Tag: atheism

Luke has posted his fourth letter:

Vox,

Holy crap that’s a lot of insults. I tried to count them but couldn’t. I can see that your readership is impressed and excited by your continuous stream of insults, but I come from a different tradition (analytic philosophy) that values clarity, argument, and evidence – not insults.

I agree we should leave the topic of evolution behind. But I’m sure our readers will remember that one of us gave argument and evidence for his views on evolution, and the other did not.

Thank you for finally explaining your view that Satan rules the Earth. But again, to just assume I should understand your views on Satan by way of vague references to children’s literature and a sci-fi novel is, I think, too optimistic. Christian teaching about Satan has a long, complex, and variegated history. I can’t just guess what your theological views are: I need you to tell me what they are.

This was written in response to my third letter to Common Sense Atheism.

Dear Luke,

I find it amusing, if not unexpected, that you continue to attempt rambling on about evolution. It is, as you have admitted, a tangent, but more precisely, it is an irrelevant tangent which has absolutely nothing to do with the discourse to which you invited me. To charge me with making false assertions and empty hand-waving because I made the mistake of directly answering one of your irrelevant questions is a very strange thing to do, especially when one considers that in that very same letter you neglected to answer the only questions I have asked of you. I am also somewhat mystified by your decision to selectively quote the rules of my blog to me as if they were applicable here. But, as you have appealed to those rules, I shall quote the two that are most relevant as they will suffice to bring your repeated attempt to derail this discussion to an end.

3. Cross-comments and off-topic comments will usually be deleted. If your comment gets deleted, deal with it. Don’t try to argue with me about it, I’m truly not interested.

10. Any insertion of evolution or Creationism into a post that is not directly and specifically related to either subject will be deleted. Repeated efforts to do so will result in banning.

The mere existence of Rule #10 shows how your attempt to turn a discussion about Christianity into one about evolution and/or Creationism is tiresomely predictable in addition to being exactly the pointless sort of thing that this discourse was proposed to avoid. I also note that your claim to have directly rebutted my three assertions with relevant evidence, argument, and examples is clearly false because the evidence, argument, and examples you provided only served to prove that you had no idea what I was talking about. I will not bother to support this, even though I could easily do so, for what should be the obvious reason that it is not relevant to this discussion! As many others have done in the past, you are assuming that a refusal to explain something is tantamount to an inability to explain it. This is not only an illogical assumption but an incorrect one, as I shall soon demonstrate by explaining what I neglected to explain in my previous letter.

I don’t believe it is accurate to say that my tactics rely upon either obscurantism or unmerited dismissal. Indeed, by asserting that I am being obscure about the Christian doctrine of the Fall, you paint yourself with the very label I had not hitherto seen any justification to apply, as failing to spell out an obvious conclusion cannot reasonably be confused with being obscure. I had assumed you were merely ignorant about Christian theology, but if you are not being disingenuous in asserting your failure to understand something as simple as C.S. Lewis’s metaphorical explication of it in the form of science fiction for children, then it will be very difficult for me or anyone else who did understand the metaphor to draw anything other than the obvious conclusion. Having studied Sam Harris’s debates, I can certainly feel some sympathy regarding your frustration at my claim that you have misunderstood what I have written at almost every turn, but in this particular case, it doesn’t change the fact that you have clearly failed to understand what I wrote. More importantly, it doesn’t change the fact that most of the people reading our letters had no trouble understanding what you did not.

Granted, it is not my custom to explain what I consider to be the obvious. Most of my regular readers are intelligent enough to draw logical conclusions and refusing to spell out the obvious serves as a surprisingly effective means of weeding out the less intelligent critics whose specious and petty critiques are of no interest or benefit to me. But, in the interest of not being obscure, I will explain my reasoning in greater detail inasmuch as it is directly relevant to the topic of why I am a Christian. In the example of obscurantism that you mentioned, you wrote that I failed to explain why Out of the Silent Planet is titled as it is, and what the implications of Satan’s temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert are. Very well, let us address those two points.

In the Lewis book, Thulcandra, or “the Silent Planet”, refers to the Earth, which, being “bent”, no longer participates in the music of the celestial spheres with the eldila or even communicates with anyone outside the orbit of the Moon. Hence the appellation “silent”. Thulcandra is not ruled by the Old One (the Creator God) or Maleldil the Young (Jesus Christ), but by its bent Oyarsa (angelic planetary principality), who represents Lucifer/Satan. This idea of a world which is ruled by an evil being in rebellion against the Creator God is based on the fundamental Christian theological doctrine of the Fall, which has been told many times in Western literature and is most clearly demonstrated in the Bible by the temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert. When Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in return for his worship, Jesus did not argue that the world was not Satan’s to give as he presumably would have if it were a false offer, (which, as the Son of God he would very well have known), instead he merely refused it. This strongly suggests that the world is not completely under the direction and control of the Creator God as most atheists assume Christians believe, but is instead ruled by an evil, intelligent, and malicious being who seeks to be worshipped in the place of God. This concept is further confirmed in numerous places in the Bible, such as when Jesus tells his disciples that “the prince of this world cometh” in Matthew 14:30 and when Paul refers to “the god of this age” in 2nd Corinthians 4:4. While there is debate among Christians about the extent of this being’s rule, which according to the Bible extends to the aion but not the kosmos, as well as the timing and nature of the end of that rule, there is no serious theological dispute as to the existence of either the evil being or his worldly reign.

