kids as tasty treats.  This idea you have in your head about how God cries his eyes out because you got lost in the forest and can't find your way home, is total bullshit.  The god who might be planning to let your daughter be raped to death next week, has no plans to tell you in advance, and wants you to continue being happy about him in the present.  What would you do if god gave you an inspired glimpse into his infallible foreknowledge, and you saw that rape happening (i.e., because it is "infallible", what you foresaw is "incapable of failing", see dictionary)?  Would you try to thwart it when that day and time finally arrive, and therefore attempt the logically impossible feat of surprising god, yes or no?  Something tell sme the ONLY reason you love god is because you DON'T know about the evil that he knows you are going to experience in the future.  Keeping you ignorant is apparently the key to keeping you obedient.

Moreover, Greg is ideally qualified to have written this book. He wasn’t raised in a Christian home, so he knows what it’s like to be a skeptical unbeliever. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, an MDiv degree from Westminster Seminary California, and MPhil and DPhil degrees in philosophical theology from the University of Oxford, and he has taught seminary courses in Christian apologetics and philosophy of religion for 15 years. He also serves as one of the pastors at Grace Baptist Church in Wake Forest, so he doesn’t live up in the ivory tower!
 Here’s the table of contents for the book, which should give you a good idea of how Welty tackles the issue:
 1. What is the Problem of Evil?

Easy:  God instructed his people to burn to death the girl who has sex before marriage in her fathers house.  Leviticus 21:9.  Since even spiritually alive people cringe at this thought, there is a very good probability, assuming Christianity is true, that this cringing arises from the Spirit's witness to their heart, not their environmental conditioning, and therefore, it is God himself in the present who is encouraging Christians to hate and despite most of the absurd Mosaic laws.  And if you carp that spiritually alive people can be decieved on this, you are a fool to pretend spiritually dead people can understand this dreck any better, and we have a rational excuse, under your own theology, to dismiss your arguments from consideration.

2. The Greater-Good Theodicy: A Threefold Argument for Three Biblical Themes

Nah, that's merely a Nazi, who, having concluded Hitler can do no wrong, therefore trifles that the holocaust it only bad when seen from a temporal perspective...an argument that would not convince those outside of Nazism.  But probably deemed a clever argument anyway by the Nazis.

3. Licensing the Greater-Good Theodicy: God’s Sovereignty over Evil

Deuteronomy 28:15-63.  he is not merely "sovereign over" evil.  He "CAUSES" evil.

4. Limiting the Greater-Good Theodicy: The Inscrutability of God’s Purposes

You don't know everything about Hitler, so you cannot really say for sure whether he might have had a greater moral good in mind in slaughtering the Jews.

5. Can Free Will or the Laws of Nature Solve the Problem of Evil?

No, for since there is no evidence the will is "free" from the laws of physics, and efforts to show otherwise are absurd trifles motivated by absolutely nothing but blind commitment to just anything and everything the bible might say.  (i.e., if you have no problem saying the purely physical nature of muscles is why damage to the muscle inhibits the muscle's power, why do you have a problem saying the purely physical nature of the brain is why damage to the brain inhibits the mind?  oh, I forgot...the bible doesn't say muscular power comes into the muscle from another dimension, therefore, you don't really care whether muscular power is purely physical or otherwise.  But if the bible says the mind can be separate from the brain, you will go the rest of your life insisting the mind can be separate from the brain, despite the fact that you violate Occam's Razor with that theory more than the naturalistic theory because you now have to allege further absurdities like other dimensions, and words like "spirit" whose definitions tie to nothing physical and are thus forced to remain in fantasyland.

When you have a thought, where do you perceive it taking place?  In your elbow, or inside your skull?  Gee, only fools would ever say the mind and brain are equal, amen?

Metacrock isnt saying anything very important either

Between 1999 and 2002, I posted regularly at CARM.  I was using the alias "ohwow".  The one Christian that I battled with the most was "Metacrock" and all of his stupid trifling "you-can't-refute-the-studies" bullshit.

This page identifies Metacrock as "Joe Hinman", so unless somebody else is using the name, I strongly suspect it is the same guy.  I've now reviewed some of his arguments and he does indeed appear to be the same person.

I was asked by somebody else to respond to something Metacrock was arguing, and that reminded me of Metacrock's "atheistwatch" blog, so I went ahead and copied and pasted some of his arguments below, and respond respectively.

First, Metacrock constantly focuses on "god" as if this is supposed to be some sort of heart-stoppingly important subject, when in fact at the end of the day, he is a liberal, he doesn't think atheists will endure any afterlife fate worse than Christians, and therefore, he must always fail in showing atheists to be irrational. Metacrock may as well insist that the temperature of Pluto is vitally important, and then chide everybody who, for lack of any danger, don't see the relevance of the subject to their daily lives, and accordingly choose to ignore it wholesale.

Monday, July 1, 2019
(1) Is just plain wrong. The ordering in a snowflake or salt crystal is efficient and dependable, but due entirely to natural processes. 

that  is totally begging the question you have no proof that it;s natural you have no evidence you are asserting it because it deals with nature you assert a prori no God therefore no God

"you have no proof that it's natural"?  Metacrock hasn't changed one single bit in 20 years:  he may as well say that we cannot prove that matter itself is natural. In normal thinking you favor the empirically demonstrable stuff over the stuff that only rides on "you can't prove it false" crap.

you also misunderstand atheism's most powerful argument.  the reason we a priori dismiss "god" is because the dfinition of that word is not based on anything in the empirical world, and is no less fabricated than the "definition" of Bugs Bunny.

