Jonah Goldberg posts the “appalled” Ed Feser on secular conservatives. Apparently Mr. Feser thinks of himself as the opposite of “smugly unreflective and dogmatic.” Readers can decide for themselves.
I will respond to just one of Mr. Feser’s un-smug, non-dogmatic statements: that only someone blithely ignorant of religion would call it “unscientific.”
I wonder to which science Mr. Feser is referring. There was the Templeton prayer experiment, and that didn’t work out too satisfactorily, did it? Granted, the research design was laughable, in a charming sort of way (the people praying for the recovery of cardiac patients, for example, were only given the patient’s first name and last initial, on the assumption presumably that God would know to which Jim G. they were referring). Perhaps Mr. Feser could propose a more scientifically rigorous design to show the efficacy of petitionary prayer or any other religious practice of his choosing.
The curious thing to me is why the idea of secular conservatism is so “appalling” to Mr. Feser and others. We are only proposing that the basis of conservatism can be broadened beyond revelation to rest on an understanding of human nature itself. Reason and the evidence of history show the crucial importance of parental responsibility, self-discipline, limited government, and free economic exchange in creating a society in which individuals can most thrive. Do religious conservatives believe that only religious belief grounds conservatism? That position strikes me as rather an admission of defeat.
Secular conservatives applaud the virtues put forth in various Holy Books, we simply claim them—proudly–as the creation of human beings, to which all have access.
Feser’s idea that today’s secular conservatives would, in a previous generation, swallow the liberal line on markets seems perfectly bizarre. First, there is just no evidence for it, and secondly, if we are such great swallowers of liberal lines, why then, are we conservatives in the first place?
Ms. MacDonald’s point is the right one: Can there even be separate religious truths? If “Thou Shall Not Kill” is moral truth, isn’t it moral truth whether god ordained it so? Was it not true before the 10 commandments were issued?
And I do wish Feser would point to the evidence of the “scientific” basis of religious claims.
Mr. Feser claims that those on the secular right have little understanding of religion and speak from ignorance. I wonder how many of us grew up in a religious family, as I did. I have 18 years of exposure to religion, my opinions on it do not come from ignorance.
“Do religious conservatives believe that only religious belief grounds conservatism? That position strikes me as rather an admission of defeat.”
And it is, and they do. It has occurred to me that this in fact is one of the bigger issues that the secular right faces. I wrote to the contact@secularright.org address earlier this afternoon with regards to the comments made by Senator DeMint on the new Capitol Visitation Center. His remarks seemingly point to the conclusion you made above: that religious conservatives (like himself) believe that christianity is the basis for conservatism.
Can there even be separate religious truths? If “Thou Shall Not Kill” is moral truth, isn’t it moral truth whether god ordained it so? Was it not true before the 10 commandments were issued?
As a matter of history & anthropology the general position is that these sorts of moral injunctions which are part of religious tradition were absorbed during the rise of institutional religions. Primitive tribes do not live in a state of all-against-all, but exhibit similar morality to ‘civilized’ groups writ small.
Mr. Feser claims that those on the secular right have little understanding of religion and speak from ignorance. I wonder how many of us grew up in a religious family, as I did. I have 18 years of exposure to religion, my opinions on it do not come from ignorance.
Most data I’ve seen suggest that of those who claim to have “No religion” (of whom around half are atheists & agnostics in the United States), on the order of 50% were raised with religion and 50% without.
I do agree that most secular people don’t know much about religion, but, I would hold that they know at least as much about religion as the typical religious person. Not only were many (around half) of such people raised religious, but while theists may not know any atheists personally (well, they may, but atheists don’t go witnessing their atheism much), atheists invariably know many theists.
Consider that 5% of the population consists of atheists & agnostics. On any given interaction with the general population, 1 out of 400 interactions would be between two non-believers. In contrast, 1 out of 21 would be between believers and non-believers, while the vast majority would be between believers.
As a matter of reality people assort with others like themselves as they age. Most of my acquaintances and friends are non-believers. But this was not the case when I was 15. In fact, in many situations I was the only atheist, and I served as the humanizing face of atheism for many of my religious conservative friends (the fact that I was personally less libertine than many of them, especially those who were not Mormon, helled).
“Mr. Feser claims that those on the secular right have little understanding of religion and speak from ignorance. I wonder how many of us grew up in a religious family, as I did. I have 18 years of exposure to religion, my opinions on it do not come from ignorance.”
Indeed. Many of us were at one time deeply interested in religion, studied it closely, decided it had no rational basis, realized we had no capacity for faith in the irrational, and finally became atheists.
re: religion & rationality. It isn’t really about that for most people. That is, religion is about rationality for very smart people, theists and atheists, especially smart people who are low on the mysticism quotient and tend to analyze and formalize. But read Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t.
David and David.
All I can say is me too.
Former religious – Born again radical agnostic.
