Craig vs Harris debate: Does Good Come From God

I listened to this debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. Here is the first of 9 YouTube installments...




My thoughts...

Dr. Craig is a good debater. However, I disagree with most of what he said. For example, he said that the existence of God guarantees objective morals. That's not at all obvious to me. God could have simply decided that he wouldn't bother making objective morals. The Deist outlook, for example, is that God set the universe in motion (with physical laws, etc), and simply stands back to watch what happens.

Most of Dr. Craig's arguments seemed to be based on semantics.

God is intrinsically good.
Thus, good must come from God.

That's a simplified version, but captures the circular nature of the argument. I'm not buying it.

The real question is does the absence of God necessarily mean that there are no objective morals. Dr. Craig says "no". I agree with that.

And this is where Dr. Harris and I disagree. He claims that objective morals CAN come from natural causes. His book, The Moral Landscape, tries to make that argument. While I agree with almost everything that he says in the book, I don't agree that there is a universal, absolute way to define good and bad, or right and wrong. One of his arguments asks us to consider the universe with the worst possible misery for everyone. To him, this establishes a global anchoring point, and any move from that universe will result in less misery, and therefor be good. Though I haven't nailed it down yet, I feel that there is something wrong with this line of reasoning. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that -- no matter how bad the universe is -- I can always imagine a universe that's worse.

I cringe when I hear Dr. Harris authoritatively state things like female genital mutilation is objectively and universally wrong. It's not that I think genital mutilation is a good idea... I don't. But my reasoning is not motivated by a universal moral; it's based on my emotions. I would hate to see anyone subjected to that kind of torture, but that doesn't make it objectively wrong. It just feels subjectively wrong to me.

I routinely mutilate the bodies of other living organisms when I eat. Does that make me bad? Should I stop eating? And the rightness or wrongness of killing someone always seems to depend on the circumstances; were you defending yourself? These questions of morals always seem to hinge on your point of view. To me, that suggests that there are no objective morals.

Gad Dang immigrants

In this month's Good News trashazine is an article entitled "Immigration: How a Foreign Invasion is Reshaping the West".

Here's the executive summary: Let's barricade our borders so that Muslim immigrants don't overtake Christianity!

The article obsesses over Islamic terrorists, and how accepting such people as citizens is a big mistake. Of course, God saw this coming a long time ago, and even warned us in Deuteronomy 32:25 of the "terror within".

Here's a quote I actually agree with.

Mixing cultures, and especially religions, can be volatile!

Not so much the cultures part. But religions typically do not play nicely together. Especially if one religion has an opportunity to bully the other out of existence.

Nuthin' like good'ol hate propaganda to keep your religion alive and well.

Motivational posters for atheists

There's a whole gallery of them. These are my favourites

Oh my DOG!

Not sure what to make of this artwork by Addie.

God's time machine

Woo-hoo!! I just received the next issue of "The Good News" from the United Church of God. Let's see... what should I tear apart this month.

Oh, this looks interesting. An article entitled "God's Time Machine". It describes how the Bible is actually a time machine that can take you back in time -- all the way to the beginning of the universe -- as well as into the future. Here is their proof.

The Bible described the big bang theory before science arrived at the same conclusion. That is, if you interpret the text "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) to mean "The universe started at a single point, out from which all the matter and energy in the universe emanated." Funny how Genesis leaves out that bit about the universe expanding from a focal point. The article quotes from God and the Astronomers (1978, p. 116),

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Let me offer a more realistic, albeit less congratulatory, variation on that metaphor.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he looks down from the peak and sees a group of theologians pointing up the mountain at him, nodding approvingly.

The article then gets off-topic for a bit. It quotes Paul Johnson,

Years later, I began my book Modern Times, a detailed study of the era from World War I to the early 1980s. This is the first epoch in nearly 2,000 years in which most governments have been guided by what might be called post-Christian ethics. And I find it to be unique in its cruelty, destructiveness and depravity."
("Why I Must Believe in God", Reader's Digest, June 1985, pp. 126-127).