(2) "Usually"? You need to do better than that in a proof. 

why? minor exclaims would not disprove the perponderemce of evidence

I think he meant "minor exceptions".  But either way, I've graduated far beyond Meta's concern with "god".  I've shown that the resurrection of Jesus has lower probability than any other naturalistic hypothesis, and I did this in the context of reviewing stuff like Michael Licona's "The Resurrection of Jesus: A new historiographical approach".  Even if God existed, the fact that Christianity is false would mean, at best, that Christians are no less likely to be in severe trouble with god too, not just atheists.

(3) and (4) are basically the sad out argument that a law of nature needs a law maker, failing to realise that a law in nature is quite different to a legal law. 

wrong on 2 commits: (1) I don't argue from a lawmaker analogy,I never assumed it;s a legislator and say that.(2) saying indicative of mind does not make it the legislature analogyy .The law-like dependability is that the thing being described (assuming Physical laws are observations of universal behavior ) is unfailing as though obeying.  mind is indicated due to purposiveness but not from analogy but from the behavior of the universe,

From the fact of supernovas and asteroids colliding with planets, I'm not seeing anything about the behavior of the universe that exhibits intelligent "purpose".  For one thing if you can get intelligent purpose out of "the behavior of the universe" you could also get it from why a rock breaks up the way it does upon hitting the ground, in which case because you see intelligent purpose in literally everything, you have left open no possibility of unintelligent purpose, and therefore your position proves too much.  You also soud like a Calvinist, since if there is intelligent purpose to the way the universe works, there's also intelligent purpose behind why the dice rolled the way they did.  The only reason people win or lose at craps is because God is there, causing the dice to fall the way they do.

Regardless, the god of the bible is a sadistic lunatic, so i would no more serve him merely because of his privileged power, than I'd sever equally sadistic space aliens if they came to earth and started flaunting their power.  If God wants me to believe in him, he apparently has the willingness to use his power to make me change my mind (Ezra 1:1) so you could also say my atheism is in part arising from god's being guilty of parental neglect.

(5) "fits the major job description"? You need to do better than that in a proof. 

Ot's spot on and you know  ot/ Again your assumption is a priori no God therefore a prori no god. it is such an obvious fit you can;t have it,  you reonl yspoiuting ieologicalbroimides at it

Sorry, this is incoherent.

Then (6)... Well, it turns out that you do use the word "warrant" when using this argument too! 

  Not in the argument, but as the decisions making paradigm is exactly how Isaid it is sed, you do not understand the issues involved .

 Same answer.

So your claim that you do not use "warrant" in all your arguments is based on two arguments, both of which do exactly what I said! 

It's not in the argument dumb ass it;s over it,
Posted by Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) at 8:14 AM No comments:

Same answer.

once again, Metacrock's belief that atheists are irrational to deny god's existence is a complete waste of time even if true:

a) so many Christians complain of god's hiddenness, it's enough to justify the atheist in saying that if spiritually alive people struggle so much with this, only a fool would "expect" a spiritually dead person to understand such mystical bullshit;

b) being irrational about a belief doesn't really contribute to one's harms in life, therefore, the fact that one's belief is "irrational" doesn't even "require" that they "worry" about the belief possibly being incorrect.  Let's say some dipshit believed the Bermuda Triangle is caused by space aliens.  However, he never says these aliens are going to make your life miserable if you don't believe in them (like Metacrock and his deaf, dumb and mute god).  He never says these aliens desire for you to see them (like metacrock whose god doesn't have anything to say about being "seen").  This Bermuda Triangle apologist simply carps that you are unreasonable to disbelieve his thesis because to accept it is to become more loving (like Metacrock says about atheists).

Well gee, does that mean you forget how to eat, where you work, who your kids are, or perhaps that drinking bleach would help get rid of the flu, all because one of your beliefs is "irrational"?  No.  I've been an atheist for more than 20 years.  I am not plagued with any problem that don't plague a million mature fundamentalist Christians and a million mature liberal Christians.  Ok, why should somebody worry in the slightest that their belief or lack of belief is irrational, when this alone doesn't imply the least bit of a threat to anything they care about?  It isn't like atheism is going to turn somebody into a child molester (atheism doesn't preach a morality, so an atheist's morality derives solely from whatever moral system her genetic predisposition leads her to favor).

Metacrock is merely doing what he's been doing for 20 years: screaming his head off about the serious importance of a type of "experience" that proves itself to be horrifically unreliable and deceptive.

If I wanted to believe that soda pop only comes from the planet Mercury, why should I give a fuck that the belief is irrational?  There are no hurtful consequences to such belief, so why should I give a shit whether it is "rational" or "irrational"?  I can hear Metacrock now grabbing the mic and doing the karaoke version of "Aquarius", and "expecting" the people at the bar to start acting like members of the Mormon Tabernacle choir.

Metacrock also forgets that because people are human psychological creatures, the mere fact that they gain a sense of daily fulfillment believing the way they do is precisely why "argument" alone is often very ineffective in changing people's minds.  That is, Metacrock is not going to change an atheist's mind by insisting that mystical Christian experience is found by empirical testing to enhance one's sense of love.

I'm also suspicious that Metacrock favors the liberal "love" view of God in the bible, when in fact the bible is replete with proofs that its god is a sadistic lunatic who delights to inflict harm and misery on children who disobey.  Read Deuteronomy 28:15-63...and don't forget that liberals like Metacrock automatically and arbitrarily dismiss anything in their bible that they don't like.

