Merry Christmas everyone!
All is quiet on the blogging front at the moment, I’m taking a few days’ rest and recuperation (long story), but there will be a new podcast within the week.
Whatever you’re doing, have a safe and happy Christmas. Enjoy yourself, spend time with people you love, and to those of us who appreciate what Christmas is all about, make sure that the main thing remains the main thing. Christ is at the centre of Christmas.
It’s bad taste to say unpleasant things about people when they’re dead. Well, no it’s not actually. Kim Jon Il just died and just today they were mocking him on the radio. Wartime songs were sung about Hitler after his demise, and so on. But in polite society, it’s not done. Christopher Hitchens lost his battle with Cancer recently, and Christians are coming out of the woodwork to say nice things about him.
He may have been a good journalist and writer, but in the arena he became notorious in – attacking religion, he was a prat, and deliberately so. And not just a prat, a pretending, smug, arrogant (certainly more arrogant than was warranted by his ignorance), belligerent prat. He – along with his equally vapid adoring fan base – was quite taken by the idea that you’ve offered a sensible critique of Christianity if you just describe it in scornful terms with a serious look on your face, or that a deep Oxford educated voice and some dirty innuendos made a point all that more logically compelling.
Christopher Hitchens, aside from having a presenter’s (and a writer’s) flair, contributed nothing of value to public discussions around religion. His circus antics only served to egg on the very worst intellectual element of atheism (frankly giving more respectable non-believers a bad name), and to undermine the academic virtues of his Alma Mater (the University of Oxford). In spite of – as far as actual arguments go – hands down losing his debate with Alister McGrath on the value of religion, the fact that he made his comments in a sassy tone and threw in a questionable joke or two warmed people to him, turning them away from analysing the intellectual merits of what was said and towards an analysis of “who gave the best burn.” In this he certainly resembles his company among the so-called “four horsemen” of the new atheism, especially Richard Dawkins, whose ostensible tribute to Hitchens is essentially a slightly less well written version of a Hitchens tirade against theism. Dawkins would have us think that Hitchens’ death shows us the dignity of atheism. No it doesn’t. It shows us what’s wrong with smoking and drinking to excess. Hitchens took the advice of Job’s wife, “curse your God and die.”
Hitchens left a lasting message for his adorers: Screw reason, just go for the shock value of a thumped podium, fake outrage, showmanship and some naughty words. It’s not much of a legacy. That said, he was a man who certainly spoke what he believed and had integrity that would allow him to do nothing else. This being the case, the last thing he would want, I am sure, is a pretentious tribute about what a sad loss of a great fellow this is. It’s sad for him, his friends and family of course, and they have my condolences for the personal loss. But as for this “here lies a worthy opponent” nonsense, forget it. He lived as a fool, played to the lowest common denominator, encouraged a generation of sloppy, angry argument makers and committed his career and a good chunk of his life to hostility towards his maker. His life was one of genuine tragedy.
Glenn Peoples
The title of this blog entry is a little misleading, since I’m actually talking about a conditional premise of one formulation of the moral argument. It’s not the formulation of the moral argument that I prefer to use, but it’s a common one nonetheless, and one that I do think is sound.
The common formulation that I have in mind is this:
I’m a moral realist. That means that I think there really are some moral facts. It is wrong to do some things, and it is right to do some things, and this isn’t just a vent of emotion or an expression of my will, it’s really true. Stephen Law is also a moral realist, but if I’m reading him rightly in his debate with William Lane Craig on the existence of God or in his more recent discussion with me on the Unbelievable radio show where I discussed the moral argument for theism, he’d sooner give up moral realism than accept theism.
An argument I sketched in that discussion was that the best way to explain moral facts is by reference to God. Although he does currently believe in moral facts, he noted that they may not be there after all, so maybe there’s no reason to invoke God as an explanation. After all, he said, we can come up with an evolutionary explanation of why we would believe in moral facts whether they really existed or not. Law wants to be careful here. At the time I raised the concern that this may just be a case of the genetic fallacy, offering an explanation of where a belief came from as though this showed or suggested that the belief is false. But this isn’t what Law means to say, he replied. The point is not that the existence of an evolutionary account of why moral beliefs exist shows that those beliefs are false. That would indeed be the genetic fallacy at work. No, the point is that whether those beliefs are true or false, there exists the same evolutionary account for why we hold them – and that account is unaffected by their truth or falsehood. There is thus no particular reason to think that the evolutionary processes that brought them into being is likely to produce true-belief forming processes.
While this line of argument does not purport to show that the moral beliefs we hold aren’t true, it’s meant to cast doubt on the probability that the process that gave rise to these beliefs (or at least the process that gave rise to the relevant belief forming processes) is likely to result in either true beliefs or reliable belief forming faculties. It’s best to think in terms of the latter, if only because it’s downright bizarre to think that evolution forms beliefs. It plainly doesn’t, but it does form mechanisms or processes that creatures use to form beliefs.
