I want to raise another question that interests me. Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place?
[…]The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?
In one of the most disgusting stories to hit the British newspapers last year, the wife of a well-known television personality, Chris Tarrant, hired a private detective to spy on him. The detective reported evidence of adultery and Tarrant’s wife divorced him, in unusually vicious style. But what shocked me was the way public opinion sided with Tarrant’s horrible wife. Far from despising, as I do, anybody who would stoop so low as to hire a detective for such a purpose, large numbers of people, including even Mr. Tarrant himself, seemed to think she was fully justified. Far from concluding, as I would, that he was well rid of her, he was covered with contrition and his unfortunate mistress was ejected, covered with odium. The explanation of all these anomalous behavior patterns is the ingrained assumption of the deep rightness and appropriateness of sexual jealousy. It is manifest all the way from Othello to the French “crime passionnel” law, down to the “love rat” language of tabloid newspapers.
[…]Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?
I, for one, feel drawn to the idea that there is something noble and virtuous in rising above nature in this way.
[…]And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom,
In 1984, Dawkins divorced his wife of 17 years, Marian Stamp; later that same year, he married Eve Barham. Dawkins also divorced Barham, though the precise circumstances of this divorce are unclear. He married science fiction actress Lalla Ward in 1992; at present, the two are still married.
I have been advised that the full article featuring Dawkins’ views is far, far worse that what was excerpted by UD.
What does atheist morality amount to, in practice? It amounts to the strong acting selfishly and allowing the weak to suffer for it. That’s why atheists are almost entirely for abortion and sexual permissiveness – the children are the first to be screwed by the moral relativism of the adults. That’s where abortion, no-fault divorce, fatherlessness, etc. come from – they are crimes committed by selfish adults against vulnerable children – because they can. It’s the strong abusing the weak, exactly as Darwinism would have them do. There are no human rights on atheism, and there is no reason for self-sacrificial moral behavior, either. Do what you want, and don’t get caught. Get them, before they can get you. Don’t let anyone diminish your happiness with their moral rules. That’s “atheist morality”.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve caught a glimpse of Dawkins’ atheist perspective on morality, either.
But the centrepiece of this Christmas edition is the main coup for the New Statesman – an interview by Prof. Dawkins with Christopher Hitchens, the great polymath who today lost his fight against cancer. It’s a fascinating read over three double-page spreads. Not least because Prof. Dawkins reveals a charming humility, allowing Hitchens to show his intellectual superiority at his own expense. Hitchens is thoughtful about CS Lewis and Christianity and rather leaves Prof. Dawkins floundering in his wake, occasionally interjecting little assents to show that he’s still there, as he struggles to keep up.
But one of these interjections is most revealing. About half-way through, the Prof gets this in edgeways: ‘Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?’
So, ‘if we win…and destroy Christianity’. True, there’s a ‘so to speak’ in there, but it doesn’t do much. Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it? And Prof Dawkins can hardly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context. He was editing the magazine, after all – there’s even a picture of him doing so, pen poised masterfully over page proofs.
Now you might think that Dawkins intends to destroy Christianity in debates, and not in the wars and purges of atheism that occurred last century in North Korea, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, and so on. Those atheist regimes caused the deaths of 100 million people, according to Harvard University Press. But Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig on more than one occasion. So whatever he means by “destroy Christianity”, he doesn’t mean “defeat them in rational debate, using superior arguments and evidence”. He had his chance to do that, and he passed on it. So, he must mean something else by “destroying Christianity” other than persuasion.
Let’s find out what Richard Dawkins thinks about morality. Dawkins has previously written this:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, 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, nor 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, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)
Dawkins’ view is that nothing is really good or bad objectively. Cultures just evolve certain conventions, and those conventions vary arbitrarily by time and place. I think we need to interpret his goal of destroying Christianity against the backdrop of his nihilism. 50 million unborn children have been killed in the United States since 1973 alone. That’s 50 million people with distinct genetic codes different from their mothers or their fathers, who will never grow up to achieve their potential.