The nature of the being who rules over the world is a tremendously important point to understand for both the Christian and the atheist. While the atheist can, as many Christians do, wonder about why a deity of sufficient power to end the reign of an evil ruler would not act immediately to do so, it is as illogical for a Christian to blame God for the actions of Satan as it is for a Vikings fan to blame Brad Childress because Percy Harvin ran an incorrect route. There is no question that Childress could have prevented his wide receiver from running the wrong route by keeping him on the bench, but there is also no question that Harvin was told what the correct route was and chose to run the wrong one anyhow, thereby making Harvin, not Childress, the responsible party. The analogy is not quite precise, of course. A more accurate one would be akin to Childress deciding to start Harvin, followed by Bernard Berrian telling Harvin to sit down and let him run the route prior to sneaking in the game and running it incorrectly. We can blame both Berrian and Harvin for the subsequent incompletion, but we cannot reasonably blame Childress except for his poor judgment in permitting both players the freedom to think for themselves and make their own decisions. The inherent conflict between a benevolent Creator and a fallen world leads inevitably to the very mainstream Christian doctrine of free will, which is why some atheists such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are so determined to prove that free will does not exist, or is at best an illusion.

And this leads us to consider some of your more interesting assertions. Contrary to your fallacious claim to be “too familiar with Christian theology – or rather, Christian theologies”, you demonstrated your ignorance of not only conventional Christian theology, but philosophy in general, when you claimed that you could not possibly have predicted that I would hold the view that God’s goodness is arbitrary. In fact, it is apparent that your level of knowledge does not even rise to the level of Wikipedia:

“Christian philosophers, starting with Thomas Aquinas have often answered that the dilemma is false: yes, God commands something because it is good, but the reason it is good is that “good is an essential part of God’s nature”. So goodness is grounded in God’s character and merely expressed in moral commands. Therefore whatever a good God commands will always be good. Fr. Owen Carroll notes that the medieval philosophical tradition Realism, to which Aquinas belonged, assumes that the model that God used when creating the universe was within Himself so that the goodness of this world reflects and participates in some limited way and extent in the infinite goodness of God’s own divine nature. The position of the opposing school of Nominalism maintains that the model that God used when creating the universe is outside of God and thus the goodness of this world is alien to the goodness of God Himself. The moral consequence of the latter position is that whatever God wills is good, even if it is inherently contradictory and morally arbitrary according to the light of human reason.”

Now, my view of God’s arbitrary goodness is not actually Nominalist, the philosophical school which you will note is considered to date back to Plato, because I believe either Fr. Owen or his summarizer is incorrect to the extent that a distinction is drawn between Realism and Nominalism in the specific application of Divine arbitrariness. But this is beside the point, as the Wikipedia summary is sufficient to demonstrate that you were clearly unaware of how the arbitrary nature of Divine goodness has been a mainstream Christian perspective for at least 700 years, and more likely 1,800 based on the writings of the Latin Fathers. As it happens, the moral consequence of the Realist position is also that whatever God wills is good even if human reason declares otherwise, due to the imperfection of human reason. The only difference is that the Realist view assumes human reason must be incorrect or insufficiently informed to understand the Divine perspective whereas the Nominalist view does not; for example, Aquinas’s relevant arguments, which can be found in Iª q. VI a. III and IV, do not preclude the view of the arbitrary nature of Divine goodness when seen from from lesser perspectives to which I subscribe. For, as Aquinas himself concludes:

“Hence from the first being, essentially such, and good, everything can be called good and a being, inasmuch as it participates in it by way of a certain assimilation which is far removed and defective; as appears from the above. Everything is therefore called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary effective and final principle of all goodness. Nevertheless, everything is called good by reason of the similitude of the divine goodness belonging to it, which is formally its own goodness, whereby it is denominated good. And so of all things there is one goodness, and yet many goodnesses.”

Ergo, those who confuse one of the many goodnesses with the one goodness may well elevate that lesser goodness to the supreme position and use it as a basis to conclude that the one goodness is evil and arbitrary, a process that one of my fellow Bucknellians describes as moral evolution and what the Bible describes as calling good evil and evil good. The Christian debate on the subject long precedes Aquinas, but while Tertullian decries the goodness of Marcion’s God as imperfect, irrational, feeble, weak, and exhausted, at no point does his view of Divine perfection preclude the arbitrary nature of that perfection when viewed from an imperfect human perspective on it. In fact, his attack on Marcion’s conception of God as a being of simple goodness points directly to the aforementioned Nominalist conclusion despite Tertullian being one of Realism’s most direct antecedents. But even though more than two millennia of Christian and non-Christian philosophical debate on the nature of God and Divine Goodness somehow managed to escape your attention, it is obvious that my views on the subject were readily available to you because I expressed them on pages 292-3 of The Irrational Atheist. I stated there that the arbitrary nature of God’s goodness, which has long been a known solution to the first horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma, “can only be considered a genuine problem for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary.”

