Atheists with judgmentalism issues

One of the reasons celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins says he refuses to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig is that Craig, according to Dawkins, is "a deplorable apologist for genocide" because of Craig's explanation of the Old Testament passages on the Hebrew invasion of Canaan.

These atheists are so judgmental anymore. You'd think they believed in some absolute, universal morality or something.

Quiet Please. Atheist Zone.

Increasingly wimpy atheists, who apparently lay awake nights worrying that someone, somewhere might be having religious thoughts, have just had their nights rendered sleepless by a Kentucky appeals court. The court ruled that language in Kentucky's homeland security law "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth" doesn't violate the state's constitution because, uh, you know, the same acknowledgement of God is in the preamble of the state's constitution.

Next thing you know atheists will be arguing that the Constitution is unconstitutional--which, come to think of it, is exactly what they were indirectly arguing in this case.

American Atheists, the cross-appellant in the suit, was suing because the law was causing them to suffer sleep disorders and "mental pain and anguish."

Many of us remember the good old days, when atheists didn't cower in fear at the mere mention of God. In fact, all that talk from the New Atheists about how brave they are because they face the world without the comfort of religion is kind of hard to square with atheist groups like this one whose tender psyches are reduced to a trembling puddle of emotions whenever they hear religious language.

They just don't make atheists like they used to.

On Ducking Debates: Is Dawkins really chickening out?

I don't normally comment on charges that the-fact-that-someone-won't-debate-someone-else-so-he-must-be-scared. You might not want to debate someone for a lot of reasons. But the recent dust-up over Richard Dawkin's refusal to debate Christian philosopher William Lane Craig just begs for comment. 


Dawkins said in the Guardian recently that he won't debate Craig despite Craig's challenge to meet him this month at Oxford. Dawkins gives several reasons for avoiding Craig, and none of them seem very convincing. And putting them all together doesn't add up to much either. 


Here is philosopher Victor Reppert, commenting on what indeed seems like Dawkins avoiding a debate because he's scared (and someone with Dawkin's lack of knowledge of philosophy ought to be):

Dawkins makes the claim that the theist is delusional, by which I take it he means that the case against theism is overwhelming. Yet he doesn't, in any serious way, engage any of the arguments in natural theology, and he seems to imply that it is beneath him to engage leading defenders of belief in the existence of God, and their arguments. I don't care whether he does it in a debate format or some other format, but somewhere, somehow, he needs to show that he knows how the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Thomistic Cosmological Argument restrict the class of what needs a cause, so that a simplistic "Who made God" can't refute them in any direct way.

Craig is a leading defender of arguments for the existence of God. Regardless of whether some of his statements are morally repugnant, Dawkins needs to come to terms with him and those like him if he is to have any credibility with respect to his delusion charges. Putting his nose in the air with the "Courtier's Reply" does not replace confronting the actual relevant arguments.

Read the rest here.

Traci Lee Simmons to speak at Highlands Latin School tonight.

Highlands Latin School's
2nd Annual Community Lecture Series
Friday, October 21, 2011

You're cordially invited to join us this Friday, October 21, at 7:00PM!

Highlands Latin School is pleased to welcome esteemed author, Tracy Lee Simmons (see his bio below), on Friday, October 21, 2011, at 7:00PM, in the Sanctuary of our Crescent Hill Campus (2800 Frankfort Ave). Mr. Simmons' lecture on "Classical Education and America's Future" is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend!

Tracy Lee Simmons has been a working journalist, editor, and writer for over 20 years. He holds a Master’s Degree in Classics from Oxford. He has written for newspapers, magazines, and journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, American Enterprise, The New Criterion, and The Sewanee Review, and he once served as an Associate Editor for National Review under William F. Buckley, Jr. He published Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin in 2002, which won a Choice Award for “Outstanding Academic Title” for that year. He continues to write regularly on literary, historical, and cultural topics.

Quaddafi is dead. Long live progressive leadership.

There's not much to say about the reported death of Qaddafi, longtime Libyan tyrant. I will just mark his end by recounting my first awareness of him.

