Common Sense Atheism What...

Common Sense Atheism » What I Think of the New Atheists http://commonsenseatheism.com/?
p=7992
Archives
About Me
Home
Common Sense Atheism

“When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will
understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen Roberts
Mar
23
2010
What I Think of the New Atheists

I was recently interviewed on the Oklahoma Atheists Godcast. Here is the MP3. Below is a rough transcript I typed up, so
you can more easily quote me and disagree with me:
Damion: So what do you think about the New Atheists?
Luke: Perhaps a more interesting question than 'What does Luke Muehlhauser think about the New Atheists?' is 'What do
atheistic philosophers think of the New Atheists?' and I've spoken with or interviewed a couple dozen of them by now and I
was surprised to find that they all have more or less the same opinion of the New Atheists, and their opinion goes something
like this. They say:
Look, the New Atheists have probably done more good for atheism in the past 5 years than all we atheist
philosophers have done in the past 50 years, writing our obscure technical articles in professional philosophy
journals. The New Atheists have put atheism into public discourse more than ever before, they've opened the
door so that people can criticize religion just like they criticize everything else like political positions and
economic policies and moral positions and so on. They've helped people to feel comfortable coming out of the
closet as nonbelievers. So they've really done a tremendous good. But of course, none of these best-selling New
Atheists are actually trained in any of the relevant fields like religious studies or philosophy of religion, so they
make lots of embarassing mistakes and it opens them up to criticisms from Christian apologists that are 100%
correct.
And so that's basically what I hear when I speak to atheistic philosophers bout the New Atheists, and as it happens that's my
opinion, too.
Now of course, much of what the New Atheists have written is not that controversial or surprising. For example, Sam Harris
spends most of his time saying that we should be free to criticize religion just like we criticize everything else, that we
shouldn't accept extraordinary claims on the basis of faith, and so on. So, you know, I'm not going to complain about that
kind of thing. But of course... well, Dawkins says that The God of the Bible is jealous and petty and unforgiving, vindictive,
bloodthirsty, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, genocidal, you know, all those things and that's actually very easy to establish
just by reading the Bible. Steve Wells, the author of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, actually has this great blog post where he
lists each of those adjectives in that sentence from Dawkins and gives all the Bible verses proving each one. So people should
look that up.
Now, the believers will say, "But you're taking those verses out of context!" But they've never explained: In what 'context' is
it morally good for God to command the Israelites to commit genocide against another tribe, including the slaughter of all
their children and animals, but preserve the young virgin girls so they can be raped by the Israelites? Right? What context is
that, that that's a good thing? Or in what 'context' is it morally good for God to command that you stone your children to
death if they are persuaded to worship a different god? And of course, believers themselves almost never know anything
about the context of these verses when they claim that atheists take them out of context. They have no knowledge about
ancient Canaan or Biblical literature or any of that. So when people say that, they don't actually care about the context. They
have no idea if you'd be taking it out of context. What's really going on is not that they care about history or truth or taking
things in context, what's really going on is that they want to be God's Cringing Yes Men, where no matter what their God
does they'll just bow down and say, "Oh yes, my lord, my lord, you're so good and praiseworthy for commanding slavery and
genocide and rape. Everything you do is good, my lord. Just please, please give me eternal life." And that's what that's really
about.
1 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Common Sense Atheism » What I Think of the New Atheists http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=7992
Or, the believer might say, "Well, what about all the good things God does in the Bible?" Well yeah, I'm sure the Son of Sam
did some good things in his life, too, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a murderous psychopath. So God doing some good
things doesn't get him off the hook from commanding genocide and slaughtering millions of innocent children and animals in
Noah's flood, and all that kind of thing. So Dawkins is quite right to point that out and to say it loudly and clearly.
So there are lots of things like that where the New Atheists are spot on and they should be commended for saying these
things loudly and clearly.
But then, there are other things where they make really basic mistakes in a way that allows Christian apologists to point out
their mistakes and make them look stupid. And the problem is that the pastors and apologists can say, "Look, this is how bad
the arguments of the New Atheists are, so you really needn't bother reading any of their books. Just turn back to the Bible.
Don't read the good parts of these atheists' arguments, because they're really all just as bad as this one or two arguments." So
I really wish atheists would be more careful to apply critical thinking to their own arguments. You know, there are plenty of
good arguments for atheism, so you don't have to rely on really bad arguments, and that just opens you up to making
Christian apologists look smart and make the New Atheists look stupid.
I'll give you a few examples. One is what Richard Dawkins calls 'The Central Argument' of his book... I think, in chapter 4 of
The God Delusion. He gives a 6-step argument for why God is extremely improbable because God is complicated and since
complicated things are improbable, therefore God is very improbable. So you would need to work your way up to complexity
by a slow, gradual process like evolution. But it's very improbable that a complex thing like God would just 'poof', be there,
without a slow gradual process beforehand.
Damion: Is that the argument that he called the Ultimate 747 Gambit?
Exactly, so God is the Ultimate Boeing 747. I think it was Fred Hoyle who said that... you know, the idea that complex life
could evolve just by chance, which of course is not what evolution claims, but... the idea that that could happen is like the
idea of a tornado running through a scrap yard and assembling a Boeing 747. Actually, I don't think Fred Hoyle was using it
in that context, but apologists actually did take it out of Fred Hoyle's context and applied it to evolution, and of course it
doesn't apply to evolution, which doesn't claim that things evolve by chance - natural selection is, just like artificial selection,
a very non-random process. But anyway, the idea is that Dawkins' says: 'Well, if you're going to go with that analogy, God is
the Ultimate Boeing 747 because he has, you know, all the information in the universe in his brain. He has relations to
everything in the universe. That's an incredibly complex being: he changes his mind, he thinks, has relationships, he
incarnates himself into a complex, physical, biological body. That's an incredibly complex being, so God, if anything, is more
complex than any life that evolved.' So if you're gonna say that life is improbable, then you gotta say God is way, way more
improbable.
So to a lot of atheists that sounded like a really good argument, but I want to explain why that's not the case.
First of all, his 6 points that he gives, his 6 steps in the argument, is logically invalid, which is to say, even if all of his
premises in his argument were true, they wouldn't even support his conclusion! So that's just a logic 101 mistake. I think
Daniel Dennet read the draft of his book beforehand, and I don't know why Dennett didn't point that out to him, because
Dennett's a philosopher and he would at least recognize an invalid argument.
But maybe Dawkins wasn't trying to give a logical argument, but rather a kind of messy outline toward some argument he
wants to make but never does. Either way, it's not very useful.
But there's another problem, and it has to do with Dawkins fundamentally misunderstanding what theism actually claims.
This was pointed out by an atheist philosopher named Erik Wielenberg who published a paper in a Christian philosophy
journal called 'Dawkins' Gambit, Hume's Aroma, and Something Something'. Anyway, what Wielenberg says is: Look, the
God hypothesis is that a being with a particular set of properties exists. Right? The God hypothesis says there's a being that is
all-powerful, all-knowing, non-physical, personal, and necessary. That's what almost every Western theologian has thought
of when he writes about God.
Now, some people will be unfamiliar with this term 'necessary.' Necessary means it had to be that way. So, consider
Goldbach's conjecture that every even number is the sum of two primes. We don't actually t know if that's true, but if it is
true, then it had to be true. If that is true, it's necessarily true. If Goldbach's conjecture is true, there's no possible world in
which Godbach's conjecture could be false. Just like the Pythagorean theorem. There's no possible world in which the
Pythagorean theorem is false about right-angle triangles in Euclidian space. Even if God exists, he couldn't make the
Pythagorean theorem false. It's necessarily true.
So theologians say something similar about God; they say God is a being that necessarily exists. That is, God exists in every
possible world. It's impossible that he couldn't exist. So if God exists, then his probability of existing was always 1. We don't
know, starting out, whether or not God exists, but if God exists then by definition God had to exist because he's supposed to
be a necessary being.
So here's where Dawkins' argument misses the point. Dawkins talks about God as if he was a contingent being like we are.
2 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
He talks about God as if he's a being like us, so that it's possible that we could have existed, and it's possible we might not
have existed. And then, if that type of being is very complex, then such a being is very improbable, because it had to have
come about by way of a long, gradual process like evolution. Well, that's fine, but of course nobody believes in a Contingent
God. They believe in a Necessary God. So if God exists, then by definition his probability of existing was 1. So there's no
sense in saying that if God existed his probability was very low, because you're then talking about two different definitions of
the term 'God.' So Dawkins' argument tries to disprove a God that nobody believes in.
Now of course Dawkins could say that there can't be any such thing as a necessary being, and he could give an argument for
that, and that would be on-target for disproving theism. But he doesn't do that, and anyway if he did offer such an argument
against the possibility of a necessary being, then that argument would by itself disprove theism, and the argument he gives
about complexity would be totally irrelevant.
So this is kind of the epic fail of the New Atheists. This is the central argument of the most popular book by the most
respected New Atheist, and it is a complete failure. It fails in just about every way it's possible for an argument to fail.
And so pastors can tell their flock: 'Look, this is how bad the arguments of the New Atheists are. They don't even address
actual theism, and they're logically invalid, and some of the premises aren't even plausible, so you really needn't bother
reading their books at all - to read what Dawkins says about the God of the Old Testament or any of that stuff.' And that's a
big problem, because then Christians remain isolated from all the good arguments for atheism and all the good points that the
New Atheists make.
I'll give another example. Christopher Hitchens in his book gives a very famous atheistic retort to Christians who offer God
as an explanation for fine-tuning or whatever. Hitchens says, basically, "Well then who made God? Who designed the
designer? To offer God as an explanation is to explain nothing, because it leaves himself unexplained."
Now this is a very popular atheist retort, and it's totally wrong. I believed it for a while. I thought "Yeah, that's a good
question." And then I read my first book on epistemology, and this is kind of an Epistemology 101 mistake.
See, in order for something to be the best explanation for something we observe, we don't also need to have an explanation
of the explanation. Physicists do this all the time. They said atoms were the best explanation for certain things we observed -
and they were right - even though they had no idea what could possibly explain the atoms themselves. And then they said
that protons and neutrons and electrons were the best explanation for some atomic phenomena we observed - and they were
right - even though they had no idea how to explain protons and neutrons and electrons themselves. See, the real problem
here is that if you say a best explanation itself must be explained, then you could never explain anything! You'd need of an
explanation of the explanation, and then an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then an explanation of the
explanation of the explanation of the explanation and on into infinity and we could never explain anything.
So this idea that in order for an explanation to be the best you also need to have an explanation of the explanation would
completely destroy science, which I don't think the New Atheists want to do since they seem rather fond of science.
So this is just a simple confusion on the part of people like Hitchens, who is not trained as an epistemologist. The reason the
God hypothesis - that 'God did it' explains something - the reason the God hypothesis is a bad explanation for things is
because it doesn't have any of the qualities that other successful explanations have. The God hypothesis is not testable, it has
poor explanatory scope, it has no predictive novelty, it doesn't fit with our background knowledge, it has terrible ontological
economy, and so on. That is why God is a bad explanation for things, not because God himself is unexplained. But what I
just talked about is way more complicated then saying "Well then who made God?" and I think that's the attraction of this
retort - it's just very, very easy. The five-year old can make this retort. But, you know, the five-year-old hasn't studied
epistemology. Unfortunately, it's an ignorant retort, and it just makes atheists look uninformed when they use it, and it gives
pastors another reason to dismiss the New Atheists and tell their flocks that this is how bad atheistic arguments are.
I have one more favorite example. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman isn't usually considered one of the New Atheists, but
anyway he is a non-believer who has published a couple best-selling books in the last few years, and almost every atheist I
know really loves his books. Well, his most popular book is Misquoting Jesus about how the Bible is compiled from all these
ancient manuscripts and fragments and these manuscripts disagree with each other all over the place and it's obvious in many