Dawkins himself is in favor of infanticide:
So what might destroying Christianity look like to an atheist?
A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday.
The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North.
The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri’s government-issued photo ID and said her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.
That’s what Kim Jong Il means by “destroy Christianity”. What does Dawkins mean by it?
One of the most difficult questions for Christians to answer, especially when posed by adherents of other religions, is the question of what happens to those who have never heard of Jesus? In this post, I will explain how progress in the field of philosophy of religion has given us a possible (and Biblical) solution to this thorny question.
First, Christianity teaches that humans are in a natural state of rebellion against God. We don’t want to know about him, and we don’t want him to have any say in what we are doing. We just want to appropriate all the gifts he’s given us, do whatever we want with them, and then have eternal bliss after we die. We want to do whatever we want and then be forgiven, later.
Along comes Jesus, who, through his sinless life and his death on the cross, heals that rift of rebellion between an all-good God and rebellious man. Now we have a real understanding of the fact that God is real, that he has power over death, and that he has very specific ideas on what we should be doing. If we accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice and follow his teachings, we can avoid the penalty of our rebellion.
The only problem is that in order to appropriate that free gift of reconciliation, people need to actually know about Jesus. And there are some people in the world who have not even heard of him. Is it fair that these other people will be sent to eternal separation from God, just because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Enter William Lane Craig to save the day. His solution is that God orders the world in such a way that anyone who would freely choose to acknowledge Jesus and appropriate his teachings in their decision-making will be given eternal life. God knows in advance who would respond, and chooses their time and place of birth, and he supplies them with the amount of evidence they need.
And this agrees with what the Bible teaches. The apostle Paul says this in his apologetic on Mars Hill in Acts 17:22-31:
22 So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
23 “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘ N D ‘ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things;
26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;
28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’
29 “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
30 “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
In this research paper, Craig explains in detail how God foreknows how people will choose in every set of circumstances, and how God uses that knowledge to get everyone where they need to be without violating their free will. God wants the best for everybody, and has ordered to whole universe in order to give each of us our best opportunity for eternal life.
Here is a summary of the what is in his paper:
The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus. This orthodox doctrine is widely rejected today because God’s condemnation of persons in other world religions seems incompatible with various attributes of God.
Analysis reveals the real problem to involve certain counterfactuals of freedom, e.g., why did not God create a world in which all people would freely believe in Christ and be saved? Such questions presuppose that God possesses middle knowledge. But it can be shown that no inconsistency exists between God’s having middle knowledge and certain persons’ being damned; on the contrary, it can be positively shown that these two notions are compatible.
Go read this paper and equip yourself to answer this common question!
Which debate would I consider to be the best to show an intelligent skeptic?
This one, between William Lane Craig and Peter Millican.
The debate was held at the University of Birmingham, England in 2011. I would put this debate in the top 3 Craig debates ever, along with his debates against Austin Dacey and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
My summary of the Craig-Millican is below. This debate is really meant for advanced students, but if you read my post “What you need to know about the BVG Theorem” before watching the debate, it should help you to follow along.
Dr. Craig’s opening speech:
There are good reasons to believe that God exists.
There are no good reasons to believe that God does not exist.
A1) The origin of the universe
The universe began to exist
If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.
The universe has a transcendent cause.
The origin of the universe is confirmed by philosophical arguments and scientific evidence.
There cannot be an actual infinite number of past events, because mathematical operations like subtraction and division cannot be applied to actual infinities.
The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) proof shows that every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. That means that no expanding universe, no matter what the model, cannot be eternal into the past.
Even speculative alternative cosmologies do not escape the need for a beginning.
The cause of the universe must be transcendent and supernatural. It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be eternal, because it created time. It must be non-physical, because it created space. There are only two possibilities for such a cause. It could be an abstract object or an agent. Abstract objects cannot cause effects. Therefore, the cause is an agent.