I can recite the Nicene Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and even the Hail Mary (Anglicans don’t use it, but I taught for a few months in a Catholic School and we said it before every lesson). I can sing around thirty hymns — though sometimes just the first couple of verses — sight unseen, and know my Bible well. I had ten years of weekly Religious Instruction in school.
The very first song I ever learned, around age 4, was “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.” Like the computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey, I can still sing it.
How much more religious instruction does Feser think I need before I see the light? Do I need a Master’s? A Doctorate? What happened to “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you”? (That’s Matthew 7:vii, for those of you who don’t know your gospels.)
I’d willingly take on the average American Christian in a test of Christian knowledge. For sure I could outsing him: in my experience, the only hymn American Christians know is the insipid and un-singable “Amazing Grace.” Ignorant? Pah!
^ yup. same here. although, i would still have trouble with the hail mary.
I think to sum up your point: the more you know about religion, the more you realize it’s all a bunch of nonsense, with exceptions of course.
I don’t think that Feser’s saying that irreligious people are more ignorant of religion than most people. I think (hope) that he’d concede Hume’s point about the typical irreligious person knowing more about religion than the typical religious person. He’s saying that the irreligious aren’t familiar with serious apologetics. One could point out that almost nobody is familiar with that kind of thing (just as almost nobody is familiar with [the real] David Hume’s writing, or Nietzsche’s, or what modern neuroscience has to say about religion).
So his claim is basically that the irreligious just aren’t familiar enough with the arguments for religious belief. I’m not saying that he’s right, but I don’t think it does much good to point out one’s familiarity with the claims or trappings of Christianity. Personally, my response is that I’ve tried my best to keep up, haven’t noticed much original thinking since the Enlightenment, and that most of it has been soundly refuted at some point in the intervening centuries.
For sure I could outsing him: in my experience, the only hymn American Christians know is the insipid and un-singable “Amazing Grace.”
A perfect example of the point Feser was making.
Americans get an ‘F’ in religion.
Ms. MacDonald,
If you really think that denying that religion is “unscientific” amounts to endorsing lame exercises in pop apologetics like the Templeton prayer experiment, then I’m afraid you’re simply proving my point. That you focus on such easy targets — here and in your other writings on this subject — seems to me pretty strong evidence that you know nothing about serious arguments for religion. Or perhaps I’ve overlooked your learned and thorough debunking of Aquinas, Maimonides, al-Ghazali, Leibniz, Clarke, Garrigou-Lagrange, et al., not to mention contemporary writers like Haldane, Davies, Plantinga, Swinburne, Craig, Miller, and other prominent analytic philosophers.
I am in any event baffled that you are baffled that I failed to make a compelling case for my position in, of all things, an email that got posted at The Corner. Indeed, part of the problem with this debate is that too many people on the “secular conservative” side seem to think a smarmy op-ed or two should settle the matter. That’s why (as I mentioned in my email to Jonah Goldberg) I have devoted a book (The Last Superstition) to making the case. I don’t expect you to run out and buy a copy, but if you take an honest look at it I think you will find that at the very least it — and, more importantly, the thinkers who have influenced me in writing it — pose a very serious challenge to the coherence of the secularist worldview, which should be addressed head on rather than glibly dismissed.
Finally, I never said that I found the idea of secular conservatism per se appalling. My complaint was only against those secular conservatives whose understanding of religion appears to be as shallow as that of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and Co. (whose foibles I expose at length in the book). For what it is worth, I used to be an atheist and a secular conservative myself, before purely rational philosophical arguments — not blind faith, not ignorance of science, nor any other such red herring — led me conclude that the naturalist or materialist view of the world is mistaken and that theism is true, indeed rationally unavoidable. The Last Superstition explains why, for those who might be interested.
I suppose the right of first response ought to go to Mac Donald, or at least to someone who’s read Feser’s book, but I’d like to note that while the irreligious may tend to demand too much detail in online arguments, it seems to me that this is a reaction to the tendency of theists to go to great lengths to avoid providing detail. No offense, Mr Feser, but your post takes three lengthy paragraphs to say “you can find good arguments for theism elsewhere, though I won’t give them here”. I can’t speak for everyone, but it becomes frustrating to debate people who do nothing but provide a laundry list of references, with the claim that one can’t possibly have an intelligent opinion on the subject without being familiar with them all. No one’s asking for a dissertation, but a brief outline of an argument would be nice.
Mr. Feser, just because you disagree with a group of people doesn’t mean they are ignorant. To wit: Dennett studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard; Harris did so at Stanford. Do you think they’re not aware of the philosophers you mention?