places that the later author has completely changed the original text to fit with his own theology, and so it's a tough job for all
these Biblical scholars to try to put together what these writings originally said, and that's what textual critics do. That's what
Bart Ehrman is.
And the impression Ehrman leaves you with in Misquoting Jesus is that the text of the New Testament is just hopelessly
confused and lost and we can't really know what the Bible says because we have so many thousands and thousands of
variations in these ancient manuscripts. And what's really disturbing about that impression that he leaves you with is that it's
the opposite of what he himself writes to his scholarly audience. See, Ehrman knows that the number of textual variants we
have for the Bible is a blessing, not a curse. If we didn't have so many variants within a few centuries of the original
documents, we would be in a much worse position. All these variants are precisely what allow scholars like Ehrman to detect
those places where a later author has corrupted the text. All these variants are precisely what allow scholars like Ehrman to
3 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
figure out a probable answer to which of the variants is correct. Now, compare this to our earliest manuscript for the writings
of Plato, which comes twelve hundred years after the original text. Now that is a hopeless situation. We have no way of
reconstructing Plato's original words precisely because we don't have variants to compare to one another, and precisely
because none of our manuscripts are from anywhere near Plato's time.
So we're actually extremely lucky with regard to the text of the New Testament, and Bart Ehrman knows it. All these
variants in the manuscripts are exactly what enable him to do what he does for his entire career.
But Ehrman doesn't point out any of that in Misquoting Jesus. He leaves his readers with the impression that all these
variants totally undermine our ability to know what the New Testament says about really important issues.
Damion: Isn't that the book where he argues that some of the most well-known anecdotes like the woman at the well... that
we have reason to believe these were added later?
Luke: That's right. A lot of what Ehrman writes is totally true and not controversial at all and really good, especially his
newest book, Jesus Interrupted - is basically just a compilation of everything that scholars know about the Biblical text, and
so this is stuff that's not controversial at all. So that book is fine.
Damion: It's just an attempt to popularize what the scholars already know.
Luke: Exactly, it's popularizing what scholars already know, even Christian scholars, from the last 200 years. So part of that
is this bit about this story in the gospel of John where Jesus says to the woman who was caught in adultery, "He who has
never sinned, cast the first stone." And it's a beautiful story, definitely not in the original New Testament, and all scholars
know it, so in most of your modern Bibles you'll either see it not there, or you'll see a little note that says 'This is not in the
original manuscripts.'
And so there's a lot of stuff in the book like that that's just not controversial at all. Also, the ending of Mark - the women are
silent at the end of Mark, they never go and tell anybody in the original manuscripts.
Damion: In your study Bible all you get is a little parenthetical that says 'The earliest manuscripts don't have this' and people
read past the parentheticals, so they need to know that this wasn't in the original book.
Luke: Exactly, so Ehrman says a lot of really good, totally non-controversial stuff like this in his book, and so I just don't see
why he has to put bad arguments in there, because then that allows the pastors to tell people, "Look, this is how bad the
arguments are, you don't need to read the rest of it." Because then Christians are going to miss out on all this really basic
Bible scholar knowledge about the Bible.
But I want to get back to... you know, in Misquoting Jesus he leaves his readers with the impression that there are so many
variants that we can't really know what the Bible says about all these important issues, but then here's this quote from page
126 of his scholarly book, The Text of the New Testament. He says:
Besides textual evidence derived from the New Testament Greek manuscripts and from early versions, the
textual critic compares numerous scriptural quotations used in commentaries, sermons, and other treatises
written by early church fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our
knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the
reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.
So you compare that kind of optimism to the pessimism of Misquoting Jesus, and he seems to be saying two different things
to two different audiences. And again, alot of what Ehrman says is not controversial at all, but then... this is kind of the entire
thrust of his Misquoting Jesus book, which I think is totally off base from his own words to the scholarly audience.
So he seems to be saying one thing to a popular audience and another thing to the academic audience. And actually this is a
little more disturbing than the mistakes of the New Atheists because Ehrman actually is trained in a relevant field. He's one
of the most-respected textual critics of the New Testament in the world, and he still gets it badly wrong when writing for a
popular audience, at least in some significant ways that allow Christian apologists to tell their flocks not to read the good
parts of his books.
Christian Biblical scholars like Daniel Wallace have made exactly these criticisms of Ehrman, and so again he can say, "See?
Look how dishonest and terrible these New Atheist arguments are. So don't worry your pretty little heads. Jesus loves you
and I'll see you in heaven." And that's a real problem.
So those are just a few examples of how the arguments of the New Atheists can be quite bad in a way that is damaging to the
rise of secularism. It's damaging to the causes that a lot of us really care about.
Damion: I know you have some issues with Sam Harris.
4 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Luke: Like I said, a lot of what Sam Harris says is really uncontroversial. It's about not taking things on faith, the danger of
religions disagreeing with each and being in conflict with each other because their ancient books says contrasting things... a
lot of his stuff I really can't disagree with at all.
I think my main problem with Sam Harris' approach is that he identifies the source of the problem in religion and I think the
source of the problem is just in human nature in general. I think it has more to do with dogma and lack of critical thinking,
and there's nothing particularly religious about dogma and lack of critical thinking. There actually are lots of dogmatic
atheists.
I don't know if you can be dogmatic about atheism because there's no content to atheism, but atheists are dogmatic about all
kinds of things, or they're superstitious about all kinds of things, or they lack critical thinking about all kinds of things. And
we just surveyed how the New Atheists lack critical thinking about their own arguments. So dogma and lack of critical
thinking, that's a human condition, not particularly a religious condition.
I know and interact with the work of lots of Christian philosophers who are much better at reeling in their critical thinking
than some atheist philosophers or the New Atheists. So my problem with Sam Harris is that he wants to make this an us vs.
them fight, and I don't think that's what it is. I think it's all of us vs. dogma and in favor of critical thinking, whether or not
you happen to believe in gods.
Damion: I gotta defend Harris a little bit. He does attack atheists faiths like Maoism and Stalinism.
Luke: Exactly, so I think Harris knows this [that the problem is dogma, not religion], but maybe he thought he would cause a
bigger uproar by making his book about the problem of religion rather than the problem of dogma. He says, for example,
'Stalinism basically is a religion, because it's so dogmatic.' I mean, there are lots of religions that aren't very dogmatic -
Taoism would be one of them. Or several forms of Buddhism, where they don't really care at all whether you believe certain
principles. Or Quakers - they don't care at all what you believe, they more care what you do.
So there's lots of religion that is non-dogmatic, and there's lots of non-religious people who are dogmatic - Stalin would be a
very good example. So to try to cast this problem of Stalin as a religious idea is just to complete redefine religion so that it
gets the bad shift. The problem with Stalin and the problem with many religions is the dogma and the lack of critical thinking.
I understand how most of us who are familiar with Western religion could see religion as the problem.
Damion: Isn't faith a broader term? When I say faith, I mean anything where you accept some set of dogmas on faith,
without any critical thinking. So The End of Faith is an attack on a lack of critical thinking and a preference for dogma over
reasoning it out.
Luke: Yup, I think you're exactly right. I do think Harris is skating this line between 'Well, do I want to attack religion, or am
I really attacking dogma in general?' And his assignment of Stalin, who is a complete atheist, to the religious category
because of his dogma, kind of shows me that Sam Harris wants to make it about religion rather than about dogma in general.
But I don't really know. In some of his speeches that he gave after [his book] he seems to sort of shift that distinction. So I
think what you're saying about Sam Harris is right, and my complaints about Sam Harris are much less than with some of the
other New Atheists. Also, Sam Harris doesn't really give any specific arguments for most anything in his book, so it's not like
Dawkins' argument where I can look at the argument and pick it apart from a logical point of view. Or Christopher Hitchens'
statement.
So I don't really have much complaint with Sam Harris' work. Most of it is pretty unobjectionable. I would just want to shift
the focus away from an us vs. them perspective, religious vs. non-religious, and shift it more to something that Harris is
sympathetic with, which would be a dogma vs. critical thinking - or really, all of us trying to work for ourselves on our own
minds in avoiding dogma and promoting critical thinking.
Damion: Did you want to talk about the whole suicide bombing issue?
Luke: That would be an interesting anecdote about critical thinking in my own experience. I read Sam Harris' book, and he
opens his book with this story about a suicide bomber and he says, "Why is it so easy for us to guess this man's religion?"
And the implication there is that this is obviously a Muslim who is doing this. It's not some atheist who wants to blow up a
bus.
Damion: Not some radical Hindu, or something like that.
Luke: Well, that's what we would expect, but as it turns out if you count up the number of suicide attacks from 1980 to
2005, it actually is more likely that it's a Marxist Hindu, namely the Tamil Tigers. When you do the math, as Robert Pape has
done - he's a University of Chicago political science researcher - it turns out that there's actually a stronger correlation
between a particular kind of political situation and suicide bombing than there is between a particular religion and suicide
bombing.
5 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
When I read Pape's work, Pape's arguments were more persuasive to me than Harris' arguments were, so I sided with Pape
and I wrote an article on my blog explaining why I thought that Pape was right. Basically Pape says that suicide bombing is
mostly a phenomena of oppressed groups wanting to evict democratic invasion of their homeland. So that's almost always the
case whenever there is suicide bombing. That's what's happening right there in that country.
Now a lot of that happens to be in Muslim areas - Iraq is a pretty obvious, major space where most of the bombing is done by
Muslims, but that's basically the thrust of Pape's argument - it's that this happens mostly where democracies have invaded
and annexed the land of some other people, and so these people - the only way they can fight back is, you know, they don't
have any gunships like the USA does, so the only way they can fight back is to blow themselves up. And so Pape wants to
say that that seems to be more of a cause than religion of these suicide bombing instances. Count them all up and correlate.
So I was persuaded by Pape's arguments and I wrote an article on my blog explaining why I was persuaded by Pape's
arguments and then - one of the most useful features of having a blog is to have people criticize your opinion, and that's what
happened. A lot of people started pointing me to other articles, and I started reading more about this, and in particular I read
a meta-study that analyzed the arguments of maybe 10 different people on the subject, and that made me a lot less certain of
my conclusion, and so I rewrote my article on my blog, and said, "In this article I originally sided with Pape against Harris,
but now I'm less certain about that," and all that kind of thing.
So this is me responding to the evidence, I think, and using some critical thinking with regard to my own opinions, and
changing my mind, and I think that's what we all have to do. So maybe it'll turn out to be the case that as I work my way
through Harris' books again, and the counter-arguments, and his counter-counter arguments, maybe I'll change my mind
about Harris as well. I've worked more deeply with the examples that I gave before with regard to Dawkins and Ehrman and
Christopher Hitchens than I have with Sam Harris. So it might be that my opinion on Sam Harris changes.
And anyway, I'm not complaining with Sam Harris' work as much I am about specific point of Dawkins' and Hitchens' and
Ehrman.
Damion: Was there anything in Daniel Dennet's most recent popular work that strikes you as a bad argument.
Luke: The work of Dennett that is associated with the New Atheist movement is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon, which basically is an extended argument that we should study religion just like we study everything else. First
of all, that's not very controversial. Second of all, the scientists who have been doing that for a century are going pick up
their heads and say, "Well, what do you think we've been doing for over a century?" This is already happening, so I'm not
clear on the reason behind Dennett's book.
He doesn't actually spend much time arguing 'Does God exist? Does God not exist?' That's not the thrust of his book. So it's
kind of outside the realm of what the New Atheists usually write about. And again, the vast majority of what he writes about
in that book is not anything I can complain about.
One minor point that I would pick out would be where he represents the cosmological argument. He does a real quick
dismissal of all the theistic arguments for the existence of God. And when he gets to the cosmological argument, he says that
it goes like this: "Premise 1: Everything must have a cause. Premise 2: Therefore the universe must have a cause. Premise 3:
Therefore God must have cause the universe" or something like that. But that's not what the cosmological argument says at
all, it's a complete misrepresentation of the cosmological argument.
Obviously, the Christian isn't going to say that everything needs a cause, because then he'd be committed to the proposition
not only that the universe has a cause, but also God has a cause. And the Christian doesn't want to say that. I've never seen