And while it would certainly be amusing to see you argue for the immutable nature of the physical constants across the multiverses, I will content myself with simply concluding that you’re correct and the problem is not that you have incorrectly grasped the central aspects of Christian theology. The problem, rather, is that you simply don’t know a damn thing about them. You may not think I can charge you with ignorance of Christian theology, but given your confirmed failure to understand my predominantly orthodox beliefs as well as mainstream Narnia-level theology, it is perfectly clear that I or anyone else can not only charge you with it, but convict you. To paraphrase what I wrote in my first letter, if you don’t understand that the world is fallen, evil, and bent, if you don’t understand that Satan is the prince of this world and the god of this age, you cannot possibly understand the most basic concept of Christianity, much less anything else about it. Your letters have served to confirm this. And the Christian doctrine of a fallen world ruled by evil is hardly a concept with which only Christians are familiar, as Philip K. Dick derived the title for the second book in his excellent VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion, from it. Lest I stand accused of obscurantism, the invasion to which the term originally referred is this one:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
– John 3:16

Now, I trust that I have sufficiently demonstrated why your claim of great familiarity with a variety of mainstream Christian theologies merits not only dismissal, but derision. If you would like to dispute that conclusion, by all means let me know,, as we have barely begun to scratch the surface of basic Christian theological concepts that are clearly unfamiliar to you. With regards for your request as to a link to where I support my claims, my recommendation is that you begin by reading the The Chronicles of Narnia. Just to get you started, please note that the lion represents Jesus. Then you should be ready for the space trilogy, after which point I would recommend moving on to Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

In the third part of your letter, you begin by errantly claiming that I denied God’s omnipotence by asserting that Satan rules the world. But I did nothing of the kind. Would you similarly claim that I deny God’s omnipotence because I also assert that King Henry VIII ruled England? You are making precisely the same mistake for which I criticize Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in TIA, by confusing capability with action. This error likely stems from the Sunday School theology of your upbringing, as it is a common misconception among less reflective Christians whose theological foundation is based more on the songs they learned as children than it is on any interpretation of the New Testament, but please note that a rejection of omniderigence is not a rejection of omnipotence because the two concepts are not identical. To be all-powerful is not synonymous with being all-acting, much less all-controlling, and the foundation for my critique of omniderigence and its concept of a Master Puppeteer God is the rather obvious observation that the God who knows that the sparrow falls is not necessarily the God who killed the sparrow. This is far from an exotic position and the debate between the hyper-Calvinists and pretty much the rest of Christianity is not a new one. If you’re looking to find the point where Christian orthodoxy and I part company, then note that it is actually divine omniscience that I question, because I don’t see any Biblical claim or theological requirement for it. See The Contradiction of Divine Characteristics, TIA pp 270-274. Even so, the debate over the extent of God’s knowledge still falls well within the umbrella of mainstream Christianity as the various books about Open Theism, both pro and con, will readily show.

While I am certainly interested in discussing which religious or philosophical account of evil best fits the observable evidence as well as further exploring the details of your beliefs, especially those that concern what appears to be little more than a hedonistic spin on utilitarianism, we cannot reasonably move forward until you answer the questions I asked you in my previous letter. While your dissertation on desirism did imply an answer of sorts, it is necessary to clarify your precise beliefs regarding the existence of evil and its nature in order to avoid making any false assumptions about them. I will close by repeating them here now, with the addition of one more question raised by your third letter. I would appreciate it if you would answer them directly before explaining your answers in as much detail as you might like to provide.

1.Do you believe in the existence of evil?
2.If you believe that evil exists, is its nature objective or subjective?
3.If you believe the nature of evil to be objective, what is that objective basis?
4.What is the mathematical equation you used to calculate the three probabilities for metaphysical naturalism, orthodox Christian theism, and desirism?

With regards,
Vox

This was written in response to 3rd Letter to Vox Day.

Luke has posted his third letter:

Vox,

Again, I’ll break this into sections.

Evolution

I agree evolution is a tangent, but once again I can’t let you get away with what you’ve said. In your first letter, you made many unsupported (and false) assertions about evolution, for example that evolution is “of little material value to science” and that “the predictive models evolutionary theory produces are reliably incorrect.” I responded by quoting your assertions verbatim and then directly rebutting them with relevant evidence, argument, and examples. In your second letter, you again refused to support any of your claims about evolution, and instead resorted to empty hand-waving:

If you do happen to investigate [my points] in the future you will discover… that it isn’t even possible to credibly dispute them.

Your repeated refusal to support your own claims is a direct violation of your own rules for your own blog, specifically Rule #2:

You are expected to back up your assertions… The dishonest and evasive tactics that are so common in Internet argumentation are not permitted here…

Tactics

Instead of backing up your claims with argument and evidence, your tactics rely mostly on obscurantism and dismissal.

Read the rest of his response to my second letter at Common Sense Atheism.

Richard Dawkins doesn’t actually give a damn about either science or reason. He just hates religion:

Let me repeat that again: I know nothing of any stance he [Bill Maher] may have taken on medical questions. No followup of “what are your complaints?” or “please tell me what you mean.” No “so, what are Maher’s medical views that upset you all so?” It’s as if Dawkins just didn’t care. La-de-da. So what if Maher supports quackery? No problem. As long as he bashes religion, it’s all good.

It’s taken him a while, but it’s good to see that Orac has finally achieved a more accurate understanding of a few of his fellow atheists. On a related note, this attempted defense of the New Atheists is based on a false foundation:

While some critics of the “new atheists” have made valid arguments, primarily that their optimistic humanism is far from realistic, they are missing out on a simple point: adhering to a scientific worldview requires discipline; it requires giving up on the certainties of childhood and the belief in ultimate protection. I don’t know whether doing so turns us into better human beings, but it certainly makes us intellectually more responsible.

