British Spitfire and German Messerschmitt Bf 109 locked in a dogfight
Here is audio of a very interesting exchange between William Lane Craig and leading atheist Daniel Dennett.
This audio records a part of the Greer-Heard debate in 2007, between prominent atheist Daniel Dennett and lame theistic evolutionist Alister McGrath. Craig was one of the respondents, and this was the best part of the event. It is a little bit advanced, but I have found that if you listen to things like this over and over with your friends and family, and then try to explain it to non-Christians, you’ll get it.
By the way, this is mostly original material from Craig, dated 2007, and he delivers the speech perfectly, so it’s entertaining to listen to.
Craig presents three arguments for a Creator and Designer of the universe:
the contingency argument
the kalam cosmological argument
the teleological argument
He also discusses Dennett’s published responses to these arguments, and that’s what I want to focus on, since most of you are already familiar with Craig’s philosophical arguments for the existence of God.
Dennett’s response to Craig’s paper
Here is my snarky paraphrase of Dennett’s reponse: (this is very snarky, because Dennett was just awful)
Craig’s three arguments are bulletproof, the premises are plausible, and grounded by the best cutting edge science we know today.
I cannot find anything wrong with his arguments right now, but maybe later when I go home it will come to me what’s wrong with them.
But atheism is true even if all the evidence is against it today. I know it’s true by my blind faith.
The world is so mysterious, and all the science of today will be overturned tomorrow so that atheism will be rational again. I have blind faith that this new evidence will be discovered any minute.
Just because the cause of the beginning of time is eternal and the cause of the beginning of space is non-physical, the cause doesn’t have to be God.
“Maybe the cause of the universe is the idea of an apple, or the square root of 7”. (HE LITERALLY SAID THAT!)
The principle of triangulation might have brought the entire physical universe into being out of nothing.
I don’t understand anything about non-physical causation, even though I cannot even speak meaningful sentences unless I have a non-physical mind that is causing my body to emit the meaningful sentences in a non-determined manner.
Alexander Vilenkin is much smarter than Craig and if he were here he would beat him up good with phantom arguments.
Alan Guth is much smarter than Craig and if he were here he would beat him up good with phantom arguments.
This science stuff is so complicated to me – so Craig can’t be right about it even though he’s published about it and debated it all with the best atheists on the planet.
If God is outside of time, then this is just deism, not theism. (This part is correct, but Craig believes that God enters into time at the moment of creation – so that it is not a deistic God)
If deism is true, then I can still be an atheist, because a Creator and Designer of the universe is compatible with atheism.
I’m pretty sure that Craig doesn’t have any good arguments that can argue for Christianity – certainly not an historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus based on minimal facts, that he’s defended against the most prominent historians on the planet in public debates and in prestigous books and research journals.
This is a very careful treatment of the arguments that Dr. Craig goes over briefly during his debates. Recommended.
Wow, this is like my worst nightmare of what a liberal co-worker could do to me, if I ever expressed my views directly.
Canada’s national newspaper, the National Post, reports:
A teacher at a posh private school in British Columbia was fired last month after making an innocuous comment about abortion to his Grade 12 law class.
[…]The 44-year-old teacher, who has asked that he not be identified to protect what’s left of his career, was teaching “the criminal law unit, a lesson on vice, ethics, morality and the law” to his small class in the Vancouver-area school in late November.“I was working my way through examples of how some people’s sense of personal ethics was more liberal than the letter of the law,” he said in an email.
For example, he told them, many people might roll through a stop sign on a deserted country road, deeming it morally acceptable, even if unlawful.
In other words, he said, in a pluralistic democracy, there’s often “a difference between people’s private morality and the law.
“I find abortion to be wrong,” he said, as another illustration of this gap, “but the law is often different from our personal opinions.”
That was it, the teacher said. “It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.”
A little later, the class had a five-minute break, and when it resumed, several students didn’t return, among them a popular young woman who had gone to an administrator to complain that what the teacher said had “triggered” her such that she felt “unsafe” and that, in any case, he had no right to an opinion on the subject of abortion because he was a man.
[…]What happened to the teacher over the ensuing few days sounds like something out of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where people were subjected to what were known as ideological struggle sessions, forced to “confess” to various imagined sins before large crowds, and roundly denounced.
Immediately after the student complained to the administrator, the teenager came, with a teacher at her side as support, to confront him in a public area of the school.
She pressed for an apology, but the teacher resisted, because, he said, it would set a dangerous precedent for a teacher to be reamed out in the presence of a colleague.
