Tag: debate

Round 3 Argument
Dominic Saltarelli

Thus far, there are three arguments at play, what I have identified as A and B, presented by Vox which are respectively for the existence of gods and for a creator/custodian God, and my own argument that gods are an explanation that fall under the domain of the following hypothesis:

For any new experience or phenomenon, when man attempts to explain the phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal, the first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong.

Gods being a first attempt at explaining supernatural experiences, thus most likely wrong, and therefore gods do not exist.

Regarding B3, I previously stated that Vox admittedly defeated his own argument by stating that the moral sense is an integral part of our conciousness and our selves. In hindsight, I can see how this could lead one to assume I did not understand that Vox was not equivocating the moral sense with the moral impulse, but rather saying that a part of us was picking up signals from an external source. Similar to saying that the eye is a part of us, but what the eye perceives is not. However what I did not emphasize well enough the first time was that Vox had also asserted the following (where the third element is considering the morality of an action):

Materialists assume that this third element does not exist and is merely a variable result of combining the first two elements, but their opinion is irrelevant at this point since they are still wrestling with the question of the material existence of consciousness itself. Should they ever manage to sort that out, it will of course have to be taken into account, but until then the science-based materialist consensus is no more significant than the cartoon of the proverbial devil and angel sitting, sight unseen, on one’s shoulders, whispering into one’s ears. Only observations, history, and logic are relevant here.

What is missing here is that not only do materialists not have a complete model of what constitutes conciousness, no one does. Ignoring this inconvenient fact allows Vox to frame the question of the source of our moral impulse into one of either “Freud’s theory and its variants” representing the possibility that the signal is internally generated or that the signal comes from a source that is genuinely separate from our conciousness. This is a false dichotomy. Applying my own hypothesis to groundbreaking theories and ideas in addition to new experiences, Freud’s id, ego, and superego are about as likely a representative of conciousness as the first periodic table of elements (earth, air, water, and fire) was representative of matter. Rejecting the notion that all things are composed of varying parts of earth, air, water and fire does not mean that the world and everything in it is not made out of elements of some sort, but that is just sort of choice one is left with if Vox’s statements regarding the nature of conciousness and the moral impulse are taken at face value.

Because Vox has no better idea of what constitutes conciousness than anyone else, admitting that the moral sense is a part of our conciousness immediately puts it on par with any other urge or desire that is already accepted as part of our conciousness due to ignorance of the source of said other urges and desires. In fact, Vox’s own argument regarding the external nature of the source of the signal could just as justifiably be applied to our sense of heterosexual attraction to the opposite sex (relatively stable continuity across time and space) or any other sensibility that we share in sufficient quantity, but no one is questioning whether that “signal” is internally generated or not. It is just another desire, a consequence of biology, and accepted as an internally generated part of us.

So, admitting that our moral sense is another part of our conciousness while having no idea what conciousness is composed of amounts to admitting B3 is false. The moral impulse that informs it need not be any more external in source than any other desire or motivation that leads to action or state of mind.

Regarding B4, I don’t see how there is any more to add, since any objections to the argument can only be an objection to the definition of evil so far agreed upon.

Regarding A3, however, one of Vox’s statements concerning the suggestive weight of evidence was:

All we know now is that there is a long and consistent record of evidence of something with superscientific abilities imposing itself on people throughout history, a record that not only preceded the era of modern science, but continues right through it to the present day.

What I have been trying to establish thus far and will elaborate further upon here is that even this statement is presumptuous. The reasons people have been witnessing gods could be that gods are real, or that they are really technologically advanced aliens, or that they are some special sort of plasma/energy based lifeform that evolved alongside humanity, future humans with time travel technology, or sufficiently common environmental factors that cause some to experience waking dreams with common attributes but differeing details. Without further context, each of these are equally plausible explanations, especially in light of the fact Vox admitted the first 3 could very well be one and the same based on our inability to differentiate between each, stating:

This does not mean that gods exist. This does not mean that aliens exist. This does not mean that aliens broadly defined as gods exist. This merely means that the weight of the historical evidence strongly indicates that aliens and/or gods exist, that the lack of scientific evidence for either gods or aliens is almost completely irrelevant concerning the fact of their existence, and that it is at least conceivable that supertechnological aliens, transdimensional beings, and supernatural gods are actually one and the same thing.

Which is precisely half of my point, and has been from the beginning. That what we think or later interpret to be gods could very well be something else, something that isn’t a god. The other half of my point being that the evidence aside from the testimonies themselves strongly suggests that we have in fact gotten it wrong, and that the experiences which result in testimony for the existence of gods is in reality attributable to something other than gods.

An analogy used by religious apologists in arguing against strict scientific materialism that I have seen used often enough in the past is an analogy comparing people to fish. If you have a lake full of fish, those fish only know breathing water, other fish, and whatever else is in the lake with them, as the lake is their universe. The argument made by apologists being that the fish are in no way justified in denying the existence of a fisherman due to their complete inability to even comprehend what a fisherman is or interact with him, since he’s never jumped into the lake with them, only cast baited hooks, nets, and disturbed the surface of the water with his toes. The fish only have supernatural events of baited hooks appearing from heaven and mind boggling appendages briefly churning the sky then disappearing. Similarly with people, we have supernatural experiences of our own that cannot be explained by what’s here in the lake with us. This is where I part with the apologists.

The chances that the fish would be able to correctly understand that the source of the supernatural events is actually a fisherman, or something even remotely like a fisherman are non-existant. What I have sought to prove through the introduction of one piece of evidence after another:

1) transition from newtonian to quantum physics
2) transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism
3) phlogiston
4) luminiferous aether
5) Dark Matter (a prediction)
6) a challenge to anyone to get a small child who hasn’t yet been taught how reproduction works to explain how babies are made

…Is that we really are just like the fish of the analogy, and when we try to explain something using less than all of the necessary details, we get it wrong. We are consistently and reliably wrong.

Now, I am talking about the very concept of gods, I cannot stress this enough. The gods of our mythology, the imagined gods people actually believe in, the idea we have in our heads when the term “gods” is used in a sentence when talking about these actual gods, rather than using the term as a synonym for “exceptional”, that is the topic of this debate. The concept of gods are what we first postulated to explain the inexplicable. Consequently, the concept itself, is wrong. Reality is something else entirely. (disclaimer: this is not a statement of hard fact but a statement of belief based on the weight of evidence)

Lastly, here I must address the rebuttals to this argument. No much else to say on the matter other than to scour history books and populate an absurdly long list of theories and explanations that ended up being wrong. The only criteria for inclusion being whether they fall under the domain of the hypothesis presented in round 2.

First, “just because it’s the first explanation, that in no way establishes for a fact that said first explanation is wrong, in fact nothing really stops us from getting it right the first time.”
I never said it was an established fact. Just that it is most likely the case. Presenting a hypothetical situation where someone somewhere gets it right the first time is ignorant and cowardly. The basis for the debate has been which case has a greater weight of evidence supporting it, I have provided a great deal supporting my position, and with a bit of time could produce a great deal more. Countering evidence with none whatsoever is absurd.

Second, “gods are by definition supernatural and inexplicable, so of course we’ll get the details wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
One of the judges, Scott Scheule, in his previous evaluation said “[S]ure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that’s just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn’t show the sun doesn’t exist.” For some reason, Scott was under the impression he was disagreeing with me here, but he made my point quite well. Yes, there is a Sun out there, but it sure as hell isn’t a guy in a chariot. It is something else besides a god.

Third, “if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”
It also does not fall under the domain of the hypothesis my argument rests on. If a person has never been to a coffee shop before, but is already familiar with all the factors that together result in a coffee shop (monetary transactions over a counter, the smell of coffee, styrofoam cups, cramped seating arrangments, and annoying people with laptops), it is not a new phenomenon that requires him to extrapolate on what he knows to fill in any details. All the necessary details are right there for first hand observation.

Lastly, regarding: For any new experience or phenomenon, when man attempts to explain the phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal, the first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong.

I realize that the hypothesis presented is a very rough draft, and needs a fair amount of revision to more accurately reflect my position. However I feel I’ve made my case even without it, and should suffice for now.

Round 3 Rebuttal
Vox

I begin by noting that I tend to agree with Dominic that in most cases, Man’s first attempt to explain a new phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal does often tend to be wrong. Dominic’s use of the word “invariably” can be excused as rhetoric and I will not offer pedantic objection to it. The principle Dominic is articulating is not only sensible, it is entirely in line with my own observation that appeals to the science-based materialist consensus are intrinsically limited by the present state of technology, and it is largely supported by history in general and the history of science in particular.

That being said, it does not apply to the question of the existence of gods. Dominic has committed a category error in attempting to appeal to this principle of Initial Error.

While the principle of Initial Error could theoretically be applied to the historical appeal to gods to explain natural phenomena, (although I note Dominic did not actually provide any support for his assertion that gods are a first attempt at understanding anything, natural or supernatural), it cannot reasonably be applied to what he characterizes as “a first attempt at explaining supernatural experiences”.

First, it is a matter of easily establishable fact that the concept of gods are not an attempt at explaining most supernatural experiences, either initial or subsequent. Astrology, ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy, ghosts, reincarnation, necroparlance and demon-possession have nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of gods. Gods may be one of many aspects of the supernatural, but they are largely unrelated to any means of explaining the majority of supernatural experiences. The connection is tangential; for example, one European survey reported that 60 percent of those who do not believe in gods nevertheless believe in the existence of the supernatural. More importantly, gods could not have originally been conceived as an explanation for supernatural experiences because the concept of gods long predates Man’s distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Dominic’s assumption that gods are an attempt at explaining supernatural experiences is incorrect and therefore his conclusion based on that assumption is also incorrect.

Based on the sheer number of creator gods identified throughout the course of human history, it is much more reasonable to conclude that the primary reason the god concept exists is to explain the phenomenon and purpose of material existence. And throughout the 50,000 years of modern Man’s existence, divine creation still remains the first and foremost hypothesis explaining it, with one brief and partial exception during the 17 years in which Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory was formulated, embraced, and rejected by the cosmological community. Even so noteworthy an atheist as Richard Dawkins, after arguing that “the most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection” freely admits that “We don’t yet have an equivalent crane for physics.” Nor do we have one for the readily observable existence of life.

While Ockham’s Razor is a heuristic, not a proof, it is at least as reliable as Dominic’s principle of First Error. And since Ockham’s Razor recommends the selection of the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions, it dictates the selection of the only serious and lasting hypothesis that Man has ever produced in preference to the others. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the only two concepts that could loosely be considered as competing hypotheses at this point in time, the multiverse concept and Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, are functionally identical to the creator god hypothesis. As I have previously pointed out, from Man’s perspective there is no meaningful distinction between a) a conventional creator god, b) a technologically advanced creator being from another dimension, and c) a programmer of Man’s virtual world.

In conclusion, I note the irony of Dominic’s appeal to the historical record in an attack on a significant aspect of it. This alone should be sufficient to invalidate the aspects of his argument that depend upon the Initial Error hypothesis.

In his attack on B3, the assertion that the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind, Dominic commits a logical error when he concludes that Man’s present failure to understand consciousness necessarily places the moral sense on par with our other urges and desires. There is simply no basis for this leap of logic. He also fails to understand that in referring to the moral sense as a third aspect of consciousness I was not limiting its existence to the human consciousness. This should have been obvious since I made an explicit distinction between the internal and external models. So, not only did I not defeat my own argument, but the assertion that I did makes it clear that Dominic did not understand it. While the moral sense is integrated into human consciousness and at least partially accessible to it, my entire argument is based upon the observable fact that it is often opposed to human desires and therefore cannot be dismissed as just another competing one.

It is true that no one has a complete model of what constitutes consciousness. I did not, as Dominic asserts, ignore “this inconvenient fact”, since I stated that examining the nature of consciousness is presently “beyond the current ability of the science-based materialist consensus”. And while it would be a false dichotomy to note that either Freud’s theory represents the possibility that the signal is internally generated or the moral impulse must come from a source that is genuinely separate from our conciousness, I never proposed any such dichotomy. I cited Freud’s theory in order to show a) even materialists recognize the third observable aspect of consciousness, and I cited its legacy of failure to demonstrate b) the materialist internal model cannot be assumed to be correct. In support of the likelihood that the external generation for the impulse was more likely than the internal, I also cited the external model’s greater success in modifying human behavior, the divergence between the rates of moral evolution when viewed from societal and historical perspectives, and the observed spatio-temporal range of the relatively static moral impulse.