Oh, Heather Mac Donald has heard serious arguments for God. Lawrence Auster, who corresponded with her about the Indian Ocean tsunami, has a collection here:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009200.html
Especially in the thread “God and Disasters”:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/006246.html
Hello Gotchaye,
The problem with your demand is this. Suppose, to take just one example, that I presented Aquinas’s famous Second Way as an instance of a brief but powerful argument for God’s existence. Immediately I would be met with a barrage of well-known objections (“Well, what caused God, then?” “Why assume the universe had a beginning?” “What about Ockham’s razor?” etc.) which are commonly regarded as obvious and decisive, but which are in fact extremely superficial, directed at crude caricatures of the argument rather than the real McCoy, and are easily exposed as worthless once one understands the argument in light of the broader set of philosophical ideas (about the nature of causation, the difference between empirical theorizing and metaphysical demonstration, and so forth) to which Aquinas was committed. Experts know all this already, but the average non-expert comes at the topic with all sorts of misconceptions derived from pop philosophy books and the like. But explaining all the relevant background concepts and clearing away the misconceptions would take a great many pages. Hence the need for a book; and there’s hardly any point in spending hours repeating what I’ve already said in the book in a blog post that will be read by only a few people, no?
Hello Dan,
The fact that I disagree with them is not the reason I say they are ignorant. There are atheists — J.L. Mackie, Quentin Smith, and J.J.C. Smart would be three examples — for whom I have great respect, and whom I would not dismiss as ignorant, even though I think they are mistaken. But Dennett and Harris are not in this league. Not even close, in fact. It is blindingly obvious to anyone who knows something about the history of philosophical arguments for the existence of God that Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens simply do not know what they hell they are talking about — nor, I dare say, does anyone who finds the work of these lightweights at all impressive. If you doubt this, I urge you to read my book, where this charge is amply demonstrated. (And for what it is worth, I might also add that other prominent atheists or agnotics, like Thomas Nagel and Michael Ruse, have also criticized Dawkins and Co. for the shallowness of their understanding of religion.)
I hate to point out to you that there are conservative religious libertarians (such as myself) who don’t fit in the false dichotomy presented on this blog (irrational religious right vs. uber-rational, highly intelligent, more evolved, secular right, justified and righteous in writing things like: decided it [religion] had no rational basis, realized we had no capacity for faith in the irrational.)
And Feser, in his comment above, is spot-on. Today’s marquis atheists (at least Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins–I haven’t read Dennett) do not understand theology. Dawkins proudly so, invoking the “coutier’s reply”–let the interested reader Google–to proclaim his ignorance a virtue. When you compare their arguments (which amount to “everything bad that has happened has been because of religion, more people have died because of religion…if God made everything who made God?…) to the arguments of the atheists of previous generations–say Camus and Russell, you see the profound decay in intellectual atheism. They are to theology what Kent Hovind is to science.
Feser is offering the courtier’s reply. Religious intellectuals can always come up with one more book you haven’t read. What does this remind me of? Oh yeah, that other religious intellectual.
Funny, I missed that bit in the gospels where Jesus said: “If y’all just set aside a year or so for intensive study and work your way through a shelf-full of philosophers, you will realise that I truly am the Son of God!”
Feser refers to “lame exercises in pop apologetics like the Templeton prayer experiment.”
Perhaps he’d share with us his own design plan for an experiment to test the efficacy of prayer?
Bradlaugh
Funny, I missed that bit in the gospels where Jesus said: “If y’all just set aside a year or so for intensive study and work your way through a shelf-full of philosophers, you will realise that I truly am the Son of God!”
Yes, and those pesky Bereans sho’ nuff received their comeuppance for the unspeakable impertinence of bringing their intellects to bear on what, even us bumpkins know, was meant to be accepted on blind faith.
And Paul, he would never dare study let alone quote a pagan philosopher. May it never be!
D.Heddle>Today’s marquis atheists (at least Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins–I haven’t read Dennett)
Marquis = rank of nobility in England and Europe, outranked by duke;
Marquee = Sign above theater, often used to promote show’s best-known stars, hence figure of speech, “marquee names”.
Mr. Heddle & Mr. Feser:
It is simply the case that the burden of “proof” or argumentation is upon those who would make supernatural claims. The quickest way to realize this is to reflect on the fact that there are many different, varied, and often contradictory relgious sytems out there, each one of which hase roughly equal empirical support (read: zero.)
If there was only one religion, ever, then maybe theism v. atheism/agnisticism would be a zero-sum game in which any “points” you scored against us would count for your side. Unfortately for your side, this is not the case: It’s Athesism/Agnosticism v. (Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judiasm, Hinduism, Jainism, etc., etc., etc.)
So, you not only need to refute the “safest empirical” stance (agnosticism), the “probably the case” stance (atheism), you have to debeunk all the other wild and fantastical superatural systems that can and do compete with your own preffered wild and fantasitcal supernatural system.
Good luck with all that.
BTW – There is not, nor has there ever been, an argument for the existence of God that was not in some way circular, used “false-dilemma”, or didn’t hide its conclusion within its premises. (If there were, it would be a settled matter.) To give but one example/rebuttal: The famous first-cause argument.
1) Things that exist (the universe) are said to stand in need of causal explanation.