the cosmological argument represented that way by a theist, and so what Dennett is doing here is - I mean, this is such a
basic point in the cosmological argument that I can't imagine Dennett... it's hard for me to imagine he would be confused
about, and so it really looks like he's putting up a straw man, where he's putting up a weaker version of the actual argument
so that he can easily take it down, instead of dealing with the actual argument.
So it's things like that that I would just rather not see at all from the atheists, because... it does reinforce that we all need to
work on our critical thinking skills, that's really what it does.
Damion: I totally agree that we should engage the best arguments that theists have. Sometimes theists will make bad
arguments - maybe they don't make that particular one, but sometimes they'll make bad ones. Sometimes popular writers will
make transparently bad arguments, but we should engage the best version of the cosmological argument that we can find,
and the best version of design arguments that we can find, because what's the point of digging into the Medieval scholars and
finding one that's easy to knock down? How's that going to serve anyone's needs.
Luke: Actually, I think it would be useful to engage the bad arguments that Christians do give because in the popular work
especially, the people who read those just have no idea that they're bad. They don't understand why they are bad arguments.
So I think it is good to just get rid of those bad arguments and explain why they're bad arguments. Then, when we're
interested in going after the truth we can engage these better arguments. But the problem with Dennett there is that not only
was not engaging the best arguments of Christians, he wasn't engaging an argument that any Christian has ever made.
6 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
So it just completely misses the point. No one is making that argument.
Damion: I bet I could find someone who makes it that bad, if I did some work and asked around. People make really bad
arguments in real life, because most people don't think about issues like you do.
Luke: Sure, well... if I were to argue about how the mechanics of a car would work, I would have no idea which argument is
good or bad, because I know nothing about the mechanics of cars. And most people have never studied logic or critical
thinking or the arguments for God or epistemology or any of that, so I'm not really blaming people for reading these
arguments and thinking that they're compelling. What I'm more concerned about is that if you're going to write an entire book
about religion or philosophy of religion you should study religion and philosophy of religion first.
Damion: Our book club here, in Oklahoma city, we've been going through the Four Horsemen. We're about done with that,
and I'm hoping we can move on to some more sophisticated books. So do you have a set of books that you'd recommend that
go beyond what the New Atheists have written.
Luke: Well, about my Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge, which I stole from John Loftus of the blog Debunking Christianity,
who said, "Look, if you want to know the truth, do yourself a favor and read both sides of the debate, or at least two sides of
the debate, between theism and naturalism. And if you're a Christian and you finish it and you still thinking Christianity is
true, then at least you're a lot better educated Christian and you know better how to respond to the arguments of atheists.
You might even be kind of a trained apologist if you go through and read both sides.
And if you come out the other side and you think, "Well, actually Christianity is false." Then in that case you haven't lost
anything either, because God never did exist, and so you haven't lost anything that was real - you've only improved your
ability to interact with the world as it really is. And vice-versa for atheists as well...
And so on my blog I gave some books that I recommended. With regard to atheism, I don't particular recommend the New
Atheist's books - not because they're all bad, just because it's a mix of good and bad, except maybe Sam Harris' book...
But then if you want to read about whether or not God exists and familiarize yourself with the arguments, there are lots of
good books. Unfortunately on the atheist side there aren't as many that are at the popular level and also good. If somebody
has done a lot of reading in philosophy and is pretty well familiar with that, there's plenty of books they can read. They can
read Miracle of Theism by J.L. Mackie, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification by Michael Martin, Arguing for Atheism by
Robin Le Poidevin, Logic and Theism by Jordan Howard Sobel, Arguing about Gods by Graham Oppy, The Non-Existence
of God by Nick Everitt, and on and on, Theism and Explanation by Gregory Dawes...
But at the popular level, honestly the atheist books that are available are not as good on this as the Christian books that are
available, just because there are a hundred Christian books that are available for every one atheist book that is available, so
inevitably there are some pretty good Christian ones at the popular level.
The closest thing that I can think of is John Loftus' Why I Became an Athiest is pretty good, though it can get kind of heavy
at times. And then, 50 Reasons People Believe in a God by Guy Harrison. That one is really easy to read, and it's got one
short and breezy chapter on each of the top 50 reasons people give for believing in a god - it's just a nice summary of why
skeptics don't think each of these things is a very good reason. So that's a really great book to start with. A lot of it is
paraphrase of things like Hume, and you don't even know that you're reading the words of a famous philosopher...
Another book I would recommend would be Sense & Goodness Without God by Richard Carrier. It present not just a
defense of atheism but an entire atheistic worldview. What would you think about what things exist or how we come to
knowledge or what are mathematical objects or what's morality, what's politics - from a thoroughly naturalistic worldview.
This is a great book, especially for people who somewhat recently left a religion and became skeptical of religion in general,
because in most religions you're give this complete way of looking at the world - there's a moral system, a political system, all
your questions are answered. So when you suddenly realize that God's don't exist, there's this vacuum - Well what do I think
about that now? Everything that I thought about morality was premised on the idea that God commanded such and such, so
what do I think about morality now that I know God doesn't exist?
So there's this huge vacuum, and Richard Carrier's book is maybe the only one-volume popular-level work that will address
all those questions and give one plausible worldview that you could adopt and test against your reason...
There's also a book coming out in April that I'm very excited about called The Christian Delusion, which is edited by John
Loftus and has contributions from people like Richard Carrier and Bob Price. It looks like it's gonna be a really great
compilation of skeptical arguments by people who are really expert on each of the individual topics...
Damion: What process did you use to put together your particular list of 10,000+ pages.
Luke: Oh, right, my Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge. How did I choose the books? The books on that list are both theistic
or apologetic in nature, and also skeptical or atheistic in nature. The way that I chose the books on the list was... I tried to
choose the books that I thought made the strongest case on either side, and then I arranged them in order of how easy they
7 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
were to read, so people could start with the first couple books and pick up all the arguments and get an idea for how
philosophers think about these issues, and how to think logically, and what the concepts involved are. And then it slowly gets
more into the technical issues involved here, until at the very end when you're reading somebody like Plantinga or Sobel
where... if you make it that far...
Damion: You may as well go ahead and major in philosophy at that point!
Luke: Exactly! You might as well become a philosopher if you can understand those books thoroughly. So that's kind of the
idea there. There are lots of books I haven't read from either side, so I'm probably missing some really good ones, but I've
read a lot of books, and these were the best of each side. And I also tried to balance them so that you would see the same
subjects covered.
Damion: Right, you've got one book on each side about Jesus, for example.
Luke: Exactly, or I've got one book on each side that compares the philosophical foundations of theism vs. the philosophical
foundations for the entire worldview of naturalism - that kind of thing. So I tried to balance them out and help people see
both sides of each issue.
Damion: When are you going to get around to debating William Lane Craig in person?
Luke: Well, here's the thing, I would definitely lose. I do actually plan to get into the debate circuit, I really enjoy public
speaking, I really enjoy interacting with people at the tip of your tongue as it were, and I really enjoy educating people about
these issues, so I probably will do a lot of that. But I don't have any experience in live debate, and William Lane Craig has
been doing live, Lincoln-Douglas style debates since he was in high school. He's also a Ph.D. philosopher and historian on all
of the relevant issues. So that combination makes him almost unbeatable.
The part that the atheist is usually missing when he goes up against William Lane Craig is that he hasn't been in any debates
at all. The atheist thinks he's giving some kind of leisurely lecture and they end up being completely destroyed by the
technical mastery that Craig has.
Damion: Right, they don't get a chance to rebut his arguments, they run out of time, they don't call out drops, all that
debating technique.
Luke: Yeah, you know what you're talking about. And I would be in the same boat, because I have no experience debating...
yet. I think I would be able to better than some, but - well, that would be fun. Maybe if William Lane Craig is still alive when
he's 95 years old and I've had 20 years of debate experience, then maybe I'll give that a try.
Damion: You can hardly do worse than any of the New Atheists. You've seen how it went.
Luke: Well, the real problem is that most atheists don't even understand Craig's arguments in the first place. There's been
like two people that he's debate that actually understood the moral argument, and they end up just talking about something
completely different. Or they don't understand Craig's response to the problem of evil, and you won't unless you've read
Plantinga, but if you've studied any philosophy of religion at all, then you've read Plantinga. So they don't know how respond
to his arguments.
These are very old arguments. It's not like there's aren't atheistic responses to Craig's arguments. It's just that the people who
debate him don't see the need to read the literature before debating him.
Damion: Or even listen to his 5 arguments, which he gives every single time. The amount of unpreparedness is killing me!
How could you go in cold when he has given the same 5 arguments 20 times in a row?
Luke: If you're going to debate William Lane Craig you know word for word what he's going to say in the opening 20
minutes. And all of his writing, all his debates, everything is available online - some of it you can order at the library, and
become completely familiar with what William Lane Craig is going to say in response to every single thing the atheist says.
There's almost nothing that hasn't been said, so you know what William Lane Craig's response is going to be, and you can
develop a counter-response.
Ray Bradley is a philosopher, and he actually read Craig's paper before debating him, and that's good. Almost nobody else
does that.
Damion: You mean the kalam cosmological argument paper?
Luke: Bradley's debate with Craig was specifically on the issue of hell or the moral argument, so he read some of Craig's
work on those topics. But yeah, if people are going to go against Craig, they should definitely read his article on the kalam
argument, his popular work on the teleological argument, his popular and scholarly work on the moral argument, his work on
the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, and the last non-argument that he gives about the Reformed
8 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Epistemology of inner witness of the holy spirit providing grounds for properly basic belief in God. This is all very
extensively discussed in the literature, there's no excuse for being completely unaware of what Craig's going to argue when
you debate him, but unfortunately that's what most atheists do.
Damion: Yeah, it's really disappointing. I've been making my way through the massive list of debates you've compiled;
thanks so much for doing that. It's a service to the world. But yeah, you hear Craig make the same arguments, and you think
"Okay, this time maybe they're gonna hit the argument" but oh... wait... nevermind.
Luke: Nope, they're gonna lecture about hos evolution makes Christianity implausible, or something else totally irrelevant to
the argument.
Damion: That's fine when they're doing their opening statement, but in the rebuttal period I want to hear at least two of his
arguments addressed and shot down.
Luke: Heh, yeah, just two - that's all we're asking for!
Damion: Two out of five!
Luke: Yeah.
Damion: Of the atheist bloggers in the atheist blogosphere, who are the top 3 or 4, in terms of popularity?
Luke: Oh, in terms of popularity. Well, if you're counting by visits and you include blogs like the Flying Spaghetti Monster
blog that mostly just posts funny pictures and things...
Damion: No, I mean people who are writing stuff. There's P.Z. Myers, there's Hemant Mehta... is Dawkins?
Luke: Well, Dawkins is not really blogging. Most of the action on his site is... the people who run his site will post news
articles or the latest video of a Dawkins talk or something like that...
So if you're asking about the most popular atheist blogs of articles, P.Z. Myers definitely is the most popular, then there's the
Friendly Athiest, he wrote that book about how he sold his soul on ebay, and then there's me, there's Daniel Florien at
Unreasonable Faith, there's vorjack at Atheist Revolution, there's the skepchick girls, John Loftus at Debunking Christianity.
It's hard to tell how popular the About.com blog on agnosticism and athiesm is, but I think that one's popular by Austin Cline.
Damion: So congratulations, you've made the top three!
Luke: I have, I shot up like a rocket, I'm way up there! It's been a lot of fun. And what I really enjoy is that when you have a
lot of readers, you get lots of criticism, and so that really helps me refine my views and people will say "Oh, no! Go read this
scientific article" and then I'll find out I was wrong about that, so that's a really benefit of having a popular blog.
Damion: Thanks for your time and your blog. Keep up the good work on that, I hope you don't get burned out.
Luke: You too, I'm glad for what you're doing, and I look forward to what you do with the Godcast.
Written by lukeprog in: General Atheism, Podcast |
71 Comments »
Erika
Thanks for putting up the transcription! That was long, but a good read. (Quote)
Comment | March 23, 2010