“When I didn’t show contrition,” he said, “I was summoned upstairs and grilled by two administrators who told me my job was on the line.”
Now panicking — he has a family to support and had just recently returned to teaching after several years in business with a relative — he apologized profusely and promised to apologize the next day to the offended student.
Instead, the school had an administrator take over the class for a day, whereupon, he was told, they would all discuss what went wrong in his absence. He would be invited back to “hear the grievances and offer an apology. It was clear I must do this successfully or I would be terminated.”
He repeatedly asked what he’d done wrong or if there was an allegation of misconduct.
“The answer I got back was that I was recognized as an outstanding teacher, but student ‘safety’ was the school’s primary concern.”
With the discussion now scheduled for the following day, the teacher, near to melting down with apprehension and disbelief, went to a walk-in clinic and asked for tranquillizers.
The discussion was postponed another day, and after “white-knuckling” it through his other classes, it came time for the law class.
It was exactly the horror show he’d imagined: His boss sat among a crowd of students, ran through a list of what had gone wrong and “what I needed to do to change.” While most students appeared to be on his side, the offended girl was still furious.
He apologized specifically to her, but then made what was apparently a fatal error: He said he liked her, that she was a bright and engaging student, and said he’d told her father just that at a recent parent-teacher night.
She stormed out of the class in tears, and he was again castigated by his superiors, this time for having been “too personal” in his apologia.
On Nov. 30, he showed up at the school, was retrieved by an administrator and taken to the “head” of school, the private school equivalent of a principal.
He was told he “could no longer continue in the classroom,” and was offered a short-term medical disability top-up for employment insurance.
He was then escorted down the hall and off the premises.
In a more recent news article in the National Post, the school is named:
Fraser Academy, the expensive Vancouver private school where last month a teacher was fired after making allegedly “triggering” remarks to a Grade 12 law class, has put its staff under a gag order.
I guess I have to react to this personally. I have seen things like this happen before, not just in the education system, nor even in the public sector, but in the private sector. It has caused me to have a very firm and convinced prejudice against people on the secular left, namely, that they are so intolerant and bigoted that they literally cannot be approached openly. It’s a short step from getting someone fired for disagreeing with you (i.e. – destroying their career and starving their family) to further acts of depravity, like false accusations, fake hate crimes, death threats, vandalism, violence and even domestic terrorism. And the secular left is doing a lot of that lately. You have to be a special kind of narcissistic sociopath to get someone fired just for disagreeing with you – and that’s what the liberal education system is turning out in droves.
Where do these kinds of students come from? Well, it turns out that the education system is chock full of teachers and administrators who are intent on undermining judgments against immorality.
Ben Levin, the man who “appeared to have it all,” was today sentenced to three years in prison for three child pornography offences.
[…]The once-tenured professor at Ontario’s Institute for Studies in Education had a “hidden, dark side” in a “depraved on-line world” as a “deviant mentor” who made “insidious attempts to normalize the sexual exploitation of children,” McArthur noted in her 23-page reasons for sentence.
[…]A member of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team, Levin was deputy minister of education in 2009 when he and then-minister of education Wynne developed the “equity and inclusive education strategy,” part of which was the 2010 radical sex-ed curriculum shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty after parental backlash. The 2015 sex-ed curriculum is virtually the same as the 2010 version.
[…]Levin himself claimed in a 2010 interview: “I was the deputy minister of education. In that role, I was the chief civil servant. I was responsible for the operation of the Ministry of Education and everything that they do; I was brought in to implement the new education policy.”
[…]Levin pled guilty on March 3, 2015, to three of an original seven child pornography related charges.
Many people go into the education system to normalize immoral behavior, and naturally they teach students to feel offended at any sort of judging of their immorality. The promotion of non-judgmentalism flows from people who do immoral things and who don’t want to feel bad about it. Many people who become teachers and administrators do so with the goal of causing students to become offended by those who make moral judgments. 50 years ago, you could expect teachers and administrators to side with the teacher who expressed the pro-life views. But today, many teachers and administrators would side with the offended student. I suspect that they share her hatred of disagreement and disapproval because they are hiding something in their own private lives, and they just hate anyone who makes moral judgments.
I really hope that this story of the pro-life student and the fired teacher will help you to learn to predict the rage you will be subject to should you ever disagree with secular leftists in the slightest way. For your own safety, you need to assume that teachers and administrators are immoral psychopaths, even if not all of them are. And this is especially true of public schools. Never state your views where secular leftists can overhear. And understand that this is going to keep going – the next generation is going to be even less sane and less moral, not to mention less employable. It is going to keep going until government money that subsidizes (and normalizes) reckless immoral liberal lifestyles runs out.