After doing some research, I realized that my case may actually be stronger than originally presented because I was thinking of the moral sense as being wholly accessible to the human consciousness, but this is not the case. As it happens, Dominic contradicted both the current scientific consensus as well as his own statement that no one has “a complete model of what constitutes conciousness” when he declares the moral impulse “is just another desire, a consequence of biology, and accepted as an internally generated part of us.” If this were true, Freud and his successors would not have had to construct their tripartite model in the first place and various moral researchers such as Lewis Petroninovich, John Mikhail, and Marc Hauser would not concur that “much of our knowledge of morality is… based on unconscious and inaccessible principles for guiding judgments of permissibility”. Emphasis mine. Were the moral sense nothing more than one of many biologically driven desires as accessible to the human consciousness as any other, there would be no need for wide-ranging efforts across several scientific and philosophic fields to explain the experiential and observable divergences from the simple two-level materialist model.

The scientifically established fact that parts of our moral sense are not even accessible by our conscious mind is further support for the external model, even if it falls well short of providing proof of it. Few researchers in the area would agree; despite this inaccessibility they simply assume it is an artifact of biological evolution even though their attempts to locate either a moral organ or an area of the brain devoted to moral reasoning have thus far proven fruitless. But the present consensus shows it cannot be reasonably said that the observation of how our moral sense somehow interacts with our conciousness without knowing precisely what conciousness is composed of or the nature of that interaction is in any way tantamount to an admission that B3 is false. Dominic’s case against the assertion that the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind is both logically flawed and incorrect according to the current scientific consensus.

Moving on to the next issue, Dominic is content to stand pat on his previous assertion that B4 was false because “Man’s moral sense greatly changes on a regular basis, even within the span of a moment.” However, this too stands contrary to the current science. In his book Moral Minds, Marc Hauser refers to language in explaining the distinction between Man’s core moral faculty and the various moral grammars that can be observed in societies separated by time and space. Although we speak a variety of languages that sound very different, the differences are superficial in the sense that they serve the same purpose and depend upon precisely the same linguistic faculty. The moral changes to which Dominic refers are mere grammatical transformations, and as such, they are not relevant to the core question of the unchanging moral faculty. B4 states that Man’s moral sense has not greatly changed over time, a statement which clearly refers to the moral faculty, not the various moral grammars, and it does not require that the many billions of expressions of that moral sense over the vast expanse of history have all been identical.

Hauser summarizes the way in which the moral faculty utilizes the various moral grammars on page 44: “The point here is simple: our moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of rules, with each culture setting up particular exceptions to those rules.” Later in the book, he also underlines one of my earlier points about the speed of moral evolution when he refers to the famous silver fox breeding experiment of Dmitry Belyaev and notes how the observed speed of intense selection “sets up a significant challenge” to the conventional materialist perspective on the evolution of the human mind.

Since the conclusions of the various scientific researchers into morality show that Dominic’s statement about the dynamic nature of man’s moral sense was false, this, combined with his previous concession concerning the existence of objective evil, is sufficient to support the conclusion that since Man’s moral sense has not greatly changed over time, the existence of evil logically indicates the existence of a definitive moral law that is as constant and as arbitrary as most, if not all, of the physical laws of the universe.

Dominic spends the greater portion of his argument in what superficially appears to be an attempt to regain lost ground previously conceded in the initial round by an appeal to his principle of Initial Error. But this is not actually the case, as his return to A3 and my “weight of evidence” argument demonstrates that there is actually a surprising amount of common ground in our opposing positions concerning the existence of gods. The difference is that Dominic fails to understand that the theistic concept of gods, and even the Christian concept of God, is much broader than he imagines. The Christian cannot reasonably insist that he knows much about the specific nature and character of God in light of how the Apostle Paul, who actually claimed to have encountered the risen Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, subsequently wrote in 1st Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”

This is very much in keeping with the earlier words of the Psalmist, who wrote: “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.” And in the book of Job, Elihu outright states that God is “beyond our understanding”. The same holds equally true of the many pagan gods, about whom Man possesses even less information.

Thus when Dominic writes “That what we think or later interpret to be gods could very well be something else, something that isn’t a god,” he is not so much arguing for the nonexistence of gods as he is revealing a failure to understand what a god is and why any being would be considered worthy of worship. I will not belabor the dictionary definition by quoting it again, but instead note that a god is primarily worshipped for one of three reasons. First, because the god merits worship due to being the lord and maker of the worshipper, second, for the material benefits that the god can grant to the worshipper, and third, because the exceptional power of the god is feared.

Now, even if the supernatural is eventually discovered to be synonymous with the natural, (as in the case of aliens from this universe), the transdimensional, (as in the case of aliens from a different universe), or the real (as in the case of a programmer responsible for creating our virtual universe), such beings are not only potentially worthy of being acclaimed as genuine gods, but in the case of the latter, are potentially worthy of being recognized as the Creator God. It is the definitive elements of godhood that are the significant aspect of the existential argument here, not the assumed supernatural element, much less the peripheral paranormal phenomena that the supernatural is said to involve, since our understanding of the supernatural is a limited and dynamic one involving “that which is presently believed to be beyond natural limits”. Gods are not synonymous with the supernatural and I note that even definitive evidence that the supernatural exists, such as reliably replicable scientific experiments supporting the existence of telepathy, for example, would not suffice to prove the existence of gods.

This also addresses the second half of Dominic’s point, which is that “the experiences which result in testimony for the existence of gods is in reality attributable to something other than gods.” But theists readily admit our understanding of the nature of the divine is far from perfect. And not only is that understanding imperfect, it is quite reasonably capable of encompassing a significant portion of the alternatives Dominic has posited. Not all natural aliens could be gods, but natural aliens that created the human race would at the very least bear a strong claim to legitimate status as creator gods. Not all transdimensional aliens need be gods, but extradimensional aliens that created our universe would doubtless merit the title. And, of course, a computer programmer who created the simulated universe in which we are the player-characters would, by definition, be our Creator God, although in that case his world would be the natural and ours would not be the natural, but rather the virtual.

The difficulty, and what in some cases may be the impossibility, of distinguishing between gods, natural aliens, transdimensional aliens, and computer programmers isn’t a valid argument against the existence of gods. It is merely an object lesson in the importance of not leaping to conclusions or placing inordinate confidence in a tool that is inadequate for the task at hand.

A significant aspect of my argument that I believe both Dominic and the judges have thus far failed to recognize is that I have not only, as Scott mentioned in his comments on the first round, rescued testimonial evidence, but have also unseated the current science-based material consensus from its presumed position of authority with regards to its capacity for determining the validity of testimonial evidence. Dominic is correct to say that Man is consistently and reliably wrong with regards to his various explanations for various phenomena, but he is incorrect to say this in defense of strict scientific materialism for the obvious reason that science itself is subject to precisely the same problem!

Dominic is somewhat unfortunate in this regard because his argument might have superficially appeared more convincing as recently as two weeks ago, before the physicists at CERN announced the overturning of what scientists had long assumed was one of the fundamental laws of the universe, the cosmic constant. Whether repetitions of the neutrino experiment confirm that the speed of light can be exceeded or not, the unexpected announcement that the speed of light limit has been broken underlines the fact that a dynamic, technology-based temporal snapshot simply cannot serve as a reliable arbiter of what is possible and what is not possible, or even what exists and does not exist. Science, and the materialist consensus based upon it, are clearly incapable of providing a valid means of assessing historical evidence in general and the testimonial evidence for the existence of gods in particular.

The concept of gods are not what Man first postulated to explain the inexplicable, but rather to explain the observable. The concept is not wrong, it is rational, it is necessary, and it remains entirely viable in light of the reality in which we perceive ourselves to exist. Since there is no reason beyond personal incredulity and the present absence of scientific evidence to deny the existence of gods, the significant body of historical evidence is more than sufficient to support the conclusion that gods exist.

Round 1: Dominic
Round 1: Vox

Round 2

It seems we’re going to need a new judge for the debate to replace CL since he has resigned:

In what will surely be joyous news to many at VoxWorld, I officially resign my role of honorary judge in the PZ Myers Memorial Debate [with a caveat I’ll explain at the end of the post].

Read the whole thing, it’s highly amusing. And please feel free to suggest a replacement for the Christian judge and you can vote on the nominees tomorrow. Dominic has already assented to the idea of a substitute since he saw this on the horizon several days ago. We’ll run the new judge by him and get his approval once he’s been chosen.

As for CL’s caveat and offer to return if I recant my scoring system, all I have to say is that is impossible since there is nothing to recant. It’s not my scoring system, I’m not the scorekeeper, and all I did was to simply add up the way each judge had scored each round for the benefit of those following along. You’ll note my opponent didn’t take any issue with it.

Round 1: 3 judges for Vox
Round 2: 1 judge for Vox, 1 judge for Dominic, 1 draw.

Since CL can’t figure out how that might add up to 4.5 to 1.5, it is clearly for the best that the pedantic little whiner resigned. And as I said in the comments, I don’t care if anyone prefers to characterize the current score as any of the following:

a) 1-0. Vox won one round. No one won the second.
b) 1.5-0.5. Vox won the first round, the second was a draw
c) 4-1. Vox won four judges in two rounds, DS won one.
d) 4.5-1.5. Vox won four judges in two rounds, DS won one, one judge called a draw in the second round.

All four of these various scores would be perfectly valid and are supported by the evidence. However, only (d) tells you exactly what happened so far, which was my entire purpose in mentioning it. I’m not the scorekeeper. I don’t declare the winner. But then, it’s hardly surprising that CL is confused as to the various roles of a contestant, a judge, and a scorekeeper, for as Nate remarked prior to the second round judging, it was only a matter of time before CL declared himself the winner.

“Who gets the car? I do!”

All in all, a rather pleasant evening. After a three-year injury layoff, I scored my first goal in the third game of the season and came home to discover that I don’t have to wade through anymore of CL’s endless, vacuous blathering.

Curiouser and curiouser! The debate begins to sharpen and come into focus in the second round and we have a fascinating difference of opinion among the three judges as they pronounce their collective verdict.

CL: Vox did not persuasively demonstrate his argument from moral evil. Dominic failed to show A3 and B3 false. B4 seems irrevocably tied to subjectivity hence still up for grabs. Dominic did not persuasively demonstrate his hypothesis that the first attempt at an explanation is almost invariably correct, nor did he attempt to account for the fact that testimony is distinct from explanation. I declare this round a draw. (For CL’s complete analysis of Round 2, visit The Warfare Is Mental.)

Alex Amenos: Gods and Flying Saucers – round to Vox, with bonus points to both participants for not making me declare whether I take Erich von Daniken seriously;

Evil Detection – edge to Vox;

The first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong – if not an altogether new argument, this is at least a very different presentation of the round 1 argument, and accordingly I prefer to give Vox an opportunity to respond before offering any further judgment.

Good show, gents. Overall I give the round to Vox. His argument is (thus far) the more tightly constructed of the two. If anyone following the debate is interested in trudging through my expanded commentary, just say the word in the comments and we’ll make arrangements.

Scott Scheule: Again, I’m very grateful to both debaters for inviting me to judge their contributions. And again, my criticisms are testament to the respect I have for both. And so no one need read all the way through my commentary, in the end, I award the round to Dominic.

Round 2 – Vox’s Statement
Judgement and Decision – Scott Scheule

Vox begins by addressing some of the complaints various commenters (and judges) have had with the topic of the debate. To be clear, I don’t question whether the topic of the debate is being adhered to–only whether it is an adequate topic of debate if it would allow in, inter alia, space aliens.

Day clarifies that the similarity between gods and advanced non-godly creatures is merely to show the failure of the materialist metric that cannot tell the two apart. Fair enough. It may also be a failure in the specificity of our definitions.

Says Day: “The failure of science to detect supernatural gods is no more significant than its failure to detect natural aliens, and combined with the potential for confusing the two, this means science is an intrinsically unreliable means of determining what historical evidence for the existence of gods and/or aliens is valid and what is not. Therefore, the science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging the mass of available historical evidence for gods.”

Some of the language is ambiguous here. Day’s conclusion that the “science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging the mass of available historical evidence for gods” is correct so far as it means the “science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging whether the mass of available historical evidence is specifically for gods, or for aliens.” The wider conclusion that some readings would supply: “science can’t deal with the historical evidence for gods, full stop” is too ambitious.

Day reiterates his previous metaphor with the Aztecs, which, with the provisos I allowed previously, is still good. He says the analogy understates the actual situation because ” a) not all individuals living in the era of modern science are scientists and b) not all scientists operate in fields that potentially concern the detection of gods.” He develops this theme at length, using a clever example about the okapi, statistics about the prevalence of scientists in the population, and dark matter. He actually understates his case here, by only considering dark matter and not dark energy. When considering energy as well, the amount of energy/matter in the universe we’ve actually been able to detect is a mere 4%.

I wholeheartedly agree it’s amazing how little we know.

Day disputes my point that “as our ability to measure reality and record history has improved, our evidence for the supernatural has begun to wane.” He uses Dominic’s evidence of aliens as a counterexample (it matters not that aliens are not gods, since science can’t distinguish the two, it might be and we wouldn’t know). I do not find this at all convincing. Yes, there are UFO sightings, but I have never heard any particularly reliable account that didn’t seem anywhere near as plausible, anywhere near as 1% as plausible, as alternate explanations such as lying or hallucination.