Ajay
This is a very interesting interview. My main critique is this: in criticizing the ‘New Atheists’ you often make an
apples-to-oranges comparison; i.e. “William Lane Craig, PhD Christian philosopher, defeats Christopher Hitchens,
Journalist for Vanity Fair”. I think, even though these two men did debate, that this comparison is invalid. You’re
picking popular science atheists and comparing them with theist philosophers.
There are two simultaneous debates going on; one on the level of popular science and an academic debate. What if I
said to you, “Boy, Graham Oppy really destroys the arguments of Rick Warren.” Or C.S. Lewis. Nobody would really
be impressed by that, right?
9 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
This isn’t to say that your criticisms of the ‘New Atheists’ are incorrect. I agree with quite a few of them. But to
criticize them for not matching up to theistic philosophers does not seem to be an apt comparison. (Quote)

lukeprog
Ajay,
You’re exactly right about the apples to oranges here. Remember that I did talk a lot about my own apples to apples
comparison (the Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge), and that I explained several times that Craig is highly qualified and
the New Atheists aren’t trained in any relevant fields. (Quote)

lukeprog
Erika,
You actually read that? I hated realizing how incoherent I still am when I do not have the option to edit my words
before putting them out there! (Quote)

Scott
My biggest problems with the New Atheists is that they are like the marketable rock stars. You turn on the radio and
hear generic, pseudo-grunge rock – that’s Dawkins, et al. Going through the motions, just not necessarily good at it. If
you dig deeper, you find the good stuff, the more experimental, louder, heavier, rock – that’s what’s on the Truth
Challenge. It’s less accessible, but the payoff is so much better.
That said, I do enjoy Hitchens’s social criticisms, and I like the calm forcefulness Harris displays – his TED lecture was
great. (Quote)

lukeprog
Sobel is math rock, you might say… (Quote)

Ajay
Luke – that’s fair. And I am going to get around to that truth-seeker challenge. I just have to clear out 6 months from
my schedule… (Quote)

Scott
Yep – I’ve actually jumped down that rabbit hole recently. Meshuggah is warping my mind right now, DEP a bit less.
Even the proggier stuff like Isis is fantastic. My biggest complaint is that they’re so wild, they sometimes forget to
make it musical, perhaps the same way Sobel is a crappy editor. I stress my profs by lamenting how badly so many
philosophers write. They say it should be about the clarity and accuracy of ideas; I say if they wrote better, their ideas
would be clearer. (Quote)

