May 2, 2012

Another example of how the demand for legal recognition of same-sex relationships restrict religious liberty

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Same-sex Marriage
[4] Comments 

On January 30, 2011 the governor of Illinois signed “The Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act” into law, thereby enacting same-sex civil unions that are equal in rights and responsibilities to marriage in the state.  While religious organizations who did social service work were specifically exempted from the non-discrimination elements of the law, the State of Illinois moved to cancel more than $30 million dollars worth of contracts with Catholic charities who worked with the state to provide foster care and adoption services because they would not pair children with same-sex couples.  The state began sending referrals to other foster care agencies.  The Catholic charities challenged the state in court and lost at both the circuit and appellate levels.  They ultimately had to drop the case due to a lack of funds to appeal it further up the chain.  The lack of state cooperation and funding will virtually ascertain the closure of these adoption agencies, which have more than 90 years of experience in this area.

The lawyer who represented the Catholic charities, Peter Breen of the Thomas Moore Society, commented, “This stands as a stark lesson to the rest of the nation that legislators promising ‘religious protection’ in same sex marriage and civil union laws may not be able to deliver on those promises.”  Indeed.

 

May 1, 2012

Illustrating the Argument for God Based on Contingency

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Cosmological Argument, Theism
[9] Comments 

During his debate with Arif Ahmed and Andrew Copson at the Cambridge Union Society, Peter S. Williams gave a lucid illustration for the argument for the existence of God based on the contingency of material reality.[1]

Imagine if I asked you to loan me a book.  You say you don’t have it, but you’ll ask your friend to loan you his, and in turn you’ll loan it to me.  When you ask your friend for the book, he says he does not have it, but he’ll ask his friend to borrow his copy, and in turn he’ll loan it to you, who will loan it to me.  If this process continues ad infinitum, I will never receive the book.  If I do receive the book it is because the process of requesting to borrow the book is not infinite, but temporally finite.  Somewhere down the chain of requests to borrow the book, someone actually had the book without having to borrow it from someone else.  

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April 27, 2012

Dawkins has to believe computers could be conscious, even though he knows better

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Dawkins, Dualism, Mind, Naturalism
[3] Comments 

At about 33:45 into his dialogue with Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins made a remarkable statement regarding consciousness:

The thing that really baffles me about consciousness is that I can kind of see that one could program a computer to behave exactly as though it were conscious, to pass the Turing Test, and actually fool people into thinking that it was conscious, but I still have trouble believing it actually would be.  And yet I think I have to be committed to the view that it would be.

He recognizes that his worldview requires him to believe that such a computer would be conscious, and yet deep down he knows that can’t be right.  He recognizes that the computer’s experience would not be the same as our experience.  And what would that difference be?  We have a first-person awareness of ourselves while a computer would not, even if both could perform identical functions.  Dawkins realizes that consciousness cannot be reduced to function and physics, and yet his worldview requires him to maintain the otherwise ridiculous claim that a super computer should be thought to have consciousness just like us.

I like the way the agnostic moderator, Anthony Kenny, responded to Dawkins’ admission: “I think it’s rather sad that you are committed to that view.  Computers are human tools.  They can’t even add two and two together.”  Exactly.  It is rather sad that someone would confess such intellectual absurdities because they are so committed to naturalism.

 

April 23, 2012

Richard Dawkins doesn’t know the first thing about philosophy

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Atheism, Dawkins, Philosophy, Science
[55] Comments 

During his recent dialogue with Archbishop Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins invoked the anthropic principle to say that even if the origin of life is improbable, it “had to” happen at least once on this planet since we are here.[1]  At that point the moderator, Anthony Kenny, an agnostic philosopher, asked Dawkins what kind of necessity he had in mind when he said life “had to” originate here.  Kenny noted that there are two kinds of necessity: metaphysical necessity and epistemic necessity.  Metaphysical necessity means it is impossible that some X not exist, whereas epistemic necessity means it is impossible not to know that some X is true.  He went on to explain that epistemic necessity does not entail metaphysical necessity, so while it may be epistemically necessary that we exist (we cannot not know that we exist), it does not mean we had to exist.  Our existence may be contingent, even if knowledge of our existence is not.  As expected, Dawkins clarified that he was not saying our existence was necessary, but only that it there can be no doubt that life did arise at least on this planet since we are alive.  

What struck me about Dawkins’ response was not his answer to the question, but what he said immediately before his answer: “I don’t know the words ‘epistemic’ and so on, so I’m not going to use that.”  Really?  That is a term so basic to the study of philosophy that no student could pass an intro-to-philosophy course without knowing it.  It leads me to believe that Dawkins does not know the first thing about philosophy (which should not be surprising to anyone who is familiar with Dawkins’ arguments).  

