Tag Archives: Dualism

Podcasts

MUST-LISTEN: J.P. Moreland lecture on Christianity and science

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I found the lectures here at Apologetics 315. These are GOOD. He covers a lot and you’ll get a lot of interesting stuff to think about. This is actually a great lecture – the old J.P. Moreland back in fine form. He’s going over a ton of arguments for theism from science. I’ve counted SIX so far, so this is a really good lecture, and perfect for beginners.

    • The full MP3 audio is here.

      He doesn’t talk about habitability at the galactic, stellar, or planetary level, though.

      I am a little busy mailing out everyone’s gifts today! I apologize for the light blogging. Please go and read just a few chapters of that Dalrymple book that I posted yesterday if you need something to read, or check out these round-ups:

      More from Neil Simpson: Another reason it is hard to stay in the Methodist church

      Neil Simpson is a methodist??? How is that even possible?

      Mailing these gifts will only take a few hours, and then I’m on vacation until January 4th!!! I promise I will write a ton then. I’m also working on an application for the Droid platform, but it’s a secret.

      I’m giving away this stuff to people this year:

      • Unlocking the Mystery of Life DVD
      • Icons of Evolution DVD
      • The Privileged Planet DVD
      • Darwin’s Dilemma DVD
      • Signature in the Cell book
      • The William Lane Craig vs Christopher Hitchens debate DVD
      • Money, Greed and God book
      • Greer-Heard Forums from 2005 and 2009
      • and other specific things they asked for

      If you guys are giving away apologetics gifts, please write your ideas in the comments. I did gift exchanges with atheists, so now I have atheist books to read! Bleh! I only want to read atheists in debates, because listening to them blab without rebuttal is very annoying.

      News

      ACLU fascists thwarted while trying to jail Christians for saying prayer

      5 Comments

      Story from CNN. (H/T My friend Ken)

      Excerpt:

      A judge has ruled in favor of two Florida school administrators who faced contempt charges for saying a prayer at a school luncheon, according to a group that helped represent them.

      U.S. District Judge M.C. Rodgers ruled Thursday in favor of Frank Lay, principal of Pace High School in Pace, Florida, and school athletic director Robert Freeman, the Liberty Counsel said.

      Lay and Freeman could have faced up to six months in prison and fines if convicted. They were accused of violating a consent decree banning county school employees from initiating prayers during school events.

      […]But the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawsuit led to the consent decree, has maintained students have a right to be free from administrators who foist their personal religious beliefs on them.

      Fascism is the idea that the state suppresses the inalienable rights of its citizenry by substituting the values and duties of the government (the rulers) for the values and duties of individuals.

      Here’s how it works:

      • Inalienable human rights are granted by the Creator
      • Only the Creator of the universe can grant inalienable human rights to his creatures
      • Freedom of religious expression is self-evidently an inalienable human right
      • Christians exercise their freedom of religious expression
      • Atheists in the ACLU don’t believe in a Creator
      • If there is no Creator, then “rights” are just social conventions that vary by time and place
      • So atheists in the ACLU cannot ground inalienable human rights
      • Without an inalienable right to freedom of religious expression, suppressing the religious liberty others is permissible
      • Atheists in the ACLU can use government to silence, suppress and imprison unwilling Christians
      • Atheists in the ACLU are offended by the free expression of Christianity in public
      • Therefore, atheists in the ACLU find it rational to suppress the human rights of their neighbors using state coercion

      There is no such thing as human rights in an atheistic “survival of the fittest” universe.

      Atheists in the ACLU prefer to use the state to suppress any public religious expression, because the public expression of religion makes them feel badly. The feelings of atheists is sufficient to justify silencing, suppressing, imprisoning and in even killing people who make them feel bad. They are not so much interesting in debating the merits of the cosmological argument – they just want to shut down dissent so they can feel comfortable about their atheism.

      Here is my entire series of posts explaining why moral behavior is irrational on atheism. Their worldview just doesn’t ground objective moral values, objective moral duties, self-sacrifice and the significance of moral decisions. And when the chips are down, they show their fascist colors. Atheists want to dismiss the claims of objective morality so they can pursue pleasure, and they don’t want you using your freedoms to remind them of their own depravity.

      UPDATE: Kreitsauce is from the panhandle and writes this comment below:

      I’m from the Florida panhandle, and we thought this whole thing was ridiculous because:

      1. Lay and Freeman have done an unbelievable amount of good for the school and the community. It’s real Christianity making a difference that has had such a profound impact.

      2. The school already teaches a Bible elective.

      3. The school meeting where the prayer took place was housed in a church.

      4. The prayer was spontaneous, not a willful violation of criminal law.

      5. All protests have been peaceful, even in the face of opposition. The believers have mostly been praying and singing hymns.

      6. Lay and Freeman have strong student, community, and parent support.

      He also links to this youtube video:

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      News

      Is the murder of abortion-performing doctors like George Tiller morally wrong?

      28 Comments

      The Wintery Knight Blog strongly condemns all abortion-related violence, whether it’s committed against the born or the unborn.

      The news story is linked here by Stop the ACLU, Sweetness and Light, Patterico’s Pontifications, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air and Gateway Pundit.

      Can Christians condemn the murder of George Tiller?