A2) The fine-tuning of the universe
The fine-tuning of the universe is either due to law, chance or design.
It is not due to law or chance.
Therefore, it is due to design.
The progress of science has revealed that the Big Bang was fine-tuned to allow for the existence of intelligent life.
Type 1: Constants like the gravitational constant are finely-tuned, and are not dependent on the laws of physics.
Type 2: Quantities like the amount of entropy in the universe, are not dependent on the laws of physics.
The range of life-permitting values is incredibly small compared to the possible values of the constants and quantities. (Like having a lottery with a million black balls and one white ball, and you pick the white ball. Even though each individual ball has the same tiny chance of being picked, but the odds are overwhelming that the whichever ball you pick will be black, and not white).
Not only are the numbers not due to laws, but they are not due to chance either. It’s not just that the settings are unlikely, it’s that they are unlikely and they conform to an independent pattern – namely, the ability to support complex life.
A3) The moral argument
If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
Objective morality does exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Objective moral values are values that exist independently of whether any humans believe them or not.
Michael Ruse, an atheist philosopher agrees that if God does not exist, then there is only a “herd morality” that is determined by biological evolution and social evolution. There no objective moral standard, just different customs and conventions that vary by time and place. Anyone who acts against the herd morality is merely being unfashionable and unconventional. On the atheistic view, there is nothing objective and binding about this evolved “herd morality”. However, people do experience objective moral values, and these cannot be grounded on atheism.
Furthermore, God must exist in order to argue that there is evil in the world. In order to be able to make a distinction between good and evil that is objective, there has to be a God to determine a standard of good and evil that is binding regardless of the varying customs and conventions of different people groups. Even when a person argues against God’s existence by pointing to the “evil” in the world, they must assume objective moral values, and a God who grounds those objective moral values.
A4) The resurrection of Jesus.
There are certain minimal facts that are admitted by the majority of historians, across the ideological spectrum: the empty tomb, the appearances and the early belief in the resurrection.
Naturalistic attempts to explain these minimal facts fail.
The best explanation of these facts is that Jesus rose from the dead.
A5) Religious experience
People can know that God exists through experience. In the absence of defeaters for these experiences, these experiences constitute evidence for God’s existence.
Dr. Millican’s opening speech:
Dr. Craig has the burden of proof because he claims that God exists.
The Christian God hypothesis:
An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God created the universe.
This God cares about humans.
This God has acted in history though the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
This is a factual claim, and we are discussing the evidence for whether these claims are true or false. We are not interested in religious practice, or the consolation of religious belief, nor any other religions.
A1) Religious pluralism and epistemology
Human beings are purpose-finding creatures – we are prone to prefer explanations that involve purpose.
Human beings are pattern-finding animals – we tend to find designs in states of affairs.
Human beings have an interest in maintaining religious hierarchies because of the power it gives them.
Religious beliefs are not determined by rational considerations, but are determined by geographic location.
The same non-scientific method of generating religious beliefs (purpose-finding, pattern-finding, geographic location, parental teaching, charismatic speakers, praise songs and worship, religious education, ancient holy books) is being used in several religions, and it leads to different, contradictory truth claims. So at least some of those conflicting claims are false. And if the method is generating some false claims, then it’s not a good method, and it undermines all the religions that use those methods.
A2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence
There is no scientific evidence for God.
A3) Mental processes depend on physical systems
There is no scientific evidence for a disembodied intelligence.
Our universal human experience is that intelligence and mental operations require a physical brain.
The quality of our thinking depends on physical conditions, like being tired or on drugs.
But Christian theists believe that mental processes can exist independently of an underlying physical reality, unimpaired by the death of the physical body and the brain.
R.A1) The origin of the universe
1. There is no evidence that whatever begins to exist requires a cause. All the evidence we have of things beginning to exist are when something is created from rearrangements of other things that already existed.