Day makes the observation that the vast majority of those who claim not to believe in evil nevertheless act as if they do. I don’t know what evidence he could have for this. Take two people, one who believes murder is objectively bad, and another who believes murder is abhorrent, but only subjectively. Both people could act identically, and we’d have no means of telling who was who unless we questioned them on the issue. I never eat eggplant, because I hate it. Someone who believed eating eggplant was evil would presumably act much like I do. That’s no proof that I actually believe in the evilness of eating eggplant.

But I granted most believe morality is objective, even if I don’t, so we can skip over this. Day argues that evil requires an actor, an event, and a sensate victim. Day argues consciousness is also required. This is all fine.

Day then says consciousness is beyond current science. I agree. Nonetheless, there are other solutions that save materialism here: Dennett’s view that consciousness is a persistent illusion would solve the problem as well as any, if only it could take account of the rather large datum of the first-person perspective. McGinn’s mysterianism would also leave us with materialism. But I won’t harp on these, as I don’t find them persuasive.

At any rate, after some exploration of the issue, we come to the issue of whether morality is internal or external. Day’s evidence here strikes me as weak. That psychoanalysis fails to provide a consistent account of morality is true, but not news. Modern accounts of morality using game theory and evolutionary psychology are stronger candidates. Day’s statement that the rapid rate of evolution of morality in the US and the overall uniformity in moral senses across societies otherwise separated is unexplainable by materialism is an assertion I see no reason to accept. If our moral sensibilities had simply evolved before the large scale dispersion of the human race, then it’s no more surprising that we should have the same morality than that we should all be interested in heterosexual sex.

As to the rapid evolution of morality lately: fashion sense has evolved rapidly at the same time, yet I’ve met few who would argue therefore that fashion must have an external non-material source. I’m not sure what sort of morality we would expect if it were entirely material or internal, and if it would differ from what we observe.

Nonetheless, as I’ve conceded, most don’t agree with me. Some will even be unnerved that I would compare morality with clothing fashion. So I’ll proceed with the axiom that morality is objective.

And so I’ll accept Day’s argument, arguendo, that as morality is as arbitrary and constant as any of the physical laws, we can say it’s a similar law. But, I suppose in contradistinction to many, I have no problem accepting something as a brute fact. I’m afraid I just don’t see the force of the argument: laws exist, thus a lawgiver is necessary. This seems to me almost an equivocation on the term “law”: which means something quite different in the cases of the Internal Revenue Code vs. F = MA.

Rebuttal Round 2 – Dominic Saltarelli

Dominic formalizes the logic of the debate. I agree with his presentation of A. I’ve given reason why I think B doesn’t succeed, even as plotted. He goes on to attack necessary planks in both arguments.

Dominic says he wasn’t arguing aliens existed, only that the evidence is on a par with evidence for gods. The implication is Dominic thinks the evidence is weak for aliens: yet Day has taken it as support for his argument in his contribution above. There’s a disagreement obviously on the validity of such evidence.

Dominic argues that the extraordinary nature of testimony for gods makes it different from other testimonial evidence, and more akin to alien encounters. I agree. Indeed, Day seems to agree as well. The only difference is Dominic (and I) think this is a shot against the evidence for gods, Day the opposite. So there’s a prior parties are bringing to the table in which they differ: their personal views of testimony of alien encounters.

Dominic says that Day’s Aztec metaphor is obfuscation. I disagree. It’s simply not relevant to this branch of the argument. That alien encounters continue the evidence for ancient gods would be one reason to not deny the evidence of past encounters with gods (says Day). But that gods may simply be absent, in much the same way whites were from Aztecs, is another independent defense of past testimonial evidence (and a better defense). And Dominic seems to concede the point here: he says it would be silly for Aztecs to deny the existence of white men. Is he thus admitting it would be similarly silly to deny the existence of gods? Again, Dominic seems to be arguing for agnosticism, not atheism.

Dominic demands evidence of aliens or gods that arises independently of the cultural milieu it supports. Fair enough. How about a risen Christ from people whose only conception of resurrection was to be at the end of days?

Were I Day, my response would be something along the line of sure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that’s just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn’t show the sun doesn’t exist.

Dominic argues that morality is not objective, and moreover, Vox has admitted as much: Vox, says he, admitted it could be an implant and that gave the game away. Well no, not exactly. The game is who’s the more likely implanter, evolution or God or some tertium quid.

Dominic argues morality, contra Vox (at times), does change often.

I find something distinctly weird in both disputers here. See, if morality is just another evolved chunk of us, we would expect uniformity in it. So I would expect Dominic to be arguing for a stable morality. And if morality is just hanging out there, perfected, then I would expect our morality to change to more closely approximate that ideal morality with time, in the same way our understanding of physical laws has changed with time–thus I’d expect Vox to argue for a fluid morality. But both are doing the opposite, at least at times.

Dominic then argues vengeance disproves a stable morality. I don’t find this at all convincing. Dominic seems to think calling vengeance an exception to the general law against, e.g., murder, is somehow to give up the claim that morality is objective. I can’t see why, anymore than granting the law that things fall at the same rate has an exception when there’s air resistance gives up the objective existence of gravity.

In sum, I think the testimonial evidence criticism does invalidate argument A. I don’t think B goes through because B1 is false. Even if B1 is true, I don’t think the law requires a lawgiver, so I don’t think B goes through. But Dominic’s arguments have been against B3 and B4, and I’m not convinced either criticism has been sound.

Still, we need a positive argument to get to atheism, which Dominic presents. It is simply his weird argument again. I will state my first response, which I still feel works.

“Moreover, simple strangeness doesn’t really bear on the issue of theism vs. atheism. Yes, it may be reality is much stranger than imagined. But that reality may have a God or may not. If there is a God, then He may well be something far stranger than anything we’ve imagined… Or there may be no God, and reality is alone, far stranger than anticipated…”

Dominic says his point was that the first explanation is usually wrong. Well, yeah. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a second explanation. When the first explanation works, we pay no attention. That gods were the first explanation seems a gross simplification. And it’s not exactly like others didn’t try materialism as an early explanation either. See De Rerum Natura.

What’s subjective is the guess at what the next explanation, the successful one, the weird one, will be. Dominic’s got a hunch it’s an atheistic explanation. Here’s my original explanation, altered to face Dominic’s revision:

“Moreover, the simple wrongness of the first explanation doesn’t bear on the issue of theism vs. atheism. It may be that the second, weirder explanation involves a god. It may be that the second, weirder explanation doesn’t involve a god. Still weird, still second, still correct in either case.”

Dominic argues that the existence of other gods not thus far touched upon is beyond the scope of the debate. I have no idea if this is true or not. The only topic I’ve seen thus far is “The first PZ Myers Memorial Debate features Dominic Saltarelli vs Vox Day and concerns the evidence and logic for the existence or nonexistence of gods.” That’s vague, but “gods” suggests a fairly wide net. Moreover Day seems quite explicit that he’s talking about as many gods as possible. The debaters are welcome to clarify the topic.

In sum, Day’s A argument fails, the B argument fails, but I’m less certain about that, and Dominic’s positive argument that there are no gods fails as well. We’re left with agnosticism, which I suppose, to be cheerful about it, means both parties lose.

Still, all in all, I think Dominic made the better case.

So, we have one vote for Dominic, one vote for Vox, and one vote for a draw. That makes Round Two a draw! Dominic has decided that for Round Three, he will present the next argument and I will write the rebuttal. The current score is Vox 4.5, Dominic 1.5.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS
Vox Day

As there has been some confusion of the debate concerning the existence of gods rather than being limited to the existence of the Christian God, I will point out that the focus on the existence of small-g gods, plural, has always been the case. In his initial post on Pharyngula that inspired my original debate challenge three years ago, PZ Myers demanded to see “some intelligent arguments for gods”. He wrote: ”Somebody somewhere is going to have to someday point me to some intelligent arguments for gods, because I’ve sure never found them.” My challenge to him reflected that, as I wrote: “It is my contention that there is not only substantial evidence for the existence of gods, but that the logic for the existence of gods is superior to the logic for the nonexistence of them as presented by yourself, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, to name a few.” Any objections to the original subject of the debate turning out to be the subject of debate are not only spurious, but entirely nonsensical.

Furthermore, if we accept the commonly cited argument for atheism articulated by Stephen F. Roberts as valid, when we understand why Dominic dismisses all the other possible gods, we will understand why he dismisses the Christian God. The atheist position that Dominic is championing is not defined as disbelief in the existence of the Christian God, but as disbelief in the existence of all gods. To his credit, Dominic understands and accepts this, and everyone would do well to follow his example.

In the first round, Dominic correctly conceded two significant points. They are as follows:

1. There is something, possibly of a distinctly external nature, is imposing itself on people throughout history

2. Objective evil, as defined as a self-aware, purposeful, and malicious force which intends material harm and suffering to others and is capable of inflicting it, is quite real.

Although Dominic has not taken issue with it, others have complained that the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of gods is excessively broad. This is not the case. Most dictionaries similarly distinguish between God and gods, sometimes more specifically than Oxford, and many even define the concept more broadly. For example, Merriam-Webster defines “god” thusly:

1. capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality: the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe
2 : a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship
3 : a person or thing of supreme value
4 : a powerful ruler

The second Merriam-Webster definition is helpful because its use of the term “believed” points to the important aspect of the potential confusion between technologically advanced space aliens and gods. While one could get technical and assert that a mistaken belief in the divinity of a technologically advanced individual is sufficient to prove the existence of gods as per the dictionary definitions, this is not an argument I am making. Dominic is correct to suggest proving other people exist is not the purpose of this discussion. Nor is it to prove that technologically advanced aliens may be god-like or that Hu Jintao is a god. My purpose in citing a correct dictionary definition of gods and the potential confusion of aliens for them is merely to show that the intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing between a genuine supernatural deity and a technologically advanced natural entity renders reliance upon the science-based materialist consensus an inherently invalid metric.

The known possibility of confusion does not mean that perception counts as actual objective existence, it means that the perception of gods and/or aliens, and more importantly, the means of perceiving them, are unreliable and therefore cannot be appealed to as if they are conclusive, or even meaningful in this specific regard. The failure of science to detect supernatural gods is no more significant than its failure to detect natural aliens, and combined with the potential for confusing the two, this means science is an intrinsically unreliable means of determining what historical evidence for the existence of gods and/or aliens is valid and what is not. Therefore, the science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging the mass of available historical evidence for gods.

In support of this conclusion, I note that in the previous round, I showed that the failure of modern science to detect gods during only 0.6 percent of modern Man’s existence is analogous to the Aztecs assuming that because no white men were seen during a given 201-day period between 1427 and 1519, Cortés and the conquistadors did not exist. But this analogy actually tends to understate the actual situation because a) not all individuals living in the era of modern science are scientists and b) not all scientists operate in fields that potentially concern the detection of gods.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, there are 5.8 million science and engineering researchers in the world, which means there are approximately three million scientists out of the 6.85 billion people on the planet assuming a relatively equal division between scientists and engineers. Even if we generously assume that this ratio of 1/2283 of the population can be applied to the entire era of modern science from 1600 AD to 2011 AD, this means that a more precise analogy requires concluding that because 6,570 of the estimated 15 million Aztecs did not see any white men during 201 days between 1427 and 1519, Cortés and the conquistadors did not exist. In light of this statistical reality, it is worth recalling that despite eyewitness testimony and historical evidence dating back to The Apadana of Xerxes in 424 BC, modern science did not credit the existence of the okapi for 299 years, the first three-quarters of the modern scientific era, despite the fact that an estimated 15,000 okapis still live in the wild today. And given how we are informed that 90% of the matter in the universe still remains undetected, it should not be a mystery that no scientists have managed to find any gods in the 10% of the universal matter they have so far managed to locate.

Furthermore, it is incorrect to say that as our ability to measure reality and record history has improved, our evidence for the supernatural has begun to wane. And here I will turn to Dominic’s excellent point about the way in which the general shift in the nature of reports of the scientifically inexplicable have increasingly tended to reflect the aliens of science fiction rather than the gods of history. Since I have already demonstrated that science cannot distinguish between the former and the latter, one cannot reasonably say that our evidence for the supernatural has begun to wane; if anything it has increased in recent decades because the testimonial evidence for the supertechnological is indistinguishable from the testimonial evidence for the supernatural. At this point, we have no idea if ancient evidence for gods is more indicative of technologically advanced aliens than current evidence for technologically advanced aliens is indicative of ancient gods. All we know now is that there is a long and consistent record of evidence of something with superscientific abilities imposing itself on people throughout history, a record that not only preceded the era of modern science, but continues right through it to the present day.