2) “God” is proposed as the ultimate cause of all things. The “first cause” that set the chain of cause & effect in motion.
But didn’t (1) presume that all things which exist must have a cause? Yes indeed, so the theist asserts:
(3) God is “causa sui”, or, a self-caused cause, thereby seeming to get around the objection.
But, if we can just assert that some things are self-caused, why can’t we simply assert that the universe as a whole is self-caused? There really is no getting around this, even if the Theist asserts:
(4) God is “sui generis”, or in a unique class all by itself.
Again, (4) is just another mere bald assertion, much like (3). You have no evidence that either are true. You just say they are. There is nothing to prevent me ascibing to the universe as a whole whatever you want to ascribe to God.
Moreover, given advancements in physics, it’s not clear that the starting premise (1) even holds. (i.e., some events may simply be uncaused, in the traditional sense of causality.)
The burden is absoultely on the theist, not on us, and that burden has never been met. Let me know when you have any evidence for your myriad metaphysical assertions, until then I will regard your writings as squid-ink. Or, as the great, unanswerable Hume wrote:
“Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry an illusion.”
(That is as far into the weeds as I will get, as the matter is more or less settled, from where I’m sitting.)
Walter,
Thanks. All my posts are Garunteed to have at least one spelling error, incorrect word choice, or unforgivable use of the passive voice. Have a go at it, assuming you don’t charge for editing.
Ed Feser’s objections are silly for another reason: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens by their own terms do not claim to respond to academic theologians such as Alvin Plantinga. Heck, if I weren’t at work, I could quote the page of The God Delusion where Dawkins says this explicitly.
The “New Atheists” are popularizers, and the “New Atheist” movement is meant to respond to popular pop-apologetics like the execrable Lee Strobel and his ilk, which are read by millions of people. They’re not meant to respond to published, peer-reviewed journal articles ridden with abstruse theology and symbolic logic — although, of course, there are plenty of secular academicians who are perfectly capable of doing so.
Mr. Feser: do you seriously contend that Dan Dennett and Sam Harris’s knowledge of theology is inferior to Lee Strobel’s? If so, I’d love to see the support for that argument. If not, then what are you complaining about?
A-bax,
It is simply the case that the burden of “proof” or argumentation is upon those who would make supernatural claims.
There is no burden of proof on me (Mr. Feser may feel differently), for it is not my desire to prove something to you. If you take a physics class from me, then there will be times when the burden of proof is upon me. But not here. Nowhere does the bible instruct me to prove God exists. As a Christian I am called to present the gospel, nothing more. If you have been regenerated you may or may not accept it (eventually you will.) If you haven’t, you won’t. Proof has nothing to do with it.
That said, your first cause argument is, in my opinion, not in the correct form (not that I put any weight on the correct form, but you should use it.) The correct form is 1) All things that have not existed forever must have a cause.
Aside:
David, you appear to have made a typo, so let me help you fix it:
You can thank me later.
Andrew T.,
Personally, I think the “here, let me fix that for you” tactic is a form of masturbation. Do you need glasses yet?
Oh, sometimes it is clever, sublime even–like when a person changes a solitary word to completely alter the meaning–but it must be in a subtle, non-trivial, delightfully surprising manner. Your effort, I’m afraid, doesn’t qualify.
I suggest that, assuming the parties involved are amenable, Mr. Feser should have his publisher send a review copy of his book to Ms. Mac Donald, so that she can post her opinion about it on this blog. If she finds the book tedious or otherwise undesirable to read, she can post that opinion instead.
Heather says the following:
“We are only proposing that the basis of conservatism can be broadened beyond revelation to rest on an understanding of human nature itself.”
Since I love and respect all the writers on this blog, I think her proposal makes a lot of sense and that the task for this blog is to show how “an understanding of human nature itself” can lead one to become a conservative. Since the media and broader culture seem to freak out when it comes to religion; then folks like Hume, Bradlaugh, and Heather can potentially have an enormous impact if they convince the secular liberals running the media and cultural institutions that their ideas are wrong, based on “an understanding of human nature itself”. In a way, this group could be like the neo-cons at the “Public Interest” who used economic and social science research against those liberals who used the same to claim liberal truths.
It remains to be seen, however, whether or not such secular appeals to “an understanding of human nature itself” can do the job the folks here at Secular Right seem to think it can do.
Hume says:
“Primitive tribes do not live in a state of all-against-all, but exhibit similar morality to ‘civilized’ groups writ small.”
Is this really true? I mean just to take one example, didn’t the Spartans throw weak babies to the wolves? Didn’t a lot of primitive tribes practice polygamy, slavery, human sacrifice, etc. Now I know all these things didn’t necessarily go away with the Bible, but at least the Bible offered up an alternate vision of morality that really was different in a profound way from what had come before (the book to read as a start is Cahill’s “The Gift of the Jews”). I think Roger Scruton (who is the kind of guy Bradlaugh would like) says something similar in his latest essay in “The American Spectator” (which is a must read for this group).
