Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Christopher Hitchens Still Doesn't Understand What Douglas Wilson Did to Him

Back in May, Christopher Hitchens had an online debate with Douglas Wilson, who challenged Hitchens to provide a basis, any basis, for an objective morality without God.

So here is Hitchens being asked about his debate with Wilson:

What about the question of morality without God? Al Sharpton spent a lot of time grilling you on that. And it was also a major theme in your email debate with the Christian author Douglas Wilson at Christianity Today.

Weird guy.

Wilson insisted that if you took Jesus out of the equation, the words “right” or “wrong” would have no meaning. Thoughts in the brain would just be a series of chemical reactions, like bubbles in a soft drink. As he put it, “If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is ‘winning the debate.’ They aren't debating; they are just fizzing.”

What he’s saying is that if he ceases to believe in Jesus, he’s going to instantly become an immoral person. It’s a terrible admission to have made! It’s an awful insult to human self-respect to say that. And they don’t seem to understand that they give themselves over in that way. It’s like saying that nothing would stop me from raping you now if I weren’t under the supervision of a heavenly dictator. And I have a higher opinion of myself than that.

So the person asking the question understood Wilson. And what does Christopher Hitchens say?

"What he's saying is that if he ceases to believe in Jesus, he's going to instantly become an immoral person. It's a terrible admission to have made!"

But that's not what Wilson said. After a five-part debate, the interviewer got the point but Hitchens still doesn't understand Wilson's argument.

Labels: apologetics, atheism, christopher hitchens, douglas wilson, morality, tag

Study Says That Atheism Not Created By Science

I think you will generally find that your assumptions will usually color how you view the data of science.

Ecklund and Scheitle concluded that the assumption that becoming a scientist necessarily leads to loss of religion is untenable.

Ecklund says, "It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions. This may reflect the fact that there is tension between the religious tenets of some groups and the theories and methods of particular sciences and it contributes to the large number of non-religious scientists."
...
RAAS data reveal that younger scientists are more likely to believe in God than older scientists, and more likely to report attending religious services over the past year. "If this holds throughout the career life-course for this cohort of academic scientists," Ecklund says, "it could indicate an overall shift in attitudes toward religion among those in the academy."

Labels: atheism

Dr. Paul Davies and the Anthropic Principle

I had the pleasure of listening to Paul Davies while he was on his book tour for his latest book. I was able to interact with him during the Q&A session and at the book signing.

While Davies raises several points worth commenting on and pondering on, I wanted to give some clarification to his argument (which isn't explicitly stated in the Guardian article) and my main critique of his overall argument.

Paul Davies doesn't want to appeal to God creating the universe nor does he want to appeal to the multiverse theory to explain the incredible fine-tuning of the universe. Davies appeals to quantum mechanics. Now, I am no expert in quantum mechanics, so I am going to go with what Davies said during his presentation.

In quantum mechanics, the quantum states are not determined until you observe them. Davies extends this to the anthropic principle. Life forms set the laws of physics. It is a quantum-feedback loop. In other words, our observations now determine the previous state of the laws of nature. I have his book, so I may fine-tune (pun intended) that description.

Well, for a guy who wants to avoid depending on theism he ends up depending on theism. How? The observer/non-observer distinction is meaningful only if God exists. Davies wants to go down the pantheistic route, as far as I can tell. Neither atheism nor pantheism can give you a meaningful distinction between observer and non-observer.

If we are just atoms bouncing around, there is no difference between a chair and yourself. If that's the case, if we have observers, atheism cannot be true.

Pantheism makes all of nature God. So how can pantheism give you a valid observer/non-observer distinction? I don't see how it can. Atheism and pantheism are very similar if not the same. One says nature is all there is (by and large). The other just labels everything as "god."

So if you can't get a proper distinction between observer and non-observer, Davies view has a major problem. But if God exists, we can have meaningful observers. God created them.

So Davies wanted to avoid God and he ends up needing God to get his theory to work. So why bother with his theory in the first place?

Labels: anthropic principle, atheism, cosmology, ID, multiverse, pantheism, quantum mechanics, theism

From Douglas Wilson: Atheism, Beachballs, and the Special Olympics

Ok, that's my title.

Scripture teaches us that unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness. But this language suggests that the operation is not effortless. In order to sin, and in order to persist in it, we have to fight against something that is true about ourselves. We are created in the image of God, and despite the fall into sin, we still retain that image. When God told Noah that the death penalty was to be applied in cases of murder, He did so because men still bear that image, however defaced by sin it may have been.

Therefore unbelievers who suppress the truth of God are expending a good deal of effort to hold a beach ball under water. Periodically it gets away from them, even though repentance has not occurred. When this happens, the results can be a bizarre flailing to get the ball back under. All such attempts to regain the calm but quivering respectability that existed before the ball got loose can be seen in various frantic civil legalisms.

Let us pretend that the illustration got away from us, just like the beach ball. What is all this supposed to mean? When the law of God is resisted and suppressed, the men who do this are objectively guilty, despite what they want to feel. This objective guilt results in subjective feelings of guilt – quivering arms holding that beach ball down. When the charade is revealed in some civil atrocity – genocide, rampant abortion, widespread sodomy – it is no longer possible to pretend that we are all decent folks just enjoying ourselves at the pool. Instead of admitting what we were doing, the response is to start splashing and yelling, pretending that we are saving someone from drowning.

In other words, when it becomes apparent that we as a people are disregarding God’s law in some flagrant way, the next thing to watch for is some kind of moral crusade that will help compensate for it. This is the meaning behind our yelling and splashing and imaginary heroics. In our nation today, a woman who is six months pregnant can go to a clinic and have the child terminated. Not only can she do this, she can receive considerable social support in doing so. The law of God is flagrantly insulted. But if that same woman stood on a busy street corner, visibly pregnant, and smoked herself a pack of cigarettes, she would be the brunt of a lot of cold, icy stares. How dare she risk a low birth weight? More than one social observer has noted the ethical incoherence of this.

But this is why unborn children can be killed for having birth defects, but if they navigate their way past our abortion laws and are successfully born, we will arrange special Olympics for them, handicapped parking spacing in every parking lot in town, and disability access into every building in the nation. We, in a fever pitch of moral do-goodism, are insisting that such handicapped individuals have a fundamental right to be able to access anything – except for their lives.

Labels: atheism