This does not mean that gods exist. This does not mean that aliens exist. This does not mean that aliens broadly defined as gods exist. This merely means that the weight of the historical evidence strongly indicates that aliens and/or gods exist, that the lack of scientific evidence for either gods or aliens is almost completely irrelevant concerning the fact of their existence, and that it is at least conceivable that supertechnological aliens, transdimensional beings, and supernatural gods are actually one and the same thing.

However, it should be noted that even iron-clad scientific proof of the existence of gods would not be sufficient to prove the existence of a creator god, still less the existence of a Creator God, and less yet the existence of the Christian Creator God who has provided Creation with moral laws as well as physical laws. The destruction of the materialist case for nonexistence is not tantamount to proving the case for existence and there is no way to make the logical leap from the evidential support for the existence of gods and/or aliens to the Ten Commandments and Jesus Christ dying on the Cross for the sins of Man. A very different case is required.

Since Dominic has already acknowledged the existence of evil as defined above, I shall endeavor to explain why the analogy of light and shadow is correct and how the existence of evil suffices to prove the existence of a creator god worthy of the more significant term God. I acknowledge that this argument will hold no water for those who reject the existence of evil or consider all events to be nothing more than meaningless and dynamic arrangements of atoms over time. However, I have observed over the years that the vast majority of those who claim not to believe in evil nevertheless speak, write, and act in a manner that completely contradicts their asserted non-belief, therefore the axiom will be legitimate for most.

The first assent having been granted, the two steps in the logic that still need to be demonstrated here are a) that the existence of evil requires the presence of a source of good, and, b) that the only entity capable of dictating an objective and definitive good is the Creator or His agent. Due to the word limit, I shall concentrate my efforts on the demonstrating why the existence of evil requires the presence of a definitive Good, and how that strongly implies existence of a Creator.

To determine if the existence of evil requires the presence of a source of good, we must first consider what the existence of evil requires. At a bare minimum, it is apparent that evil requires an actor, an action/event, and a sensate victim. One does not consider a hurricane to be evil although it is an event and there are victims because there is no actor. One does not consider a man telling lies to the mirror to be evil because no one is deceived; there is no victim. And one does not consider a man smashing a stone into pieces to be evil because although there is an actor, an action, and a victim, the victim is not sensate.

However, of the seven deadly sins, wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony, only gluttony even requires an action for its commission. The others are states of consciousness that may or may not lead to action. Now, obviously to insist that the seven capital vices of Christianity are evil would be special pleading, but I cite them only to highlight the way in which an evil state of consciousness usually precedes the evil act regardless of what the evil act may be. So, we must conclude that evil requires either an actor, an action, and a sensate victim or an actor and a state of consciousness in which committing an action is desired. Such states of consciousness are not crimes, of course, since the law requires action, and usually, material injury before it is concerned. And yet, those who admit to the existence of evil uniformly consider these intentional states of consciousness to be evil even when the actor remains completely inactive. It is not merely the pedophile’s actions which are evil, but also his state of consciousness previous to any subsequent evil actions.

So, evil is fundamentally a matter of consciousness, which at this point in time places it beyond the current ability of the science-based materialist consensus to examine. But those who have experienced such states of consciousness already know that the materialist explanation for cause-and-effect are insufficient, even before taking Dominic’s suggestion of occasional exceptions to it into account. Consider the differences between a plant which lacks the capacity to consider consequences or a moral sense, an animal which lacks a moral sense and a Man who possesses both the capacity to consider consequences as well as a moral sense.

Plant: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Animal: Do what thou wilt, with due regard for the policemen around the corner.
Man: Do what is right.

Man’s consciousness observably has at least three aspects, as unlike animals, which operate according to a simple utilitarian dualism, Man has an additional sense which acts as an internal brake upon his desires in addition to the external brake imposed by other parties. It is this sense which caused Freud to develop his theory of ego, id, and superego, and it is possession of this sense which explains why we hold men responsible for actions that animals are permitted. When Man contemplates an action, he is capable of taking at least three elements into account.

1.His desires.
2.The potential consequences
3.The morality of his action

The sense that is required for the third step is what I referred to in the previous round as the antenna that is indicative of the existence of some form of transmission. It is usually referred to as conscience, or in religious terms, the “still small voice”, and it is something that is simultaneously internal to the consciousness and outside the desires and the awareness of consequences. It is most noticeable when it is in opposition to the alignment of the two other aspects of the state of consciousness. Materialists assume that this third element does not exist and is merely a variable result of combining the first two elements, but their opinion is irrelevant at this point since they are still wrestling with the question of the material existence of consciousness itself. Should they ever manage to sort that out, it will of course have to be taken into account, but until then the science-based materialist consensus is no more significant than the cartoon of the proverbial devil and angel sitting, sight unseen, on one’s shoulders, whispering into one’s ears. Only observations, history, and logic are relevant here.

Given our observation that this sense exists and that it picks up signals that may or may not be produced internally and which are known to frequently contradict the two other elements, we must decide if it is more likely that the signal is internally or externally generated. Freud’s theory and its variants is the most established of the various internal models, but nearly 100 years of the consistent failure of psychoanalysis and its theory of the unconscious mind suggest that external generation is more likely, especially when one considers the external model’s relative success in comparison with the internal model when everything from suicide rates to life expectancy are compared. Moreover, neither the materialist perspective nor the internal model can account for the difference between the rapid rate of claimed moral evolution observed in the United States with regards to homosexuality and the very small variations in moral sensibilities observed across societies separated by geography as well as the full extent of the historical record.

If we accept that the signal is externally generated, the next question is the extent of the signal. Due to the relatively small range of variations in moral sensibilities, we can see that this signal has a vast scope in terms of time as well as space. The transmitter, then, must be able to transcend the material to at least the same extent that human consciousness does, it must be capable of reaching the utmost expanses of humanity both geographically and temporally, and it must be relatively stable. And it because it is departures from the signal that result in states of consciousness that we have shown to be evil, it is obvious that such states can only exist insofar as the signal also exists. In the absence of the signal, which is the objective and definitive Good, or if one prefers, the Moral Law, neither the state of consciousness nor the actions of the actor can rise above the animal level, and therefore cannot be considered evil. The Law can only be broken if the Law exists. Evil can only exist in the presence of the Good.

Now, the signal need not be a signal per se. It could also be a pre-programmed implant, in which case we would speak of the implanter rather than the transmitter. But regardless, the almost uniformly observed existence of Man’s moral sense throughout history proves that so long as we accept that (1) evil exists, (2) potential differences between one’s consequentially safe desires and one’s moral sense can be observed, (3) the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind, and (4) Man’s moral sense has not greatly changed over time, then the existence of evil logically indicates the existence of a definitive moral law that is as constant and as arbitrary as most, if not all, of the physical laws of the universe.

And because this definitive moral law is constant and arbitrary, there must be a lawgiver capable of both defining and transmitting it. It should be readily apparent that the term more customarily used for the lawgiver is God, who as the Creator of the universe has both the authority and the ability to define the arbitrary constants of the moral law in the same way He has defined the constants of the physical ones.

REBUTTAL
Dominic Saltarelli

First off, I would like to thank Vox for letting me off the hook for having to wrack my brain to come up with a sufficiently entertaining argument to prove a negative. It was my mistake to overlook the topic of the debate being towards “gods” rather than the preconcieved yet popular notion of “God”. So any references to a creator God, the cosmological argument, and out-of-context quoting of Aristotle pointing out how the teaching method of a competing school is poor because it suffers from infinite regress by trying to rely on demonstration alone, are all being dropped as not germane to the topic at hand (though may be relied upon for satire at a later time).

In summary, Vox’s argument thus far is twofold, the first providing the foundation for the second.

(A) There is (1) a mountain of testimonial evidence of interaction with gods, (2) testimonial evidence is generally reliable, thus (3) it is ahistorical and denialist to dismiss all such testimonial evidence, and therefore the evidence suggests gods are real.

(B) (1) Evil exists, (2) potential differences between one’s consequentially safe desires and one’s moral sense can be observed, (3) the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind, and (4) Man’s moral sense has not greatly changed over time, then the existence of evil logically indicates the existence of a definitive moral law that is as constant and as arbitrary as most, if not all, of the physical laws of the universe.

The conclusion of (B), that this law means a lawgiver who meets the definition of God, is an element, or at least subset of the set of likely “gods” established by (A).

Both arguments require all of A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and B4 to each be true statements for the evidence to support the logic that gods are more likely than not. Establishing that, contrary to the arguments presented, there is evidence showing A3, B3, and B4 are each false statements will invalidate the conclusions drawn by both (A) and (B).

Further, because this is the point of the debate, “not A3” being the true statement supports the separate line of argument I presented originally that there is valid logic and evidence for the non-existence of gods, which I will seek to clarify herein, and by clarify I mean dumb down my original argument enough so that people aren’t laboring under the impression I was actually arguing for the existence of aliens rather than calling me out for making the argument from incredulity (which it primarily was, with the exception that I gave actual reasons to be incredulous).

A3 – “it is ahistorical and denialist to dismiss all such testimonial evidence”

The true statement would be that it is ahistorical to dismiss all testimonial evidence out of hand. Vox provides several good examples of why this statement is true (the existence of okapis and the empire of Assyria to name a few). However, testimony of personal contact with gods is a class of testimony, clearly defined by being an experience of the apparently supernatural, out of the ordinary, and demanding of an explanation. This is precisely why I introduced the relatively recent phenomenon of alien abductions. It is a class of testimony that is equivalent to and practically indistinguishable from testimony of interactions with gods, as opposed to testimony of interactions with the mundane. By presenting evidence that we have every reason to dismiss testimonial evidence of alien abductions due to the fact that pre-existing cultural influence both preceedes and largely defines what is later reported by alien abductees, and the same can thus be said of angelic visitations, demonic possession, and ornery leprechauns.

A3 is false.

The only argument Vox has presented that A3 is true are increasingly elaborate ways of saying “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. I completely agree that this is true. However Vox’s responses thus far regarding A3 have been against an imaginary materialist-concensus opponent who dogmatically insists that gods aren’t real because he hasn’t personally poked one with a stick. My argument, from the very beginning, has been that testimonial evidence for gods in particular is easily dismissed for the exact same reason that testimony for alien abductions can be dismissed. That it would have been silly for a hypothetical group of Aztecs to deny the existence of hostile Spainards before ever meeting a white man is intentional obfuscation, because Vox’s own argument is entirely dependent on the idea that the gods have in fact been met.

The response to my objection is not to hem and haw and say, “well, we don’t know everything you see, so, it… uh, could be.” We may not know much of anything, but we do know each other pretty well. If we didn’t, Vox’s entire argument regarding the existence of evil would be impossible to make.

The only response that actually addresses my argument would be to show me someone who is possessed by a demon that spits on both the cross and the name of Christ who has never heard of Christianity or been exposed to anything christian. Show me someone recounting an experience of being sexually molested by little grey aliens with big heads and huge hypnotic eyes who’d never heard of or been exposed to Hollywood films or other popular culture sources that tell us what aliens do and what they look like. There has been no such showing yet.

That we don’t know everything is irrelevant. That aliens who may exist that may yet further be mistaken for gods is irrelevant. We have established thus far that “not A3” is a true statement, given my evidence that this is such and Vox’s complete lack of any rebuttal. Because A3 is false, the conclusion drawn from (A) is also false.

B3 – “the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind”

Vox’s argument here involves correlating the moral impulse, the objective Good, with a signal that imposes itself on our conscious decision making process, with the significance of the analogy being that the signal is external and universal, crossing time and space to affect everyone. Vox dashes his own argument to pieces by stating:

“…it is something that is simultaneously internal to the consciousness and outside the desires and the awareness of consequences.”

and

“It could also be a pre-programmed implant, in which case we would speak of the implanter rather than the transmitter.”

Ok, so after all that about it being a still quiet voice most likely external in nature, it could equally just as well be an integral part of us that is just another influence on our decision making process. Why Vox would invalidate his own argument so completely is a mystery, but of no conern to me. This admission by Vox that the moral impulse is internal to the conciousness (and no weasling out by saying I don’t understand the part about it being identified most easily through opposition to other parts of the conciousness, [notice how I italicized “parts”, that’s the kicker]) and likely a result of our physical structure is simply admitting B3 is not true. Our morality is just as much a part of us as any other part of our conciousness that influences decision making.

B3 is false.

B4 – “Man’s moral sense has not greatly changed over time”

Vox himself admits there has been a “rapid rate of claimed moral evolution observed in the United States with regards to homosexuality”. I could leave it at that. Since this is what I was expecting from the very beginning, though, I will go ahead with what I had at the ready. Man’s moral sense greatly changes on a regular basis, even within the span of a moment. In fact, man’s moral sense completely reverses itself and actively pushes us towards evil so often we have a word for it. This single word invalidates B4, and demonstates that “not B4” is the true statement.

Vengeance.

Retribution and revenge can be considered as evil in a great many situations. But just as often we call it justice. Objective evil has been defined, it is:

“A self-aware, purposeful, and malicious force which intends material harm and suffering to others and is capable of inflicting it, requiring either an actor, an action, and a sensate victim or an actor and a state of consciousness in which committing an action is desired.”