Metacrock also forgets that one's choice to deny religion might be the way their brain fights back against prior past abuses.  While the previously raped woman is unreasonable to thereafter think that every man is a potential rapist, you also cannot really blame her, given the hell she was put through.  It is similar to Christianity: while it might not be reasonable for the person who came out of an abusive form of Christianity to say that entire religion is a 100% bullshit, you also cannot really blame such a person for reaching such a broad-brushing conclusion.  While I find Christianity to be false, I refuse to say that anybody who joins the cause is therefore unreasonable.  Mormonism is false, but if the single girl chooses to join and just wrap her life around it because Mormon ideas of family are closest to her own, I'm not going to call her unreasonable.  People tend to go where they are loved, and they do so for reasons that often do not include "compelling argument" beyond the fact that everybody yearns to be loved by others.  And given that "theology" is about as important as the Cheshire Cat, the person who joins a church more for the empirically demonstrable social benefits and less because of its "theology" is not being unreasonable.  Mammals need food and social roots far more than they need "theology".

Are you starting to notice that Metacrock is irrational for pretending that irrationality of a belief is some show-stopping important danger?  If your belief that your peanut butter sandwich talks to Elvis, doesn't cause you to become an unsafe driver, or to set your house on fire, or let your kids starve to death, etc etc, then why should anybody care any more about that belief, than they care about what your favorite Disney character is?

Metacrock also forgets to note that his own dogshit bible encouraged people to do things that encourage their minds to become irrational, such as the biblical command that you give suffering people free alcohol for the purpose of helping them forget their troubles temporarily:

 4 It is not for kings, O Lemuel, It is not for kings to drink wine, Or for rulers to desire strong drink,
 5 For they will drink and forget what is decreed, And pervert the rights of all the afflicted.
 6 Give strong drink to him who is perishing, And wine to him whose life is bitter.
 7 Let him drink and forget his poverty And remember his trouble no more.
 (Prov. 31:4-7 NAU)

Sure, Metacrock doesn't like bible verses that encourage alcoholism, but given that bible inerrancy is a false doctrine, I don't really give a fuck if the alcoholism interpretation of this passage contradicts anything else in the bible, that interpretation is certainty justified by the grammar and context, and the single solitary reason Christian commentators hem and haw about this is because they know a straightforward obedience to this verse would contradict NT ethics. I have already steamrolled the fuckhead who tried his best to pretend that "give" doesn't mean "give" in this passage.  See here.

So far, I haven't seen Metacrock answer the argument from religious language, to wit: "god" constitutes an incoherent concept, because the only basis for the dictionary definition is even further ad hoc postulates that also cannot be shown to be true.  It is like pretending "Casper the Friendly Ghost" is "coherent" because somebody somewhere defines him as a "non-physical life form that likes to tell jokes".  When the definition of a word is not tethered to anything empirically demonstrable, you are ill-advised to pretend this crap you believe in is as true as the existence of trees.  That is, you are ill-advised to act like a Christian.

I'll do a few more, than I'm done with this.

from http://atheistwatch.blogspot.com/, Metacrock pitches his book as follows:

Arguments for God from religious experience have always been considered a secondary level of argument.

That's because the diverse nature of the alleged experiences makes their purely naturalistic basis far more probable than the trifle that they experience the same god in different ways, and since all people tested are human mammals, the traits all such experiences shared can also be explained in purely naturalistic terms.  Show me a mystical experience that gives the experiencer new knowledge they more than likely couldn't have gotten in a naturalistic way, and I'll start giving a shit about somebody else's hallucinations. Deal?

And as a reminder, once again, all Metacrock is doing is "arguing for God's existence", when in fact Jesus' remaining dead for 20 centuries makes god's existence irrelevant even if true.  IF jesus didn't rise from the dead, the fact that so many billions in history thought he DID, testifies to the horrifically deceitful nature of religion...as if Catholicism and modern Christianity didn't already.

It's always been assumed that their subjective nature makes them weak arguments.

Then you cannot fault a person for becoming a Mormon, and thus denying what you think is the "true" gospel, because they had a private religious experience they interpret to mean the Holy Spirit was telling them the Book of Mormon is true.  As soon as you say other empirical evidence shows that experience to be false, you render the experience completely unnecessary to consider.  You can know from empirical evidence alone whether a religious experience is true or false.

One also wonders what Metacrock would have to say to Aborigines and others who for centuries were happy to smoke drugs so that they could, in their subjective religious experience, talk to the spirits.  Does empirical evidence falsify their drug-induced fantasies, yes or no?

The atheist scared to death of subjectivity.

Because being led around by subjective religious "experiences" provides not the slightest protection against false belief, especially given that the bible has not motivated even thousands of "cultists" who believe in "Christ", to fear that their subjective experiences are deceptions from the devil.  Once a person chooses the subjective over the objective, there's no telling what degree of stupidity they will fall into, while with empiricism, your concern to interpret the real world correctly is a somewhat more laudable goal.

This work, compiling empirical scientific studies that show that religious experience is not the result of emotional instability but are actually good for psychologically, constitutes a ground breaking work that places religious experiences on a higher level.

Nice to know that you approve of the Mormon religious experience.  I can understand why you are a liberal.

The Trace of God is an exposition (445 pages) employing both philosophical investigation and social science research. The book analyzes and discusses a huge body of empirical research that has up to this point been primarily known only in circles of psychology of religion, and has been over looked by theology, apologetics, Philosophy of religion and more general discipline of psychology.

