Tag Archives: Belief

Polemics

What Christians can learn from atheists about making truth claims

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I found this post from Simple Apologetics through Brian Auten’s Apologetics 315 Twitter feed, which discusses what Christians can learn from atheism with respect to bearing the burden of proof for Christian truth claims.

Excerpt:

For instance, many atheists also call themselves “free thinkers”, a title suggesting that they are not beholden to any one perspective, but always open to following wherever reason and evidence may lead. As the current description of “Freethought” on Wikipedia reads:

Freethought holds that individuals should not accept ideas proposed as truth without recourse to knowledge and reason. Thus, freethinkers strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any logical fallacies or intellectually limiting effects of authority, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmas. Regarding religion, freethinkers hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena.

Of course Christians will disagree about the basic tenets of freethought in regards to religion, but the first section of this description is one that nearly everyone should be able to gladly affirm. (We might want to broaden what counts as a legitimate basis for our opinions to include testimony from others, memories, and other ‘properly basic’ beliefs, but I digress).

In this regard, atheists (and others) who denounce a fideistic approach to religion are doing religious people a great service. Whenever the claims of faith are said to be outside of rational investigation, it creates a great challenge for everyone else. To take a small scale example, I once knew a student who would occasionally cancel Bible studies because “God told me that we should not meet today.” The truth of the matter was more likely that she was behind in her homework! Her ‘prophetic’ explanation was frustrating and a conversation stopper, but it also came across as fairly disingenuous, and it eroded the trust in our relationship.

A similar, but more significant, problem exists when Christians say “you just have to take it on faith” or “you just need to believe” or “pray about it and it’ll become clear to you” when confronted with difficult challenges to their beliefs. These words initially sound good, and pious, and noble, but upon reflection (or hearing them one too many times), they start to sound like an intellectually lazy way of avoiding the problems. When atheists (or others) criticize Christians for this, they are calling us to a higher level of reason, thoughtfulness, and conversational engagement with other viewpoints.

This process—of going from conviction, to being challenged, to doubt about our own ideas, to investigation, to fresh conviction—should be celebrated. It is okay to not have answers and it is okay to change our minds as we continue to learn and grow. Going through the emotionally wrenching experience of uncertainty is necessary if we are to process the complexity of contemporary challenges to religious belief (or, alternatively, the current arguments against atheism).

Many people know that I don’t get along well with fideistic Christians and that I can barely keep myself from running out of the church because there is often very little thinking and arguing going on in there. Everywhere I look I see postmodernism, religious pluralism, socialism, and moral relativism. Feelings have replaced thinking, and everyone afraid to offend other people by expressing and defending an idea as correct. Part of that is because no one knows why they believe anything, anymore, and they are too busy having fun to study anything to see if they are right.

But, as I wrote before, the Bible’s definition of faith is “trust based on evidence”. In that post, I give three lines of argument that faith is NOT  something you either prefer to believe or not, apart from evidence and arguments. The  Old Testament and New Testament agree that people need to rest their trust in God based on arguments and evidence, “that they may know for certain”. That phrase is quoted in both the Old and New Testaments. Know For Certain.

That’s actually why Jesus performed miracles. He made assertions about the spiritual world, and then he gave evidence of his authority to make those pronouncements by healing the sick, etc. and even by rising from the dead. The question for us today is – since we can’t perform miracles, are there any alternatives left to us that can take the place of miracles? And the answer is yes. We can use philosophical arguments, and hard evidence from science and history.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

Responses to arguments against Christian theism

Rebuttals and refutations of arguments against Christian theism are listed here, e.g. – the problems of evil and suffering, the problem of the unevangelized, the problem of religious pluralism, the problem of divine sovereignty vs. human freedom. You can also find some positive historical arguments for Christianity in particular on that page. Formal academic debates featuring prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens and James Crossley abound on Youtube. There is no excuse for not being prepared to explain and defend.

News

Is the taxpayer-funded scientific bureaucracy self-correcting?

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Consider this post from Evolution News which talks about a paper in the prestigious pro-naturalism journal Science that is drawing a lot of criticisms. (H/T Melissa, Jonathan)

Excerpt:

Last December we reported on a controversial paper published in Science which claimed to have discovered bacteria that feed on arsenic instead of phosphorous. According to NASA, this research promised to provide “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” At that time the media reported things like:

  • scientists discovered “a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today” (Wired)
  • the “bacteria is made of arsenic” (Wired)
  • the bacteria is “capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes” (Gizmodo)
  • the paper had reported “arsenic-based life” which is “very alien in terms of how it’s put together” and “NASA has, in a very real sense, discovered a form of alien life” (io9)
  • “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life” (Nature)

But soon after the original Science paper was published, credible scientists began critiquing the paper’s claims. In the June 3, 2011 issue of Science, several of those scientists have published comments critiquing the original paper. Many of their criticisms focus on the claim that the original paper did not establish or rule out the possibility that the bacteria are not still living off of phosphorous.