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April 18, 2012

More people are reading books than ever

Posted by Jason Dulle under Social, Statistics
1 Comment 

If you are like me, you thought reading books was becoming passe.  Reading books is what people did in the old days before television and all of the various forms of entertainment we have today ruined people’s desire to read.  Apparently that’s not the case.  Book-reading is more popular than ever, perhaps due to increased education and the internet. It would be interesting to see how these figures break down based on age.  I would still venture to say that teenagers read less today than they did in days past, but hey, I could be wrong about that too.

 

HT: Scot McKnight

 

April 18, 2012

Posting will become more frequent soon…really

Posted by Jason Dulle under Odds & Ends
[4] Comments 

Posting has been quite infrequent, especially of late. My explanation is the same as before. Things are finally letting up a bit at work now, and perhaps I’ll finally be able to get back to blogging on a regular basis and respond to the massive number emails that have been piling up in my inbox over the last few months (sorry Facebook and Twitter, but I’ll never get caught up on you). Thank you, everyone, for your patience.

 

April 3, 2012

NYT reviews Lawrence Krauss’ new book on why something exists rather than nothing…and it isn’t pretty

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Cosmological Argument, Naturalism, Science
[22] Comments 

Physicist Lawrence Krauss’ new book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, purports to answer the age-old philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing from a scientific, rather than philosophical or religious perspective.  In the book’s afterword Richard Dawkins announces that Krauss has triumphed in his quest:

Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.

Columbia professor of philosophy, David Albert, couldn’t disagree more.  In his scathing review for the New York Times, Albert points out that Krauss has not answered the question at all.

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March 30, 2012

Responding to the “change and diversity” argument against moral objectivism

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Relativism
[3] Comments 

One of the arguments moral relativists use to support their view that moral values are not objective is what I call the “change and diversity argument.”  It is reasoned that since moral values have changed over time (we once thought slavery was moral, but now we don’t), and moral opinions even differ from culture to culture at the present time, morality cannot be objective.

This is not a good argument for several reasons.  First and foremost, the presence of contrary opinions does not imply the absence of truth.  Just because people disagree on what is moral does not mean moral values are not objective, nor does it mean that no one is capable of possessing knowledge of moral truths.  Consider a mathematical problem posed to 10 students.  If each student provided a different answer to the same problem, would it follow that no one was right or that there is no right answer?  No.  Relativists who offer the “change and diversity” argument against objectivism are confusing moral epistemology for moral ontology.  While it may be that people can be mistaken about what is right and wrong, that no more implies that there is no moral truths than the fact that people get their sums wrong implies that there are no mathematical truths.

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March 28, 2012

Lazarus and the rich man: parable or not?

Posted by Jason Dulle under Hermeneutics, Theology
[29] Comments 

What do you think of the pericope of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16?  Do you think it is a parable or a historical event?  Why?

 

March 22, 2012

The Mind-Body Interaction Problem is not a Sufficient Reason to Reject Dualism

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Dualism, Epistemology, Mind, Naturalism, Philosophy
[7] Comments 

Those who reject dualism (the view that man is made up of two kinds of substances: physical and immaterial) often cite the “interaction problem” as an argument against the view.  Stated simplistically, the interaction problem is to explain how an immaterial entity such as a mind/soul could causally interact with material entities.  One envisions the Hollywood movies in which a ghost is desperately trying to pick up a beverage or kiss someone to no avail.  Try as he might, he cannot connect his immaterial self to the material world to affect it in any way (unless you are Patrick Swayze!).  Many monists think the interaction problem alone is sufficient to dismiss dualism as a possibility.

Such an approach to the question seems wrongheaded, however.  One should not look at the queerness of mind-body interaction and immediately conclude that the mind cannot exist independent of the brain.  One must first evaluate the evidence for the existence of such an entity.  If there are good, independent reasons to think the mind is not an immaterial entity—but can be reduced to the brain or arise from material processes—then the interaction problem could serve as further confirmation that there is no soul.  But if there are good reasons to think the mind is an immaterial entity separate from the brain, then the interaction problem—while difficult or even impossible to explain—is insufficient to overturn the evidence that the mind is immaterial.  While we may not know how the mind interacts with the material world, we know the two entities do exist, and do interact with each other.  One need not explain how something occurs to know that it occurs.  We may forever be ignorant of how the mind and body relate to each other, but we have direct awareness and experience of the fact that they do.

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March 14, 2012

Verdict reached in forgery trial involving the famous James Ossuary, Jehoash Inscription, and Ivory Pomegranate.

Posted by Jason Dulle under Archaeology
[2] Comments 

Oded Golan with the James Ossuary

Oded Golan, an antiquities collector, and Robert Deutsch, an antiquities dealer, were acquitted today of forgery charges brought against them by the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA).  The IAA had charged these men with forging some of the most famous and recent finds related to Biblical archaeology including the James Ossuary, Jehoash Inscription, Ivory Pomegranate, and Three Shekels ostracon. 