The closest analog we have to something coming into being from nothing is quantum particles coming into being from nothing, and that causation is random.
There is no evidence that thoughts can bring about physical effects, and Bill is arguing for a mental cause to the origin of the universe.
Even if things that begin to exist IN the universe have causes, it doesn’t hold for the universe as a whole. Bill is committing the fallacy of composition.
Time begins with the universe, but our experience of causation is that it is a temporal process. So if there is no time “prior to” the universe’s beginning, then how can there be a cause to the universe?
It’s possible that there could be something outside our universe that is eternal.
It’s also possible that the Big Bang could be wrong, and this universe could oscillate eternally and not require a beginning.
2. There are cosmological theories that avoid the beginning of the universe by positing a prior period of contraction prior to the Big Bang.
The beginning of this universe depends on general relativity, and that theory breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics.
3. There is no evidence that minds can exist without an underlying physical system. So even if there is a cause of the universe, then it is neither an abstract object nor a mind. It would have to be something else, and not something we are familiar with – we are just not in a position to speculate of what it could be.
R.A3) The moral argument
Atheists do believe in a standard of morality that is not based on what groups of humans believe.
Utilitarians think there is a standard of moral values that is objective, because the measure of human happiness (for the greatest number) is objective, even if people are mistaken about what promotes that happiness.
Kantians have a rational process for determining which moral imperatives should be universalized.
Humeans have a system that is rooted in natural human sentiment.
Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal:
I do not have the only burden of proof. The topic is “Does God Exist?”. If Dr. Millican answers “no” then he has a burden of proof, otherwise we are left with agnosticism.
R.A1) Religious pluralism and epistemology
First, there is no single common method of adopting a religion.
Second, MY method this evening is logic and evidence and personal experience – which is the same as his method. So his comments about how people in different religions adopt their religion through parents, church, singing, etc. have no bearing on the arguments I will be making.
R.A2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence
Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence if we can reasonably expect that there should be some evidence that is not present. He would have to show that there should be more evidence for God’s existence that the 5 arguments that I already presented – something that we should expect to see that we don’t see.
R.A3) Mental processes depend on physical systems
No response by Dr. Craig. (but see below)
A1) The origin of the universe
1. He says that there are speculative cosmologies like the multiverse that escape the need for a beginning, but that’s false, the BGV proof applies to them, and they do need a beginning.
He says that you can escape BGV by positing a contraction prior to the expansion. However Vilenkin says that any contraction phase is unstable and would introduce additional singularities that would hamper any later expansion phase.
He says that we need a theory of quantum gravity in order to describe the early universe. But Vilenkin says that the BGV proof is independent of gravity as defined by general relativity.
He did not respond to the philosophical arguments for a beginning of the universe.
2. He says that we don’t have experience of things coming into being except from material causes. However, it would be even more difficult to explain the universe coming into being on atheism since you can’t appeal to a material cause nor to an efficient cause. Even Hume recognizes that things can’t pop into being without causes.
He talks about how in quantum physics virtual particles appear out of nothing. But that’s false, because the quantum vacuum in which virtual particles appear is not nothing, it is a sea of subatomic particles and energy. Quantum physics is not an exception to the idea that things that come into being require a cause.
He mentions the fallacy of composition. But I am not saying that everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the universe as a whole has a cause. I am saying that non-being has no capacity to bring something into being. Non-Being doesn’t even have the potential to bring something into being.
3. He says that there are no unembodied minds, so the cause of the universe can’t be an unembodied mind. But the argument concludes that there is a non-material cause, and it can’t be an abstract object, so it would have to be a mind.
In addition, we ourselves are unembodied minds. This is because physical objects cannot have the properties that minds have, like the property of having feelings.
Material conceptions of mind don’t explain identity over time.
Material conceptions of mind don’t explain free will.