MC
Luke,
I really think you’re giving too much intellectual credence to Christians who advance the cosmological argument.
Having talked with hundreds upon hundreds of Christians–lay apologists, pastors, evangelists, nuns, et al.–in
discussions on religion and atheism, I can only think of two or three who have advanced the cosmological argument
whose first premise wasn’t similar or identical to the form: “everything must have a cause” or “everything must come
from something”. Perhaps my experience is unique, but I highly doubt that the average evangelical thinks of God in
such strict modal terms that you impute to them. From what I can tell, they treat God as just another contingent person
like their aunt or father, except with amazing super-powers. Basically, an invisible Superman.
Hell, I’ve personally stunned dozens into complete shock and silence of door-knockers with the question “who made
God?” or “where did God come from, then?” at their instance that “everything has to come from something!”
10 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Plus, I seriously think that considering the finer issues of modal ontology–given that all cosmological arguments seek
as their modus operandi to prove a contingentia mundi or ab initio mundi–make very germane questions concerning
the ontic grounding, priority, or supervenience relation(s) (etc.) involved. And, given these considerations, the “what
created God” objection, doesn’t seem so irrelevant even to the KCA as many think.
As Hume (Cf. part IX of Hume’s Dialogues), Kant (pp. A567/B595-A642/B670 of the first Critique), as well as J.N.
Findlay (1948) and others have argued, it isn’t at all obvious that the God of classical theism, even if it exists, exists in
all possible worlds. You might not realize what damage you’re doing, or to what degree you’re selling naturalism and
atheism short, by so cavalierly granting to theists that God is a necessary being simpliciter. It greatly handicaps one’s
argument for naturalism and atheism in the proceeding arguments and discussions; tantamount to giving the tortoise a
head start in Zeno’s paradox.*
*(This isn’t just an analogy: reading Oppy, Grunbaum, Le Poidevin, Morriston, et al., it is evident that, because the
KCA relies on the dualism/theism-friendly A-theory of time, set-theoretic considerations and treatments of time and
temporal sequences/events, like those of Zeno’s paradoxes and other supertasks, constitute challenges, which, for my
money, leave the KCA dead in the water.) (Quote)

TaiChi
“ So if God exists, then by definition his probability of existing was 1. So there’s no sense in saying that if God existed
his probability was very low, because you’re then talking about two different definitions of the term ‘God.’ So
Dawkins’ argument tries to disprove a God that nobody believes in.” ~ Lukeprog
Suppose someone came up with a purported proof of Goldbach’s conjecture. The mathematical community thinks that
it is possible that the the conjecture has been proven, so they lean ever so slightly towards thinking Goldbach’s
conjecture is true. Several mathematicians go over the proof, and are unable to find a flaw. Now the mathematical
community thinks the conjecture is likely. A hundred mathematicians inspect the proof, with the same results. And
now the mathematical community accept the proof, and so accept Goldbach’s conjecture as a necessary truth.
Notice that, despite the necessary nature of the fact whose truth is in question, it still seems to be sensible for the
mathematical community to ascribe loose probabilities to Goldbach’s conjecture. On your view, this makes no sense –
you think mathematicians should refrain from talking probabilistically about what must be a necessary truth. But this
sort of talk does make sense, because the probability being assigned to Goldbach’s conjecture isn’t a deep fact about
the conjecture itself, and so does not conflict with it’s necessary nature. Instead, the probability is a measure of the
evidence which we have for the conjecture, which is something external to it.
Let’s take another example. On a popular account of reference, the name “water” is a rigid designator – it picks out
the same substance in all possible worlds. Moreover, what the term “water” rigidly designates is the same as what the
term “H2O” rigidly designates, and so the fact that “Water is H2O” is a necesssary truth. But despite this, there was a
time when this necessary truth was not known. Later, it was hypothesized. Still later, it was critically endorsed. Finally,
it became part of scientific theory, having achieved this status gradually, in correlation with the accumulation of
scientific evidence. So, again, we have a necessary truth which was once thought possible, then probable, then finally
accepted simply as true by the scientific community. Yet, despite the necessity of “Water is H2O”, and so it’s
metaphysical probability of 1, it would be unreasonable to say that the usual judgments of probability made by
scientists about the matter were somehow incorrect. Why? Because the probabilistic judgments are epistemic, they
describe the strength of logical inference from the evidence that the scientists have to the hypothesis they have, and do
not describe ‘water’ or ‘H2O’ themselves.
The same goes for Dawkins’s musing about God. That God has a low probability is not an essential fact about what
God is, but about the kind of evidence we have on the question of God’s existence. And so Dawkins is well within his
rights to talk probabilistically about a necessary kind of being.
One final point: Wielenberg doesn’t make the argument that you’re making here. He only brings up God’s necessity
because he thinks that it entails God’s not having come into existence, and he takes this non-origination to knock down
Dawkins’s improbability argument. Perhaps you know this, but you implied in the interview that the argument you
gave was his, so I’m not sure. (Quote)

lukeprog
MC,
You may be write about theists saying ‘everything must have a cause.’ Maybe I’m just not talking to the right theists.
I don’t grant that God is a necessary being. I was just saying that’s part of the definition of God.
11 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
One of the reasons I reject the KCA is because I reject the A theory of time. But I’m not confident in that. I need to
study more philosophy of time. (Quote)

lukeprog
TaiChi,
I’ll have to re-read Wielenberg’s paper; perhaps I’ve misremembered it!
I take it Dawkins was arguing for a low metaphysical probability for God. Things do get more complicated if we start
talking about epistemic probability. I agree with everything you said on that subject. (Quote)

lukeprog
TaiChi,
I re-read Wielenberg’s article and see that you are right. Thanks for pointing this out! (Quote)

Aaron
Luke – fantastic, thanks!
One thought about Ehrman’s book. When you surmised what you thought was wrong with his book, I got the
impression that he covered it.
I got the impression from his book that we can be confidence from 200-300AD onwards because of the number of
manuscripts available (the blessing) however our confidence goes down the closer we get to when they were written.
Therefore we can be confident our Bibles of today are an accurate representation of Bibles circa 200AD but not say
100AD and therefore we cannot exactly say what was originally written – which wouldn’t sit well with
fundamentalists.
Perhaps you have a different interpretation? (Quote)

Haukur
Good post, Luke. Kudos for changing your mind on the suicide bombers. (Quote)

John W. Loftus
AhhhhhHaaaaa! You admit to having stole the Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge from me!!!!
Gotcha.
Hey, together we’re making a difference. Keep it up Luke. (Quote)

Charles
Luke,
Great interview. Mine is just a minor gripe. I would rather that you didn’t revise blog posts by changing the original
content that was submitted. It really rips a whole in the mind when you go back and read something later and can’t
figure out why what you remembered is now different when the reason it seems different is because it is! (Quote)

Justin Martyr
Hiya Luke,
Just wanted to say that I think this is one of your top posts. (Quote)
12 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Hermes
Re: Contingent/non-contingent, necessary/not-necessary.
That’s just part of the word game. If statements are made on that basis, and are not backed up, then they can be
ignored. If those who don’t back them up are miffed their assertions aren’t taken seriously then they have to make the
first step to back them up.
As discussions on religious ideas and theistic conjectures are both constantly sliding topics, it’s a waste of time to leap
ahead and address issues that have not even been raised or if have are not adequately supported beyond the stage of
being an assertion.
So, with that said, was it sloppy not to say something? Probably. Yet, the only thing I would actually fault Dawkins on
isn’t in him not inoculating the conversation from those criticisms, but not addressing them as they clearly should be
when the criticisms were specifically voiced; Why should those statements (on contingent/non-contingent,
necessary/not-necessary) be given any reply, if they aren’t even supported beyond the level of an assertion? (Quote)

Feldmm1
I agree with MC; you are just plain wrong when you say that theists don’t advance that form of the cosmological
argument. I remember being fed that argument when I was seven or so, and even at that age I could see the big flaw,
but even when I pointed it out, the person telling me the argument still did not get the concept, instead saying that God
does not need a cause because he is eternal. If I was given the Kalam Cosmological Argument at age 7, I would have
not seen a contradiction, and I would probably be a theist today.
It’s not just MC and I that have found people that advance arguments like this. In How to Win Every Argument: The
Use and Abuse of Logic by Madsen Pirie, under the section for the fallacy of the conclusion which denies premises,
Pirie remarks, “The conclusion which denies its premises constantly slips uninvited into religious arguments” (36).
Then, Pirie uses arguments similar to the first cause cosmological argument that Dennett used in order to show
examples of the fallacy. So I suspect that this form of the argument is much more common than you think. In fact, I
would hypothesize that the reason that “what caused God?” is such a popular objection is because many atheists have,
in fact, had someone try to feed them the argument when they were little, and they spotted the flaw; then, they
confuse more sophisticated arguments like the KCA with the first-cause argument and give the same objection.
Moreover, although it is obvious to us that there is a contradiction, it does not seem obvious to many other people that
there is one, hence its popularity and transmission (or attempted transmission) to the younger generation. Thus,
although I agree with you that there are indeed many Christians which know enough logic to spot the fallacy, there are
also many that do not, so it was a good idea for Dennett to refute that variation of the cosmological argument in his
book, in order to point that out to anyone reading the book that has not seen the fallacy. However, I do agree that
Dennett should have addressed more sophisticated cosmological arguments like the Kalam cosmological
argument. (Quote)

MauricXe
Luke,
What would turn you back to theism? (Quote)

Ken Pulliam
Luke,
Very informative interview. Regarding Ehrman, one point that I think is missed is that in his popular writing on
Misquoting Jesus, he is arguing against the evangelicals who believe in inerrancy. There is really no way to know for
certain that we have the original words of Jesus or of any biblical book for that matter. All scholars know this but
many evangelicals do not. We do have more relative certainty or reasonable probablility about much of the NT due to
the great number of mss but that is different than saying we can arrive at the original text. As Ehrman points out, most
TC today following Eldon Epp’s lead put the term original in quotations when speaking of the “original” text.
I think you are right to say that Ehrman’s point is easily confused. (Quote)