I was in 7th grade at Dapplegray Middle School in Rolling Hills Estates, California in the early 1970s. We (all of us students) were herded into the gym, where we saw a film on the incredible economic miracle taking place in an African country most of us had never heard of. And this was all taking place, we were told by the film's narrator, under the rule of a progressive new leader.

The country was Libya, and the progressive leader was Quaddafi.

Public schools. You gotta love 'em.

Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your brains!

White people. Occupying Wall Street. Protesting rich people who take advantage of other people. Funded in part by George Soros. Billionaire hedge fund manager. Who was convicted of insider trading in in France in 2002.

Just thought I'd mention it.

"Rebels Without a Clue" runs in Lexington Herald Leader

My article "Rebels Without a Clue" was published in Friday's Lexington Herald-Leader.

And one more thing...

I should have added to the last post on whether Christians should vote for Mormons one other thing (and this in relation to Perry's remark that he disagreed with Pastor Jeffress): I would rather vote for a Mormon who thought that Mormonism was Christian than a Christian who thought Mormonism was Christian--largely because the latter, but not necessarily the former, should know better.

Should you vote for a Mormon?

You can say the right thing at the wrong time. And this appears to be what has happened on the issue of Romney's Mormonism.

Okay, for starters, I have no political problem voting for a Mormon candidate for office. In fact, if I was faced with a choice between an atheist candidate who would do the right thing and a Christian candidate who would do the wrong thing, then, in principle, I would vote for the atheist candidate without blinking. As Gene Veith has recently reminded us, Luther once said, "I'd rather be ruled by a smart Turk (Muslim) than a stupid Christian."

So when someone like Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor and Perry supporter, made this an issue the other day, it really complicated things politically, even for people like me. The problem lies in connecting together the question "Should I vote for Mitt Romney since he is a Mormon?" and the completely different question "Is Mormonism Christian?"

What we need here is de-linkage. The two questions have little to do with each other: the answer to one should have little to do with the answer to the other. Unfortunately, it may be too late, practically speaking, to make that distinction.

The answer to the second question, "Is Mormonism Christian?" is: No, of course it's not. Unfortunately, this question has been sort of muddled by the use of the word "cult." Is Mormonism a cult? Sure it is. So is Methodism, Lutheranism, and Pentacostalism--and Catholicism. Cultus is a Latin word that means "worship" or "form of worship." Is Mormonism a form of worship? Yes it is. So are all Christian sects, Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic.

As Pastor Jeffress himself rightly pointed out, he was using the term in a modern evangelical religious sense to mean "non-Christian sect," and not the sociological sense of a culturally deviant and dangerous religious group a la Jim Jones. But it still muddies the waters, maybe hopelessly.

What Jeffress was really saying was that Mormonism was not a Christian sect. He was right here too. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, Christianity is defined as "the beliefs of the apostles." That is its original and still dispositive meaning. Those beliefs were refined and extrapolated by the seven ecumenical councils, the last of which was the Council of Nicea, which produced the Nicene Creed, the greatest and most definitive statement of Christian belief. A few of us would add a few more councils, here, but that's a different issue.

So the answer to whether Mormonism is Christian is easy to decide: Are their beliefs consistent with the beliefs of the Apostles as they were expressed in the New Testament and as they were articulated in the Nicene Creed? And the clear answer is "No."

If you take any cardinal doctrine of Christianity and ask whether the Mormon Church unconditionally accepts it, the answer is "No." The Atonement. The Resurrection. The Virgin Birth. The unique deity of Christ. They may have beliefs that sound similar, but just a little scratching under the surface shows they do not accept these beliefs as historically defined by the Church.

Heck, they're not even monotheistic.

That doesn't mean they're not good people, or that they ought to be culturally marginalized, or that any one of them can't be president. It just means that they are not within even the broad definition of the Christian Church.

All that being said, if voting for Romney for president is going to require culturally that we all say nicely that his religion is Christian, then a cultural problem is created that affects my political decision. It gives the political position, which is otherwise unproblematic, a negative cultural consequence.

This wouldn't be Romney's fault. It will be the fault of people like Pastor Jeffress, even though he's right about Mormonism.