The verdict does not prove that these artifacts are authentic. It only shows that the prosecution could not prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.  But given the fact that the trial lasted five years, there were 138 witnesses, and 400 exhibits, the fact that the IAA could not demonstrate that these artifacts are forgeries says a lot.  There are good reasons to think they are authentic, and there are world-renowned experts in the field who agree with this conclusion.

I wonder how the media will report this given the fact that most media outlets have been referring to the James Ossuary as a forgery simply based on the IAA’s charge.  If you see any media reports, please provide the link in the comments.

 

March 13, 2012

Yes Moral Facts are Obvious, but the Question is Why?

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Moral Argument, Theistic Arguments
[3] Comments 

While I do not think the objectivity of moral values makes sense in an atheistic or purely naturalistic world, many atheists and naturalists affirm the objectivity of moral values anyway (for which I am happy).  When you press them to explain what makes it wrong to steal, rape, or murder, however, they will often respond that such things are morally wrong because they cause unnecessary suffering.  This is unhelpful.  The question seeks to know the ontological grounding for the moral values that exist in the world.  Rather than provide that grounding, the atheist appeals to another moral value (any X that causes unnecessary suffering is wrong).  But you can’t explain what makes moral values “moral” by citing another moral value.  The moral value that it is wrong to cause harm unnecessarily needs to be grounded ontologically just as much as the moral value that it is wrong to steal or right to tell the truth needs to be grounded ontologically.  Since it can still be asked what makes it wrong to cause unnecessary harm, the ontological grounding for morality must go deeper.

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March 6, 2012

What I’ve Been Reading: The Heresy of Orthodoxy

Posted by Jason Dulle under Bible, Book Reviews, Textual Criticism, Theology
[5] Comments 

In the early 20th century German theologian Walter Bauer proposed that Christian orthodoxy is a historical fiction.  Heretics were not those who departed from the original teachings of Jesus and the apostles, but those on the losing side of a political battle for dominance by one group of Christians over another.  Orthodoxy represents the side who won, not the side of those who remained faithful to Jesus’ teachings.  There is no such thing as Christianity per se, but rather a collage of various Christianities.

While Bauer’s proposal was severely critiqued by other scholars and joined the ash-heap of theological history, as is the case with most bad ideas, someone comes along later, picks up the idea, brushes off the ashes, repackages it, and tries to sell it again.  Such is the case with the Bauer thesis.  Today it is being peddled by people such as Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels.  Speaking to a postmodern generation that prizes diversity, detests absolute truth claims, and thinks truth claims are an attempt to gain power and exert control, they have found a receptive audience for their pluralistic view of Christian origins and history.  For them, the only true heresy is orthodoxy itself: the claim that there is one enduring truth, and one Christian faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints.

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March 2, 2012

Dawkins is an agnostic? Why certainty is irrelevant to defining atheism

Posted by Jason Dulle under Atheism, Dawkins, Philosophy
[7] Comments 

During his dialogue-debate with Rowen Williams (the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church under the Queen of England), Richard Dawkins was asked by the moderator why, if he admits that He cannot disprove God’s existence, he doesn’t just call himself an agnostic.  Dawkins response was, “I do.”

This is interesting, particularly in light of his past identification as an atheist, as well as his remarks that on a scale of 1 to 7, with one being “I know God exists” and seven being “I know God doesn’t exist,”  he ranks himself a 6.9.  He is only 0.1 away from being absolutely certain God does not exist, and yet he thinks that is good reason to adopt the agnostic label.  I disagree.

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March 2, 2012

Why Atheists Can’t Have Objective Morality

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Atheism, Moral Argument, Naturalism, Theistic Arguments
[17] Comments 

J. W. Wartick has written a nice article evaluating the case for atheistic ethics, particularly as presented by philosopher Louise Anthony.  She represents a brand of atheists (such as Sam Harris and Michael Shermer) who refuse the nihilism of an earlier generation of atheists who admitted that if there is no God, there are no objective moral values.  She thinks God does not exist but moral values do.  Or so she says.  When she defines what those moral values are and how they are determined, it becomes clear that they are subjective, not objective.  Something has value if she values it, and something is wrong if it causes suffering.  But these are mind-dependent, and thus subjective by definition.  For meaning and morality to be objective, it must have an existence independent of human thinkers such that even if conscious beings did not exist, moral values and meaning would still exist.

Ultimately, atheists can only put forward various ways that humans can know what is moral (epistemology); they cannot explain what makes those moral values moral.  Secular ethics lack an objective foundation.