So what should we make of this? Can we give an evolutionary account of why we would believe in moral facts, an account that is blind to the actual existence of those facts? Secondly, if we could give an account like this, would it undermine the probability that the processes that form those beliefs are reliable? I will give two answers: Yes, it is trivially true that we can give an account like this, and no, the fact that we can do so should not undermine our confidence in the belief form process that forms moral beliefs. In doing so I will be drawing on an argument by Alvin Plantinga, namely the “evolutionary argument against naturalism.” While I am inclined to think that argument is unsound, many of the insights that it draws attention to are true nonetheless.
The offices of Beretta and Say Hello to my Little Friend are about to undergo relocation. All office staff and volunteers will be off for the next week or so, our sound engineers will be taking a break, all equipment is being moved and the entire organisation is getting a change of scenery.
Yeah, I’m moving house, so the blog will be pretty quiet while we pack and stuff.
Next week it will be my pleasure to have my third discussion on the Unbelievable radio show with host Justin Brierley. My partner in conversation will be Stephen Law, who teaches philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London.
Although the only public comments I have made about Stephen at this blog have been for the sake of disagreeing with him, the fact is that I like reading what he has to say – however mistaken I might think he is. Yes he has creativity and style, something lacked by plenty of academics, but unlike other vocal critics of religion like P Z Meyers, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, Stephen Law usually knows what he’s talking about as far as philosophy goes (I say usually because it does seem to me that philosophy of religion is not his strength, and this is the subject area of his “Evil-God Challenge.”). Law’s “Evil-God Challenge” should be read by anyone who wants to philosophically defend the Christian faith. That being said, the central point of the article, that theistic arguments are just as compatible with a malevolent deity as they are with the God of Christianity, is false. I think first year students in philosophy of religion who want to defend the Christian faith should – before being allowed to progress to the second year – be able to explain why the evil God challenge fails. If they’re not sure how they would do it, they should make sure they listen to the discussion on Unbelievable!
Glenn Peoples
In a podcast on presuppositional apologetics, I noted that it does in fact contain the kernel of a significant type of argument for theism. But what I have never appreciated is the combative “all or nothing” approach that many presuppositionalists take. Unfortunately, some of them see all arguments for God’s existence – all arguments apart from their own transcendental argument – as intellectual treachery, as selling out, and as borderline sinful. This has a couple of harmful consequences: It creates needless squabbling between Christians who are really serving the same end, and it frankly makes Christian apologists look crazy in the eyes of onlookers.
Here’s an example. A presuppositionalist apologist with no time for any method of defending Christianity other than by using presuppositional apologetics recently wrote a brief blog post called “Pascal’s wager is a bad bet.” In it, he takes a line used by a number of other presuppositionalists, charging that any conventional (i.e. non-presuppositional) argument for God’s existence takes the stance that God is only probable, and not certain. This time he has Pascal’s wager in his sights:
Is God a probable God or a certain God? In church we know the answer: “The Heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 14:1) It’s not “The Heavens might declare the glory of God–if he exists, and the skies might proclaim the work of his hands–if he exists.” Could we really say that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:39) if we worshipped a probable God? Of course not! In Church, we worship a certain God, yet what do we do? – We go out into the world and tell unbelievers that we could be wrong! We give them “Pascal’s Wager.”
….
Brothers and sisters God is not a good bet, God is not even the best bet, God is the certain God that has revealed Himself to us, such that we are certain of His existence (Romans 1: 18-21). Blaise Pascal said some wonderful things, but his wager is a terrible bet.
I looked up Pascal’s Wager on a search engine, and could not find one thing written negatively about it by Christians. What are we doing?!? We worship a certain God, yet defend a probable ‘god!’ Folks, a probable “god” is not God–a probable ‘god’ does not exist.
Unfortunately, in his zeal for presuppositional apologetics, Sye has misconstrued Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager does not amount to the claim that Christianity might be false, nor does it make the claim that God’s existence is merely probable. In fact, the argument contains no premises or conclusions about whether or not God exists! Presuppositionists of this ilk (and I have to say, not all presuppositionalists do this) need to lift their game and realise that we are actually on the same team.
I left this comment at the above blog:
Sye, Pascal’s wager does not claim that God’s existence is probable or improbable. That is not the point. It is not an argument about whether or not God exists, or about how likely God’s existence is. It is an argument that you definitely should live as though God exists.
It is not fair to accuse it of being an argument for a “probable God,” no matter how catchy that phrase might be.
At the moment my comment is still awaiting moderation over at that blog.
Glenn Peoples
I was wrong about divine command ethics. God is free to command what is in accordance with his nature, but he is not bound by any particular one of those things.
This episode asks the question: “What is Faith”? Is it, as some maintain, just believing things for no good reason? When Christian thinkers over the years have spoken of having faith, what have they been talking about? Listen and find out!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
As someone who (as far as I can tell) is a fairly orthodox and conservative – I would say evangelical – Christian, what should I make of the frequent reference among my peers to the “verbal” inspiration of Scripture?
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