A man who gets his hands on the boy who raped his daughter meets every single clause of the definition presented above. Yet both the man and what happens next is not evil, it is justice. Depending on who you ask, of course. Evil is suddenly not evil when the victim deserves it, this is what our moral sense tells us, yet meeting out justice and punishment satisfies every single criterion for objectively identifying evil presented.

Trying to argue at this point that our sense of justice is itself a consistent a part of the moral sense by pointing to the grand scheme of history and how it’s a component that has always been a part of our cultures is to avoid the issue at hand. The argument is that there is an objective and consistent Good that we can sense with the morality identifying part of our conciousness, and exceptions or violations to this universal Good are how we recognize evil. But I have shown that the moral sense itself completely reverses course and calls evil, the Good, on a regular basis. Time to put Mere Christianity down, C.S. Lewis can’t help you now.

B4 is false.

Having shown that Vox’s argument for the existence of gods is false, it is apparently still incumbent on me to make a positive case for the non-existence of gods, again.

The theme of my presenation was titled “truth is stranger than fiction”, for which I did what I could to divorce any personal feelings on the matter from the attempt to establish the pattern, and only afterwards finally admitting that I’ve noticed the pattern myself and found it persuasive. The hypothesis which I sought to prove being that for any new experience or phenomenon, when man attempts to explain the phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal, the first attempt (and sometimes 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc…) at explanation is almost invariably wrong. Test it if you like. Find a young child, turn the tables, and be the person to ask them how babies are made.

The examples I provided showed this pattern through history. When physicists were first exploring the atomic and subatomic, they went in with the expectation that little particles couldn’t be all that different from big ones, with experimental results very quickly overturning that assumption. Similarly with the first impression regarding what revolved around what in the solar system. Another example would be the phlogiston theory of fire, because that extra weight had to go somewhere. Then there was ‘luminiferous aether’ to fill up the universe with something that could carry these pesky light “waves”.

It’s not terribly relevant to the debate, but consider the case when applying this hypothesis to a prevailing “first explanation for a great mystery” that has not yet been officially scrapped. Take Dark Matter, the idea that the universe is mainly composed of just more matter that it so happens we can’t see or detect any direct way, but it’s got to be there, because nothing else could account for these gravitational anomolies. I expect it to be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the tachyon soon enough. Those most likely to do it being a vocal fringe group of plasma cosmologists challenging this first attempt at an explanation.

So, to make myself absolutely crystal clear on the matter, the hypothesis is:
For any new experience or phenomenon, when man attempts to explain the phenomenon using the tools for understanding at his disposal, the first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong.

I thought I was being clear before when I came out and explicitly said “great mystery” rather than rely on context alone to convey that the explanations that fall under the domain of this hypothesis were those that required imagination to fill in the missing details.

The response received so far to this argument has been a dismissive wave of “obvious to Dominic does not make it true”. The counter examples being perfectly mundane references to Starbucks and Internet porn. No imagination is necessary to postulate the existence of either, and the retort so far has been remarkably asinine. There is no need to rely on extrapolation to paint a complete picture when acertaining either Starbucks or Jenna Jameson is real.

Given that I have supported the hypothesis with historical evidence, and that there has been no attempt at all in refuting it, the evidence suggests that the hypothesis is true. Applying it to the concept of “gods”, we see that for man’s experiences of what he has deemed supernatural throughout history, “gods” was the first explanation. This first explanation is an extrapolation using the tools for understanding at man’s disposal at the time to explain a new phenomenon, and is consequently most likely the incorrect explanation. Gods are not real because the true reason for the eyewitness testimony that they are based on is something else entirely.

Let me also make it clear here and now that whatever that something else would happen to be, I neither know nor care, nor is it required to be singular in nature or anymore conscious than gravity. The only case I’m making is in regards to the one thing it isn’t. Further, attempting to claim that this argument does not disprove any and all potential gods rather than those identified thus far is outside of the scope of this debate.

Round 1: Dominic
Round 1: Vox

The three judges have reached their decisions and provided their commentaries. Each not only has a different perspective, but took a different approach to their judging. The bulk of CL’s decision is posted on his blog; go there to read the whole thing. The entirety of Alex’s and Scott’s statement’s are posted here below. Scott elected to judge both the initial statements and the rebuttals separately, whereas CL and Alex judged the whole of the four pieces.

CL: Overlooking his neglect for citations, Vox’s arguments respected scientific methodology, consistency and consensus, whereas Dominic’s arguments showed flagrant disregard for the same. I’m not being harsh, but Dominic didn’t make a single forceful argument for the non-existence of gods. On the other hand, Vox’s argument from mathematical probability established plausibility, but that isn’t sufficient to force the conclusion that gods exist. Vox’s argument from moral evil wasn’t sufficiently developed to be relevant. The clincher? Dominic conceded the forcefulness of Vox’s “plethora of evidence” argument, which clearly tips the scale in Vox’s favor, but it gets worse for Dominic: Vox’s “plethora of evidence” is also consistent with Dominic’s “alien hypothesis,” and aliens are acceptable given the definition of “gods” we’ve been supplied. So, unexpectedly, both Vox and Dominic seem to have agreed that E/L->gods! Since Dominic was supposed to argue that E/L->no gods, it seems he didn’t make his case and actually conceded Vox’s. Since our loosely-defined concept of “gods” allows for any superhuman being worshipped as able to control nature, I don’t see how Dominic could successfully argue that E/L->no gods, unless of course he attributes Vox’s “plethora of evidence” to an uncannily teleological “Northern lights” -type phenomena. Or mass delusion, but both these guys are levels above John Loftus.

I reluctantly declare Vox Day the winner of round one, but not by much. In fact, it’s almost by default.

NB: This is merely CL’s conclusion, CL closely analyzed the entire round on a point-by-point basis at his blog, The Warfare is Mental. Go there to read the entire analysis.

Alex Amenos: I’m going to be brief and unspecific with my comments because I don’t want to risk influencing the direction or content of the participants’ arguments any more than absolutely necessary. My breakdown, generally:

The Ancient Astronaut Argument—Oh sweet Sitchin, I never expected this when I signed on for the job. Noting that Vox has not yet responded to the rebuttal, I give a small edge to Dominic.

Vox’s Argument from Evil v. Dominic’s Rebuttal—I didn’t find Dominic’s rebuttal to be terribly compelling. That’s not to say it couldn’t be beefed up, but as for now….edge to Vox.

Dominic’s ‘Effect before Cause’ Argument v. Vox’s Rebuttal—Vox.

‘Problem of Infinite Regress’ Point and Counter-point—TLDR, draw

Dominic’s ‘Truth is Stranger than Fiction’ Argument v. Vox’s Rebuttal—Dominic’s argument suggests the answer to the Question is not only Not-Known but also maybe Un-Knowable. I’m going to stay on the fence with this one for the time being.

Not a knockout by any stretch, but I give the first round to Vox. Looking forward to round 2.

Scott Scheule: First, let me thank the debaters for their contributions to this perennial debate. That both could produce novel arguments on this well-worn issue is a marvel. Moreover, the respectful tone that both champions have maintained thus far is testament that–despite the great degree of name-calling currently exhibited by both sides in this era of New Atheism–an interesting, illuminating, and entertaining exchange of ideas remains possible.

I will announce my choice for the winner of each round of debate, after giving a summary and examination of the respective offerings of the debater. I have erred, in my evaluations, on the side of being overly critical. I hope no one finds this to be a sign of disrespect: it is intended as precisely the opposite.

Opening Statement – Dominic

Dominic’s opening salvo consists of three arguments. Two of these are anticipatory of the theist’s arguments: first, he denies the necessity of a prime mover, and second, he argues the cosmological argument is invalid as it is victim to an infinite regress, antipathy towards which is what is supposed to drive that argument in the first place. I examine these in turn, before moving on to the third, positive argument.

Argument 1: There is no need for a first mover.

Dominic argues that a first mover is only necessary if space-time is causal and linear, and we have reasons to believe that it is not (entirely) so.

I’m not entirely sure it’s true that linearity is necessary for the first mover argument. Rather it’s the causality prong that bears the burden. If God exists out of time, which seems to be the typical conception, then he doesn’t exist “before” the cause in anything but a very strained sense of “before.” Now, to be sure, all these mysteries of timelessness are a problem for the first cause argument proponent as well, importing as he does everyday “timeful” intuitions to a timeless realm, and I imagine there are significant points to be gained by the atheist in that area. But that’s something we’ll have to examine if it comes up.

Regardless, Dominic attacks the linearity of space-time by giving evidence against that conception: 1. a recent paper by Daryl Bem that shows some psychic ability in participants, particularly as regards pornography; 2. an anecdote by my fellow judge “cl” where he claims to have had a prescient vision; 3. the phenomenon of deja vu; and 4. mantic dreams.

Again, even if we grant the truth of this non-linear version of space-time, I don’t see it much aids against the prime mover argument. Say it’s proven an effect may precede its cause: if such, we can imagine our prime mover no longer necessarily preceding his creation, but perhaps even succeeding it. God may exist after the end of the universe, and thence he reached back and caused the universe. This slightly altered cosmological argument seems to pack the same punch, as, as I’ve said, it’s the connection of cause and effect that matters, not the temporal relation between the two.

But let us assume that non-linearity would be a significant wrench in the works for the cosmological argument. Even so, I find Dominic’s evidence strikingly weak. With all due respect to cl, I think we’re perfectly entitled to cut his experience out of the data set as a mere anecdote. (Of course cl may not be able to do so, which is presumably why Dominic chose it. Nonetheless, I’m not cl, so I can, and do.) Bem’s paper is interesting, but recent, and an outlier. I would be happy if it turns out to have identified something true–but, given the long failure of research to find evidence of such things, I think a large amount of skepticism is required here. As to deja vu, which I experience quite often, I’m similarly skeptical here: mystical and delightful as the phenomenon is, my guess is it’s just a short in the brain’s memory apparatus.

As to prescient dreams, Dominic felt the phenomenon widespread enough not to need a reference. I disagree.

So I think the evidence offered for non-linearity is weak at best, and the issue perhaps entirely irrelevant.

Argument 2: The cosmological argument suffers an infinite regress.

I have never heard this counterargument before. Dominic runs the normal cosmological argument, and points out that thought itself is the phenomenon that most easily crosses abstract and material, and thus it was a thought of God that bridged the gap. The first thought, he asserts, was a thought about thinking, as that would be the purest thought. But what was the thinking that that thought was about about? More thinking? Hence, an infinite regress.

But I see no reason to think the primordial thought of God would be about thinking. If that’s truly the purest thought–and I don’t see why that is either–then why would God have to think that and nothing else?

Moreover, I’m generally skeptical of infinite regress arguments. Even with Zeno’s paradox, nevertheless, arrows do reach their destinations, so either that’s an illusion of some sort, or there’s something wrong with the argument. The latter seems more likely. And I’m tempted to use a similar counterexample here. Thinking about thinking leads to an infinite regress, perhaps: nonetheless I can–and I imagine y’all can as well–think about thinking. I’m doing it right now. Infinite regress, or no, I can do it, so either an infinite regress must be possible, or for some reason, this really isn’t an infinite regress.

Argument 3: The truth is stranger than fiction.

This is the only positive argument against the existence of gods. If the previous two counterarguments succeeded and there were no other pro-theistic arguments, we would be left with only agnosticism. I’m not faulting Dominic here–the topic of the debate was never sharpened into anything as clear as “There are gods,” but left rather murky as “evidence for and against gods.” Still, as his contribution to evidence “against gods,” for which he’s presumably the proponent, this doesn’t do much.

Dominic’s point here is that gods are simply not strange enough to be the real answer. Reality has to be far stranger than that.

The adjective “strange” verges on the dangerously subjective. Moreover, imagine hearing, e.g., Christian orthodoxy without prior exposure. God gives birth to a third of His tripartite-self, speaking to that fraction of himself and ultimately sacrificing it to remove the ancient taint of ingestion of a forbidden fruit. Eldritcher stories are imaginable, but with fresh ears this one’s pretty weird. I recall C.S. Lewis in, I believe, “Mere Christianity” pointing out this oddness.

Dominic gives examples of weirdness proving true: quantum physics (certainly the best example), heliocentrism. Many more examples could be added: evolution, the germ theory of disease, genetics. But there’s surely some selection bias here: a discovery must be, almost by definition, of something weird. Otherwise a discovery isn’t really necessary. Why is it bright during the day and dark at night? Answer: the sun shines during the day. Nothing weird about that. All the commonsensical functions of the world don’t draw attention–point being, truth is often quite a bit less strange than fiction. We just don’t notice it. The chicken probably crossed the road because chickens walk and roads are things that are sometimes walked over.