This is why TIA was particularly devastating to the New Atheists’ arguments and why they were forced to retreat from making many of those they had been making prior to its release. For all that they pretended to ignore the book, you’ll note that you seldom see the Red State argument or “religion causes war” anymore. Most have even abandoned the “No True Atheist” attempt to absolve atheism for the crimes of historical atheists, although many still cling foolishly to the ludicrous “In the name of” variant. I’m probably most pleased that no one has even attempted to defend Daniel Dennett’s incompetent attempt to justify the division of doxastic labor on the part of “scientific” belief, although I suspect this has far more to do with the inability of most atheists to read or understand Dennett than it does with the conclusive nature of my criticism of his logic.

The New Atheists are precisely the opposite of intellectually responsible. That’s part of what distinguishes them from more honest atheists such as Meslier and Russell, who did not seek to cloak their disbelief under a fraudulent veil of science. As I have repeatedly pointed out, their coherent arguments are reliably anti-scientific, as they repeatedly reject objective observation in favor of logic – and bad logic at that. To give one example, it is an incontrovertible and undeniable fact that no amount of “magical thinking” prevents an individual from being a superlative scientist thanks to the fact that the scientific method is not an ideology or even a belief, it is merely a process. And yet, this hasn’t prevented Sam Harris and others from not only claiming that it does, but that it must. (Dawkins, surprisingly, appears to have realized the demonstrable absurdity of this position and rejected both it and its application to Harris’s primary target, Frances Collins.) One may also note that the religious USA appears to have done rather well in collecting science-related Nobel prizes this year contra the New Atheist position on the incompatibility of religion and science.

As for their vast catalog of incoherent arguments, the piece by Strenger serves as a reasonable example. There is nothing comforting or certain about Christianity taken in sum, even if there is comfort and hope to be found in Jesus Christ. The assurance of “ultimate protection” for those who elect to follow the hard and narrow way in Christianity is distinctly qualified and there is no similar assurance of any kind to be found in any religion except possibly for Islam.

Where, I wonder, is intellectual responsibility to be found in repeatedly attacking the nonexistent figments of one’s imagination?

Whereas I merely hold you in intellectual contempt. If I were a typical atheist whiner, I’d worry a lot more about the former than the latter. Bob writes:

I came here with the genuine wish to learn why people believe what they believe and find myself so terribly disappointed. Here is a blogger that instead of explaining himself prefers to sling insults at others. I do not understand his letters to the comprehensible Luke and so am branded unintelligent. I am not unintelligent. I put it to Mr Vox that an intelligent man would be able to explain himself in words that the average person can understand (and certainly me). I also put it to Mr Vox that it is his responsibility to explain himself in words that the average person can understand as he is a Christian and his words could very well save the idle reader. Alas instead he insults the idle reader who is now adding another name to the list of hateful Christians, increasing the size of the wedge between me and faith.

Bob appears to have missed the point that the unintelligence is relative, not absolute. And actually, Bob is learning quite a bit about the Bible, God’s attitude towards men like him, and the guidance it actually provides to Christians here. I must also point out that Bob is not only a whiner, but a proven liar, as I have explained numerous things in great detail in my two letters to Luke as well as in the associated comments. I deny that I have slung any insults that are not accurate and independently verifiable observations; a commenter may find it insulting when I point out that he has completely failed to understand something that is both logical and supported by the relevant documentation, but that does not change the observable fact that he failed to understand it. Those who don’t like it when I describe them as lacking in relative intelligence would be wiser to demonstrate the superior intelligence they claim to possess rather than its opposite.

In THE RULES OF THE BLOG I make it very clear that I will respond in the manner I am addressed. This includes passive-aggressiveness and snark, which will be treated in the same manner as more direct attacks. If you think any professional writer, let alone a Superintelligence, is incapable of detecting such faux-civility, let me assure you that you are delusional. As I also point out in the rules it is wise to ask if your assumptions are correct before you elect to launch a critical attack based on those assumptions. I have been writing controversial opinion commentary on a very public site for eight years, so the chances are reasonably high that I saw and successfully dealt with your argument long before you first formulated your thoughts on the subject, particularly if they are related to a subject as old as Christianity.

Let me give an example from the comments yesterday. Instead of simply asking the obvious question: “isn’t that a circular argument”, Silver Bullet first incorrectly asserts that my explanation for why I am a Christian involves circular reasoning. Then, after I and others explain that he has improperly summarized my explanation and correctly inform him that there is no circular reasoning involved, he improperly summarizes it again, then assumes a condescending posture, claims that my dissertation is “ridiculous” and that my response to his criticism is “ignorant.” At no time has he ever stopped to simply ask the obvious question: “why do you believe that your argument is not circular?” He’s not the least bit interested in being informed, he’s simply an unintelligent, illogical ankle-biter who merits nothing better than a brutal and contemptuous slapdown. It is very easy to demonstrate how he has been wrong about the logic of the explanation – note that it’s not even an argument – from the start. Also note that he substitutes “Why do you believe in the Christian God” for “Why are you a Christian” throughout his comments, which is incorrect but irrelevant as I can show his illogic even using his own rephrasing.

