Right Reason

“Don’t be so picky. Enough people say it this way now in many pockets of our culture, therefore words have changed their meaning. Get over it and move on.”

“Oh you’re so pedantic. Why worry about the details of whether what I said is technically right or wrong? Language is all about communication, and people know what I mean so just chill out.”

I’m not a hateful person. I’m fairly likeable, so some people tell me (right Mum?). But I hate, hate hate people who say things that resemble either of the two sentiments I quoted above. I am moved to consider them as the Psalmist considered God’s enemies, “I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies” (Psalm 139:21). People who do this are not merely unintelligent (in fact I’m sure that in many cases they are not unintelligent). They are traitors. They are vandals. They are cultural saboteurs. They are leaks in our bucket of well-being (I came up with that analogy myself. Make a donation before using it.)

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Well, the podcast has roared back into life with the episode on Divine Command Ethics. Although time is a pretty scarce resource, as I mentioned in episode 39 there are a couple more episodes in the making already. Episode 40 will be in the area of epistemology and philosophy of religion, looking at the question of what faith is (when that word is used in the couplet of “faith and reason”). The episode after that, episode 41, will step away from philosophy and into the world of historic and systematic theology, looking at the doctrine of the descent into hell as mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed.

I’m working on several articles for publication as time allows as well. The first is a fairly popular level exposition of the place of religious convictions in politics and law, aimed at a New Zealand audience. Another is a piece on whether or not a thoroughly secular (in the sense of godless) outlook can give a plausible account of the type of doctrine of equality required by the liberal democracy. The other two pieces are actually being prepared as papers to be delivered at conferences, but after they have been delivered and hopefully subjected to critical feedback I plan to submit them for publication. The first of these is called “The Non-moral Goodness of God” and will be presented at the APRA conference at the University of Auckland this coming July. It’ll be interesting to see how the talk is received by Eric Weilenberg, as it offers some criticism of his comments in his work Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe. The second piece is “The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics” which responds to the concern that if Divine Command Ethics is true, then people who don’t believe in God have no hope of acquiring moral knowledge – a concern that is most recently raised by Wes Morriston, and which I argue is mistaken. I’ve submitted this paper for presentation at the annual conference of the Evangelical Philosophical Society in San Francisco this November, and I’m hopeful that it will be accepted. If all these projects succeed that’ll be four decent academic achievements this year, which might not be a lot for a full time academic, but for someone in my position it’s not too shabby!

What follows is a bit of somewhat more personal information for those who are interested.

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I announced at the time a debate on November 13, 2010 in Puebla Mexico on the question: Does the Universe have a Purpose? The debate participants were Matt Ridley, Michael Shermer, and Richard Dawkins vs Rabbi David Wolpe, William Lane Craig, and R. Douglas Geivett.

This second post in the “Name that Fallacy” series draws on material from that debate. Remember that the question being addressed here is whether or not the universe has a purpose (I do not want to predispose you to find a particular fallacy anywhere). That is the only comment I will add on the issue in debate. To provide some background to today’s example, here’s a section from William Lane Craig’s statement:

In today’s debate, we on the affirmative side are going to defend two main contentions. First, that if God does not exist then the universe has no purpose, and secondly that if God does exist then the universe does have a purpose. Let me say a word in defence of each of those contentions.

First, if God does not exist then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man like all biological organisms must die, and the universe too faces a death of its own. Astronomers tell us that the universe is expanding, and as it does so it grows colder and colder until its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light. There will be no heat. There will be no life. Just the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space, a universe in ruins. This is not science fiction. As unimaginable as it sounds, barring divine intervention, this will happen.

But if atheism fails to provide a purpose for life and the universe, what about biblical theism? According to the biblical worldview God does exist and man’s life does not end at the grave. Because of this we can live consistently and purposefully within the framework of such a worldview. And thus, biblical theism succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Now, I’d be the first to say that none of this proves that God exists.