Moreover, simple strangeness doesn’t really bear on the issue of theism vs. atheism. Yes, it may be that reality is much stranger than imagined. But that reality may have a God or may not. If there is a God, then He may well be something far stranger than anything we’ve imagined (many Christians would happily agree)–nonetheless, He’s still God. Or there may be no God, and reality is, alone, far stranger than anticipated (many atheists would happily agree). There still won’t be a God.

So I don’t think this argument succeeds.

Dominic also says postulating the existence of supernatural beings is abundantly obvious as being a convenient fantasy concocted as a childish and superficial explanation of any and everything. This may be true, but it’s mere assertion, and can be treated as such.

Opening Statement – Vox Day

Vox begins by widening evidence to its full dictionary definition, in contrast with the niggardly conception that many of the New Atheists hew to. Essentially his conception of evidence allows in testimony, whereas others would limit evidence to the purely scientific. There’s usually some sort of vulgar verificationism or falsificationism appealed to by the atheist here, but such an appeal is naive.

With this wide definition, Vox Day points out the vast quantity of evidence for gods throughout time.

It’s hard to quarrel with this and I don’t. Even if such evidence is flawed in some way, it must be dealt with. While Day defends this proposition at some length, with examples, as I largely agree I won’t detail his defense. I only note that the defense is sound, and the examples–the Hittite Empire, Nineveh, the Higgs boson–are felicitous.

Vox makes the interesting observation that the supernatural universe may coincide with some part of the multiverse, and an inhabitant thereof may well be the gods we seek. Could be.

There’s another interesting observation worth quoting:

“When the mathematical odds indicate that advanced technological aliens exist somewhere in the material universe and contact with superhuman beings has been reported on tens of thousands of occasions, the assumption that gods do not exist begins to look more like outright denial than reasonable skepticism. When seen in this light, the failure of modern science to detect gods in what the scientific consensus presently states is only 0.6 percent of modern Man’s existence is analogous to the Aztecs assuming that because no white men were seen during a given 201-day period between 1427 and 1519, Cortés and the conquistadors did not exist. No doubt this would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable conclusion, right up until the day Córdoba arrived in the Yucatán.”

This is clever and I’ve never heard it before. It is somewhat weaker than it seems at first blush, as it neglects a salient feature of our evidence for gods: it is as our ability to measure reality and record history has improved that our evidence for the supernatural has begun to wane. Now, as Vox points out, rightly, this could be a momentary blip. Human history is no lengthy thing in the greater scheme of the universe, and the gods that be may simply be busy elsewhere–nonetheless, the inverse correlation is suggestive.

Vox goes on to make an argument from evil, essentially: 1. evil exists; 2. the existence of evil “requires the presence of a source of good”; 3. the only entity capable of dictating an objective and definitive good is the creator entity or His agent. Hence, God, exists. Fans of William Lane Craig will recognize this move.

I don’t find this persuasive, for at least two reasons. One, I simply don’t think evil exists. There are things I would describe as morally wrong, but all I intend by that judgement is to express my subjective dislike of such things. Many do not share my intuition here–it’s a common feeling that good/evil has a universal, timeless aspect that other, more petty likes and dislikes or ours lack: I share this hunch, for example, but I resolve it by denying its validity. Others don’t, and for them, this argument has a weight that should be respected.

Nevertheless, the other steps of the argument strike me as of dubious validity as well. Why, for example, should “good” be taken as the fundamental quality and not “evil”? Perhaps all good requires a perfectly evil being, after all. Nor is it as self-evidently clear to me as it is to Vox that evil is the sort of thing only defined in contrast with its opposite, a la heat and cold.

Nor is it clear that a creator gets to define morality. On a smaller scale, I think few believe this as regards, for example, parents and their children. We would rightly balk at the parent who claimed to able to define the morality of his ilk, creator or no.

Nor is it clear to me why the creator (or his agent) most be the one propounding moral law. Suppose the creator were not morally perfect (nothing seems to demand that He be so, save Anselm’s shaky metaphysics), and another god, one who didn’t create, existed. Suppose the latter were perfectly moral. Surely it’s the latter who we’d look to as the propounder of morality–creator or no.

Now it may be the vast power of the Almighty means the rules are different when we’re dealing with an ex nihilo creation. But that argument remains to be made.

Bottom line, this move may go through, but it’s not clear that it must without more information.

Note that our debaters have shot past one another here. Dominic attacked the cosmological argument, but Day didn’t rely on that (unless it’s implicit in his discussion of a creator God). Rather, Day’s main evidence is testimonial.

Of all the claims, it seems to me that it is this, Day’s mustering and rescuing of testimonial evidence, that is the strongest thus far adduced. Thus, the round goes to Day.

Dominic – First Rebuttal

Dominic’s rebuttal is attractive, clever, and funny. Rather than dispute Day’s insistence on the validity of much testimonial evidence, Dominic glibly accepts it, but points out it misses something: accounts of aliens. Dominic then treats us to a brief history of the concept of extraterrestrials and the rise of abduction accounts.

Moreover, Dominic argues, it is more likely that the testimony for gods through the ages was actually imperfectly grasped accounts of encounters with extraterrestrials. Such beings are statistically probable, as Fermi pointed out. (I am somewhat disappointed that Dominic didn’t seize on evidence of Elvis sightings and make the parallel argument that all testimony for gods through the ages was actually imperfectly grasped accounts of the King.)

But aliens, however powerful, are not gods, Dominic argues. No more than the technically advanced men worshipped by the famous cargo cults were gods in relation to their devotees. I agree.

The extraterrestrial argument is a fresh argument–John Shook mentions aliens in his debate with Craig, but he certainly doesn’t develop the theme as fully as Dominic does. It’s hard to dislike the argument; it would resolve the Fermi paradox, at least. If this were a common counterargument, I’d give the common responses to it. But it’s new to me, so I’ll leave it to Day.

Day’s testimonial evidence arguably dispatched with, Dominic moves onto the (reverse) argument from evil.

Dominic defines evil in a fairly non-controversial matter, essentially willful infliction of harm and suffering, then examines Day’s metaphor of light and dark, and pointedly disagrees with it.

Dominic first disputes that evil is purely a negative thing, a mere absence of good. Evil, says he, is “recognized through positive…tangible… action.”

He says the objectivity of evil is a result of it being unpleasant for someone, and that, presumably, is enough to impart objectivity. No lawgiver is needed.

I find this an uncomfortable expansion of what it means for something to be objective. If objectivity can be achieved by merely having an effect on a person, it’s hard to see what couldn’t be objective. Take any of our stereotypical notions of subjectivity: say, is Glee a good TV show? Now surely if anything is subjective, it’s this. Yet there is a measurable effect of Glee on its viewers–we can clock laughter, survey boredom, gauge serotonin release, etc. Does this render the quality of Glee an objective fact? Surely it can’t, if objectivity/subjectivity is to mean anything.

Nonetheless, Dominic’s statement that “Good and Evil laws requiring a lawgiver is [an] assumption” is well taken. The atheistic moral realist can claim that morality is simply a fact of the universe, a brute fact, on a par with basic physical laws. The origin of those physical laws is problematic, but it at least gives the realist some precedent.

Moreover, Dominic seems to agree with me that morality is not objective in the commonly held sense of the term.

He argues that morality is not, in principle, different from other human sensitivities, such as to heat and to sweetness. Why, he asks, should evil be elevated to the level of universal law, when we don’t do the same with heat and sweetness? Essentially, the argument seems to now be: man’s moral sense has enough in common with things we consider simply subjective to be rightfully considered subjective itself. Thus he rejects the first plank in Day’s argument from evil: that evil exists. Sure, Dominic thinks evil exists, but not in the objective, universal sense that Day does and many others do.

I realize that Dominic is agreeing with my own stated view here, and it’s somewhat ironic that I’m now going to critique that belief, but here goes.

Yes, it may be that “morality” is no more objective than heat and sweetness. Nonetheless, there is a very common hunch that it is, even among atheists. Witness Sam Harris’s latest (abysmal) attempt to produce an atheistic account of objective morality. What are we to do with this intuition? It may be wrong–but why is it at all? Why indeed, as Dominic himself asks, do we elevate morality to universal law?

I don’t know the answer. But regardless, the simple fact of the matter is we do elevate morality to universal law. Why? Well, perhaps there’s some evolutionary psych explanation. But there’s another possibility, one that is far simpler: perhaps morality simply is universal, while sweetness and heat sensation are not.

In sum, Dominic produces an insightful if partly problematic critique of Day’s two arguments for God. Again though, this leaves us only, if entirely successful, as agnostics.

First Rebuttal – Vox Day

Day begins by pointing out Dominic’s definition of gods as beings predating this universe is unnecessarily restrictive, and historically inaccurate. Only the creator God need precede the universe: the vast menagerie of others gods have no such requirement, and historically are seldom described as such. Day gives the example of Olympians, who patently were not creators.

Still I wonder if these non-creator gods really qualify as gods, or if they are, as Dominic argued, merely superior beings. That is to say, are these non-creator gods nothing more than the technologically advanced humans that the cargo cults centered around? Dominic dismisses them as unworthy of consideration for this debate because of this identity: he may well be right to do so. It may be that the Creator is the only suitably godlike being worth debating.

Even were that so, however, Day defends the Creator as well. Day dismisses Dominic’s evidence for the (partly) non-causal nature of time as irrelevant. I had much the same criticism in my review of Dominic’s opening argument, and so agree with Day here. However, Day does little more than simply assert this irrelevancy: some more illustration would have helped.

I do disagree, however, that it is completely irrelevant. It may well be irrelevant to the vast majority of gods, but, the cause and effect and linearity of time does bear on the issue of the creator God, if no other. At least, Dominic argues it does and needs to be addressed. We thus have a set of dueling assertions here, with Dominic asserting relevancy and Day denying it, with little other exploration.

Moreover, the nature of cause and effect–unlike linearity–strikes me as an intimately important part of the cosmological argument. Witness any of Craig’s presentations, which invariably start with something like: “Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” Now if there were a counterexample to this, that would be pertinent. Nonetheless, Dominic does not, psychic porn notwithstanding, present any such counterexample that I can see. Perhaps Day simply disagrees that violations of causality in our universe have any bearing on that initial premise: if so, I’m sympathetic, but not convinced.

Assertion or no, as I largely agree with Day’s stance, it’s tough to fault it. Moreover, Dominic’s assertion was the counterargument to an argument that Day didn’t actually make–so he’s within his rights to wave it away.

Day goes on to dispute Dominic’s argument about the infinite regress present in the Creator’s first thought. He echoes some of my criticisms and adds more besides, and I think largely carries the day here. I’ll move on in the interests of avoiding pleonasm.

Day goes on to critique Dominic’s sole positive argument for atheism, his “truth is stranger than fiction” argument. Day and I agree here that the metric is disappointingly subjective. Indeed, I find many of Day’s criticisms here, as well, coincide with mine, so I won’t repeat them at length. I will only sum them up briefly: 1. strangeness is subjective; 2. strangeness functions equally well as an argument against the current scientific, materialist consensus, as it does to the current theological consensus.

Day points out, rightly:

“Had I argued that gods exist because their existence is obvious to me, I would have expected his rebuttal to consist of little more than pointing and laughing, because that is all that would have been needed to dismiss such a feeble appeal to personal sensibilities.”

Just so. It is not per se an invalid step to take something merely as sensually obvious–this is what my belief in the external world ultimately comes down to–but to assert this and merely nothing else would not do much to carry one’s burden of persuasion. Note that Craig in his debates will mention the testimony of the Holy Spirit as evidence for God–rightly–but never rests his entire defense on this one prong, and usually spends most of his time elsewhere; while he believes it to be the strongest argument, he realizes it’s not persuasive to those who don’t already agree.

If my review here is rather brief, it’s because by and large I find little to fault Day for here, and for a reason: I had many of the same reactions to Dominic’s arguments. While Dominic’s rebuttal was inventive, Day’s was less so. But I can’t fault Day for this: the reason it was less inventive is because a less inventive response was necessary for Dominic’s opening arguments.

Day wins the rebuttal.

UPDATE – In light of the judges awarding the first round to me, I’m going to exercise my option to write the next post, thus giving Dominic the rebuttal. I will attempt to send my Round 2 post to him by Friday evening. The word limit for both of us is 3k words.

THE REASONS AND EVIDENCE THAT GODS PROBABLY DON’T EXIST

First off, I see no need for a “first mover”.

I’m assuming gods refer to one or more concious beings who predate our universe (at least one of whom being its creator), capable of creating something out of nothing with concious intent. The being(s) necessitated by the cosmological argument (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas…William Lane Craig, choose whichever version you like, they’re all basically the same) something I’m assuming all readers of this are familiar with, so no reason to summarize it.

However, the existence of the supernatural is necessary only by taking it as axiomatically true that cause preceeds effect, and therefore space-time is causal and linear.