1) Why do you believe in the Christian God?
Why do you believe in the government.

2) Because I believe in the Christian definition of evil.
Because I believe in the government’s definition of crime.

3) What is the Christian definition of evil?
What is the government’s definition of crime?

4) That which is defined as evil in the Bible.
That which is defined as crime in the statutes.

Now, Silver Bullet’s logic claims that because “violation of the government’s laws” and “that which is defined as crime in the statutes” are interchangeable in meaning, the argument is intrinsically circular. He explains, as to an 8 year old, that a statute can’t confirm government-defined crime since government-defined crime is based on the statutes. Now, this would be true if it weren’t for the obvious fact that the actions which the government defines as crime can be confirmed to exist independently of the statutes.

Returning to the subject, it’s clear that Bob is more familiar with Sunday School theology than with the Bible, let alone any sophisticated Christian analyses. Not only is it not my responsibility to explain anything to anyone who willfully refuses to seriously entertain reasonable answers to questions he has asked, it is actually my duty to help other Christians avoid the dishonest snares that this sort of deceiver often makes a habit of laying. According to the Bible, God considers it righteous to detest the sort of dishonesty we see on a regular basis from a certain type of atheist. He also detests the thoughts of the wicked, His curse is on them, He discards them like dross, and promises to destroy all of them even as He laughs at them. One can even reasonably interpret His detestation of their sacrifices to indicate that He despises their good deeds. This message of Divine detestation for a certain kind of individual is consistent throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

So, who are the wicked? Those who detest the upright. Those who suppress the truth. Those who abuse those who correct them. Those who say: “No one sees me… I am, and there is none besides me.” (Isaiah 47:10)

Now, please note that I am not describing atheists such as Luke here, at least not on the basis of the evidence of his two letters to date. Ignorance and errors of logic are very different from dishonesty; anyone can be wrong but no one has to lie, misrepresent, or otherwise attempt to deceive. There are indisputably a number of atheist regulars here who I have found to be honest, intelligent, and even in some cases genuinely truth-seeking. They simply lack faith for a variety of reasons, some of them very understandable. For example, who can truly blame Charles Darwin for the shattering of his Christian faith after the death of his beloved daughter? After all, few have the fortitude of Job; every Christian should pray that his faith is never put to such a terrible test.

It’s worth noting that even the Bible distinguishes between godlessness and wickedness, although the two often coincide. But isn’t it amazing that a text more than two thousand years old can so perfectly describe the behavior of certain individuals today?

A fool’s lips bring him strife,
and his mouth invites a beating.
– Proverbs 18:6

Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you. And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men, for not everyone has faith.
– 2nd Thessalonians 3:1-2

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;
– Romans 1:29-30

Fortunately, wickedness is a choice, as is repentance. And every mocker, every fool, every dishonest, godless, would-be critic here knows that they have consciously made that choice, even if they will never admit it to anyone. No doubt it would tear at the heart of a better man than me that some so firmly prefer wickedness to wisdom and deception to truth, but I have to confess that their self-destructive choice does not trouble me in the slightest.

Dear Luke,

I was a little disappointed by the way your second letter appeared to indicate that this discourse is already on the verge of devolving into the very sort of debate that you originally proposed avoiding. Fortunately, I think we can avert that by focusing on the question you originally posed to me, namely, why I am a Christian. Evolution has no more to do with why I am a Christian than the ontological argument, and for all that you might like to discuss those things, they are simply not relevant to the subject. Now, as to the six sections of your last letter, the first two can be readily dismissed. Regarding the first, I can only say that when I initiate a public discourse with an established figure whose views are well-known to the audience, I prefer to operate out of as little ignorance as possible. If you happen to feel otherwise, that is certainly your prerogative.

As to the second point, entitled “Creationism and evolution”, I must inform you that you are both off-topic and incorrect. It is not possible for you to have investigated the matter, much less to have discredited what I wrote, as you clearly did not understand what I am talking about in any of the three statements I made. If you do happen to investigate them in the future you will discover, as others have before you, that it isn’t even possible to credibly dispute them. Perhaps if you had read more of my work, you would know that my criticisms are seldom the expected ones, even if they happen to look superficially similar to those that have been articulated before by others. And you would also know that professional, academic, and scientific consensus mean absolutely nothing to me when I have examined the supporting facts and logic and reached contrary conclusions. As it happens, in three weeks my publisher will release a book in which I detail the fatal flaws that render invalid a theory that predates the modern evolutionary synthesis and is equally well-established in its scientific field. But, as I noted previously, precisely none of this is relevant to the topic at hand! You wrote to claim that you can’t let me get away with my answers, but I am afraid you have no other choice. You chose to ask an irrelevant question and I answered it. It is of no concern to me what you might happen to think of the answer as neither my answer nor your opinion is pertinent to the present discussion.

Now onto the third point, which happily is a relevant one. You wrote:

You write as if Christianity is the only worldview that has an account of evil, but this is absurd. All religions have an account of evil. So evil is just as much evidence for their truth as for the truth of Christianity.