Material conceptions of mind don’t explain intentional states (thinking about something).
Material conceptions of mind don’t explain mental causation.
The best explanation for our own first person experience of the mental realm is a substance dualism. We are non-material minds, and we can cause effects in the physical world. And God does the same thing. He is a mind, and he causes physical effects.
A2) He gave no response.
A3) He says that there are atheistic theories of morality that don’t depend on the opinions of groups. But these theories all depend on the idea that human beings have instrinsic value – that they are the sorts of things to which moral considerations apply. Naturalism cannot ground this moral value – human beings are no more valuable any other animal.
Also, there are no objective moral obligations in naturalist systems of morality, because there is no one in authority to command them. Moral prescriptions require moral prescribers.
A4) He gave no response.
A5) He gave no response.
Dr. Millican’s first rebuttal:
R.A2) The fine-tuning argument
We have to be careful not to judge what counts as finely-tuned through our intuitions.
We have to be careful about reasoning for a sample size of this one observable universe.
We don’t really know about the full range of possibilities for these constants and quantities.
There might be other universes that we can’t observe that aren’t fine-tuned, and we just happen to be in the one that is fine-tuned.
The fine-tuning might be solved by future discoveries, like the inflationary cosmology removed some of the fine-tuning.
There might be a multiverse that we don’t have evidence for right now.
We need to be careful about using science to prove God because science might change in the future.
The universe is very big and mysterious.
This argument doesn’t prove that God is good. He could be evil = anti-God.
God created the universe inefficiently if his goal was to produce life.
God created the universe too big.
God created the universe too old.
God created too many galaxies and stars that are not hospitable to life.
If the universe were fine-tuned for life, then there should be more aliens.
If the universe were fine-tuned for life, then there are probably lots of alien civilizations. But then Jesus would have to appear to all of the aliens too.
R.A1) The origin of the universe
2. It’s not a big deal that you can get multiple solutions to equations involving subtraction of actual infinities. For example, the equation 0 x y = 0 has many solutions for y, but that doesn’t mean that multiplication doesn’t work in the real world.
A2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence
I would expect that there would be more evidence than there is.
R.A1) The origin of the universe
2. The BVG proof might be overturned by future scientific discoveries. We have no reason to be confident in current physics.
I agree that the quantum vacuum is something and not nothing, but it’s similar to nothing.
We don’t have any reason to believe that things that come into being require causes – except for our universal experience that this is always the case.
3. As to the cause of the universe coming into being, you said that it could only be an abstract object or a mind, and it can’t be an abstract object because they don’t cause effects, so it must be a mind. But there are all sorts of things we’ve never thought of that it could be other than a mind.
I agree that mental properties are not physical properties and that epiphenomenalism is incorrect. Physical objects can have “algorithmic properties” as well as physical properties, it doesn’t mean that computers have minds.
Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal:
R.A2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence
He expressed his personal opinion that there should be more evidence, but that’s not an argument.
God knows how people will respond to getting more evidence or less evidence and he has to be careful not to take away their free will to disbelieve by piling them up with coercive evidence. God’s goal is not just to convince people that he exists. God’s goal is to have people respond to him and pursue him.
A1) The origin of the universe
2. He said that multiple answers to equations are no problem. But the problem is that you can’t translate multiple answers into a real world context.
The problem is that you are subtracting an identical number from an identical number and getting contradictory results, and that cannot be translated into the real world, where subtraction always gives a definite single result.
He talks about how you can get multiple answers with multiplication by 0. But 0 is not a real quantity, it is just the absence of something, and that cannot translate into the real world, because it has no being.
He says that I am only using evidence from current physics. But that is the point – the evidence of current physics and cosmology supports the beginning of the universe.
3. He said that an umembodied mind can’t be the cause, but we are minds and we cause effects on our physical bodies.
In addition, the design argument supports the idea that the cause of the universe is intelligent.
A2) The fine-tuning of the universe
He says we should be cautious. Of course.
