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| Comments on "Why the New Atheists Cant Even Beat DSouza: The Gap in Religious Thought" |
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 | Monday, June 2, 2008 at 12:39:27 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Hi Greg, I have a question: if D'Souza noticed you and these essays and actually had the 'nads to challenge you to a debate, would you be ready for it?
I'm asking, because once your series is done, it would be a lot of fun to start dropping links to them in fora where religionsts are parroting these bad arguments.
I'd like to see if we could push the lightweights (Hitchens et al.) aside and get in D'Souza's epistemological face.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 13:41:16 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Nolan Eakins
E-mail: nolan(at)eakins.net
URL: http://nolan.eakins.net/
I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the word "God" is never defined by those arguing for God's existence. It's close to saying "the universe started with the big bang" but never defining what the big bang is. There does seem to be one consistency though, everyone assumes God is a supernatural being. Sadly you can't argue for the existence of a supernatural being due to the very definition of supernatural, because the being gets argued out of existence by its own definition.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 14:51:07 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Eric Dennis
E-mail: eric.dennis(at)earthlink.net
Greg,
Good post. I find this kind of argument obnoxious coming from D'Souza who, as you say, clearly knows better. I have this picture in my mind.
We have, on the one hand, a carpenter who plans and carefully exectures a two-story house for himself and, on the other hand, a man ranting and raving about a thousand story structure he's built that dwarfs his competitor's puny dwelling. When he is asked where is this magnificent structure he explains that the carpenter's house is made only of oak, while his is pure marble, that the carpenter's house stands on the dirt of the earth, while his floats over the ground through the action of enormous magnets, etc. He continues that surely based on his own lofty standards of construction no one would dare assert that he has been bested by a mere carpenter.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 14:56:34 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
"There does seem to be one consistency though, everyone ***assumes*** God is a supernatural being."
That assumption is one of the key weapons wielded by the God squad -- they take advantage of the fact that everyone has a concept of God, and use it to evade attempts to lock down what in the world they are talking about, when asked.
"For those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, no explanation is possible."
Go see Greg's first post in this series, and watch Bill Tingley use this tactic multiple times in the comments.
http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2008/05/why-new-atheists-cant-even-b ...
If you refuse to admit the arbitrary, they have no case to make.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 15:57:52 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Greg Perkins
E-mail: greg(at)ecosmos.com
URL: http://ecosmos.com
Jim May asks, "if D'Souza noticed you and these essays and actually had the 'nads to challenge you to a debate, would you be ready for it? ...once your series is done, it would be a lot of fun to start dropping links to them in fora where religionsts are parroting these bad arguments."
[chuckle] Wouldn't it be great to find out? :^) Seriously, though, I have a hard time imagining that happening since he would have so little to gain from taking someone like me on. He needs a "big" target like a bestselling author who is getting a lot of attention. More realistic would be to try goading him into taking on someone under the auspices of ARI.
On readiness: actually, he's a pretty strong speaker and scary-good at throwing up a lot of dust, so I'd tell anyone taking him on to brush up on their Toastmasters skills so they have a strong stage presence, to review the game tapes to have compelling lines of approach to his typical arguments ready at hand, and to have a panel of talented friends pummel them for hours with a storm of D'Souza's sort of verbal shenanigans to get a little practice clearing away dust and keeping the audience focused on essential facts.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 16:30:13 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Mel McGuire
Speaking of dust (from D'souza's op-ed:
"He doesn’t even ponder the central question raised by his title. If he’s right that all religions are false and God is a figment of the human imagination, why should imaginary things cause so many problems? Dreams and unicorns don’t “poison everything” so why should deities?"
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 18:19:57 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Greg writes:
"And he is obviously well-read in the history of Western thought, which has seen the fundamental errors in these religious arguments exposed countless times through the ages. Yet he presents them again with a straight face."
He can do this because he knows there are precious few equipped to call him on it. I can confidently state that D'Souza would not have ever been heard from, were he transported back to that movement's peak.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 18:20:52 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
"That movement" in the above post is the Enlightenment.
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| Monday, June 2, 2008 at 19:05:36 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Tom Rexton
E-mail: tjrexton(at)hotmail.com
In addition to being an argument from ignorance, it's also a particular kind of argument that I like to call the "order" argument. I've heard it many times before: how can you explain the "order" in the Universe if there is no God? Ayn Rand herself had been asked this in one of the interview selections in the film "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life". She said (my summary) that the "order" is in the mind of the scientist who is able to grasp it.