There are several problems here. You begin by incorrectly identifying an implication that simply is not there. I have never denied that other religions possess accounts of evil. Every worldview except that of the rational materialist has a more or less coherent account of evil, but the salient point is that those accounts of evil are all very different. Therefore, the question is: of those various accounts of evil, which most closely parallels the evil that we can observe and experience in the material world? For example, if we say that rape is evil, are we saying that it is an illusion, a personally distasteful confluence of atoms, a minor property crime against the father, or a grievous offense against God’s Will involving the desecration of one of His fleshly temples? Clearly your conclusion is incorrect because evil cannot provide the same evidence for the truth of competing accounts of evil. Also incorrect is your description of the Christian concept of evil as “a roaming magical force that hunts us down and seeks to destroy us”. Evil can be external but it is internal as well, because the Christian concept of evil is simply that which violates the Will of God. Satan is merely one of many evils, perhaps the greatest example of it, but far from the only one.

I very much agree with you when you write that “an all-good, all-powerful God doesn’t fit very cleanly with the amount of pointless suffering we see all around the world.” Of course, your statement does little more than confirm your unfamiliarity with both the Bible and Christian theology that I originally suspected, for as I wrote in my previous letter: “[U]nless you can understand why the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is called Out of the Silent Planet, unless you fully grasp the implications of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, you cannot possibly understand much about Christianity or the degree of difference between it and other religions.” The Christian God does not rule this world. The being that Jesus described as “the prince of this world” in John 14:30 does. To fail to understand this vital point is to completely fail to understand Christianity, since one cannot possibly understand the significance of the Redeemer if one does not understand from what, and from whom, Man must be redeemed. While it is true there are Christians who disagree with me on this point and insist that this world is precisely as God planned it and therefore the best of all possible worlds, that evil is an integral part of God’s perfect plan, and that the whole Redemption of Man is merely some sort of elaborate Kabuki dance where the pre-ordained steps are robotically followed, but my view of omniderigence is well-documented.

Since your understanding of my argument was demonstrably incorrect and your criticism of it verifiably false, it is clear that my belief in Christianity remains rationally justified even if I cannot conclusively prove its truth to anyone else’s satisfaction. I am curious, however, in your interest in seeing me argue for the existence of evil. While I have no objection to doing so given the obvious relevance of the matter, I must first understand something about your definition of evil. Do you believe in the existence of objective evil or do you believe that evil is a purely subjective matter?

I also note that given your obvious failure to correctly grasp some central aspects of Christian theology, the rational basis of your rejection of Christianity is necessarily called into question. As I’m sure you understand, the truth or falsehood of Christianity is not dependent upon your intellectual limitations. Or mine, for that matter.

On the fourth point, you write:

No doubt, Christianity is different. Every religion is different from all the others. But uniqueness is no measure of truth. Raëlism is pretty unique. So are Jedi-ism, Scientology, the John Coltrane Church, and many other things. But that does nothing to increase their probability of being true.

You’re correct, the mere fact of uniqueness does nothing to increase the probability of anything being true. The problem is, that is tangential to the point I actually made when I wrote that Christianity was a better guide to human behavior than those other religions, and than the very best models the social sciences have produced despite having two thousand more years of human experience upon which to draw. That does increase its probability of being true, even from the secular, scientific perspective.

On the fifth point, I am pleased that you find my perspective to be consistent. That you find it terrifying is entirely appropriate, since I think people should be terrified by the idea that the world is ruled by an intelligent, evil, genocidal being. I would find it terrifying too, were it not for the fact that I believe in a greater power that has given men the ability to be free of that rule. Fear, and freedom from it, is an important theme in the Bible as we would not so often be told “do not be afraid” if there was not something to quite reasonably fear. However, I have to point out that it is fundamentally unreasonable to fear my perspective if the Christian worldview is incorrect. The madness that could hypothetically lead me to conclude I am hearing a divine command to commit murder, for example, is not only no more likely to occur than any other form of lethal madness, but possesses an inherent restriction upon it that other forms of madness do not. Since God has not hitherto issued any such direct commands to me or anyone else of whom I am aware in quite some time now, the Biblical directive to test such phenomena would naturally call for some rather strict criteria. And, since Christians have been scientifically demonstrated to be happier and less subject to the sort of mental disease that such a scenario requires than non-Christians, it is obvious that any fear of Christians mistakenly believing they are divinely appointed to commit havoc is neither reasonable nor scientific.

On the sixth point, I have no problem whatsoever admitting that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, even if it were demonstrated to be an incontrovertible historical fact, does not conclusively prove that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that there is an immortal soul, that Heaven exists, or that Jesus is the only way to it. This isn’t in dispute; Jesus not only knew all this himself, but he outright predicted that there would be many men who would refuse to believe despite the wondrous signs they had been shown. Richard Dawkins is only one of numerous atheists who insist that they would not believe in God even if they encountered him directly. Belief is only half of the salvation equation anyhow, and it is the less important half.

The reason Christianity is rationally justified even though the ontological argument, cosmological argument, teleological argument, the magical resurrection of Jesus, and the existence of evil do not entail the complete truth of Christianity – which, according to 1 Corinthians 13:11, every Christian knows we cannot know – but they still suffice to establish the Bible as the most credible authority regarding that which is unknown. This would, in Daniel Dennett’s terms, justify the doxastic division of labor on the part of the Christian, in fact, it would make it a logical necessity. If we accept your hypothetical suggestion that the Bible genuinely confounds our current understanding of science, then obviously the most rational position is to accept the tenets and dictates of Christianity than to cling to the inferior verities of science, to say nothing of those other religions whose claim on observable, experiential reality is even more tenuous. This, of course, has nothing to do with why I believe, much less worship, but I think it should satisfy your desire to assert that various common arguments on behalf of the existence of God don’t actually prove the truth of Christianity.