He says the probabilities can’t be assessed. But you can just take the current value and perturb it and see that the resulting universe loses its ability to support life, and you can test an entire range around the current value to see that that vast majority of values in the range don’t permit life.
He says that the current physics is not well-established, but there are so many examples of fine-tuning across so many different areas of science that it is not likely that all of them will be overturned, and the number of finely-tuned constants and quantities has been growing, not shrinking.
He says it doesn’t prove that God is good, and he’s right – that’s what the moral argument is for.
He says that God isn’t efficient enough, but efficiency is only important for those who have limited time and/or limited resources. But God has unlimited time and resources.
He says that the universe is too old, but the large age of the universe is a requirement to support intelligent life – (i.e. – you need third generation stars to provide a stable source of energy to planets, and those stars require that two generations of stars are born and die).
He said what about aliens, and theists are open to that, and God can certainly provide for the salvation of those beings, if they have fallen into sin.
Dr. Millican’s second rebuttal:
R.A1) The origin of the universe
3. Just because epiphenominalism is false, it doesn’t mean that substance dualism is true.
The majority of philosophers of mind do not accept substance dualism.
R.A3) The moral argument
The majority of philosophers are moral realists, but a minority of philosophers are theists. So that means that there must be some way of justifying morality on atheism, which I will not describe right now.
Atheists can express their opinion that humans have intrinsic moral value.
He grants that atheists can perceive moral values. But if atheists can perceive moral values, then why is God needed to enable that?
Atheists can express their opinion that humans are special. We can be rational, and that makes us special.
Atheists can express their opinion that it is good to care about other humans because they are of the same species.
R.A4) The resurrection of Jesus
We don’t have any reasons to believe i the supernatural.
The gospels are written late for the purposes of evangelism.
The gospels are not independent, e.g. Matthew and Luke depend on Q.
John is the latest gospel, and the Christology of John is the highest of all.
The four gospels agree because the early church rejected other (unnamed) gospels that didn’t agree.
Matthew 27 – the earthquake and the raised saints – is not recorded in any other contemporary non-Christian source.
Dr. Craig’s final rebuttal:
A3) The moral argument
He says that human beings are rational, and that gives them value. But atheists like Sam Harris prefer the flourishing of sentient life. He includes non-rational animals as having moral value. So without God, we see that the choice of who or what has moral value is arbitrary. And where would objective moral duties come from if there is no moral lawgiver?
The fact that most atheists accept objective moral values doesn’t mean that they can rationally ground those values on their atheistic worldview. You can’t provide a basis for moral values on atheism by counting the number of atheists who accept objective morality. It’s not surprising that atheists can perceive objective moral values IF they are living in auniverse created by God who grounds these objective moral values and duties that atheists perceive.
A4) The resurrection of Jesus
He cites Geza Vermes and Bart Ehrman as authorities on the historical Jesus, but both of them accept all three of the facts that I presented as minimal facts. Ehrman doesn’t accept the resurrection of Jesus because he presupposes naturalism. He rejects the resurrection on philosophical grounds, not historical grounds.
Dr. Millican’s final rebuttal:
R.A5) Religious experience
Religious experience is an unreliable way to test the claims of a religion, because lots of religions have them and they make contradictory truth claims. In the future, we may discover naturalistic ways of explaining religious experience.
R.A4) The resurrection of Jesus
Even if you can make a case for the resurrection based on these3 minimal facts, there are other stories in the New Testament like Matthew 27 that are quite weird and they undermine the 3 minimal facts that even Geza Vermes and Bart Ehrman accept.
R.A1) The origin of the universe
Bill hasn’t shown that there is any reason for thinking that things don’t come into being, uncaused, out of nothing.
A4) The problem of evil
Theists can’t explain what God’s specific morally sufficient reasons are for permitting the apparently gratuitous evil that we see.
WINTERY KNIGHT 