In other words, the religious experience of Christian "apologists" did not open their eyes to these studies that would help promote their cause...almost as if the god who is guiding them is actually dead....or doesn't care...or finds it funny to prevent his followers from knowing the best arguments...

This body of work needs to be known in each of these interested groups because it demonstrates through hundreds of studies over a 50 year period, the positive and vital nature of the kind of religious experience known as “mystical.”

Except that Jesus stayed dead, which means any "god" that is actually out there, is so utterly amorphous as to be undeserving of serious concern.

Even though most of the studies deal with “mystical” experience, linking studies also apply it to the “born again experience” as well as “the material end of Christian experience.”

What's funny about the Christian religious "experience" is that not even a combination of this and a copy of the same bible used by everybody else, is sufficient to prevent these people from disagreeing with each other, even to the point of insisting that each other's religious experiences are false.  You'll excuse me if I conclude that private religious 'experiences' heighten a person's tendency to espouse false doctrine.

Read Jeremiah 17:9.

The book opens with a discussion as to why arguments for the existence of God need not “prove” God exists, but merely offer a “warrant for belief.”

But since "warrant for belief" does not render the opposing position "foolish", your warrant for belief does not form any degree of intellectual compulsion upon the atheist, which means YOU are the fool for pretending that your case is so overwhelming.  Hell, Mormon apologists can show "warrant for" Mormon belief, but does that put you under the least amount of intellectual compulsion to adopt their beliefs?  NO.

It discusses why there can’t be direct empirical evidence for God and why that is not necessary.

In other words, the world needs to know that the literal interpredtation of the OT which most of the Christian church adopted for 2,000 years, was false, despite whatever smarts they obtained from their religious 'experience'. That is, their religious experience deluded them.

It also lays out criteria for rational warrant. In Chapter two it presents two arguments that are based upon religious experience and then shows how the various studies back them up. This is not an attempt to present directly empirical evidence for God but to show that religious experiences of a certain kind can be taken as “the co-determinate” or God correlate. It’s not a direct empirical view of God that is presented but the “God correlate” that indicates God, just as a fingerprint or tacks in the snow indicate the presence of some person or animal.

Then you misunderstand science.  Fingerprints would be direct evidence of some person, and that directness doesn't fade merely because the print can possibly be forged.  Anything can be forged or misunderstood...does that mean there's no such thing as direct evidence?

Religious experiences of this kind are the “trace of God.” These studies demonstrate that the result of such experiences is life transforming.

So far, Jesus wants you to become a Mormon, because look at how transformed the lives of Mormons are.  Nice going.  But as a liberal, you actually embrace Christian diversity despite the fact that the NT in large part condemns the idea that Christians should be divided on doctrine.

This term is understood and used to indicate long term positive and dramatic changes in the life of the one who experiences them. People are released form bondage to alcohol and drugs, they tend to have less propensity toward depression or mental illness, they are self actualized, self assured, have greater sense of meaning and purpose, generally tend to be better educated and more successful than those who don’t have such experiences.

Are you fucking kidding me?  Its as if this dumbass never heard of "lies, damned lies, and statistics".

I have to wonder whether Metacrock's book deals with the fact that the vast majority of Christians do not claim a supernatural ability to deal with life's problems, or the fact that non-Christians notice that Christians appear to be just as limited to physical means as anybody else in trying to cope with life's issues.  Apparently, becoming a Christian involves nothing more mystical than adding biblical theology to the stuff one studies on Sunday.

These studies prove that religious experience is not the result of mental illness or emotional instability.

Studies also prove that dreaming during sleep isn't caused by mental illness or emotional instability. But its fantasy-land nonetheless.

The methodology of the studies (which includes every major kind of study methodology in the social sciences) is discussed at length. One of the major aspects of the book is the discussion of the “Mysticism scale” (aka “M scale”) developed by Dr. Ralph Hood Jr. at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The importance of this “M scale” (that is a test made up of 32 questions) is that it serves as a control on the valid religious experience.

But since "god" cannot even be coherently defined, testing for valid religious experience is sort of on the order of testing for valid alien invisibility.

One can know through the score on the test if one’s experience is truly “Mystical” or just “wool gathering.”

Except that since nobody can show increase in knowledge solely by "mystical" experience, it ultimately draws from the person themselves, not from anywhere else.

Without a control we can’t know if one has had a true experience and thus we can’t measure their effects.

Contrary to your own bible that says there IS a way to determine whether somebody's mystical experience is valid.

Being able to establish that one has had true “mystical experience” one can determine that the effects of that experience are positive and long term.

God wants people to be Mormons.

Thus that sets up the rationally warranted arguments for God.

Which are irrelevant because Jesus stayed dead, at which point you really couldn't say whether the "god" who allegedly exists finds atheism or Christianity to be more worthy of his wrath.

... It also implies that God is working in all faiths.

I think I just found out why Metacrock has never gained any traction with any serious Christian ministry.  he thinks the Mormon's "experience" is more important than the doctrinal truth that Paul said was important enough to divide fellowship over (Titus 3:9-11).  I suppose Metacrock gets rid of bible-based rebuttals by simply disagreeing with whatever part of the bible he doesn't like.

The Author, Joseph Hinman, is a Christian and he does believe in the exclusivity of Jesus Christ but he also recognizes God’s prevenient grace to all people.