Finally, just because I’m curious, why does Andrew T. find Strobel so offensive?
Jeff Singer: Strobel is the religious equivalent of a used-mattress salesman. If you have your copy of The Case For Christ, I can connect the dots for you, or you can just google “Jerry Vardaman.” I have personally corrected Strobel on this matter, and he continues to perpetrate an outright (and laughably stupid) fraud. I can only conclude that truth matters nothing to him.
David Heddle: For a pedant, you sure play the victim awfully well. Since we both know your “argument” is nothing more than special pleading, perhaps you can slink away now.
Regarding the bible, and knowledge of it, I frankly don’t understand why everyone doesn’t close the book, never to open it again, upon reading I Cor. xiii. 11 🙂
If anyone has an example of a good working secular conservative society, one that would please the secular rightists here, I think that would broaden my mind considerably. Is there any rational basis to believe such a thing is doable? I don’t mean, “can we think of it logically?” but “has it been done before?”
With apoligies for a length that was difficult to avoid on a maiden voyage here!
I would quarrel with the very concept of “secular conservatism” as apparently envisioned by this blog. When you pit reason against religion, you have already ceded the battlefield, if not the battle, to the religious right. Just as atheists can be political conservatives, the deeply religious can be secular conservatives as a political matter. When you promote an anti-religious (scientific, enlightened) position, you are setting up a religio-centric confrontation, not a political dueling match. Does that not seem patently counterproductive if your goal is to take the religion out of politics? It’s interesting to me that on sites like HotAir, discussion of social initiatives (most recently, for example, the idea of banning gay adoption) almost inevitably devolves into religious and/or doctrinal arguments between religious conservatives themselves! The battlefield you’ve chosen here looks all too sectarian in character too.
I suggest that the fundamental change to be resisted is the conflation of private (religious) and public (political) life, something that the founders pretty clearly avoided. Disputes over whether, and/or which, founders were traditional Christians, or Deists, or closet Atheists, or none of the above is an historical pastime. If they had intended us to be, or even remain, a “Christian Nation,” they were perfectly capable of charting that course in our founding documents. Franklin’s substitution of “self-evident” for “sacred” in the Declaration runs counter to the popular, but circular, argument that anything other than a Christian nation would have been inconceivable at the time. The controversy over whether the Declaration of Independence constitutes evidence of religious intent, is, itself, a largely modern, ahistorical, phenomenon. As a Declaration groupie, I’m perfectly happy to engage in that discussion, but where the founders intentions are concerned, it’s most telling that the Declaration itself began gathering dust almost immediately upon promulgation. It lay mouldering in obscurity till Lincoln pulled it out and brushed it off in an effort to bolster his stance on emancipation. The founder’s religious practices found primary expression in personal writings, private correspondence and individual conduct, not in the public documents of governance.
Your central assertion in this post seems similarly and emblematically misguided:
After ceding the battlefield conceptually as a blog, you are now gratuitously ceding the very “basis” of conservatism! It is, in fact, the prominence of social/religious “conservatism” (and the emphasis on Christianity which now proliferates in political dialogue) which is a newly narrowing force on the right. The kind of revisionism which casts historical invocations of the divine, common to both left and right, as political, Christian, imperatives is really a post-Reagan phenomenon. It coincides with an immediate, explicit, effort to promote the arguable claim that George H.W. Bush lost a second term because he ignored his putative conservative Christian base. This was a dual purpose spin, in which the religious right claimed, for itself, sole status as the Republican party’s base and asserted its own centrality to Republican electability. In practice, however, the defection of any of a number of coalition partners could, and did, sink that ship. The rise of the religious right heralded the end of consensus building around mutually acceptable principles, and the beginning of a decades long struggle for dominance.
More recently, the unacknowledged element of Karl Rove’s extraordinary, successful, effort to enlist social conservatives in the 2004 election, is that those voters were, once again, the newest, and in many cases temporary, members of the Republican coalition. It took explicit, unprecedented, catering to their narrowly defined social interests to engage them at all. Those interests, and the preponderant political, legislative, judicial objectives of social conservatives are often fundamentally antithetical to the traditional conservative principles you outline above. Proposition 8 in California, for example, is not a Republican success story. One could more easily argue that it’s the kind of demographic success we usually ascribe to Democrats.
Pro-life imperatives, in which I would include attaching legal life and personhood to conception, positively invite federal, governmental intrusion, not just on personal, familial and medical decision-making, but on reproduction itself. Social issues have, ironically, upended historical principles on both sides of the aisle, as we see Democrats pushing back with states rights and non-interference. In asserting the absolute primacy of moral values over political values in the public arena, religious conservatives have perched religious, social and physical privacy, along with the Republican party itself, at the top of a very steep, slippery slope which they simply refuse to recognize.