So you have a paper being published that everyone is excited about because it helps the naturalists to close gaps in their worldview. But was it good science? The Evolution News piece goes on to list the criticisms of the paper.

And here is the result:

Of course the authors of the original paper, including lead-author Felisa Wolf-Simon, co-authored a reply to the criticisms which should also be read. But critics remain unconvinced. Nature news recently quoted Barry Rosen of Florida International University stating, “I have not found anybody outside of [Wolfe-Simon’s] laboratory who supports the work.” Likewise, Rosie Redfield observes:

“With so many mistakes pointed out, there should be at least some where the authors say, ‘you’re right, we should have done that but we didn’t’,” Redfield says. “This as an entirely a ‘we were right’ response, and that’s a bad sign in science.”

Despite the high levels of skepticism of claims of arsenophilic bacteria, Nature reports that few scientists have taken the initiative to attempt to experimentally reproduce the claims made in the original paper:

However, most labs seem too busy to spend time replicating work that they feel is fundamentally flawed and is not likely to be published in high-impact journals. So principal investigators are reluctant to spend their resources, and their students’ time, replicating the work. “If you extended the results to show there is no detectable arsenic, where could you publish that?” asks Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who critiqued the work in FEMS Microbiology Letters in January and on 24 May at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans. “How could the young person who was asked to do that work ever get a job?” Refuting another scientist’s work also takes time that scientists could be spending on their own research. For instance, Helmann says he is installing a highly sensitive mass spectrometer that can measure trace amounts of elements. But, he says, “I’ve got my own science to do.”

Such admissions do not bode well for those who blindly believe in the perfectly objective, self-correcting nature of science. In this case, it seems safe to experimentally critique these claims since so many respected scientists have already expressed vocal skepticism. Yet experiments are apparently not yet forthcoming. What about areas of science where scientists are not able to express their dissent freely? For example, who would take time to experimentally critique claims that are central to neo-Darwinian theory, especially if it’s dangerous to one’s career? One hopes that science will become more self-correcting when it comes to claims made in support of materialism.

In light of what we now know about global warming research, shouldn’t we be a little more welcoming of whistleblowers and critics? Shouldn’t we be a little more careful about hastily approving research that agrees with the religion of naturalism, instead of checking it over thoroughly to make sure that it really is good science?

Videos

Seven videos from the Biola University conference on God and evolution

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I have been weaseling out of my apologetics posting this week, and this is my last chance to get something good up so I can make it onto Brian Auten’s weekly apologetics bonus links at Apologetics 315, the best Christian apologetics site ever.

So I am posting SEVEN video clips from a recent Biola University conference on theistic evolution. (H/T Mysterious Jonathan)

Conference details:

Can you believe in God and Darwinian evolution at the same time? Scientists and scholars have an answer that may surprise the audience as they explore this and related questions at the God & Evolution conference on Saturday, October 16, 2010 at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

The conference will focus on the conflict between neo-Darwinism and traditional theological views of Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

What is “theistic” evolution, and how consistent is it with traditional theism?

What challenges does Darwin’s theory pose for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews?

Is it “anti-science” to question Darwinian Theory?

These questions and more will be addressed at the one-day conference by Marvin Olasky, editor of World magazine, biologist Jonathan Wells, political scientist John West, philosopher Jay Richards, attorney and science writer Casey Luskin and authors David Klinghoffer and Denyse O’Leary.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, Christians, Jews, and other religious believers have grappled with how to make sense of it. Most have understood that Darwin’s theory has profound theological implications, but responses have varied dramatically.

Some believers have rejected it outright; others, including “theistic evolutionists” such as Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, have sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with their religious beliefs, often at the cost of clarity, orthodoxy, or both. As a result, the whole subject of God and evolution is a source of confusion for many believers.

Join us for this one-day seminar, featuring contributors to the new book, God and Evolution, exploring these issues and offering a wide-ranging critique of those who seek to reconcile materialistic theories such as Darwinism with belief in God.

Here is the playlist for all SEVEN video clips.

Clip 1 of 7: Jay W. Richards: The Central Issues (34 minutes)

Clip 2 of 7: John G. West: Three Big Questions (22 minutes)

Clip 3 of 7: Casey Luskin: Why the New Atheists Won’t Be Appeased (21 minutes)

Clip 4 of 7: Denyse O’Leary: Catholics & Evolution (29 minutes)

Clip 5 of 7: David Klinghoffer: Judaism & Evolution (17 minutes)

Clip 6 of 7: Jonathan Wells: Science and Theistic Evolution (26 minutes)

Clip 7 of 7: Panel Discussion with Marvin Olasky (99 minutes)

So it looks like there are 2 Catholics (Richards, O’Leary), 2 Jews (Luskin, Klinghoffer), 2 Protestants (West, Olasky) and 1 “Other” (Wells) in that list. It’s a diverse group.