The majority of our experience confirms these assumptions as self-evidently true, from daily living down to events only quantum physics can describe, thus making the existence of at least one god absolutely necessary. The problem I have with this though, is that there are other experiences which contradict these assumptions, and ironically enough are often relied upon as themselves proof of the supernatural which, from my perspective, they ultimately contradict.

Precognition (the artist formerly known as prophecy).

Exhibit A. Daryl Bem. (see a paper recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Technically, the jury is still out on his results, as more rigourous replication must take place first to verify the study. One such paper is found here)

Essentially, Bem demonstrates that the future can affect the past by reversing the order of conventional psychology tests and seeing statistically significant results, the most amusing of which is the ability of subjects to find porn. Subjects are sat down in front of a computer with two selectable regions, and are told to select one, where it is randomly selected by the computer for one of the regions to display a blank wall, but the other will reveal a sexually stimulating image. This test, as opposed to others which displayed less interesting images, deviated significantly enough to warrant suggesting precognition was in fact a possibility. The effect of being rewarded with a sexually stimulating image was leaking back in time often enough to influence its cause, that of selecting a region on the computer screen. Time itself is no obstacle when it comes to finding porn on a computer.

Exhibit B: Mystery butter.

A Christian blogger who goes by the name of “cl”, in an ongoing attempt to provide ever stronger arguments in favor of theism at his blog, The Warfare Is Mental, offered up a personal story of his own as part of a series arguing favor of his tripartite model of conciousness, where he relays a story of a time when he clearly remembered an event, right before it happened, apparently triggered due to the zen like state one enters when scooping up butter balls.

Exhibit C: Deja Vu.

A phenomenon so common as to have it’s own term. A feeling of disorientation that comes from the sensation of experiencing the same event… twice, somehow. If time was completely linear in all circumstances, then how is it that people can have two experiences of the same event bump into each other enough to disorient them. While one explanation could be the processing delays in the brain that occur between a literal sensation and the concious awareness of said event, such that at least two copies of the same sensory stimuli drift through the brain, this is, at best, idle speculation.

Exhibit D: Dreaming the future.

Another phenonmenon so common that I feel is safe enough to present as evidence without needing to cite a reference. I even know someone personally who routinely dreams things that happen the next day.

Each exhibit presented here is evidenciary support to dissuade one from automatically accepting that either cause necessarily preceedes effect or that time is linear in the strict sense, upon which the cosmological argument and the necessity of gods rests. Time is usually linear and cause almost always preceeds effect, but not necessarily, the universe seems to be trickier than that.

Second, the cosmological argument itself is an attempt to eliminate the problem of inifinite regress that suffers from inifinite regress.

Now, rather than thinking I’m resorting to the “Then what created God? Ha, gotcha!” nonsense, it’s better to look at the original structure of the argument first put forth, since the summary version that most people are familiar with is vague enough to define God as an unstable particle. God is more than just a source of energy, since the observation is that everything that has a direction was pushed that way, yet an immediately observable exception to this is the phenomenon of conscious intent as a source of motion. A body, (literally, a human body) can be completely at rest, yet spurred to motion through conscious effort. This led to the concusion that God, being defined as the unmoved mover, is by necessity a conscious entity who chose to create the universe, since thought itself is the most readily observable phenomenon that bridges the gap between the purely abstract and the material. And the purest thought, then, would be thinking about thinking, the first act that led to the creation of the universe and needs no material source to give it a push. This, however, does not alleviate the problem of infinite regression that was sought to be solved, as it only addresses infinite regress of particle motion. This first thought, the one about thinking… Thinking about what, more thinking? Infinite regress. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Lastly, the statement “truth is stranger than fiction” itself is quite persuasive.

Building on my rejection of the cosmological argument, I’ll further contest that gods are not real simply because as an explanation, they are simply too convenient. The truth of the matter, regardless of which great mystery being discussed, is reliably something far stranger than whichever fiction is first proposed.

The most obvious example of this was the painful transition from Newtonion physics to quantum physics. Under the classical model, particles were particles and behaved like partcles, motion was consistent, and everything ran its course, and all the mindless matter in the universe was reliably deterministic. A simple explanation that is based on precisely what one would expect of the world given nothing in our experience schizophrenically goes from acting like a particle to acting like a wave, or mysteriously teleports from one location to another. A simple explanation that turned out to be quite wrong.

Or one could go back earlier to the transition from geocentric to heliocentric models of planetary motion. The simple explanation, that of the earth being stationary with the sun rotating around it, turned out to be the fiction whereas the truth was far stranger, namely the planet we sit upon, that doesn’t feel like it’s moving at all, is in fact spinning around quite fast.

Recognition of an explanation as too simple, too convenient, or too obvious is useful as a predictive tool as well. Healthy skepticism of the theory of evolution by natural selection can be arrived at by recognizing the explanation itself as an entirely self-contained and awfully neat little attempt at summarizing the history of life on this planet. Personally I’d put money on the actual process being something far stranger involving phenomenon that we don’t even have words for yet and forces previously thought to have no impact on speciation whatsoever.

This being said, postulating the existence of supernature beings is abundantly obvious, to me at least, as being a convenient fantasy concocted as a childish and superficial explanation for the origins of any and everything, from the beginning of the universe to the strange bumping one hears in the attic. It’s a fiction we’ve told ourselves for countless generations, and it is my firm belief that the actual truth of the matter, from why or how the universe began (or just always was) all the way down to experiences some people have communicating with the dead, is something far stranger than any story we tell ourselves about gods and ghosts.

TO WHICH VOX REPLIES

I feel that I must begin by congratulating my opponent for not only producing a far more intriguing piece than I had reason to expect, but concocting one that I suspect makes my case for the existence of gods look downright sane by comparison. If nothing else, Dominic has produced a genuinely original case for atheism.

I begin by correcting his assumption that gods must predate our universe or be capable of creating something out of nothing. While at least one god must be assumed to be the creator god that fits this definition if the universe was indeed created, the vast majority of gods are not the creator and need not be capable of creating anything out of nothing, much less predate the universe. I note that the greater part of the gods described in the historical record do not fit Dominic’s description here. By the definition he assumes, neither Zeus nor Athena would qualify as gods, much less Baal, or Chemosh, or other gods known to have been worshipped in the course of human history.

The attack on the potential existence of the supernatural by denying cause and effect is certainly an unexpected one. However, the assertion that the existence of the supernatural depends upon the axiom that cause precedes effect or that space-time is causal and linear is both incorrect and unsupported. While there is plenty of reason to criticize both his self-evident assumptions and the refutations of those assumptions, it is not necessary to do either because his logic is flawed. It does not matter if the self-evidence of his assumptions are correct or not, just as it does not matter if his subsequent case against those assumptions are sufficient to reject them or not, because he has failed to do more than nakedly assert a link between those assumptions and the existence of the supernatural, much less the existence of gods.

So, although I find them intriguing, I have nothing to say here about the existence or non-existence of precognition, mystery butter, deja vu, or dreaming the future, because none of them are relevant to this debate given the nonexistent logical link between those four things and the existence of gods.

With regards to the second point, the problem of infinite regress as it relates to consciousness rather than to particles, the problem was solved long ago by Aristotle in Posterior Analytics. To summarize, the concept of infinite regress depends upon an assumption that there is no way of knowing other than by demonstration. But not all knowledge is demonstrative, because knowledge of the immediate premises depends upon indemonstrable truths. Thus there is no regress and the argument is defeated. Furthermore, Dominic’s specific formulation contains two additional flaws. First, even if we accept his definition of “the purest thought”, there is no rational requirement that the first thought need be the purest one, therefore that first thought need not be thinking about thinking, much less thinking about thinking about thinking. Second, there is obviously no need for the first thought about thinking to concern more thinking, as is evidenced by Decartes’s famous statement, “I think, therefore I am”, because in the Decartesian formulation the first thinking about thinking does not concern more thinking, but rather the existence of mind. The regress ends and the appeal to the problem of infinite regress is once more defeated.

As to the third point, I entirely agree that truth is stranger than fiction. I also agree that turning to divine action to explain every unknown is too convenient to be convincing, (to say nothing of lazy), and I wholeheartedly concur that the true explanation for the existence of life on Earth will almost surely be far stranger than any of us presently imagine.

Nevertheless, convenience is not a serious argument against existence. 7-11 indubitably exists. Starbucks seemingly exists on every corner. Few things could possibly be considered more convenient than Internet porn, which is available 24-7 around the entire planet, and yet it too can be confirmed to exist. Convenience is not convincing, but it should not be taken as negating either. Ockham’s Razor is certainly not a proof, but it is a useful rule of thumb and parsimony is usually considered to be a scientific positive when the relative likelihood of two competing theories is being compared.

While I can hardly question what is or is not obvious to Dominic, I can certainly point out that “obviousness to Dominic” is not a objective metric that is relevant in any way to anyone else. Had I argued that gods exist because their existence is obvious to me, I would have expected his rebuttal to consist of little more than pointing and laughing, because that is all that would have been needed to dismiss such a feeble appeal to personal sensibilities. And since I have already shown that his rejection of the cosmological argument is based on a false foundation, it is obvious that his subsequent arguments are invalid to the extent that they rely upon it.

However, his cited examples from the history of science are important, because they underline a point that I made in my initial argument concerning the dynamic nature of the materialist consensus and the limits which technology places upon it. With the continued advance of technology and the concomitant changes in Man’s future understanding of the universe that will come from that advance, it is entirely possible that a belief in the material limits of the universe which rejects the supernatural may well one day look as ignorant and crazy as a belief in Newtonian physics which rejects quantum physics.

Now, it is always possible that the strange bumping in the attic is nothing but the wind. And it may be convenient to say that what we see and what we hear is seen and heard because it is actually there. But most of the time, that simple explanation is true and our senses are observing things because those things are real. The converse, on the other hand, is not necessarily true. Sometimes we don’t see anything because they are not there. But often, we don’t see anything because our eyes are closed.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS

In order to make the case that the weight of the available evidence and logic is more supportive of the existence of gods than of their nonexistence, it is necessary to define the two terms. In making my case for the existence of gods, I am relying upon the definitions of “evidence” and “logic” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. I am utilizing the term “evidence” in a sense that encompasses all three of the primary definitions provided.

Evidence:
1.Available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
2.Information drawn from personal testimony, a document, or a material object, used to establish facts in a legal investigation or admissible as testimony in a law court.
3.Signs or indications of something.

Logic:
1.reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity

There is a vast quantity of extant documentary and testimonial evidence providing indications that gods exist. This evidence dates from the earliest written records to current testimonials from living individuals. While it is true that the quality of this evidence varies considerably, it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand anymore than one can conclude Gaius Julius Caesar did not exist because one cannot see him on television today. Each and every case demands its own careful examination before it can be dismissed, and such examination has never been done in the overwhelming majority of cases.

For example, there are many documented cases of confirmed fraud in published scientific papers. If we apply the same reasoning to published scientific papers that some wish to apply to documentary evidence of gods, we have no choice but to conclude that all science is fraudulent. But this is absurd, as we know that at least some science is not fraudulent. Therefore, if one is willing to accept the validity of published scientific papers that one has not been able to verify are not fraudulent, one must similarly accept the validity of documentary evidence for the existence of gods that one has not examined and determined to merit dismissal for one reason or another.

Because it is intrinsically testimonial in nature, the documentary evidence for gods has been impugned on the basis of studies concerning the unreliability of eyewitness testimony for various reasons. However, this critical analogy actually demonstrates the precise opposite of what it purports to show. Since eyewitness testimony has been variously determined to be somewhere between 12 percent and 50 percent inaccurate, this means that between 50 percent and 88 percent of the testimonial evidence for gods should be assumed accurate, at least concerning the correctly reported details of the divine encounter. The correct interpretations of the specific details, of course, are a different matter.

One of the core principles of the historical method is that “the closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate historical description of what actually happened.” Blanket rejection of the entire historical record that does not accord with the present materialist consensus with regards to the universe turns this principle on its head to such an extent that it can only be described as ahistorical. Moreover, it is downright illogical given the dynamic nature of the materialist consensus, especially when one takes into account how many times the material rejectionist position can be confirmed to have been wrong whereas the historical record was correct. The cities of Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Nineveh, and the empires of Assyria and the Hittites are but six of many valid examples.

In fact, the material rejectionist position amounts to nothing more than a time-limited appeal to technology. At one time, Man could not detect x-rays, radiation, or distant planets because he lacked the necessary technology. At present, Man cannot detect dark matter, the Higgs boson, other universes, Heaven, Hell, alien life forms, or intelligent supernatural beings. These things may or may not exist, for example, the scientists at CERN have excluded the possibility of the Higgs boson particle from masses ranging from 145 to 466 GeV. But science has never managed to exclude the existence of gods from anything, and unless one also rejects the existence of multiple universes and other undetected concepts, one cannot reasonably reject the existence of gods.