And now, the subject of this blog post, Richard Dawkins. Here is the relevant section from his presentation, which came later that day:

I think the whole case that the other side is putting really comes down to an emotional case rather than a rational one. William Lane Craig seemed to think that it would be so intolerable, so disagreeable that we are doomed to death, that the universe is doomed to death, somehow playing on the heartstrings, playing on the emotions, it’s not nice to think that we’re all going to die, it’s not nice to think that the universe is going to die a heat death and everything is going to come to an end. It’s not nice to think that everything is meaningless. Somehow that must prove that there is purpose in the universe and that there is some sort of top-down supervising God.

I will offer no further comment in this post on the above quotations. The floor is yours, folks. Name that fallacy!

As all my New Zealand readers know, as do many others I’m sure, just before 1pm a few days ago on the 22nd of February a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The destruction was massive. Over a hundred people have been confirmed killed, and over two hundred are still missing [EDIT: as I post this, the confirmed death toll has risen to 145]. The outlook is truly grim, with a couple hundred people likely to have died in this disaster. I have a number of family members and friends in Christchurch, but it seems that they are among the fortunate ones and they’re relatively unscathed.

These are photos I took of the beautiful Welseyan Methodist Church on Durham Street when Ruth and I visited Christchurch in 2009.

And here it is now. Some people were dismantling the organ at the time. It had been damaged in a previous earthquake which caused much less damage in September 2010. One of these men was killed. I’m amazed that any of them lived.

I could multiply dozens, hundreds of photos to demonstrate the level of destruction, but there are plenty of these elsewhere. New Zealand hasn’t seen a disaster like this since I don’t know when. For those of you who have lost loved ones, you have my sincerest condolences. I am truly sorry for your loss.

Right now, people are still afraid, they’re wounded (or dead), and thousands are going to be in mourning for a while. A large number of people, myself included, would love to be able to stop the clock in their own lives, go to Christchurch and be part of the rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding effort. But of course this isn’t possible for us. We have lives, jobs, families and so on. We’re only human.

And that’s where I get to my point here. We’re only human. We can’t put things right. We can’t put the city back together. We certainly can’t raise the dead and reunite families, and we could never have prevented this catastrophe. We’re only human. But God is not merely human. God’s resources are limitless. God knows the future. God can raise the dead and heal the wounded.

And there’s the problem. God, who is loving and good, who has all of this power, allowed this to happen. You can’t blame me for the horror we’re seeing on TV right now, I’m powerless to do anything about it. But God is sitting there right now letting people endure this.

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In my recent post showing how Live Action has exposed Planned Parenthood clinics abetting child prostitution, we observed people working for Live Action acting undercover. That is, they were acting as though they were people that they weren’t really. A man posed as a pimp when he wasn’t actually a pimp, and a woman posed as a prostitute when she wasn’t really a prostitute. They did this because had they announced up front that they represent Live Action and they wanted to know how staff members would respond if they were confronted with child prostitution, they would either have been told to leave, or they could rest assured that the answer given would reflect the desire to present Planned Parenthood in the best possible light, and therefore may not have been correct. Live Action therefore intentionally led Planned Parenthood staff members to believe things that were not true in order to get the truth that they would otherwise not have uncovered.

Working undercover in this way is of course nothing new. Police detectives work undercover posing as potential buyers of illegal drugs, spies work undercover in order to obtain sensitive information from enemies and so on. Less controversial still are examples like the “mystery shopper” who is paid to go into a store and pose as an everyday customer in order to assess the level of customer service, or football players who “fake” a pass, pretending that they are going to pass the ball one way when in reality they are not going to hold onto the ball and run for the other end of the field.

In spite of the relatively widely accepted practice of going undercover in all sorts of different ways, some have raised an objection to Live Actions’s conduct in doing what they have done. A spokesman for Planned Parenthood raised the objection first, attacking Live Action for “lying.” However, criticisms have also come from sources much closer to home for Live Action, the group spearheaded by pro-life spokesperson Lila Rose, who is a Catholic (this becomes relevant later when we look at her recent critics).

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