Here is an article by Steven Cowan about the problems of evil and suffering.
Intro:
The problem of evil is no doubt the most serious challenge to belief in God. Even religious believers find it troubling that evil exists in the world—and so much evil! It is puzzling, to say the least, that an all-powerful, absolutely good being would allow evil to exist in his creation. And yet it does. Evil and suffering exist and they are often overwhelming in their magnitude.
Now let’s find out what a noseeum is, and how it relates to the existence of evil and suffering:
However, perhaps God’s existence is incompatible with a certain kind of evil that exists. For example, the atheist William Rowe has argued that God’s existence is inconsistent with pointless or gratuitous evil. By “pointless evil,” Rowe means evil that does not and cannot serve a greater good. And Rowe believes that there is such pointless evil in the world. He thus concludes that God does not exist. Rowe’s argument may be simply stated as follows:
If God exists, there would be no pointless evil.
There is pointless evil.
Therefore, God does not exist.
[…]But, is there pointless evil in the world? Rowe thinks there is. To show that there is pointless evil, Rowe introduces what he calls the “noseeum inference.” Like the pesty little bugs that some readers may be familiar with, a “noseeum” is something that you cannot see—it is a “no-see-um.” And a noseeum inference is a conclusion drawn on the basis of what one does not see. The basic structure of all noseeum inferences looks like this:
I cannot see an x.
Therefore, there probably is no x.
We all make noseeum inferences everyday of our lives. Every time I go to cross a street, I look both ways and I step out into the street only after I “no-see-um” a car coming.
[…]Rowe applies this kind of noseeum reasoning to God and evil. Rowe suggests that if we cannot see a reason for a particular instance of evil, then there is probably not a reason. Suppose we hear about a very young child who is tortured to death to amuse some psychotic person. We think about this event and we examine all the circumstances surrounding it. No matter how hard we try, we cannot see any good reason why this child had to suffer the way she did. Since we cannot see a reason why God would allow this child to suffer, there probably is not a good reason—the child’s suffering was pointless. Of course, Rowe would be quick to point out that he is not speaking merely hypothetically. There are cases like this in the news every day—real-life cases in which we shake our heads in frustration, wondering why God would allow such a thing.
Is Rowe correct in his conclusion? Do such examples prove that there is pointless evil in the world? I don’t think so. To see why, we must recognize that noseeum inferences are not all created equal. Some noseeum inferences, as we have seen, are reasonable and appropriate. But, many are not. Suppose I look up at the night sky at the star Deneb and I do not see a planet orbiting that star. Would it be reasonable for me to conclude that there is no planet orbiting Deneb? Of course not. Suppose that using the best telescopes and other imaging equipment presently available, I still cannot see a planet around Deneb. I would still be unjustified in concluding that there was no such planet.
In that example, the planet is the noseeum. Just because you look really hard, you can’t be confident that the planet is not there. And similarly with the problem of evil and suffering, looking really hard and finding no reason does not mean that there is no reason. It just means that you are not in a good position to see the reason. You don’t know enough to to be sure that there is no reason, because of your limitations as a human being.
To know that any given instance of evil or suffering is gratuitous/pointless requires a high level of knowledge. How much knowledge? Well, consider this paper by the late William Alston of Syracuse University, who lists six problems with the idea that humans can know that any particular instance of evil and suffering is gratuitous. (You can get the PDF here)
According to the paper, human beings just do not have the capability to know for certain that God has NO morally sufficient reason for allowing any particular instance of evil and/or suffering. God’s morally sufficient reason is a noseeum. To know for sure that there is no reason, we would need to have more knowledge than we do.
Also, remember that on the Christian view, the good aim that God has is NOT to make humans have happy feelings in this life, regardless of their knowledge, wisdom and character. That’s what atheists think, though. They think that God, if he exists, is obligated to make them feel happy all the time. They don’t think that God’s goal is being actively involved in forming their knowledge, wisdom and character. God has a purpose – to work in the world so that everyone who can freely respond to him will respond to him. The Bible says that allowing pain and suffering is one of the ways that he gets that group of people who are willing to respond to respond to him – FREELY. To be able to claim that evil is gratuitous, the atheist has to show that God can achieve his goal of saving all the people he wants to save while permitting less suffering in the world. And that is a very difficult thing for an atheist to show, given our human cognitive limitations.
The best place to learn more about no-see-ums is in this excellent lecture by Biola University professor Doug Geivett.