Metacrock must think apostle Paul was a fool...the "danger" of rejecting the gospel is nowhere near the urgent level that motivated Paul to go buzzing around as if he were trying to save screaming children from burning buildings...and getting himself martyred in the process because of his intolerably high level of fanaticism thereto.

I guess the most powerful rebuttal to Metacrock's obsession with irrelevancy is the same one I hurled at him 20 years ago:  You have not demonstrated the significance of "god", nor have you demonstrated that atheism poses the least bit of a "threat" or "danger" to anybody.  You have not demosntrated that a person who would rather live life as they like instead of signing up for some mystical self-help course are "irrational" or "unreasonable".  You are instead simply screaming out that something you choose to waste your time researching is of paramount importance...only to find out later that all we are missing out on is "sunshine and candy lambs".

I'll pass.  The historical evidence in favor of Jesus' resurrection is pitifully weak, and nothing about your message indicates the danger or loss of ignoring mystical experience is any worse than the danger and loss that looms when one stares at one's zits in the mirror.  Finally, too many Christians have decried the alleged "loving" benefits of being religious, for me to believe your song and dance that only good things will happen if I start telling myself the key to happiness is religious mysticism.

my challenge to Anthony Garland

Anthony Garland wrote a 2003 paper in The Conservative Theological Journal entitled "Does Dispensationalism Teach Two Ways of Salvation?"  Since Academia.edu recently recommended I read it, I issued him this challenge after downloading the paper:

Since I see no justification from the immediate context of Matthew 5:17-21 to presume the 'fulfillment' of the law meant anything other than the sinner's own fulfillment of it, it appears that Jesus really did teach legalism, which doubles as a reasonable hypothesis for why the Judaizers existed in the first place.

Since I see no justification from the immediate or larger context of Matthew 28:20 to justify delimiting the "all" in "all that I taught you", I am reasonable to believe that, at least for Matthew and his school, Gentiles don't become true disciples unless they obey all that Jesus taught according to that particular gospel.  And yet you'd have to search long and hard for any American Christian today who seriously obeyed "all" that Jesus taught the disciples in that gospel.   

Since biblical inerrancy is denied by most Christian scholars, and since those who espouse it disagree with each other about its nature and scope, this is an objective justification for refusing to view that doctrine as a governing hermeneutic.  it is far more controversial than other heremenutical rules like grammar, context, genre, etc.   In short, reading Matthew's legalistic Jesus through the rose-colored glasses of Ephesians 2:8-10 is an absurdly subjective preference and does precisely ntohing to intellectually compel the non-Christian reader to think that the only correct interpretation of Jesus is the one that harmonizes with apostle Paul's opinions. 

If you want to find a lot of dispensationalists who insist that Jesus' pre-cross teachings no longer apply to the modern church, take a look at evangelical Protestantism of the last 100 years.  Jesus is the ultimate authority on how to get saved, and he said plenty about it...but today's Protestants most often leave Jesus in the dust and run immediately to Acts 16:31 and Romans 10:9 to tell others how to get saved. 

I suppose it is because they know Jesus was a legalist, and they realize that if they quoted him to others in the simplistic fashion that they quote Paul to others, the others will get the 'false' impression that salvation must be earned by good works (!?)
Would love to dialogue further with you about this.
Barry Jones
barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

Will J. Warner Wallace ever stop pushing his elementary school level apologetics?

This is my reply to yet another "pushing ignorance as knowledge" article by J. Warner Wallace entitled:

“There is no evidence for God’s existence!”

8:05 AM (2 hours ago)

How Would YOU Respond?

I respond to the version I recieved in email.

How would you respond to the objection that there "isn't any 'hard' evidence for the existence of God"?

I'd respond "I agree.  You refuse to take the Mormon view that God is physical, therefore, there couldn't logically be any "hard" evidence for God unless you arbitrarily defined "spirit" as "physical".

This complaint is commonly presented to young Christians

It's also commonly presented to Christians of any age, because it forces Christians to recognize that what they believe in, cannot be "proved" but only "inferred", and as such, is subject to numerous powerful objections.

and we, as their parents, educators and leaders, have a duty to help them respond.

If the Holy Spirit actually did anything more than exist as a biblical concept, i guess he would have a 'duty' to educate you as well.  But unfortunately, like the child who rationalizes Santa's inability to fit into a chimney, you don't care that nothing at all can be rationally credited to the Holy Spirit's direct intervention, you will simply tell yourself over and over that the Holy Spirit never does anything on his own, but only works "through" Christians...that way, you can always pretend that the Holy Spirit's work is real despite the fact that your own efforts are much better interpreted as  purely naturalistic phenomena.  Nothing was ever a more gratuitous afterthought, than "the Holy Spirit".  What are you gonna say next?  Angels are the only reason you weren't killed by a meteor today?

Here is one reasonable response we can give to skeptics, excerpted from a recent "Quick Shot" article:
“What do you mean by evidence? There are two forms of evidence: direct evidence (eyewitness testimony) and indirect evidence (everything else).

You started by addressing the question of "hard" evidence.  Since "hard" obviously means "direct" in this context, we have good reason to deny that "hard" evidence can also be "indirect".

Both forms of evidence are used to make cases in a court of law.

And hearsay is typically rendered inadmissible in a court of law, which would thus dispose of 99% of the biblical 'witness' to Jesus rising from the dead.  And that's just hearsay, when in fact the gospels have already been rendered inadmissible under the ancient documents rule...a rule used in courts that, with good reason, J. Warner Wallace doesn't think can help him in his desire to do what car salesman do...create a problem...sell the solution. That's right, kiddies...you cannot possibly live out your full potential in Christ unless you purchase materials authored by J. Warner Wallace. 