Belief, like love, is less a state of being than a continuous series of choices. However, it is clear from your consistent misunderstanding of my statements that the choices you and I have made to believe or not believe are different ones, based on fundamentally different concepts. I hope that I have clarified some of those concepts so that you have a better grasp of what those differences actually are. If, in your next letter, you would clarify whether you believe in the existence of evil or not, what you believe its nature to be, and whether that nature is objective or subjective, I can then begin to inquire further as to the foundation of your beliefs.

With regards,
Vox

This was written in response to 2nd Letter to Vox Day.

Luke responds. Read the rest of his letter at Common Sense Atheism.

Vox,

Thanks for your reply. I’ll break this letter into sections for easier reading. I wish we had fewer differences to write about!

1. Research and discussion
You asked me why so many atheists want to discuss religion with you before reading your book on the subject. But that’s not an atheistic tendency. It’s a human tendency. We are all short on time. But I know how you feel. Every week I am barraged with questions about ethics that are answered in my short and well-organized Ethics F.A.Q., which is linked from above the fold on every page of my site!

I have skim read your book, enough to know that you and I agree about much of what the New Atheists have written. But no, I did not read every word. I have not browsed your blog archives. And I wouldn’t expect you to read my book or blog archives, either. I think we can clarify our views for each other well enough as we go along.

This was written in reply to my previous letter.

Dear Luke,

First, I must congratulate you on your tactics. Your approach is not only civil, but clever. The technique of granting your interlocutor the benefit of some initial assumptions can be an extremely effective one, particularly if you are confident of your ability to handle the arguments that follow naturally from them. Since you are an ex-Christian, I would expect you to be at least somewhat familiar with most of the standard arguments and I completely agree that it would not serve either of our purposes to waste time fencing over the usual terrain. However, I don’t think there’s any need for you to to grant me any assumptions, at least not in order to answer the questions you’ve posed.

Before I begin answering those three questions, however, I have a minor one for you. I understand why many atheists wish to discuss religion with me. I have written a book on the subject, after all. What I do not understand is why so many of them wish to discuss religion with me without first reading the relevant book. It would seem to me that reading the book and then asking questions would be the rational way to go about the process, so perhaps you could enlighten me as to why that is often not the case. I know you’ve read at least part of The Irrational Atheist, but had you completed it, you would know that some of your assumptions about certain Christian beliefs don’t apply to me.

For example, in answer to your second question, I am not a Young Earth Creationist. I don’t know how old the Earth or the race of Man is, nor, I contend, does anyone else. I have never been impressed with Bishop Ussher’s reasoning or his chronology. I even did some similar calculations when I was seven or eight and concluded at the time that even if one took the Biblical account seriously, there appeared to be a considerable amount of missing information that rendered the chronology incomplete. On a tangential note, given that evolution assiduously avoids addressing the question of origins, there is no intrinsic conflict between the concept of a Divine Creation followed by an evolutionary mechanism utilized in order to the produce the variety of species we observe today.

Not that I subscribe to that idea, however. To complete my answer to that second question, I am a skeptic who is highly dubious about the theory of evolution by natural selection for three reasons. First, I see it as a dynamic and oftentimes tautological theory of little material value to science. This may change in the future, of course, but since it has been around for 150 years without producing much in the way of practical utility or reliable information, and has even hampered the development of more useful biological science, I see little sign of that changing anytime soon. Second, the predictive models evolutionary theory produces are reliably incorrect and fall well short of the standard set by the hard sciences. In fact, they seldom even rise to the much lower standard of the social sciences. Third, the theory of evolution by natural selection does not rest on a scientific foundation, but a logical one; it is no more inherently scientific than the Summa Theologica. Since our discourse is not intended to be about evolution, but religion proper, I will not go into further detail on the subject in this dialogue except to say that all three of those statements can be verified in substantial detail by anyone who wishes to investigate the matter. So, with that tangent out of the way, I will return to the primary topic and your first question.

Why am I a Christian? Because I believe in evil. I believe in objective, material, tangible evil that insensibly envelops every single one of us sooner or later. I believe in the fallen nature of Man, and I am aware that there is no shortage of evidence, scientific, testimonial, documentary, and archeological, to demonstrate that no individual is perfect or even perfectible by the moral standards described in the Bible. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ is the only means of freeing Man from the grip of that evil. God may not be falsifiable, but Christianity definitely is, and it has never been falsified. The only philosophical problem of evil that could ever trouble the rational Christian is its absence; to the extent that evil can be said to exist, it proves not only the validity of Christianity but its necessity as well. The fact that we live in a world of pain, suffering, injustice, and cruelty is not evidence of God’s nonexistence or maleficence, it is exactly the worldview that is described in the Bible. In my own experience and observations, I find that worldview to be far more accurate than any other, including the shiny science fiction utopianism of the secular humanists.

