Tag Archives: Faith

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?

News

Peer-reviewed journal apologizes for censoring pro-ID article

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From Evolution News. (Excerpt below, with links removed)

Excerpt:

In one of their favorite soundbytes, members of the Darwin lobby like to assert that intelligent design scientists do not publish peer-reviewed research. That claim is manifestly false. But the fact that intelligent design scholars do publish peer-reviewed articles is no thanks to Darwinists, many of whom do their best to ensure that peer-reviewed articles by intelligent design scientists never see the light of day.

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.

The publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters (Elsevier, the international science publisher) has now agreed to issue a public statement apologizing to Dr. Sewell as well as to pay $10,000 in attorney’s fees.

“It’s hard to imagine a more blatant assault on intellectual freedom and the free exchange of ideas,” says attorney Pete Lepiscopo with the California firm of Lepiscopo and Morrow, which represented Sewell.

Lepiscopo points out that in retracting Sewell’s article, Applied Mathematics Letters “effectively accepted the unsubstantiated word and unsupported opinion of an inconsequential blogger, with little or unknown academic background beyond a self-professed public acknowledgment that he was a ‘computer science grad’ and whose only known writings are self-posted blogs about movies, comics, and fantasy computer games.” This blogger’s unsupported opinion “trumped the views of an author who is a well respected mathematician with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University; a fully-tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas–El Paso; an author of three books on numerical analysis and 40 articles published in respected journals; and a highly sought-after and frequent lecturer world-wide on mathematics and science.”

After Dr. Sewell’s article was pulled, Darwinian zealots crowed about their achievement and maliciously speculated that the article was withdrawn because it wasn’t really peer-reviewed or because it was somehow substandard. The journal, meanwhile, left Dr. Sewell to twist in the wind, seemingly endorsing the Darwinists’ smears. The journal editor Dr. Rodin wrote a groveling letter to the Darwinist blogger who complained to him in which he agreed that publishing Sewell’s article would involve “impropriety.” Rodin further apologized “for our erroneous judgement in even considering this paper for publication.”

Dr. Rodin and his journal now have to issue a public statement providing “their sincere and heartfelt apologies to Dr. Sewell… and welcom[ing] Dr. Sewell’s submission of future articles for possible publication.” More important than the apology, the journal has to set the record straight by reiterating that “Dr. Sewell’s article was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication” and by making clear that his article was not withdrawn because of “any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors.”

Wow. I actually clicked on some of the links in the post at Evolution News and was carried off to the lands of naturalistic blogging. It’s amazing how confident they are in their little echo chambers, but I cannot fathom why this should be since they are unwilling to debate their views in public. To me, you can only know something if you are willing to hear the criticisms against it. If you censor all your opponents and hang around in little online chat rooms gloating to your choir about how smart you are and how right you are, why think that you really know anything about what you are talking about?

The only way to be sure about any issue is to listen to both sides in a debate, and let your opponents have a hearing. I would not feel confident in asserting anything if I only heard the arguments on one side of the question. Not only do the Darwinbots seem to be confident in asserting their views without hearing their opponents, they are actually arrogant and insulting about it. But before you can be trumpet your victory in a disagreement, doesn’t there have to be an actual debate first? Canceling the debate by censorship doesn’t mean that you won the debate.  It means you’re scared of debate.

Here’s what you do. Slap a defamation lawsuit on the blogger who complained for a million dollars and let them have their day in court to explain why they said what they said. Then we’ll find out which side has the blind faith and which side has the knowledge.