I am not anti-religious, and I believe that it is important to stipulate that the religious right is an indisputably legitimate constituency. They would, I believe, argue that immorality, which they associate with irreligiousity, is injurious to society, and thus passes the Jeffersonian “injurious to others” test. Their assumption of the conservative mantle, however, at the expense of political (limited government), economic (free market), and libertarian (individual) conservatives is an exercise in redefining conservatism and redesigning the Republican party as a sectarian organism, not the ideological coalition it has long represented. Secular conservatives can rightly claim that they have not left the party and I join in their refusal to let the party leave them.
Andrew T,
I leave blogs when I get bored or when the blog owners ask me to leave. (Or when I am banned, such as on Bill Dembski’s Uncommon Descent.) I don’t leave when trolls (even if they are fellow trolls) ask me to leave. So save the pixels.
By the way, on this thread I asked you for a reference to a published, peer-reviewed article to back up you claim that:
I’m still waiting. Or were you just blowing smoke?
Just for the record, here are a few propositions that I think are clearly true:
(1) The apologetics of people like Strobel are pretty poor.
(2) The atheist response, given by people like Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., to people like Strobel, aren’t very good from a trained philosopher’s point of view, but they’re significantly better than the popular apologetics of the Strobels of the world.
That said, I don’t think this speaks much for them; as John Hick pointed out in the beginning of his book Evil and the God of Love, it’s a lot easier to criticize positive propositions than it is to argue for them. For instance, an atheist acquainted with even thin non-cognitivist or nihilist gruel would, I think, be able to fairly quickly put a well-educated, but moral realistic, non-philosopher on the defensive without very much to say. Similarly, a lot of well-educated non-philosophers would be hard-pressed to come up with good reasons for believing in an external world when faced with objections one could find in an introduction to philosophy class. This by itself, though, does not show that, because it’s hard to think of good arguments on behalf of moral realism, external-world realism, or theism, that we should therefore think that all those positions are clearly false. The fact is, it does take a while for someone to point out the difficulties in the presuppositions of Cartesian skepticism, or Ayersian non-cognitivism, or Dawkinsian atheism. And because it takes so long, a lot of sophisticated believers in those things will be chary of wasting time in an internet forum explaining those things.
So, I don’t think it’s fair to say “courtier’s reply” to someone who doesn’t want to have to explain, to a non-philosopher, Fritz Warfield and Marian David’s latest 100-page essay showing the problems of Cartesian skepticism.
@ David Heddle: As the Sarge said in Stripes, “Lighten up, Francis”. No one’s asking you to actually leave, but if you’re going to dish it out (8th grade masturbation jokes), you should really have a thicker skin than you’re displaying. Seriously…relax, buddy.
@ JM Hanes: “After ceding the battlefield conceptually as a blog, you are now gratuitously ceding the very “basis” of conservatism!” Wow…where to begin. The whole point of Heather’s post, and perhaps this entire site (if I may be so presumptuous) is make space for those conservatives who are not religious. Do you honestly not see that it is possible for a *true* conservative to lack religious faith? If so, you should read some Derbyshire, or some of Heather’s stuff. I’m not kidding.
As (our) Hume put it, “fact comes before theory”…so that if your theory cannot accommodate the possibility of a non-religious conservative, you will find reading this blog a very frustrating experience.
JM Hanes, you know religious liberals right? I’m sure you find their ideas as grating as I do. So, if religiosity was co-extensive with conservatism, there would be no religious liberals, right? But…there are religious liberals. So maybe, just maybe, religiosity (or its inverse) can be separated from liberalism (or its inverse). Do you now see the logical space in which a member of the “secular right” could exist?
All Heather is trying to do is get conservatives like yourself to not needlessly drive conservatives like her away with your insistence on supernatural commitments as a litmus test for political allegiance. Fair enough?
“All Heather is trying to do is get conservatives like yourself to not needlessly drive conservatives like her away with your insistence on supernatural commitments as a litmus test for political allegiance. Fair enough?”
Really – then why is she challenging the rationality of religion – sounds like she is doing quite a bit more than fighting a litmus test and offering an alternative that will co-exist with religion in the conservative platform.
Edward Feser’s book is all about reality and reason (the subtitle of this blog) and if Heather was really about that, she would seek first to understand the other person’s argument before brushing it off. You know, one of those virtues that history and reason have proven to be good for humanity 😉
All good natured jabbing aside, read Edward’s book. Another good book is The Science Before the Science. I would recommend Edward’s book first… just because he gets you through the heavy philosophy and metaphysics faster. The root of our society, our understanding of truth and how we can know it, has fallen apart and discussions like this one are perfect evidence of it.
David Heddle:
You are a grade-A nitwit, and for the third time, I note for those non-nitwits that your argument amounts to nothing more than a special pleading that your God doesn’t need an explanation but everything else does.