I don’t concern myself much, if at all, with the conventional extra-Biblical dogma that you describe and in which many Christians believe. I am dubious about the concept of the Trinity as it is usually described, do not await an eschatological Rapture, have no problem admitting that the moral commandments of God are arbitrary, and readily agree that the distinction between the eternally saved from the eternally damned appears to be more than a little unfair from the human perspective. On the other hand, I know that evil exists. I have seen it, I have experienced it, I have committed it, and I have loved it. I also know the transforming power that Jesus Christ can exercise to free an individual from evils both large and small because I have seen it in the lives of others and I have felt it in my own life. Now, ever since St. Augustine wrote his Confessions, it has been customary for Christians to exaggerate their sinful pasts; Augustine was hardly the Caligula that he portrayed himself to be. I find dramatic personal histories to be tiresome in the extreme, so I won’t say more except to note that as an agnostic, I enjoyed a sufficient amount of the hedonistic best that the world has to offer across a broad range of interesting and pleasurable experiences, only to learn that none of it was ever enough. It may amuse you to learn that one girl who knew me only before I was a Christian happened to learn about The Irrational Atheist and wrote to me to express her shock: “The fact that you wrote this book proves there is a God.”

And one with a sense of humor, no less. Now, there’s no reason this would mean anything to you or anyone else who was not acquainted with me before. But it meant something to that woman, just as an observable transformation in one of my close friend’s lives made a distinct impression on me.

I certainly do not deny the experiences or revelations of those who subscribe to other religions. I merely question the specific interpretation ascribed to them by those who lived through or received them. After all, the Bible informs us that there are other gods and that those gods are capable of providing such things at their discretion. Among other things, I studied East Asia at university and have spent a fair amount of time reading the sacred texts of various religions, including a few fairly obscure ones. I have yet to encounter one expressing a religious perspective that can be legitimately confused with the Christian one, nor, in my opinion, do any of these alternative perspectives describe the observable material world as I have experienced it as well as the Christian one does. I think it is astonishing that an ancient Middle Eastern text is frequently a better guide to predicting human behavior than the very best models that the social sciences have produced despite having an advantage of two thousand more years of human experience upon which to draw.

I suspect that unless you can understand why the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is called Out of the Silent Planet, unless you fully grasp the implications of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, you cannot possibly understand much about Christianity or the degree of difference between it and other religions. Fortunately for many Christians, intellectual understanding isn’t the metric upon which salvation is based. The Biblical God claims to know everything about the human heart and He would appear to recognize that thinking isn’t for everyone.

In answer to your third question, I will simply note that if a different being had created the world, then a different morality would obviously apply. For more on this, consider reading the second appendix in The Irrational Atheist entitled “Two Dialogues”. I believe logic dictates that the Creator alone has the right to set the standards for His Creation. His game, His rules. In keeping with that principle, God always has the absolute right to do as He sees fit, which just so happens to be precisely the answer He gave to Job and company. The answer to Euthyphro’s so-called dilemma is that the good is good because it is commanded by God, since there is no objective, supra-divine standard of Good by which His commands may be judged. Finally, to demonstrate the flaw in the logic of your example of the artificial baby, I shall merely cite the old joke. First, make your own dirt. Then go ahead and do as thou wilt.

I hope these answers have given you some perspective on why I am a Christian. In the interest of keeping this letter to a reasonable length, I think I should give you the opportunity to ask whatever additional questions have occurred to you before we turn the tables around and address your beliefs.

With regards,
Vox

PS: I would be deeply remiss if I did not take the opportunity to commend you for the eminently sensible conclusions you have expressed regarding the validity of the New Atheists’ arguments.

NB: This was written in response to 1st Letter to Vox Day.

Luke is the atheist blogger at Common Sense Atheism and is interested in a friendly discourse on the topic of Christianity and atheism. At his suggestion, we will attempt to avoid regurgitating all the usual arguments for and against the existence of God. Here is the opening letter of our discussion. I will respond to it within a week.

I’d like to start with a question about why you believe what you believe about God. But I’d like to skip all the usual arguments. In fact, for the sake of argument let’s say all the theistic arguments succeed, and all the atheistic arguments fail. Let’s say the modal ontological argument establishes the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and all-good being. Cosmological arguments establish this God as the creator of the universe. Design arguments establish that he purposely designed the universe to host intelligent life. Historical analysis shows that Jesus rose from the dead.

Read the rest of it at Common Sense Atheism.

Richard Dawkins sees a cloud, smaller than a fist, on the horizon:

The Flea Circus Invites a Newcomer!
The cover of The Irrational Atheist claims to dissect the “Unholy Trinity,” but I think we have to give this one to Sam due to the cover design!

A Dog Named Flea

Assuredly he lacks the spine
To ascertain the big canine.
Should we encounter in debate
He’ll meet a most odorous fate,
For in taking him down a peg
I have merely to lift my leg
And R. Dawkins will slink away,
Wet, and wearing Eau de Day.

From The Irrational Atheist:

“Dawkins is the worst offender, his prickly reaction to criticism is not to address it, not to discuss it, but to disdainfully dismiss it, unread. When Douglas Wilson published his response to Letter to a Christian Nation, Dawkins lost no time in labeling him “Sam’s Flea”. According to Dawkins, arguably the most visible representative of science today, any published criticism of him and his fellow militants can only be driven by the desire for book sales.(14)

Feynman wept.

——————–
(14) “Fleas” and “parasites” are Dawkins’s favored means of referring to his critics. On 4 March, 2007 at richarddawkins.net, Dawkins posted an entry entitled “Was there ever dog that praised his fleas?” in reference to the “three new parasitic books released in response to The God Delusion.”“