Feldmm1
13 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
I apologize if it seems like I am being a little rude when I say things like you are just plain wrong; I should have said
that you are mistaken. I think part of the reason I chose the words I did was because I am somewhat astonished that
you never heard any Christian say things like that before, when the fact that they do is extremely apparent to me, as
well as because it irritates me that theists which use the first-cause argument in which the conclusion contradicts the
premises are able to get away with it easily and then indoctrinate children with the belief that the argument works
before many of them know what the word “contradiction” means. I don’t know. Anyway, I apologize again. (Quote)

lukeprog
Aaron,
I’m glad to hear you got a different impression from Ehrman’s book. Perhaps it is not so pessimistic-sounding as I and
many others think.
What you say is of course correct, though note that we are in a much better position with regard to the NT than with
any other ancient text. (Quote)

lukeprog
John,
I think I admitted that in my very first post on the challenge, didn’t I? (Quote)

lukeprog
MauricXe,
What would persuade me to adopt theism? Exactly the same thing that would persuade me to adopt string theory, the
many-worlds hypothesis, or any other theory. Sufficient evidence. (Quote)

lukeprog
By the way, it should be noted that I already disagree with some of what I said back when this interview was
conducted. For example, TaiChi pointed out that I slightly misrepresented Wielenberg’s argument, and I think I would
be a bit softer on Ehrman now. (Quote)

James Thompson
Luke, I just listened to Sam Harris’ speech from Aspen. I thought he made a good point about dogma of Nationalism,
Politics and Religion being much the same.
I think the New Atheists don’t emphasize that point more.
Maybe Sam would do an interview with you? (Quote)

Ken Pulliam
Luke,
We are in a much better situation with regard to the NT text than we are all other ancient docs. However, the error
that Geisler and Craig make and which Ehrman calls them on is that we still cannot arrive at certainty on what the
original wording of the docs. is. That is not a problem unless you believe in inerrancy as Geisler, Craig and most
evangelicals do. (Quote)

Tony Hoffman
Luke: “Now of course Dawkins could say that there can’t be any such thing as a necessary being, and he could give an
argument for that, and that would be on-target for disproving theism.”
I think that you’re basically making a category error here. Dawkins is a populist writer, and he (correctly, I think)
14 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
criticizes the “reasoning” used to demonstrate that if a designer is required to explain existence, then the explanation is
either ad hoc or more improbable than that which it seeks to explain. And his argument does this.
What Dawkins argument does is relegate the theist to the position of arguing for a necessary God, which she is free to
make. The problem there (which he may have done through ingenuity or just good writing instincts), is that Dawkin’s
argument has chased the theist into the realm of the (technically) philosophical. That fight can, I think, be won on
different merits, but the fact is that Dawkins argument, while not being technically sound, does confine the theist
argument to place few can, or care to, follow. As a new atheist, I think he fits his function to a tee.
I sometimes wonder if you are not faced with the inverse of the curse of knowledge on this issue. (The term comes, I
think, from a psychology experiment where the player is shown a song that she must play using only her fingers
drumming the tempo, while the listener must guess based on that drumming. The result is that the drummer estimates
that the listener will guess the correct answer WAY more times than they really do. So I wonder if you may not realize
that Dawkins argument may only be designed to demonstrate not that God does not exist, but that the argument for his
existence can only be articulated in a way that virtually all Christians are unable to follow.) (Quote)

Christof Jans
I’m with Tony Hoffman here. Dawkins is basically saying that invoking God as an explanation is invoking something
that is more improbable than what you are trying to explain. So it’s not a good explanation. That is what Dawkins is
trying to say and I don’t see why it is mistaken. (Quote)

The “who made God?” objection : The Uncredible Hallq
Pingback | March 24, 2010
cl
I think my main problem with Sam Harris’ approach is that he identifies the source of the problem in
religion and I think the source of the problem is just in human nature in general. (Luke)
I’m glad an atheist finally said that. Every theist error has its atheist counterpart, because, it’s human nature to err.
Dawkins is basically saying that invoking God as an explanation is invoking something that is more
improbable than what you are trying to explain. So it’s not a good explanation. That is what Dawkins is
trying to say and I don’t see why it is mistaken. (ChristofJans)
Well, I thought Luke’s objections were valid, and I see Dawkins’ argument as mistaken for at least two reasons:
1) To simply label God “improbable” is a naked assertion (though I grant that the word ‘improbable’ was your addition
and may not appear directly in Dawkins’ argument as delineated in The God Delusion);
2) Causes are not required to be more complex than their effects. (Quote)

cl
Feldmm1,
“What caused God” is only a valid response to somebody who argues that all that exists requires a cause. (Quote)

Reginald Selkirk
My main critique is this: in criticizing the ‘New Atheists’ you often make an apples-to-oranges comparison
What’s wrong with that?
Apples and Oranges — A Comparison

by Scott A. Sandford (Quote)

Reginald Selkirk
and I like the calm forcefulness Harris displays – his TED lecture was great.
The one where he tries to claim that science can determine moral values? I thought that was philosophically retarded. I
15 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
look forward to lukeprog dismantling it.
Harris has a tendency towards black and white thinking which leads him into certain errors. (Quote)

mikero
I was surprised by your criticism of Sam Harris. In almost every Sam Harris video I can recall seeing, he has been
explicit that he is opposing dogma, of which religion is one instantiation. I know I’ve heard him say this many times. I
haven’t read his books, so can’t attest to what he writes in them. (Quote)

lukeprog
Ken,
Yes. (Quote)

Silas
Good job Lewk. Doing stuff IRL is hard, but you did well. (Quote)

Feldmm1
Feldmm1,“What caused God” is only a valid response to somebody who argues that all that exists
requires a cause.
Yes, that was the premise that was originally presented. All that the person needed to do was modify their original
argument to make it like the Kalam, but they did not. (Quote)

Haecceitas
Ken,
Technically, the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t even require the current existence of a single manuscript or a printed
version of the Bible. All that it requires is that the originals were inerrant (and even this is qualified to a greater extent
than many think – though you know this, obviously) when they were produced.
The doctrine of the preservation of scripture is another matter. (Quote)

Haecceitas
Swinburne rejects the logical necessity of God, by the way. But then again, he argues against the idea that God is
complex. (Quote)

lukeprog
Haecceitas,
Dawkins argument wouldn’t apply to Swinburne’s God, either, because Swinburne’s God is eternal, and never ‘came
into existence.’ Wielenberg notes this in his paper. (Quote)

Haecceitas
I haven’t read his paper, but isn’t it at least a bit more unclear whether Swinburne’s concept of God would escape
Dawkins’ criticism simply by virtue being eternal? Especially given his own emphasis on simplicity as a significant
factor in making a hypothesis probable (and conversely, complexity making a hypothesis improbable).
Also, you’d have a much easier time convincing everybody that Dawkins is attacking a straw man if you think that
eternity is all that is required for the concept of God to avoid the criticism. There may be at least sizeable minority of
theists who don’t think that God is necessary, but very few if any theist would deny the eternality of God. (Quote)
16 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53

Lee A. P.
Very informative interview. Regarding Ehrman, one point that I think is missed is that in his popular
writing on Misquoting Jesus, he is arguing against the evangelicals who believe in inerrancy.
Yes. Exactly. I am confused that Luke does not seem to understand that. (Quote)

Haecceitas
Luke,
One point that I wished you’d have made in this interview is that the definition of “faith” as inherently irrational as it’s
used by many of the new atheists is a gross misrepresentation if they are intending to interact with the actual top
apologists rather than what may be the perspective of the common person in the pew or certain fideistic theologians.
The evidentialists will typically define faith as conviction and trust grounded in evidence, whereas presuppositionalist
and reformed epistemologists will argue for warranted faith by a different route (still not saying that it’s “blind faith”
by definition). Christian apologists may be wrong, of course, but at least they should be allowed to define their own
terms. (Quote)

Haecceitas
I think people like Wallace are fully informed (obviously) about the textual issues and that may lead them to be
hesitant about affirming the doctrine of the complete preservation of Scripture, but this isn’t inerrancy as such. (Also, I
have no idea as to how many pastors, etc. will take the same route, so perhaps Ehrman’s points are legitimate when
criticizing them.) (Quote)

Ken Pulliam
Ken,Technically, the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t even require the current existence of a single
manuscript or a printed version of the Bible. All that it requires is that the originals were inerrant (and
even this is qualified to a greater extent than many think – though you know this, obviously) when they
were produced.The doctrine of the preservation of scripture is another matter. (Quote)
Yes, I agree but as Ehrman points out from a practical standpoint, if only the original wording is inerrant and we can’t
be certain about the original wording, then what value does inerrancy serve? I guess you could say that it means that at
least the beginning of the stream was not polluted but if it has become polluted since the beginning, what practical
difference does it make? (Quote)

Haecceitas
“Yes, I agree but as Ehrman points out from a practical standpoint, if only the original wording is inerrant and we can’t
be certain about the original wording, then what value does inerrancy serve?”
I guess someone might ask the same question about many other theological doctrines. But perhaps that’s just a wrong
question to ask. Why is it necessary that there should be some practical value? Is that the only basis for Christian
doctrine?
I suppose some inerrantists believe the doctrine simply because they see it as a logical consequence of holding that
God inspired the Bible.
But at the same time, one could argue (with considerable plausibility) that if the originals really were inerrant, then it is
very probable that the types of omissions from the original inerrant text that the may have crept into the textual
tradition are (in light of the wealth of textual evidence) rather insignificant for practical purposes. (Quote)