Indeed, the acceptance of the possibility of the existence of the multiversal and the rejection of the possibility of the supernatural makes no sense, given that it is entirely conceivable that the two could be identical. It would be as difficult for humanity today to distinguish between a technologically advanced being from a different universe and “a superhuman being worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes”, which is how Oxford defines a god, [as it would for an ancient human to distinguish between a current U.S. Marine with air support and a god.]

Science itself lends support to the idea of the material existence of gods in this universe when astronomical evidence taken into account. According to the latest scientific consensuses, the universe is 13.75 billion years old, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old, the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, and homo sapiens sapiens reached behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. As there are a conservatively estimated 200 billion stars in the galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the universe, this indicates that there has been sufficient time for at least 7,891 billion alien races to appear, evolve, and reach a higher level of technological development than Man given the current ratio of 1.18 planets discovered per star. And to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from godhood.

One could dismiss the numerical argument as a simple appeal to very large numbers, except for the fact of a written historical record which repeatedly describes contact with superhuman beings possessing power over nature and human fortunes. When the mathematical odds indicate that advanced technological aliens exist somewhere in the material universe and contact with superhuman beings has been reported on tens of thousands of occasions, the assumption that gods do not exist begins to look more like outright denial than reasonable skepticism. When seen in this light, the failure of modern science to detect gods in what the scientific consensus presently states is only 0.6 percent of modern Man’s existence is analogous to the Aztecs assuming that because no white men were seen during a given 201-day period between 1427 and 1519, Cortés and the conquistadors did not exist. No doubt this would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable conclusion, right up until the day Córdoba arrived in the Yucatán.

So, there is evidence from history, mathematical probability from science, and logic from the combination of the two which support the existence of gods. However, the most powerful evidence for the existence of not only gods, but the existence of one or more Creator gods, can be materially observed in Man himself. Just as the existence of various phenomena can be correctly deduced through the observation of senses and sensors designed to interact with those phenomena even if a particular phenomenon remains unobserved, the presence of an invisible sound wave can be deduced by the presence of an antenna and the presence of a lawgiver can be deduced by the presence of prison guards. Hence the importance of Man’s moral sense.

While some people throughout history have reported experiencing personal contact with God, most have not. However, I am not aware of a single individual who has denied ever experiencing any direct contact with evil. And by evil, I do not mean mere bad fortune, physical pain, or the application of the various principles of physics to suboptimal human action, but rather those self-aware, purposeful, and malicious forces which intend material harm and suffering to others and are capable of inflicting it. We are aware of this force in ourselves and we can observe it in others. As anyone who has witnessed a child lie for the first time knows, human evil not an entirely learned behavior, it is at least partially endogenous.

As a shadow requires the presence of a source of light in order to exist, evil requires the presence of a source of good. What some call God is perhaps better understood as the source of that good through which evil can exist and be observed, by which I do not mean any subjective and experienced good, but rather the objective and definitive good. But the only entity capable of dictating an objective and definitive good with universal application is either a) the entity that created the universe, or b) an entity given managing responsibility by the creating entity. This is not a case of might makes right, but rather, conception and creation necessitating constants.

Therefore, when we observe and acknowledge material evil, we must correctly conclude the existence of a Creator God.

TO WHICH DOMINIC REPLIES

The opening argument for the positive existence of gods comes from the mountain of eyewitness accounts of having experienced what they can only describe as supernatural. Admittedly, no amount of handwaving theorizing that so many people throughout history have been merely dishonest, crazy, delusional, or suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy can stand up against the sheer volume of accounts made, so dismissal simply is not an option. There is no denying that there is something, possibly of a distinctly external nature, is imposing itself on people throughout history causing them to report visitations from gods, angels, demons. What was left out are the more recent and very similar accounts of space aliens.

From space.

Early accounts of UFOs contain vague references to fires in the sky that are wheel-like or circular. Examples of this are the flying Vimanas of the Sanskrit epics, Ezekiel’s Wheel (which, from the description, sort of looks more like a V-22 Osprey [landing gear and all] with an extra pair of wings and rockets underneath the tiltrotors, than a flying saucer), the mass sighting at Nuremberg in 1561, and the ‘Miracle of the Sun’ event in Portugal (1917). Attributing such sightings to actual aliens rather than supernatural manifestations of the classical sense does not occur until after pop culture had introduced alien life into the public imagination.

Aliens seem to first have been introduced as forms of social commentary coupled with an increasingly materialist worldview, from Voltaire’s ‘Micromegas’ (1752) as a vehicle for warning against anthrocentric hubris and a convenient means to lampoon a few people he didn’t particularly care for, to H.G. Wells ‘War of the Worlds’ (1898) as a criticism of gunboat colonialism. Aliens as entertainment took as many different forms as the people who subsequently claim to have actually met them. Detailed descriptions of the aliens themselves, and what subsequently happens to a person after meeting them, were all wildly different, and a more consistent story does not emerge until after science fiction literature and Hollywood have a crack at it, writing the scripts for such experiences before people actually start having them.

The event that really popularized alien abductions and set the stage for the flood of abduction stories that people have reported since is generally considered to be the Betty and Barney Hill abduction (September 19, 1961), where the couple recounts an alien abduction with many of the details pulled straight from an episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ which aired just 12 days beforehand, and the 1951 film, ‘Invaders from Mars’. From here, alien encounters have become increasingly normalized with nearly everyone meeting “Grey” aliens with squat bodies, thin limbs, huge heads and giant black unblinking eyes, the sort that we have been exposed to by Hollywood now as the prototypical ‘alien’. Quite different than the furry vagabonds who harrased Colonel H. G. Shaw in 1897. And never mind that the case of Antonio Villas Boas did not occur until 9 years after the publication ‘Flash Gordon and the Adventures of the Flying Saucers’.

The evidence suggests that there is a very strong influence of belief and disposition which not only influences how paranormal events are interpreted, but how they are in fact experienced and remembered. Looking now at the eyewitness accounts of visitations by gods and angels, and also of demon possession, the first observation to make is that familairity with the context is a mandatory prerequisite for having the experience, just as no one remembered being abducted by a Grey alien with giant unblinking eyes until after Hollywood gave us Grey aliens with giant unblinking eyes. Again, this isn’t to say that all the experiences are delusional, given the logic that 50 to 88 percent of such accounts can be considered honest accounts by people who are not crazy, simply that the actual explanation, the real source that triggers these experiences, is something quite different, and let’s not forget stranger, than what they appear to be to the eyewitness, given the sheer variety of expereiences and undeniable influence of pre-existing culture and belief. After all, Barney Hill reported that one of the first things the aliens said to him was to not be afraid. Something that anyone familiar with eyewitness accounts of angelic visitations should recognize. However, Barney wasn’t visited by angels bearing halos and white wings, and he did not recognize them as such, he saw space aliens. This is not an ‘interpretation’ of details, these are entirely different details, one of gods, the other of aliens.

This brings us to the second point, that of the materialist position rejecting such accounts on the basis of the lack of an objective measuring tool which would verify the validity of the accounts of gods made by the eyewitnesses is ahistorical and the intellectual equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand. Here, there is no dissagreement. Rejecting something’s existence based on nothing more than ignorance of similar phenonmenon is an unsustainable position.

However, included in this point, is the argument that gods are more likely than not given that our gods could very well be aliens. Ironic, given what all I just wrote, but worthy of being addressed separetely. Combining the statistical probablity of alien life with the eyewitness accounts of paranormal visitors and the Oxford dictionary’s definition of “god” would lead one to believe that the alien visitation explanation concocted over the past 110 years or so (particularly in the last 50) is the more accurate description of real gods, and our religions (with the exception of the Mormons) are clumsy attempts at describing what we now have better tools for understanding, that we’re being visited by aliens. Maybe the Mormons are actually right and we should follow Matt Stone and Trey Parker to the promised lands.

To address this, I would argue in turn this application of the Oxford definition actually makes one group of men gods over others. For example, John Frum, a recipeint of his own cult, possessed, along with the rest of the American military, the superhuman ability to bestow gifts of divine cargo upon the residents of the island of Tanna. Squint at bit a the word “superhuman”, or just take it in context of the situation, and the military service men whose actions led to the creation of such cargo cults were, technically, gods.

Somehow, I doubt that proving other people exist, though, is the purpose of this discussion. Further, if we’re saying that technologically advanced aliens are as god-like as anything in the universe, we should probably just stop now.

But then we’d miss out on what I see as the actual argument, and what I predict will be the real thrust from here on out. The final argument, that a real creator God (big ‘G’) is necessary given the existence real objective evil in the world.

Objective measurement is one where the point of reference does not move. Here I believe we can all be in agreement that objective evil, as defined as a self-aware, purposeful, and malicious force which intends material harm and suffering to others and is capable of inflicting it, is quite real. It would be an impossible task to actually prove that people have never or do not act with self-ware, purposeful, and malicious intent to cause material harm and suffering to others and are capable of inflicting it. This metric for evil is universally recognized and it does not change. Some people go so far as to do it for its own sake because it pleases them.

The logical chain that results in demonstrating a Creator God who is necessary to establish the metric by which evil can exist and can be recognized begins with the following statement:

“As a shadow requires the presence of a source of light in order to exist, evil requires the presence of a source of good.”

This statement is always taken at face value as axiomatically true, and is always phrased as a light/dark dichotomy for illustration. I also happen to disagree with it.

Objectively real evil is something we intuitively recognize by its qualities, and I don’t see how any of the qualities that defines evil requires a source of goodness to either enable or define it. Evil is a phenomenon that is recognized through positive (or should I say, tangible?) action, not through negatives, as opposed to the metaphor of evil being a shadow, a region where light (the Good) doesn’t hit. Evil is always unpleasant for someone, that’s what makes it objective, but leaping to the conclusion that it couldn’t exist without the objective and definitive Good strikes me as awfully non-sequiteur, knocking the base out of the argument that our ability to recognize evil necessitates the existence of a custodian of the Good. Besides, calling Good and Evil laws requiring a lawgiver is not only assumption, but in light of my opening arguments, just too convenient as well.

I wouldn’t be at all suprised if our objective recognition of evil could be completely redefined to be merely experiencing the color blue if all of humanity were converted to a diet consisting exclusively of shellfish and Mellow Yellow. After everyone is done scratching their heads, let me explain.

Right now, it is indisputable that our perceptions and attitudes are heavily influenced, possibly even dictated, by what finds its way into our bloodstream. High doses of anabolic steriods increase aggression, THC improves ones mood, psilocybin makes you see things that aren’t there, and alcohol can significantly affect what the imbiber considers to be proper behavior at her best friend’s wedding.

The nutrients we derive from food fall under the same few categories: fat, protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. We all eat roughly the same things due to the fact we all need the same kinds of dietary input to survive due to the similiarity of our bodies (which is also why its safe so say we all see colors in roughly the same way, philosophers and their “what if my blue is your red?” be damned). Sugar is sweet, 50 degree Farenheit water is cold, and someone who steals from someone else for purely personal gain is evil. The first two are readily accepted facts across the board (thus objective, the only thing subjective is “how sweet” or “how cold”) as being a consequence of our common biology, yet the third gets a free pass as a universal law that we know though our moral intuition, that would hold true even without us around. This makes no sense.

I’m not saying that our common biology is the definitive answer as to why we all perceive and recognize flavor, temperature, and evil, but it is just as good an explanation, if not better, than jumping to the conclusion that our recognition of evil is a window into some absolute moral law, much less saying that the very act of recognizing it requires some corresponding Goodness. We know that what we consume can and does affect our minds, personalities, and perceptions (such as steriods, marijuana, mushrooms, and tequila), and for the most part we all consume roughly the same categories of nutrients to survive (regular food, from sweet potato to squid), so it’s unsuprising that we have some experiences and attitudes that are common across the board.

So the existence of objective evil is not itself a definitive proof of a lawgiver, it could just as easily be a secondary consequence of our biological reliance on vitamin C or something equally unexpected. Given the theme of human progress I highlighted in my own opening arguments, I would not be at all suprised if our perception of evil ultimately is explained as a combination of our diet, the wavelengths of the radiation that hits us from the sun, coupled with a surprising discovery by someone who finally figures out why yawns are contagious but sneezing isn’t.

Dominic’s first post and my rebuttal can be read here.

Announcing the judges:

Christian: cl aka The Warfare is Mental

Agnostic: Alex Amenos

Atheist: Scott Scheule

Dominic has confirmed that he is fine with all three of them. So, while Dominic and I compose our initial pieces, which we will send to each other in order to allow for the writing of the initial responses, it would be a good idea for the judges and everyone else to discuss how the scoring system will work.

To recap, Dominic and I are each writing an initial piece, then will compose a response to the other’s initial piece. Those four pieces will then go to the judges, who will score the initial round as per the system decided here. Judges, please email me to confirm that you are good to go so that I’ll have your email addresses and can provide them to Dominic as well.

UPDATE – Okay, my initial piece is done and off to Dominic. I’m not sure it won’t convince anyone I’m not off my rocker, but at least it should prove interesting.