 

March 1, 2012

Bioethicists Advocate “After-Birth Abortions” = Infanticide

Posted by Jason Dulle under Abortion, Apologetics, Bioethics
[34] Comments 

Bioethics is a strange field.  Not only are there no objective qualifications for being a bioethicist, but one need not even hold views that are deemed ethical by most morally sane people.  Indeed, it seems that the field of bioethics consists primarily of liberals who hold to a utilitarian philosophy of ethics in which almost everything is permissible.  That is why you can have bioethicists advocating infanticide in respectable bioethics journals like the Journal of Medical Ethics.  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote an article for the journal titled “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”[1] that appeared online February 23, 2012.

The abstract reads:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

While I disagree vehemently with their reasoning and conclusion, this is where the arguments for abortion logically lead one to.  The authors recognize that birth is a trivial and subjective dividing line for determining who is valuable and who is not; who can be killed and who cannot.

HT: Wesley Smith

[1]J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100411.

 

February 29, 2012

Using Social Statistics to Argue Against Homosexuality and Same-Sex Marriage

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Homosexuality
[18] Comments 

Chad Thompson makes an interesting point about using social statistics to argue against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.  Even if it is true that the average homosexual only lives to age 43, or that homosexuals are much more likely to be highly promiscuous than heterosexuals, this may not be true of the homosexual you are speaking to.  They may be age 65 and engaged in long-term, monogamous same-sex relationships their whole life.

Additionally, such statistics do not necessarily show that homosexuality is bad or immoral.  What if homosexuals argued against the validity of heterosexual relationships and opposite-sex marriage on the basis that 43% of marriages end in divorce, and 3/10 women killed in this country die at the hands of their husband or boyfriend?  Would you be prepared to conclude that heterosexuality or marriage is immoral, or ought to be avoided?  Surely not![1]  So why think someone who believes homosexuality is morally and socially benign will be convinced by statistics showing the dark side of homosexuality?  They could always argue, as heterosexuals do, that while these statistics are alarming and cause for concern, the solution is not to condemn homosex but to encourage homosexuals to behave better.

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February 27, 2012

Biblical Archaeology 48 — The Berlin Fragment: “Israel” May be Attested to Earlier than the Merneptah Stele

Posted by Jason Dulle under Archaeology
[4] Comments 

I’ve been sitting on this report for several months now….

The Merneptah Stele, dated to between 1210 – 1205 BC, has long been thought to contain the earliest extra-biblical reference to “Israel.”  However, there may be a reference to Israel in an artifact that is ~200 years older than Pharaoh Merneptah’s stele, but has been lying unnoticed in a museum storeroom for nearly 100 years.

University of Munich Hebrew scholar and Egyptologist, Manfred Görg, recently discovered a small granite slab in the storeroom of the Egyptian Museum of Berlin that he and a couple of colleagues argue contains a reference to Israel that predates the Merneptah Stele by ~200 years.[1]

The 18” x 15.5” fragment is believed to have been part of a pedestal for a statue. It contains two wholly preserved and one partially preserved Egyptian “name rings.”  Pharaohs would often record their exploits by listing in rows the names of all the cities or peoples they conquered. The name of the city was written in a round-edged rectangle, and above this name ring was a pictorial representation of the people of that city – consisting of a head and upper torso.

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February 27, 2012

Where I have been

Posted by Jason Dulle under Odds & Ends
1 Comment 

I am known for posting regularly and responding to comments, but over the past two weeks I have only posted one new post and have not been able to respond to the many comments that have been coming in on the various posts. Where have I been? Working. Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t pay the bills, and my work schedule has been hectic. And when I say hectic, I mean the working-through-the-night kind of hectic. I’ve been living off of 3-4 hours of sleep for the past three weeks. Things have let up a little bit, so I’ll begin posting more regularly again, but I can’t guarantee I’ll always be able to respond to comments (and I won’t even attempt to catch up on the old ones).

 

February 20, 2012

Tied at the Hip: The Logical and Evidential Versions of the Problem of Evil

Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Problem of Evil
[30] Comments 

After the failure of the logical problem of evil (deductive argument) to demonstrate the impossibility of God’s existence given the presence of evil in the world, atheists have largely turned to the evidential problem of evil (inductive argument) to provide a probabilistic argument against the existence of God.  Whereas the logical problem of evil argued that the mere existence of evil in the world proves God cannot exist, the evidential problem of evil argues that the amount of evil in the world is so great that it is highly improbable that a good God exists.  Those who advance the evidential form of the argument claim that if the amount of evil in the world reaches some threshold, then it is no longer reasonable to believe that a good God exists—and of course, they believe the amount of evil in the world has reached this threshold.  The argument could be stated as follows:

(1) The probability of God’s existence is commensurate to the amount of evil in the world.
(2) The probability of God’s existence declines as the amount of evil increases
(3) There is much more evil in the world than we would expect there to be if a good and all-powerful God existed
(4) Therefore, it is improbable that God exists.

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