There is a large body of direct evidence for God’s existence, like the testimony of those who observed the Resurrection of Jesus

The trouble being that at best the only first-hand testimony to it is Matthew, John and Paul, everything else in the NT that testifies Jesus rose from the dead is second-hand, or other disqualified phenomena like dreams/visions, or testimonies that have been changed by textual variation.  I'd say 3 first-hand testimonies, whose first-hand nature is even disputed by Christian scholars (in the case of Matthew and John), is a pretty sad case for the resurrection of Jesus.  To say nothing of the other arguments that show them to be liars or deluded, such as arguments against miracles and against the alleged eyewitnesses' identities and authorship.

and the testimony of those who have experienced the miraculous intervention of God.

Sorry, for a couple of years I've been issuing a challenge to Christian scholar Craig Keener to provide checkable documentation for any "miracle" he claims has happened within the last 100 years, that he believes is the best attested. So far, no takers.  See here.  Likewise with every other claim propounded by those in Christianity who happen to disagree with their cessationist Christian brothers. (Isn't that a hoot?  Cessationist Christians believe miracles no longer happen, non-cessationists believe they still do.  Jesus, is there anything beyond Jesus' gender and God's existence that "Christians" agree on?).

There is also a large body of indirect evidence for God’s existence, like a universe that came into existence from nothing,

So god is like the parent who realizes the child is too ignorant to realize how dangerously they are to the camp fire, but who only uses "indirect" discussion and evidence to alert the child to this great danger.   You'll excuse me if I draw the conclusion that your camera-shy god's love for me is limited.

But for a more direct response: Since even Christian creationist organizations like AiG and ICR claim the big bang contradicts the bible and contradicts science too, you can hardly fault atheists who agree that the big bang contradicts the bible.  For example, Dr. Jason Lisle is a Christian astrophysicist who researches issues pertaining to science and the Christian Faith.  He says:

In fact, there are many contradictions between the big bang and the Bible.

...Therefore, for those who believe the Bible, the big bang is not an option. 

See here.  I'm an atheist, I'm not arguing that the big bang is false because it contradicts the bible.  That would be stupid.  I'm arguing that if even other Christians who are more educated on the big bang than J. Warner Wallace, insist that the Big Bang contradicts the bible, then atheists obviously cannot be considered 'unreasonable' to regard the big bang as unbiblical, and to accordingly laugh at J. Warner Wallace as somebody interested in pushing populist crap.  Let Wallace first engage the Christians who have formal education in astrophysics, who find the big bang unbiblical.  Let him host a debate between Christian apologists who accept it and Christian apologists who don't...then maybe his pointing to the big bang will appear to have somewhat more plausibility than the case of a child pointing to a dollar under their pillow as proof of the tooth fairy.

the naturalistically implausible appearance of fine-tuning in the universe,

The second law of thermodynamics doesn't say systems always tend toward disorder.  It says CLOSED systems tend toward disorder.

Evolution and the Second Law
Some critics claim that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because organization and complexity increases in evolution. However, this law is referring to isolated systems only, and the earth is not an isolated system or closed system. This is evident for constant energy increases on earth due to the heat coming from the sun. So, order may be becoming more organized, the universe as a whole becomes more disorganized for the sun releases energy and becomes disordered. This connects to how the second law and cosmology are related, which is explained well in the video below.

See here. Of course I would disagree with the view that it makes sense to talk about something to be true for "all" of the universe, since I view the universe as infinitely large and old, while the word "all" necessarily implies a limitation (all the bread, all the cars, etc).

The universe is full of stars which are sources of energy for the planets around them, so that entropy or disorganization can be stalled or decreased through energy input.  But for proof that complexity can increase without intelligent intervention, when water freezes, its atomic structure becomes more complex.  I guess this is the part where you insist that it never gets cold unless an intelligent god blows cold air?

the miraculous origin of life from inorganic matter,

God of the gaps fallacy.  Every time science admits it doesn't have the answer, you fill that hole with "god did it".  But it was only science alone that weaned you away from mistaking epilepsy fits for demonic possession...unless you wish to say that Jesus has imparted some of his power to epilepsy medication, and that's why this chemcical is capable of holding back the demonic manifestations?

and the improbable existence of information in DNA.

The way you idiots talk about the information in DNA, you would think that we could look at human tissue through a microscope and see various combinations of actual English letters.

All this indirect evidence is most reasonably explained by a Divine Creator.

Not when you remember that you cannot define "divine creator" or "God" in a coherent way without running back to your question-begging security blanket of "god's ways are mysterious".

Maybe I'm just stupid, but sounds to me like nobody is under the slightest intellectual obligation to worry about, or pay any attention to, concepts that cannot be coherently defined.  Pasting definitional labels on God is about as useful in the real world toward the goal of coherence, as would be insisting that Santa is a "special" human being who uses "magic" to deliver presents to the kids of the world.  That's also pasting definitional labels on Santa, yet does precisely nothing worthwhile in the real world.  Since the definition is based upon nothing in the real world, the attempt at coherence is abortive.  What else are you gonna say?  The big bag wolf takes medication for depression?

Do you think you might be interested in examining all the direct and indirect evidence related to God’s existence?”

Do you think you might be able to fulfill your Christian duties acceptably to God without purchasing anything produced by J. Warner Wallace?