      Yes, Christians can, and yes, Christians do, condemn any and all violence against abortion doctors. And so do I. I believe that murder is objectively wrong, whether it is performed against born or unborn victims.

      Morality is rational on Christianity because Christianity grounds the minimal requirements for meaningful morality. (The post also contains arguments and evidence for Christian theism and responses to the arguments against Christian theism)

      The Bible says: “You shall not murder”.

      So, anyone who murders the born or the unborn is not a Christian and is not being moral. I am a Christian, and therefore I strongly condemn any violence against doctors who perform abortions, including George Tiller. The murderer of George Tiller was wrong, had no justification for what he did, and he should get the death penalty.

      UPDATE: My pro-life friend Neil from 4Simpsons reacts:

      I subscribe to over 100 blogs.  Well over a dozen have commented on this.  I’ve yet to see one that didn’t condemn the murder, though I’m sure the MSM will ignore the clear and consistent principles of the pro-live movement and try to demonize and broad-brush us with this.

      Now let’s see whether murder is wrong on the atheist worldview…

      Can atheists condemn the murder of George Tiller?

      The goal is to see whether humans ought to adopt the moral point of view, on atheism. Does atheism ground the the minimal requirements for morality? Is it rational to do the right thing on atheism?

      Requirement 1) Objective moral values: NOT GROUNDED

      On atheism, moral values have no mind-independent existence. In other words, they are purely subjective. Either you invent your own personal standard or you adopt the standards of the majority of your herd, in the time and place in which you live. Those herd standards change over time and in different places, of course. They are arbitrary conventions. And there is no reason why your preferences are better than anyone else’s preferences, even a murderer’s. On atheism, a murderer and a non-murderer just have different preferences.

      Requirement 2) Objective moral duties: NOT GROUNDED

      On atheism, there is no such thing as objective moral values, and so there can be no objective moral duties either. Atheism is committed to materialism, and objective moral values and moral duties are non-material. Atheists can only ground subjective moral values and moral duties. But a duty owed to oneself can be canceled when things get difficult. Even a social contract is arbitrary. There is no reason to limit your happiness because of an arbitrary social contract, so long as you can escape the social consequences of disobedience.

      Requirement 3) Moral accountability: NOT GROUNDED

      On atheism, there is no accountability after death for the decisions we make in life. So long as we can avoid the consequences for violating the arbitrary fashions of the time and place where we live, nothing will happen to us if we put our happiness above the needs of our feelings of “empathy” for others.

      Requirement 4) Free will: NOT GROUNDED

      On atheism, there are no minds or souls independent of the material that makes up the body. Therefore, everything that humans do is fully determined by the genetic programming and the sensory inputs. To expect moral choices or moral responsibility on atheism is like expecting the same from a computer. Physical systems don’t have free will. There is no “ought to do” for lumps of matter that are not designed by anyone for any specific purpose.

      Requirement 5) Ultimate significance: NOT GROUNDED

      On atheism, life ends in the grave for them. Scientists have discovered that in the future, the amount of usable energy, such as the heat and light emitted by stars, will run down to zero, the “heat death of the universe”. What this means is that the entire universe will become cold and lifeless at some point. Humans are therefore doomed to extinction. It doesn’t matter ultimately how an atheist acts – they end up the same no matter what they do. The only action that is rational on atheism is the selfish pursuit of pleasure and happiness.

      Can atheist scholars ground morality rationally?

      Let me cite the views of atheist scholars from a previous post. These are the people who are the most committed, authentic atheists, and who have thought through what it means to be an atheist at the highest level.

      The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)

      In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Source: Richard Dawkins)

      The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

      The late atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie said that moral properties are “queer” given naturalism “if there are objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have a defensible argument from morality to the existence of a god.”

      Conclusion

      In my survey of atheist views, none of the ten respondents could oppose slavery on rational grounds, none of the ten respondents could perform self-sacrificial acts on rational grounds, and none of the ten respondents could explain why murder was wrong, on rational grounds. They may have chosen the right alternative, but only based on emotion, not on reason. Morality is not rational on atheism and there is no way to condemn immorality in others.

      So long as an person can escape the consequences of his actions, there is nothing wrong with murder, on an atheistic worldview. Atheists can express what they personally like and don’t like, or what the customs are in their society in a certain time and place. There is no “moral ought” on atheism, no principled reason to act any particular way except to be “happy” and to avoid social disapproval from acting unconventionally. So, keep that in mind in the coming days as you discuss the George Tiller story with atheists.

      Further study

      You can get the full story on the requirements for rational morality in a published, peer-reviewed paper written by William Lane Craig here. You can also hear and see him present the paper to an audience of students and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. The audio is clipped at 67 minutes, the video is the full 84 minutes. There is 45 minutes of Q&A, with many atheist challengers.

      The video of this lecture is the best material you can get on this issue, and the Q&A from the hostile audience is vital to the lesson. More debates on atheism and morality can be found on the debate and lecture page.

      You can find a post contrasting the morality of an authentic, consistent Christian with an authentic, consistent non-Christian here. A post examining how atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million innocent people in the 20th century alone is here. A post analyzing the tiny number of deaths that religion was responsible for is here. A post examining other ways that the secular-left kills millions of people is here.

      The Wintery Knight Blog strongly condemns all abortion-related violence, whether it’s committed against the born or the unborn.