I'm in a book again! "Did God Create the Universe from Nothing?" by Jonathan M.S. Pearce

I'm very proud to say that I contributed a chapter to another book by Jonathan Pearce and Dr. James East. 

This lovely book provides quite the response to the Kalam Cosmological Argument.  My contribution was related to Craig's inconsistencies in applying science to the philosophy of time, but Jonathan has an very broad set of objections to the argument.

It was even good enough to warrant a foreword by Jeffrey Jay Lowder, one of the OG's of Internet Atheism.

You can purchase a virtual or physical copy of the book here from Amazon. It definitely would make a nice stocking stuffer for any infidels this holiday season.

Responding to Tim Keller's "Making Sense of God" Talk

The other day one of my former pastors who I am still friends with posted the following video of Tim Keller giving a talk at Google to give an overview of his new book "Making Sense of God".  He specifically asked his non-believing friends if we'd like to have a discussion about it.

I obliged, but it ended up being a 1500 word response and I was pretty happy with it, so I've decided to post it here on my blog.

For reference, here's the video.  My response below the fold only covers the main talk, not the Q&A.

Countering the Moral Argument Part 2: Responding to William Lane Craig

Note: What follows is the script for my YouTube video on Countering the Moral Argument Pt 2.  Keep reading below for the transcript!

Once again I’m rather surprised to see that apologist William Lane Craig has deigned to respond to my videos again in his podcast.  What I am more surprised to see is how Craig could so blatantly either ignore my arguments entirely or misconstrue my objections when attempting his own response.  To be fair to Craig in some cases his misconception could be attributed to how I worded things, but in other cases he even states a position that I explicitly argued against in my video, without even mentioning the objections I made against that position. 

Since this is a counter-response, I’m including links in the description box to my original video and website where you can listen or read my arguments, as well as link to William Lane Craig’s website where you can download his podcast and give it a listen or re ad the transcript.

That said lets go through Craig’s responses to my objections to the moral argument.

An Atheistic Master Class Video on Counter Apologetics

Not too long ago I posted about cheering on Jeff Lowder in his debate with Christian apologist Frank Turek. The debate hasn't been made available yet, but Jeff had prepared so much material for the debate that he knew he couldn't fit it all in.  

Not wanting his work to go to waste, Jeff took the slides he created and then created a nearly two hour and thirty minute video going through all of the material refuting Frank Turek's book "Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case".  

Jeff hits at least twenty arguments in this video, and he hits them hard.  He also exposes quote mined texts used by apologists of biologists and atheist philosophers by showing where the quotes are being used in a misleading way (ie. James Rachels), or where the quotes aren’t relevant or are cherry picked (ie. Richard Dawkins).

While the material here is based on Turek's book, it's really a complete walk through of philosophically rigorous refutations to the kind of arguments you'll hear from just about any apologist. 

This video is an Atheistic Master Class in how to answer apologetics. If you want to learn how you should respond to arguments, then you need to watch this. 

The main problem is that this is an extremely comprehensive and rigorous video.  As such, I took the time to go through and provide an outline of what is covered and where it is in the video so that you can digest it in bite sized chunks if you wanted.

Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/10/01/the-victims-of-christian-apologetics/#sthash.9S5vtD69.dpuf

The first 10 Minutes are a run through Jeff’s "VICTIM" arguments showing that Value, Induction, Causality, Time, Information & Intentionality, Morality are assumed by Christian apologetics, not explained by it.

After that Jeff switches to answering the arguments put forward in Turek's book. Below is the argument being answered, the time stamp, and a link to that point in the video.

Responses to apologetic arguments

1. Causality/Kalam – 10:43 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=10m43s
2. Causality/Fine Tuning – 28:55 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=28m55s
3. Reason/Laws of Logic – 34:28 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=34m28s
4. Reason/Applicability of Math – 45:04 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=45m4s
5. Reason/Free Will – 54:37 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=54m37s
6. Information/Origin of Life – 1:02:19 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=1h2m19s
7. Information/Epigenetic Information (ie. argument against naturalistic evolution) – 1:20:58 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=1h20m58s
8. Information/Intentionality – 1:23:15 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=1h23m15s
9. Morality – 1:23:45 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXWTc6-toDo
10. Morality/Implications of Atheist Morality – 1:51:31 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=1h51m31s
11. Morality/Laws requiring Law Giver – 2:01:37 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=2h1m37s
12. Evil – 2:02:43 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=2h2m43s
13. Evil/Examples of Apologetics committing the Fallacy of Understated Evidence – 2:06:43 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=2h6m43s
14. Science/Science Presupposing God – 2:16:10 - https://youtu.be/xXWTc6-toDo?t=2h16m10s

Overall the video is fantastic. It has some audio level issues, but in terms of content it is completely spot on.  