Conversational Atheist
I’ve been thinking about these kinds of objections for a while, and I think what Dawkins means is something like the
following.
It’d be like people coming across a tall wall with a name written in chalk on it 30 feet off the ground. A person might
ask, how could a person ever climb a ladder high enough to write his name on a wall?
17 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
If someone said, well you’re ok with the notion that a person, once attaining a height on a ladder, can climb back down
easily, right?
Right.
Then it’s easy, a person climbed a ladder to an even higher height, and wrote his name 30 feet off the ground as he was
climbing down!
The new problem becomes obvious — if the difficulty was to explain “how could a person got up a ladder THAT
HIGH”, how does “well, a person got up a ladder EVEN HIGHER and came down a bit” — do anything but make the
thing being explained even more difficult?
I think Dawkins isn’t trying to merely saying that because the thing you use to explain complexity is *unexplained* it
fails (I agree saying ‘unexplained’ alone doesn’t work for reasons you’ve previously argued). I think he’s saying that
because the thing you use to explain complexity is *more complexity*, the only think you’ve accomplished is created
a new thing that “needs to be explained” in the same exact way as the first — and to a higher degree. (Quote)

piero
Well, I thought Luke’s objections were valid, and I see Dawkins’ argument as mistaken for at least two
reasons:
1) To simply label God “improbable” is a naked assertion (though I grant that the word ‘improbable’ was
your addition and may not appear directly in Dawkins’ argument as delineated in The God Delusion);2)
Causes are not required to be more complex than their effects.
Yes, the word “improbable” does appear in Dawkins’s argument, and with good reason, I think. It is not a naked
assertion, but a consequence of the theistic argument for the existence of God that runs something like: “It is
extremely unlikely that the universe arose spontaneously, so there must be a creator”. If the universe is unlikely to
have arisen spontaneously, then it is even more unlikely that something so complex as the universe’s creator arose
spontaneously. So this creator had to have a creator, etc.
Concerning causes, you are right in general, but wrong in particular. God is not posited as the mere cause of the
universe, but as a creative, conscious, purposeful cause: when a theist says “God is the cause of the universe” he/she
does not mean “cause” as in “subduction is the cause of Chilean earthquakes”. The fundamental difference is obvious:
subduction does not intend to cause earthquakes, whereas a theistic God is the willing cause of the universe.
Unless, of course, you subscribe to a naturalistic view of God, in which case there’s not much point in antagonizing
atheists by using a non-standard nomenclature. Just call a cause a cause, and a spade a spade. (Quote)

Hermes
I think he’s saying that because the thing you use to explain complexity is *more complexity*, the only
think you’ve accomplished is created a new thing that “needs to be explained” in the same exact way as
the first — and to a higher degree.
Yes, and a bit more. It was clear to me that he was mocking the absurdity of the complaints ID/Creationists have
against evolution. If they want to use ‘it is too complex!’ as an argument, then they have to deal with the
consequences.
It’s kinda silly to insist that Dawkins have a bullet proof answer to such a malformed argument that basically boils
down to personal incredulity.
Yet, the typical tactic of many professional theist debaters is to load up dozens of arguments and questions and shot
gun them out — unexplained and unsupported.
Meanwhile, it is somehow bad taste to cut corners on any reply. Sophistry I like, but not in the worst sense when used
as a legalistic tactic.^
^. Related: The Romans (~second century CE) loved suing each other, and even the educated ones were not taught
general knowledge but how to argue, so people who were good at arguing were held in high esteem. (Quote)

Steve n Carr
‘Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament
18 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.’
In other words, the citations often have a different text to that in modern Bibles..
Let us look at one example – Matthew 19.17 /Mark 10.18/Luke 18.19
One very early Church Father is Justin. In his Dialogue 101.2 (probably from the 140s or 150s) , we read “One is good,
my Father in the heavens.” This very early quotation is not what we read in the Bible today.
Perhaps he was just working from memory, or did he have a manuscript which differed from today’s Bibles?
EPHREM: Commentary on the Diatessaron, XV.9, in both the original Syriac and the Armenian (2 manuscripts) reads:
“One is good, the/my Father who [is] in the heaven.”
Ephrem died in 373, and the Syriac manuscript of the Commentary is fifth century. And Tatian, of course, composed
the Diatessaron (the gospel harmony upon which Ephrem was commenting) about 172, on the basis of the gospel texts
current then. And this citation agrees precisely with Justin’s, allowing for the differences in Syriac and Greek. We now
have two independent sources which show that the 2nd-century manuscripts of this Gospel verse differ from what is
read today.
IRENAEUS: Haer. V.7.25 (pre-185): “One is good, the/my Father in the heavens.”
Another second-century source confirming the ‘wrong’ version of Matthew 19:17.
HIPPOLYTUS: Haer. V.7.25 (pre-222): “One is good, the/my Father in the heavens.”
Another early Christian Father has the ‘wrong’ version.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: Strom. V.10.63 (composed c. 207):”One is good, the/my Father.”
At least Clement drops the ‘in the heaven’ phrase.
PSEUDO-CLEMENTINE HOMILIES: XVI.3.4 about 260 AD. “For one is good, the/my Father in the heavens.”
Another early Church Father disagrees with the ‘correct’ version of the Bible.
VETUS LATINA MS e (apud Matthew, 5th cent.): “Unus est bonus, pater.”
This is the second most ancient manuscript and it also has ‘Father’
VETUS LATINA MS d (apud Luke, 5th century.): “Nemo bonus nisi unus Deus pater.”
‘Father’ again.
So how can we ‘reconstruct’ the text of modern Bibles when all these church fathers say something different to the
modern text. (Quote)

TaiChi
“ I re-read Wielenberg’s article and see that you are right. Thanks for pointing this out!” ~ Lukeprog
Excellent!
“ I haven’t read his paper, but isn’t it at least a bit more unclear whether Swinburne’s concept of God would escape
Dawkins’ criticism simply by virtue being eternal? Especially given his own emphasis on simplicity as a significant
factor in making a hypothesis probable (and conversely, complexity making a hypothesis improbable).” ~ Haecceitas
This is my view, too. Wielenberg fairly quickly decides that Dawkins is assuming God to have come into being at some
point in time..
“ ..let us direct our attention to the fourth premise of the Gambit:

(4) It is very improbable that there exists something that (i) is at least as complex as the natural, complex
phenomena in the universe and (ii) has no explanation external to itself.
Much of the support for this premise rests on the idea that the more complex a being is, the less likely it is that such a
being would spontaneously come into existence by chance alone. Dawkins sees a kind of tension between conditions
(i) and (ii) specified in (4) above. If something has no explanation external to itself, then presumably it somehow came
into existence on its own. The more complex the entity in question is, the less likely it is that this would occur. Thus, a
spontaneously-formed God who is at least as complex as the physical universe itself is very improbable.” ~ Wielenberg
.. and dismisses Dawkins argument with ease, on the basis that Dawkins targets a God of no interest to theists. But with
you, I think that something complex is improbable whatever the facts concerning its past existence or non-existence.
Suppose there were a deck of cards, that for reasons unknown, had enjoyed eternal existence, and hadn’t been
shuffled or tampered with in any way during this existence. What are the chances that the card on top of the deck is a
diamond? That is the Queen of spades? Surely the odds are just the same as if the deck had been fairly shuffled. And
what are the odds that the cards are arranged alphabetically, then numerically, front to back, so that the order of cards
is unique? Again, just the same as with our regular deck of cards, shuffled fairly.
Well, a complex God seems to me like that ordered deck of cards – it is a particular permutation of parts, and as one
amongst many possible arrangements of parts, it is, as a logical matter, quite an unlikely arrangement. So a complex
God is unlikely, his eternity notwithstanding. (Quote)
19 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53

MauricXe
haha bad question. (Quote)

lukeprog
TaiChi,
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. I can see how Wielenberg interprets Dawkins in terms of ‘coming into existence’
as Dawkins frames the problem in the context of evolutionary mechanisms, but what happens if we draft a new
argument against God from complexity that does not depend on God ‘coming into existence’? Hopefully my upcoming
biblioigraphy on complexity and simplicity will assist us in thinking about that issue. (Quote)

cl
feldmm1,
Okay, well.. now you’ve got me curious: if you understand the distinction, why did you previously say,
If I was given the Kalam Cosmological Argument at age 7, I would have not seen a contradiction, and I
would probably be a theist today.
IOW, if the distinction has been made, and you understand it, then where’s the contradiction? Or, maybe I’m just
hearing you wrong and you are actually saying there is no contradiction in the KLA?
piero,
It is not a naked assertion, but a consequence of the theistic argument for the existence of God that runs
something like: “It is extremely unlikely that the universe arose spontaneously, so there must be a
creator”. If the universe is unlikely to have arisen spontaneously, then it is even more unlikely that
something so complex as the universe’s creator arose spontaneously. So this creator had to have a creator,
etc.
Causes are not required to be more complex than their effects. IOW, not only is Dawkins’ assertion naked, but
ignorant: I’m not arguing that the universe’s Creator arose spontaneously, and neither are most monotheists. This is
exactly what people are talking about when they say the New Atheists tend to make lame arguments: Dawkins’
assertion of “improbable” is founded on an instance of the genetic fallacy, and responds to a strawman argument.
TaiChi,
Hey there. Though it took a while, I just wanted to let you know I got back to your comment here. Also, I started my
own little series of posts on desirism here, in case you’re interested. My first goal is to clearly articulate where I agree
and disagree with Fyfe. (Quote)

TaiChi
Lukeprog,
Looking forward to it.
Cl,
Thanks, I’ll check those out. (Quote)

Rodrigo
Congratulations, Luke!! It was a pretty good interview and you made your points very clearly. I think you are
absolutely right when you say that the New Atheist don’t address the best theist arguments (or should I say the best
formulations of these arguments) found in the professional religious philosophy literature or at least from the
arguments formulated by Christian Apologists who are familiar with analytical philosophy and modern metaphysics. I
think your right on the mark, but I’ve listen all the theist arguments that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris engage and
respond, told by many religious people, most of them don’ t even know what “necessity” means and really see God as
20 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
a kind of person just with hyper-overdimensioned qualities and abilities. I’ve indeed read worst and more simplistic
formulations of those arguments by theist, even some theologists, than the one’s used by Dennet or Dawkins. I think
that is against these low level arguments that the works of the New Atheist are directed to and they serve as an
introduction to the debate. Yes, I would love to see the debate get deeper and see more qualified work from Atheists
who really engage in the more complex theist arguments in more popular books.
Best regards and sorry for my English,
Rodrigo (Quote)