With respect to your “challenge,” you can find the answer just as easily as I can (and I even suggested a search parameter for you on Google — perhaps you tried it?). In any event: The Universe: The Ultimate Free Lunch in Eur. J. Phys. 11 , p. 236 (1990).
A-Bax:
Wow, where to begin. Maybe at the end where I say, “Secular conservatives can rightly claim that they have not left the party and I join in their refusal to let the party leave them.” I think one’s faith has nothing to do with whether or not one qualifies as conservative. My point in regard to “broadening” the definition of conservatism beyond “revelation” was that the definition is broad enough, the problem is religious conservatives’ push to arbitrarily narrow it down — to the exclusion of anyone who doesn’t share their socially conservative views and objectives. It seems to me that HMacD is essentially letting the religious right shape the the playing field (religious vs. non-religious convictions) and using their definition of conservatism as the baseline. I think that’s a mistake, because the result is generally a religious argument, instead of a political argument.
I’m dismayed to think I failed to make my perspective clear and that the ideas I was advancing somehow got so lost in the shuffle. I’ll head back to the drawing board to revise and abridge and hope to post a more streamlined version next time around, as future topics allow.
Sorry Andrew, merely finding a paper by Stenger does not answer the challenge. I never claimed Stenger didn’t publish any papers. That paper has nothing to do with your claim and in no way, shape, or form can be construed as “debunking the notion that the formation of stars in the universe is ‘a house of cards.'” For crying out loud, the paper is from 1990, before the problem of the fine tuning of the cosmological constant was known–before it the increased acceleration of the universe was known, etc.
Before you make false claims in physics, you might want to check that you are not making them to a physicist.
Oh, if you really believe that this paper by Stenger does what you claim, you should submit a quick note to Phys. Rev. Lett so that that rest of the community can know that the problem is solved! Think of all the grant money you can save–it’s your duty as a taxpayer during these troubled times.
Now–maybe you could Google some more with three criteria 1) A paper by Stenger 2) It is published in a peer-reviewed journal and 3) It supports your claim. Don’t forget (3) this time.
I’ll even give you some help. What you want is a worked-out version of musings and speculations he wrote about here. If he took these ideas, completed (or made substantive progress on) a program of research and then published the results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal—well then you’d have me dead to rights.
Aside: as I have said many times in many places, Stenger’s approach is very reasonable and may work. But he hasn’t demonstrated it yet.
I thought I would chip my 2 cents in, for what its worth.
Are there realities that exist outside of perception and therefore not verifiable by perception? I mean is it possible that stuff exists which is imperceptible.
Take for example a blind person, is his belief in light, the product of empirical verification or faith? Clearly the phenomena of light is real, but there is no way a blind person can empirically prove it.
Now the McDonald League of secular conservatives, would have us believe that beliefs are valid only if they are empirically verifiable. But that line of reasoning makes our blind person irrational for believing in the light. Indeed the logic and reasoning of a blind atheistic conservative would be that light does not exist since I cannot empirically verify it. This is patently absurd.
The traditional conservative view was that realities do exist outside the realm of perception. Empiricism is not enough. Us traditional conservatives would argue that the blind man makes an act of faith in believing that there is light. The object of that faith is congruent with reality.
It is also possible to believe in things which are not real, but that does not take away from the fact that belief in the unverifiable, may be belief in the actual, there is however no way to prove it. I might believe that there are other solar systems in the universe like ours, but I currently have no way of proving it, is my belief in such things ridiculous?
The traditional conservative has more in common with a Hindi, Roman or Zulu than the modern atheistic variant. We may have argued about our gods, but we acknowledged that there was more to the universe that what we sensed. Atheistic conservatives brush aside what we cannot prove, even though it may be true. Our blind atheist does not seek corrective surgery for his vision, because he knows there is no light.
JM Hanes: Perhaps I misunderstood your initial comment. But as far as your second comment goes, it seems to me that HMacD is not so much “letting the religious right shape the playing field”, so much as trying to engage them.
I.e., trying to broaden (from their perspective) the legitimate bases for conservatism. Though I agree with you, and Hume, that the current scientific understanding of human nature is sufficient as a basis for conservatism, the Rod Dresher’s and Pat Buchanan’s of the world – much as I like their writing and agree with (a fair amount) of what they say – see revelation and religious faith as the only *true* basis for a *real*conservatism, it seems.
For HMacD, I think, it is more fruitful (tactically) to attempt to reason your way to an acceptable non-religious basis for conservatism rather than to just take it as given, even though she, and I, and you may consider it a given. Is this a kind of concession? (That we must convince our religious brothers-in-political-arms that our stance is legitimate) Yes, in the sense that we KNOW we are legitimate…but it makes good tactical sense so as to not needlessly alienate the religious right (yet not bow down to them, either.)
Thanks for the back & forth.
T-Bax:
I suspect the confusion was mostly of my own making. It was such a relief to find a conservative site pushing back against the anti-secular right, my post was sort of like a first novel, into which an author pours his entire life experience to date.