Bravo Jeff!

Turns out we didn't need church after all

I wanted to do a quick post as an update on my possible attendance at a Unitarian Universalist church.

To do a quick summary, my wife & I wanted to ensure our daughter had more interaction with other children, especially in leisure time. My wife also did somewhat miss the church community, especially since she was also a stay-at-home parent for about 2 years at the time.

This led me to investigate attending a Unitarian Universalist church.  There was one practically around the corner from our house, but my only hang up was related to what exactly they'd be teaching our daughter. 

So I sent an email to the church's contact address and laid out what we believed (atheists, but humanists) and what my concerns were (what was taught about supernatural beings in their kids classes).

To my surprise I got...absolutely no response.

My guess is that they don't really have someone checking the contact email account at the church, which is really odd given what I know about how even small churches operate. I used to be a very active volunteer when I was a believer, even when most of the volunteers were quite old, we had something setup where the email would go to someone who would respond.

Life went on, and then I only recently remembered how odd it was to have never heard back from the church.  This caused some reflection in me, and I realized we as a family have nearly zero desire to go to the church anymore and I wanted to elucidate why.

Cheering for Jeff Lowder

Tomorrow, renowned Internet Infidel Jeffrey Jay Lowder will be debating Christian Apologist Frank Turek at Washburn University on September 21, 2016.

Unfortunately the debate will not be live streamed, but it will be recorded and should be posted online afterwards.  Suffice it to say if you can attend this one live, go do so.

Why am I posting about this? Because it's hard to overstate the amount of respect I have for Jeff Lowder. When it comes to doing counter apologetics on the internet, Jeff is one of the OG's. In 1995 he co-founded and was President of Internet Infidels, one of the most accessible and comprehensive resources of serious atheist thought in philosophy of religion online. When I was deconverting, infidels.org was invaluable.

This isn't just a case of someone being the first to do something, Jeff currently blogs over at The Secular Outpost and I consider him to be one of the best people making atheist content on the internet.

He is extremely precise in his work and in his charitable representation of the views of his opponents. He's also extremely well versed in apologetic arguments and counter points.  He's literally got at least 20 years of studying this topic, and if you search Internet Infidels or his posts on The Secular Outpost you'll see he has an educated position on all of the common arguments.

Basically, Jeff knows his shit.

He's squaring off against Frank Turek, a very successful apologist. Frank isn't a Alvin Plantinga or a Richard Swinburne, that is he's not a professional philosopher. He's someone who takes philosophical arguments and presents them in accessible ways. This is not to insult Frank Turek at all, or to say that he doesn't understand his material - he does.  He's a clearly a professional communicator, and from what I've seen of his debates he's a pretty damn good one at that.  If I was an Evangelical Christian, I'd be glad to have someone as effective as Frank Turek communicating my views.

Jeff isn't a professional philosopher either, but I think Jeff knows the material so well that he will be able to point out the problems with Frank's arguments in ways Frank probably hasn't had much experience with.  This will serve to deflate the aura of certainty that Franks apologetic style comes off as selling to evangelicals, and that's a service we should applaud as atheists.

This will definitely be one to watch if you care about precision in the philosophy underlying the theism vs atheism debate.  I eagerly look forward to the video or audio being released online, it should be quite the debate.

Go Jeff Go!

Sean Carroll, Catholicism, & Unfalsifiable Metaphysics

We interrupt your regularly scheduled quiet time on the Counter Apologist Blog to bring you an actual post!

Lately I've been doing some thinking about apologetic arguments, and that leads me to thinking about metaphysical arguments in general.  Part of this post is to help me document some ideas I’ve had about fundamental issues regarding metaphysical arguments. 

Much of this is triggered by reading posts by Catholic apologists and theologians.  Catholics are unique in that they tend to be Thomists, and so ascribe to a kind of Aristotelian metaphysics that was endorsed by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is the official philosopher of the Catholic Church, and much of their theology is based on his work. 

If the name Aquinas rings some bells, it’s because he’s the guy who has the “Five Ways” or rather five arguments that supposedly prove the existence of a god.  One of the most famous of these arguments is one for a “prime mover” or an “unmoved mover”.

The argument itself isn’t really important per-se, it’s actually air tight in terms of premises following to their conclusions.  The issue is the Aristotelian metaphysics it assumes and is based on.  Suffice it to say, if you’re using the kind of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics favored by modern day Thomists, the conclusion readily follows.

What atheists disagree with in terms of the Thomists is the metaphysics they assume.