Umm... have you ever heard of the witch hunts, or the black plague, or genocide (see Leviticus 34:11-14). This quote from Johnson is only a self-serving opinion. If anything, it seems that getting rid of religion gives people one less thing to fight about. The least religious countries are consistently the most peaceful.

OK, back on track with Biblical prophecies. The article quotes Daniel 12:4.

But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase"

The article points out that people travel a lot more these days, by planes, trains, cars, etc. According to the article, the text "many shall run to and fro" predicted all that (of course, the word "run" must be interpreted rather loosely). Also, computers and the Internet were predicted by "knowledge shall increase".

Jesus Christ himself apparently predicted the nuclear arms race, "if that time of troubles were not cut short, no living thing could survive" (Matthew 24:22, Revised English Bible). First of all, the Bible was REVISED?! The article points out that gunpowder and nuclear weapons had not yet been discovered, then asks "But how could the Bible predict such a remarkably accurate scenario 2,000 years in advance?" It didn't. I would NOT call "no living thing will survive" remarkably accurate. Nor do I think that "time of troubles" accurately predicts nuclear arms races.

The article makes no serious effort to predict anything at all. Its only focus is on trying to convince you that the Bible predicted past events. But it's all just classic post hoc rationalization, and data-mining for any shred of Biblical text that could be used to support their current agenda. It's very much like astrology; a horoscope makes vague statements (eg. "jump on the next opportunity that comes your way"), and the reader later on fills in ALL the meaningful interpretation and accompanying details.

The Bible is only good at predicting the future retrospectively. And it leaves out all the details. Utterly useless.

Of course, the article finishes off with a qualifier. Let me paraphrase it for you: "You can only know how to use the Bible as a time machine if you join our church and surrender to God." Convenient.

[From intelligent-falling.blogspot.com]

Going to Hell

I haven't always been an atheist. There was a time when I was young when I cried myself to sleep because I was so scared about going to Hell. Belief in Hell is, by definition, theist. Not certain where I got such an impression of Hell, but I have a hunch. My family joined the Velvet Hills Baptist Church. In fact, my dad helped build the... umm, building. The preachers visited the Sunday-school classes and told us their stories. Great story-tellers; they were extremely impassioned.

On Sunday mornings, my dad used to have the TV or radio tuned into religious shows while he was milling around, working on the house; so one would think my dad a religious man.

I don't think I ever bought into that view of my dad. One day my mom told me that my dad didn't believe in God. I think I found that difficult to comprehend, but I'm glad that seed was planted. That singular event might have opened my mind just a crack to the possibility.

You see, somewhere along the line I switched. I stopped believing in God.

The rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar has always been a fixture in my family. My parents used to play the soundtrack on our stereo. Later, we owned the video and watched it many times. That movie left me with the impression that Jesus was probably just a cool guy. Except for the end of the movie, where the song "Jesus Christ Superstar" goes rather Broadway, there is nothing in the movie that suggest Jesus was the son of God. No miracles, divine intervention... nothing. In my view, it told the story of a sociological phenomenon.

At some point, I learned about the theory of evolution. I guess it was grade 10 when I first heard about it. It was a feeble introduction in science class; we watched a video that I don't think I really understood. No class discussion. I'm not sure if our teacher didn't believe in it, or if was too much of a hot-button topic to be worth dwelling on. Regardless, over the next 10 years or so, I would come to respect that theory a great deal. To me, it's one of the most profound ideas ever conceived.

I also recall thinking that if there really was a god, he'd be OK with the way I live my life. I am nice to people, and give a lot of thought to the way the world works.

Today, I'm pretty public about the fact that I am atheist. The only caveat is that I am technically agnostic. I am a scientist in the sense that I believe we should look to explain our world through natural causes, not super-natural causes. The God hypothesis is unfalsifiable in that there is no natural observation that can disprove the existence of God. So, that's why I hope that if there is a God, he's understanding about people like me.