I would hate to see this crew fall into the all too familiar battle which pits reason against religion, as in (A/B=X) = senseless, for instance. Atheists have a real weakness for that sort of confrontation, which they repeat with determined regularity — despite overwhelming evidence that the scientific/rational arguments they think they’re “winning” are more polarizing than productive and have almost zero impact on the religious convictions of believers. I’m hoping that my arguments against such arguments will prove more fruitful, assuming I can get this clarity thing worked out. 🙂
Ditto on the back & forth.
Enlightenment emoticons! Who knew?
“You are a grade-A nitwit, and for the third time, I note for those non-nitwits that your argument amounts to nothing more than a special pleading that your God doesn’t need an explanation but everything else does.”
I hear this a lot. It seems to me, though, that explaining something by positing something else that explains it, even if this something else is not itself explained, is how science works. The singularity that resulted in the big bang explains why there is a universe. That’s a positive advancement, even though scientists haven’t made any experimental progress in (though people like Alan Guth have had ideas for) explaining why the singularity (whatever that is, precisely) is the way it is, and why it led to an eruption.
Now, if a theist says “everything natural needs an explanation, but God doesn’t, so God is a good explanation for why there is a universe”, that may strike you as special pleading (though I think even that view can be defended and is probably right), but if the theist says “God explains why the big bang happened, so that’s one thing in favor of the God-hypothesis”, that doesn’t strike me as special pleading.
Incidentally, if you are interested in engaging in philosophically trained theists who are willing to respond to your questions about why anyone could be rational and believe that God exists, try http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/.
David Heddle:
Now who’s moving the goalposts?
I produced a peer-reviewed paper that responds to your circular argument. Now, you demand that I produce a peer-reivewed physics paper — because obviously the 2000 Philo article in <a href=”http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Cosmo/FineTune.pdf”your own link” doesn’t count — responding to a theological argument.
Your argument is nonsense on stilts; it’s a predetermined conclusion that by your own admission would make no difference even if the evidence were exactly the opposite. So, um, why am I doing this again?
—
Robert Gressis:
Well, only if the statement is what Kant would call synthetic; that is, the subject contains information not present in the predicate. Otherwise you’re just naming stuff. Here’s an oversimplified example:
Q: “Why is the grass green?”
A: “Because it has zorbleen.”
Q: What’s a zorbleen?
A: “It’s a special substance that causes things to be green.”
That’s not an explanation; that’s another name for the problem. On the other hand, replace “zorbleen” with “chlorophyll” and explain why chlorophyll has green-causing properties in plants, and you have yourself a real explanation. And that’s the difference.
I submit to you that — in that paragraph at least — “God” is zorbleen and not chlorophyll. Perhaps you can make an argument that has actual content, but so far, all you’ve done is (a) posited that the universe requires a cause, and (b) named that cause “God.” That’s… not helpful, to say the least.
Incidentally, I don’t really have “questions” that I think need answering. I have a conclusion that I’ve drawn from the available evidence. If you (or others) want to convince me that either (a) the evidence is other than it appears to be or (b) I’ve made some error in processing it, I’m happy to oblige. But I don’t claim that all theists are irrational per se, so that’s not something I need solved.
Andrew,
You produced an irrelevant peer-reviewed paper that doesn’t respond to any argument. And specifically, it doesn’t respond to what you claimed.
An no, it wasn’t a theological argument, is was a physics (cosmology) argument. You stated that Stenger destroyed the argument that the formation of stars was a house of cards. Anybody that cares to go back to the original post can plainly see that’s what you asserted. I have asked you from the beginning the same thing, goalposts all nice and stable, will you produce a peer reviewed paper from Stenger that backs up your claim? I don’t care where it is published, it can be in a peer reviewed sewing journal, but it has to back up your claim scientifically. That’s not moving the goal post–maybe you want to try another random logical-fallacy charge to try and extricate yourself?
You can’t produce the paper because no such paper exists. Sadly, you lack the cajones and/or the integrity to say: “Yes I misspoke, overstating what Stenger has done. My bad.” Instead you demonstrate that, when challenged to put up or shut up, you are garden variety obfuscator–a species that is a dime a megadozen on the intertubes.
Andrew T writes: “I submit to you that — in that paragraph at least — “God” is zorbleen and not chlorophyll. Perhaps you can make an argument that has actual content, but so far, all you’ve done is (a) posited that the universe requires a cause, and (b) named that cause “God.” That’s… not helpful, to say the least.”
So let me ask you this: if I say, God created the universe because God is (as Plantinga says) at least a person with desires, beliefs, and causal efficacy, and that God created this universe because he thought it was good to create the universe, is “God” still functioning as “zorbleen”?
Oh, and I should say that the claim that God caused the universe to exist seems to me to be a synthetic statement, unless you think theists are committed to the claim that by definition God had to create a universe (this seems to be what Rowe is arguing in his latest book).