As it turns out, there is plenty of evidence for the existence of God.

But given that the way you define "god", this thing is infinitely more complex than anything else, thus the concept of "god" would rank as the lowest probable explanation for any phenomena under Occam's Razor...which says the simplest explanation that accounts for the data is more likely to be the correct one. Gee, how "simple" is "infinitely complex"?

Wallace then uses this pic, and I comment respectively:




First, calling the Comos a "room" logically implies there's an "outside the room", but the notion that there is any such place as "outside the cosmos" is foolish....I don't care how often you think about other dimensions, or how often you think your dead grandmother calls out to you from the clouds.

Second, the Big Bang is considered both unscientific and unbiblical even by Christian creationists and apologists.  See above.  Apparently, what exactly the bible teaches or doesn't teach on the subject is far from "clear" and only a stupid person would insist that somebody has an intellectual "obligation" to "correctly" understand unclear Iron Age texts on theology.

The universe does not appear fine tuned.  The creation of stars and planets is understandable in completely naturalistic terms once you know what you are talking about.  There is no such thing as full destruction of matter or energy.  The carbon and iron which result from a dying star flying through space, degrade and eventually get used again in the formation of other stars and planets.  See the First law of thermodynamics: neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed.  There is no such thing as brand new creation, anything that exists outside the mind is never more than just the reconfiguration of previously existing atoms.

Abiogenesis has not been proven yet, but the surprising results from the Miller Urey experiments showed that the building blocks of life did not need any intelligent designer to put them together.   See here for a primer, see here for more scholarly stuff.

Personally, given the fact that life is purely naturalistic, while "supernatural" is plagued by incoherence at the definitional level), I don't find panspermia (life originated elsewhere and arrived on earth via aliens or comets) to be more improbable than "god did it".  The truth is that the universe is infinitely large and old, which gives it plenty of time to eventually chance upon the right combination of materials that result in self-replication.

I cover the "limited universe" bullshit in my rebuttal to Frank Turek's objective morality arguments here.

See here for more of my answers to Wallace on similar issues.

If biological organisms display attributes of intelligent design, then apparently the reason carnivores inflict misery on other creatures is because god wanted them to be this sadistic before sin came into existence (see here).  Genesis 1:31 says God's creation, before the Fall, was "very" good, and this has created a storm of controversy among Christian apologists and creationists, because if the old-earth creationist model be correct, then the pre-Fall world, which God was calling "very good" was at that time filled with carnivores inflicting misery on other animals merely out of need to eat (i.e., God thought a world full of carnivores that inflict misery on other animals was "very" good)...which conclusion the young-earth creationists insist makes God into an evil sadist, since they say carnivorous attributes didn't start forming in animals until after the Fall. See  Kent Hovind clobber Dr. Hugh Ross on this point here at time code 1:28:00 ff.  Hovind says he doesn't think it "very good" that a lion should rip the guts out of a zebra...to which Ross had nothing much to say except how that the new creation, still in the future, would be "better"  (despite the obvious objection that if God is perfect, then whatever he created in a pre-fall world would have been not only perfect, but morally perfect, so that since nothing can be better than perfection, nothing in the future could ever possibly be "better" than the pre-fall state of life).

Wallace says 'evil and injustice persist' but this is only because he has a child's view of god's love...in the bible, the "loving" god sometimes takes "joy" in inflicting death, disease and torture on his followers when they stray (Deuteronomy 28:63).  the Christians who blindly assume abortion is sin apparently never read that part of the bible where god credits himself with all death (and since god is perfect, anything that god does, is morally perfect, such as doing what he does behind the scenes to facilitate killing).  See Deuteronomy 32:39.  I do not ask whether God can be morally good to kill.  I ask whether God can be morally good to cause one human to kill another.  But if you say the mob boss was morally good to plan and authorize a killing, you just said the punk who actually pulled the trigger was doing something morally good.  So that if you seriously believe that bible verse, then you are morally justifying all human murder, even if you don't realize it.

If you insist that the analogy to the mob-boss and his punk is not sufficient, maybe you should ask yourself why you bother attempting to use "human reasoning" in the first place, since in fact you'll quickly toss it out the window merely because it rebuts your theology. You are like a cashier who decides, based on her  mood, whether or not she will employ correct math when handing change to the customer.

Wallace then says ""Outside" the natural realm"", apparently aware that the concept of "outside the natural realm" is incoherent and would only be found plausible by those who already believe such "place" exists, despite the sheer lack of evidence for any such thing.

Wallace then says transcendent objective moral truths exist, but I've already destroyed Christianity's most vocal champions on that point.  Matthew Flannagan could not answer my criticisms of his objective-morality model and quietly stopped responding when I turned up the heat and asked him why he assumes child-torture is absolutely immoral.  He simply thought his position necessarily true and those who disagree with it necessarily wrong, no need to actually prove anything  See here.  I also clobber Frank Turek's best efforts to show objective morality.  See here.

Wallace then says "humans possess free agency", thus playing into a very popular concept held by people for reasons having nothing to do with actual study of philosophy.  But the term "freewill" begs the question "free from what?".  Free from the laws of the physics?  Free from the brain?