The "order" argument results from the ignorance of or denial that existence IS identity. The universe could NOT have been any other way. It is what it is because it exists. It could not exist otherwise. The laws of Nature are not some sort of rules imposed upon entities to make them behave as they do; the laws of Nature are part of Nature. Entities act the way they do because of their identity. Their identity is what it is because they exist. Or simply: existence -> identity ->causality.
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 7:51:34 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Maybe this is a tangential issue here, but I have always thought that the "Big Bang" theory proves nothing but that there is something wrong with modern physics. After all, it is just a secularized version of the idea that the world was once created *ex nihilo*.
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 10:34:57 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: JJZeise
E-mail: Featherfall50(at)yahoo.com
It's not quite ex nihilo. The idea is that some of the properties of the universe changed after that process, leading to the physical constants under which we now operate. In other words, the universe *as we know it* began then.
Greg, while I've seen the new atheists use the arguments that you present in this installment, I don't think they are quite as capable of recognizing the arbitrary. That bodes well for you or the prospective ARI representative in a debate.
One difficulty to overcome in such and argument is that D'Souza targets a general audience. When a reasonable individual dismisses an arbitrary assertion, to the layman that may look like a retreat.
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 11:42:40 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Steve D'Ippolito
...it may look like a retreat, or just a flat out refusal to argue a point.
One might counter that by bringing up an (obviously ridiculous) example of an arbitrary and comparing what you are (not) arguing against to it--in other words illustrate *what* you mean by an arbitrary with an example that parallels what they are pusing.
Just saying "that's an arbitrary assertion so I won't bother to debate it" does no good--in fact I doubt the general public is even aware of that use of the word "arbitrary" so they'd only be confused by it. (I know I had to read the bit about it in OPAR to understand that usage, myself.)
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 12:02:00 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Greg Perkins
E-mail: greg(at)ecosmos.com
URL: http://ecosmos.com
JJZeise, good points, and you're exactly right: this article doesn't offer as startlingly different a take as the other pieces in the series. The trouble is that the New Atheists are haphazard and inconsistent, sometimes pointing out arguments from ignorance, but also letting people like D'Souza get away with epistemological murder by granting FAR too much to the arbitrary. Before offering *any* scientific speculation (or even any hard-earned scientific knowledge) in response to these sorts of arguments, they really need to first explain and emphasize (and require the other guy to acknowledge) the problem in that entire approach. Otherwise, they are only setting/reinforcing the precedent that that sort of thinking is reasonable in the first place.
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 13:42:01 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
JJZeise: I must admit I know very little about the universe before Big Bang. I have seen speculation that it was preceded by a Big Crunch. But I do not know much about that either.
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| Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 18:11:35 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Stephen Bourque
E-mail: srbourque(at)comcast.net
URL: http://realityandreason.blogspot.com/
Excellent post, Greg.
There are two ideas in D’Souza’s op-ed that are recurring elements in the religious writings that adopt scientific-sounding arguments. The first is to invert the relative positions of science and religion by associating each with language that belongs to the other realm. (I’ve written more about this here: http://realityandreason.blogspot.com/2008/04/shaky-ground.html) This disingenuousness is glaringly evident in D’Souza’s use of “God hypothesis” and “atheist dogma.”
The second is the fallacy reflected by the notions that the universe is “narrowly tailored to permit life” and that the infinitesimally small odds of life turning out as it did cannot be explained naturally. This confuses the probability of achieving a particular outcome in a random process with the probability of achieving SOME outcome. For instance, if you plan to flip a coin ten times, the odds of obtaining some particular pattern, say HTHHTHTTTH, is small (less than 0.1 %). But if you’ve already obtained that pattern, the probability of the event is 100%; it is certain.
For the same reason, one cannot look at mankind and life on earth and marvel at the remarkably small odds of it turning out this way, saying, “the universe behaves as if it knew we were coming!”
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| Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 11:57:15 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Ichor
I'd like to take a moment to thank the "new atheists" for reuniting me with Objectivism. After listening to their anemic debates and reading their work, I grew frustrated with their inability to identify the root cause of religions evil. So frustrated that I knew that the Objectivist ideas made from a philosophic basis would cream these shmucks who could only grasp as much as natural science allows. After remembering how satisfying it was to read and learn about Objectivist ideas I have been reinvigorated ever since.
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| Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 16:34:08 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Richard
E-mail: bubbawadd(at)yahoo.com
There is something absurd about this excerpt from D’souza. The debate seems to be about the existence of some entity called God. How does D’souza describe the entity? What are its attributes? What does the entity do? If it doesn’t do anything, why do we care whether it exists?