The problem with metaphysical assumptions, especially ones that try to get to the base of fundamental reality, is that proving or disproving them is either trivially easy or impossible.  The trivial ones are easy to disprove because they assume something we can show not to be the case, and the others are so well crafted so as to be immune to disproof – though that also leaves these principles underdetermined.  We can’t actually prove or disprove these kinds of assumptions.

So it was this tweet by one of my favorite contemporary atheists, Sean Carroll, discussing an objection to his book “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself”.

The objection comes from a writer/apologist named Brandon Vogt who writes at http://www.strangenotions.com

In the book, it appears (I’ve not yet read the book) that Sean directly goes after the Aristotelian metaphysical assumption that “Everything in motion must be moved by something” and as Brandon helpfully clarifies, by motion he means any change whatsoever. 

Sean points out that the conservation of momentum casts doubt on that assumption, using the example of “objects on frictionless surfaces moving at constant velocity do not need a cause to keep moving”.

Brandon counters that at best this shows we don’t need a sustaining cause to keep an object moving, it wouldn’t show we don’t need an initial cause to start said motion. 

Brandon continues to say that by failing to distinguish between types of causes, Sean misses the point of the argument, and so fails to refute it.

The more I think about it these underlying issues, the more I have to agree that Sean hasn’t, and in fact can’t, disprove Aristotle’s premise.  However at the same time I don’t believe Brandon or anyone else can establish the premise either.  

The assumption of the naturalist is that physical stuff that makes up our universe has always existed. Right now we think the most basic form of physical stuff is what is described by quantum mechanics (QM).  The idea we get from QM is that this “stuff” has and will always operate according to these QM laws.  There is no “cause” of it to have started, and it doesn’t require anything to sustain it either. It just exists and it does its thing.
The theist will disagree with that, but that’s our position. 

A Thomist says that all changes require some kind of cause, which is backed up by our intuitions and our everyday experience.  The problem comes from example that Carroll brings up, and from another famous example, that of radioactive decay.   Eventually radioactive elements will decay. It’s completely random, and as far as we can tell it simply happens. There’s no physical cause of it, not apparently anyway, and the best we can do is predict a range in which the decay will happen (this is the half-life of a radioactive element.

You might think this would disprove the Aristotelean metaphysic, but they will respond that just because our best theory doesn’t show that there is some kind of cause for the decay, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Perhaps there’s a better theory out there that will come about once we solve other problems in physics.  

The issue is that while it’s true we can’t definitively say there is “no cause”, it certainly appears as if there isn’t one give our best information and theories.  

So the key metaphysical principle at stake in the argument gets put in this kind of perpetual underdetermined status, never to be resolved. 

Study this stuff long enough and you’ll notice that this is a very common theme for nearly any major topic in metaphysics. Metaphysical principles are relegated to metaphysics, instead of just physics, because the principles themselves are so general and crafted in a way that they can’t in principle be proved or disproven. 

So in the end, atheists will point to things like the conservation of energy or what Sean refers to as the Quantum Eternity Theorem which says either time is infinite or it is not fundamental. Either way, looking at our best description of the physical stuff (ie. quantum mechanics) the physical stuff has “always existed”. 

A theist can counter even that evidence by saying, somewhat like Young Earth Creationists, that god still created the universe a finite time ago and made it look as if it has always existed, but there isn’t evidence of this. 

In the end, the theist holds to their metaphysical principle which is based on our intuitive “every day” experience of how the world works, and the atheist points to findings from science which undermines those intuitions and principles. 

The theist can say that our evidence doesn’t truly undermine their principles, but they can’t exactly prove that we must accept those principles either.  So round and round we go, with neither side able to prove the other wrong, because of the very nature of the question being asked.

Convincing Theists to Abandon Theism?

This is intended as a conversation piece in response to a rather interesting blog post by philosophical theologian Stephen J. Graham.

Despite being quite very opposed to Stephens views, I really enjoy interacting with him on Twitter.  Most exchanges we have are very respectful and we seem agree on a variety of topics not related to theism.

His blog post really caught my eye since he tries to answer philosopher Anthony Flew's challenge of asking what it would take to abandon theism.

Stephen's answer is quite candid, pointing out he doesn't really know exactly what it is that grounds his theism but never the less he gives two things which could undermine his Christian beliefs:

1. Showing the concept of god is incoherent.
2. Conclusive historical evidence of Jesus not existing or the resurrection being a hoax.

Stephen also goes on to describe how a traumatic event in his life could make the problem of gratuitous evil more convincing to him personally, which would undermine his belief in god.  There isn't too much I would say in response to that point, so I'd like to focus on the first two.