The trouble for the libertarian and others who believe in genuine free agency is that such absolute freedom logically results in irrationality...that is...when you wish to eat fast food and on the way you eventually decide against Burger King and for Taco Bell, genuinely free agency means there was, ultimately, no reason that compelled you to choose the way you did.   Your agency was just a coin standing on its edge, it happened to fall over toward the Taco Bell side of things, and there is no "reason" why it fell that way...just "just" decided at the moment to choose that choice.  Thus to say our agency is truly "free" is to say it is also free from the laws of causation, which automatically puts the libertarians in the same fantasyland as Eden and "other dimensions", and therefore imposing not the slightest scintilla of intellectual obligation on the materialist atheist to bother with such stupidity.

Freewill is also refuted by the fact that individuals have consistent personality characteristics.  Did you ever wonder why it is that kids, even twins, raised in the same house by the same parents, often display very different personalities even in infancy?  Since you cannot blame their environment, you have no other option except to blame the only other possible culprit...genetic predisposition.  This is why some kids survive abuse just fine, while others are turned into criminals because of it.  While I understand crime victims who say 'I was abused as a child too, but I didn't turn into a criminal because of it", the scientific truth is that a person's ability to counter the influences of their environment cannot be anything other than their genetic predispositions..

Freewill is also refuted by the fact that ingestion of physical chemicals can cause us to make much different choices than we normally would.  The child who climbs the walls all day long is doing so for chemical-brain reasons which we now call ADHD, which can be controlled by Ritlan.  What...does Ritlan have a spiritual effect on a child's freewill?  Did God invent Ritlan, or toss it down from heaven? Of course not, our decision- making mechanisms in the brain are nothing but pure electrochemical reactions.  That's precisely why physical substances are capable of causing us to decide things in ways we normally wouldn't.  Depressed people stop being depressed when they smoke drugs.  The good girl can be convinced to act immorally at the party if she drinks enough alcohol.  Calm people can be short-tempered if they drink too much coffee.  Etc, Etc.

Wallace will say that the brain's being affected by physical substances doesn't completely cancel the possibility that perhaps the mind merely comes into the body using the brain as an interface, and when the interface is chemically damaged, the resulting choices and personality are too.  But the stupidity of this response is found in the question "comes into the body from where?"  You guessed it...from another dimension.  Christians literally believe the mind originates in the twilight zone. They also believe in other stupid things...like the idea that atheists are under some sort of intellectual obligation to "answer" bits of ignorance like this.

Also, only stupid people think babies have freewill, so since everybody agrees babies don't have freewill, and most people think adults do, the question naturally arises:  why don't human beings exhibit freewill from birth...if in fact freewill is "free" from physical limitations, coming as it allegedly does from the spiritual dimension?  The honest answer is that our ability to make rational choices is an attribute we gain over time and growth, which therefore means the ultimate basis of our will is firmly rooted in the physical world, leaving Christians and their 'spiritual dimension' crap out in left field.

Finally, that the bible is of no help whatsoever in answering this question is clear from the fact that the bible did nothing to resolve the Augustine/Pelagius debates, and did nothing to resolve the Calvinist/Arminian debates, and did nothing to resolve the disagreement between Luther and Erasmus on the nature of the will, and has done nothing to reconcile the current church splits over this doctrine that these prior debates spawned.

Did those debates do anything to help today's apologists come to resolution on the issue?  No.  James Patrick Holding wants the world to view him as a "smart guy", yet adopts Molinism (the abused child produced by the Calvinist/Arminian stalemate), a stance that Calvinist "smart guys" Steve Hays and Dr. James White consider ridiculous and unbiblical.

And for the Christians who foolishly equate the mind with the spirit, they will find their dreams dashed under 1st Corinthians 14:15, where Paul necessarily distinguishes the mind from the spirit, which thus leaves open a biblical door to the possibility that the bible will allow for the "mind" to be purely and wholly physical.

And don't even get me started on the fact that Christians also disagree on whether the bible says man is a dichotomy (body + soul or body + spirit), or trichotomy (body + soul + spirit). Google "trichotomist debate".

So you are a rather stupid fuck if you think opening your bible will do anything toward guiding you toward "truth" about the matter of human freewill.  What...maybe you think the Holy Spirit is more interested in guiding YOU into the truth of such matters than he was in guiding past Christian giants like Augustine, Calvin or Luther?

Finally, Wallace says "consciousness exists in the universe", but even pretending for the moment the naturalistic explanations for this are weak, "god" remains an incoherent concept, so that because the naturalistic explanations are less incoherent, the rational person should favor them above the "god did it" excuse.   Learn how the advocates of various views respond to each other in Joel B. Green and Stuart L. Palmer, eds., In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005; 2^nd ed., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010).  See Christians disagreeing with each other about trichotomy here.

And I do not concede the weakness of naturalistic arguments for consciousness.  The discussion about freewill, supra, also shows the purely naturalistic and physical nature of the mind.  If a person can undergo a major personality change due to brain injury or disease affecting the brain (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, including old folks forgetting names of family and forgetting who they are or where they live), then we do not immediately leap to "but couldn't there be another dimension that the mind comes into the body from, and when the interface is damaged, it falsely makes the will appear to be physical only?"

Instead, we draw a conclusion similar to the one we draw when we notice that a person's bicep is responsible for their during curls in the gym, and when that muscle is severed or severely damaged, they can no longer do those curls:  We conclude the basis for muscular power is purely physical...we do not conclude that maybe the muscle power comes into the bodily tissue from another dimension, and the physical injury giving rise to weakness merely inhibits the spiritual aspect from manifesting itself fully.

However, you can bet your life savings that if the bible had said the power of our physical muscles comes from the spiritual world, every Christian apologist in creation would be insisting my above-logic is merely "worldly" and "incorrect" and "not according to Christ".