Consider the debate about ether. Ether was supposed to be a “fluid” or something that carried electromagnetic waves. The characteristics postulated for ether meant that light would travel at a different velocity along the path of the earth’s orbit as opposed to the velocity perpendicular to this path. Finally, we (Michelson-Morley) determined that the velocity of light was the same in both directions. This experiment disproved the existence of ether, or at least the existence of something having the proposed characteristics.
As for internal morality, D’souza needs to read the works of Edward O. Wilson. (So also do Ayne Rand fans.) We are animals and we get our feelings of morality the same way as other animals. The “ability to tell right from wrong” IS explained by one of Darwin’s followers: Wilson.
Does anyone know how D’souza knows that time and the laws of physics originated at the “time” of the Big Bang? I think a more accurate statement would be that we do not understand how physics incorporates the facts that point to a Big Bang.
And finally, isn’t it more likely that life evolved to fit the existing universe, and not the other way around.
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| Sunday, August 31, 2008 at 15:23:58 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Lesli
Not much to say here. I’m not familiar enough with D’Souza to know whether you’re quoting him in context, but at face value I’d agree this is a weak point for him.
So, yes, here’s a logical fallacy to which he apparently falls prey.
I would still argue that you have never sufficiently grounded your use of logic.
Also, given your adamant atheistic personal persuasion, I am curious how your use of logic has given you certain knowledge that God does not exist. Seems to be a bit of a gap there, unless I misunderstand you.
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| Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 9:21:00 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Greg Perkins
E-mail: greg(at)ecosmos.com
URL: http://gregperkins.net
Hi, Lesli. Wow!! It is genuinely heartening that you recognize D'Souza as falling prey to the fallacy of the God of the Gaps argument from ignorance! Though as I discussed, his problem is endemic in religious thought -- your thinking included, no? Every argument from any sort of miracle (like the Resurrection one you seem to like) is an argument from ignorance, arbitrarily positing one's favorite "supernatural" thingie to fill that gap in knowledge regarding what happened. The same is true for the ever-fashionable argument from design that comes in so many delightful flavors.
Regarding your perception of my "adamant atheistic personal persuasion": Sigh. Really, it isn't all about your God, or anybody's god. My adamantly rejecting talk about gods is no more epistemologically interesting than my adamantly rejecting soft headed conspiracy theories, ghost stories, superstitions about the number 13 and black cats, talk of leprechauns and unicorns and gremlins, and on and on. Broadly speaking, I am a-gremlinist and a-unicornist for the same reasons and in exactly the same sense as I am a-theist: I have found these all to be products of baseless, erroneous thinking, and have simply dismissed them as epistemologically unworthy.
The important logical principle here is called the "burden of proof": you claim to know a god or gremlin or conspiracy or whatever *exists*, so rational people hoping to learn something ask why you say so -- and if you can't pony up with some valid epistemological mojo so they could know it too, they will properly reject your baseless mumbles *as baseless mumbles* and go about their business in reality. Game over, thanks for playing, please try again when you think you might have some mojo. Notice how there's nothing special in there about gods -- the conspiracy nutters and psychics and fairy chasers get the same treatment, and for the same reasons.
This relates to how someone could know the nonexistence of the subject of baseless mumbles: If you offer someone such a tale, and it *happens* to get specific and contradict something else that *happens* to be known, then the laws of logic let rational people know that your tale is false. So in such a case, your baseless tale isn't just rejected as baseless -- it is also rejected as false. But please understand that there is absolutely no need for or obligation on anyone to go and find such a contradiction to help you improve your epistemological hygiene. If that sort of connection happens to be noticed by a rational person in your midst, and if he happens to be feeling generous, maybe he'll share it and you can then feel grateful for his giving you an extra hint that you shouldn't be clinging faithfully to baseless tales in the first place.
Being such a guy, I'm happy to share that kind of observation. Here's one: As I explained, miracles, to fill the role they are hoped/claimed to fill, would entail contradicting the fact of identity. I happen to know that fact of identity, and you could too -- it's a Law of Existence after all -- so the law of non-contradiction says that miracles are Right Out. And so is anything like your god that is purported to be capable of them. QED. (See how this connection really isn't useful knowledge for me? I'm not the one who needs to see it and get straightened out. Heck, I would have been just fine never thinking about it in the first place.)
Da nada,
Greg
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