Hermes
Rodrigo, if you have not read it, this is partially in line with what you bring up;
The Courtier’s Reply
Background: http://deoxy.org/emperors.htm
I admit it is not a reply, but if you haven’t seen it yet you might find it informative. (Quote)

piero
Causes are not required to be more complex than their effects. IOW, not only is Dawkins’ assertion
naked, but ignorant: I’m not arguing that the universe’s Creator arose spontaneously, and neither are most
monotheists. This is exactly what people are talking about when they say the New Atheists tend to make
lame arguments: Dawkins’ assertion of “improbable” is founded on an instance of the genetic fallacy, and
responds to a strawman argument.
As I said before, it is true in general that a cause need not be more complex than its effects, but it is not true in the case
of a willing cause. A willing cause is what we call a designer, and a designer has to be more complex than the thing
designed. Now, if you are willing to accept that God is less complex than the universe, you will get no argument from
me. (Quote)

Hermes
it is true in general that a cause need not be more complex than its effects, but it is not true in the case of a
willing cause.
Well said.
Now, if you are willing to accept that God is less complex than the universe, you will get no argument
from me.
If the Christian deity exists, of course it is less complex than the universe. It didn’t have to do any heavy lifting such as
actually doing anything to get the whole ball rolling.
It clearly hates knowledge, and seems to be indifferent about evil — giving as well as taking. Otherwise, though, it
‘behaves’ exactly like other equally credible regional deity, though maybe some of the others have a better general
attitude. Dagda or Bacchus, for example.
Yahweh seems to be be in desperate need of a vacation or a screw, as He acts both uptight and ironically much more
irked about “His creation” than someone who has some foresight. He seems to have a really bad sense of timing as
well. Maybe he’s more like the office mooch who takes credit for the work of others? No wonder he’s not more
accepting of the results! How can you complain about someone else’s mistakes if you’ve already taken credit for their
work? (Quote)

Rodrigo
Rodrigo, if you have not read it, this is partially in line with what you bring up;The Courtier’s
ReplyBackground: http://deoxy.org/emperors.htmI admit it is not a reply, but if you haven’t seen it yet
you might find it informative.
Thanks Hermes,
21 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Yes I knew the Courtier’s reply. I agree with you that it’s related, but it is a bitdifferent. In these case the ones using
these strategy are not lay religious people or simplistic theologists, the one’s targeted by the New Atheists arguments,
in my view. They are intellectuals like Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton who admire religion and “believe in
belief” (as Dennet says) but don’t really believe in the same kind of god most people worship, but they won’t admit it.
They prefer a more abstract kind, like a “transcendental impetus” but conform with most naturalistic attitudes. But
there are no real arguments backing them up. At least they never state them. So they cite obscure works and ancient
theologists, that are supposed to be refined and deep, but never state explicitly the arguments favoring these particular
theologies. They just say that the New Atheist are ignorant of those particular authors, as it was relevant for the
discussion.
Rodrigo (Quote)

Hermes
Rodrigo, agreed. Well said. I found PZ’s summary helpful, but Jason Rosenhouse’s review (linked by PZ) to be the
real meat of that issue. It was a shame I did not pay attention to it more the first time around.
FWIW, I am a fan of Armstrong’s work, if not her conclusions.
For example, her book A Short History of Myth is informative, has an interesting perspective, and also has just about
driven me to do a screaming tirade of nearly every paragraph in that book.
She does an amazing job of almost getting it, then in the same paragraph of taking back much of her advances by
simply inserting a slight tweak that causes the whole paragraph to be wrecked.
Doing this occasionally — or to be a devil’s advocate — is fine, yet I suspect either she has an agenda or is holding on
to an idea that leads to her very strange and unsupportable conclusions. It’s almost like she’s gossiping about the topic,
and spreading unrelated innuendo in the process. (Quote)

Rodrigo
I feel the same way about Eagleton whose criticism against some post-modernist relativists positions I liked very much.
And about Allan-Orr, a evolutionary geneticist, who works on adaptaion genetics and speciation, but used the same
kind of reply against Dawkins and after that was heavily criticized by PZ Myers.
Rodrigo
Rodrigo, agreed.Well said.I found PZ’s summary helpful, but Jason Rosenhouse’s review (linked by PZ)
to be the real meat of that issue.It was a shame I did not pay attention to it more the first time
around.FWIW, I am a fan of Armstrong’s work, if not her conclusions.For example, her book A Short
History of Myth is informative, has an interesting perspective, and also has just about driven me to do a
screaming tirade of nearly every paragraph in that book.She does an amazing job of almost getting it, then
in the same paragraph of taking back much of her advances by simply inserting a slight tweak that causes
the whole paragraph to be wrecked.Doing this occasionally — or to be a devil’s advocate — is fine, yet I
suspect either she has an agenda or is holding on to an idea that leads to her very strange and
unsupportable conclusions.It’s almost like she’s gossiping about the topic, and spreading unrelated
innuendo in the process.
(Quote)

Michael
A red flag went up for me in reference to misquoting jesus that has been addressed by others here also. The
significance was not being able to piece together what the earliest bible said but the inability to piece together the
original god inspired inerrant text ‘because all we have are copies of copies of copies’ but not the original text itself. It
is with the multitude of copies with their multitude of variations that makes the point. An appologists would be better
served to ignore the significance of Ehrman’s inerrancy conclusion and change the focus to the ‘conflict’ which isn’t
really there. Thanks for the thought provoking discussion! (Quote)

oarobin
i am intrigue by this statement “That is, God exists in every possible world.”
22 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
it seems to suffer from the same problems as the naive set theory concept of universal set
i.e. if a god exists in all possible world does he exist in a world that has no God (ala mimicking set of all sets.) or the
world where there is no existence.
i would like to see how theologians have formally dealt with this problem. (Quote)
Comment | April 3, 2010

lukeprog
oarobin,
The whole point of saying God is necessary is to say that he exists in every possible world. There is no world in which
god does not exist. All such worlds are impossible worlds. (Quote)

oarobin
i know “The whole point of saying God is necessary is to say that he exists in every possible world” . the effect though
it that it puts the existence of god in the definition of world since it was not deduce from the premises. this has the
immediate effect of defining other classes of objects i.e. pseudo-worlds that has in its definition the non-existence of
god or super-worlds that just drops the god question altogether. it then naturally leads to a question of which one of
these worlds are we currently in.
in short using the existence of god in the definition of world does not mean you are describing our existence nor does it
mean that it is not a more elaborate description of the empty set. (Quote)

Tony Hoffman
Besides any problems that oarobin may be on to regarding logical problems with God’s necessity, I’d like to add that it
also has the disadvantage of a) positing something that we have never encountered (an uncaused cause), b) is beyond
our ability to experience or comprehend, and c) is superfluous.
I do believe, as well, that a post on God’s necessity is overdue here. Or did I come late and miss that party sometime
more than a year ago? (Quote)

^_`a b‫ور‬efea‫ا‬hi ‫ و‬jk_‫ د‬bmnokp‫ | رو‬TehranReview
Pingback | April 9, 2010
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
Name (required)
Mail (will not be published) (required)
Website
Submit Comment
Notify me of followup comments via e-mail
Essentials:
23 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Table of Contents
For Philosophers
Why This Blog is Different
My Story
Truth-Seeker Challenge
Epic Posts:
Atheism F.A.Q.
Ethics F.A.Q.
500+ Atheism Debates
Free Religion Audiobooks
Atheism Podcasts & More
Philosophers of Religion
Gods (and a poster)
Arguments
Categories:
Alvin Plantinga
Amazing Atheists
Ask the Atheist
Atheist Film & TV
Bible
Buddhism
Christian Theology
Confucianism
Creationism
Criticism of Atheists
Debates
Ethics
Free Stuff
Funny
General Atheism
Guest Post
Historical Jesus
How-To
Indexes
Inspirational
Intelligent Design
Intro to Ethics
Intro to Logic
Intro to Religion
Islam
Kalam Argument
Letters
News
Paganism
Philosophy of Religion 101
Podcast
Politics
Problem of Evil
Quotes
Resources
Reviews
Science
Scientology
Video
William Lane Craig
24 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53
Meta:
direct contact
RSS
Comments RSS
Podcast-only RSS
Podcast on iTunes
My Twitter
Subscribe via email:
Best Atheism Blogs:

Atheist Ethicist
Proving the Negative
Epiphenom
Greta Christina
Daylight Atheism
Debunking Christianity
Vridar
Dwindling in Unbelief
Secular Outpost
Triangulations
My Books:
Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes
25 of 25 16-04-2010 00.53

Common Sense Atheism What...

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Common Sense Atheism What...

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Common Sense Atheism » What I Think of the New Atheists http://commonsenseatheism.com/?

Common Sense Atheism

What I Think of the New Atheists

Damion: So what do you think about the New Atheists?

Damion: I know you have some issues with Sam Harris.

Damion: Not some radical Hindu, or something like that.

So it just completely misses the point. No one is making that argument.

Damion: You mean the kalam cosmological argument paper?

Damion: Two out of five!

Damion: So congratulations, you've made the top three!

Written by lukeprog in: General Atheism, Podcast |

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Sobel is math rock, you might say… (Quote)

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 23, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

I’ll have to re-read Wielenberg’s paper; perhaps I’ve misremembered it!

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Luke – fantastic, thanks!

Perhaps you have a different interpretation? (Quote)

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Hey, together we’re making a difference. Keep it up Luke. (Quote)

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Re: Contingent/non-contingent, necessary/not-necessary.

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

What would turn you back to theism? (Quote)

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

I think the New Atheists don’t emphasize that point more.

Maybe Sam would do an interview with you? (Quote)

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

What’s wrong with that?

Apples and Oranges — A Comparison

Comment | March 24, 2010

look forward to lukeprog dismantling it.

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010

Comment | March 24, 2010