Is forced busing needed to add some color to the white faces Occupying Wall Street?

Remember all those charges of racism against the Tea Party? Well, now the highest ranked Tea Party candidate in the Republican primary is Black, and white folks are Occupying Wall Street.

It's a crazy world.

Strange Bedfellows

The guy who bailed out the big boy banks wants to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement. Go figure.

Are science and religion incompatible?

Essays lauding the superiority of science over religion are not uncommon, and Julian Baggini, atheist editor of Philosopher's Magazine, gives us another one in the Guardian. Biologist Jerry Coyne, of course, is much impressed, as he is with any such pronouncement, no matter the quality of them.

Baggini acknowledges that science is focused on how questions, and religion on why questions, but contests the non-overlapping magisteria view of the late Stephen J. Gould--that religion and science deal with two completely different kinds of questions that do not impinge on one another--and correctly so. This is, in fact, one of the places in which the New Atheists are correct: you can't place religion and science in two hermetically sealed compartments and expect them never to get mixed:

This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.

So far, so good. There are claims made by Christianity that are empirically testable: That Christ was born without a human father, lived at a particular time, spent his life in particular place as a member of particular tribe who performed specific miracles, was executed on a particular mountain under the reign of a specific governor of Judea, and was raised after a specified number of days from the dead and seen afterwards by hundreds of people. And that his disciples went around afterwards preaching and baptizing and performing some of the same miracles as Jesus did in His name.

Now you can believe those claims or not, but they are the claims Christianity makes (in fact, its central claims) and they are "scientific" in the broad sense of being explicitly empirical and subject to proof or disproof by the methods of whatever empirical discipline would apply to them, which, in this case, happens to be history. Some are only empirical in theory and are not practically verifiable, but others of them are subject to at least some empirical scrutiny.

There are also philosophical or metaphysical claims made by Christians (but not necessarily by Christianity per se) who are operating in the realm of natural theology that are subject to proof or disproof. Examples of this would be the traditional proofs for the existence of God. These arguments can philosophically prove particular theistic beliefs, such as the existence of God, but if someone were to disprove any one of them, it would not affect the central claims of Christianity itself--it would only prove that some particular Christians (St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.) were mistaken.

Despite the fact that he is a philosopher, Baggini says nothing about these metaphysical issues which are neither strictly theological nor empirical. In fact, Baggini seems to somewhat confuse the two when he speaks of "an evidence-led, rational examination of a view." A view could be "evidence-led" and not rational, or rational and non "evidence-led." The traditional proofs for the existence of God (or for that matter certain theorems in mathematics) are rational, but not "evidence-led," at least in the sense of being empirically testable.

But the main problem with Baggini's piece is that he seems to see every case in which religion makes an empirical claim as a case in which science and religion are in conflict:

[H]ow easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we're talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab.

Coyne too chimes in too, shaking his pom-poms:

This, of course, is just another take on something many of us have long maintained: any theistic religion—that is, one that posits a God who is active in the universe—must perforce make claims that can in principle be empirically examined or tested. And that is a “how” question. On the level ground where science and faith must compete to answer such questions, religion always loses, and always will.

The fact that two approaches may happen to focus on the same subject does not automatically put them into conflict. Conflict only comes when one approach says one thing about it and another approach says something contradictory. If historians say that historical records show that there was a comet in the sky in 627 B.C. and astronomers say there wasn't, that's a conflict. But if they both approaches conclude there was a comet in the sky at that time, then there is not conflict. The two are perfectly compatible.

If science is "incompatible" with theology because they arrive at truth through different methodologies, then science is also incompatible with history, and with ethics--and with philosophy, Baggini's own discipline.

There is really no sense in talking about whether whether science and religion are compatible. If they look at the same alleged fact and come to differing conclusions about it, then so be it. Let it be decided using the methodology that is appropriate.

If the subject is the chemical makeup of something, then apply science. But if it is the existence of God, then science is going to have to bow to philosophy; if it is the genuineness of a historical event, then it's going to have to bow to history; and if it is the nature of the doctrine of justification, then it's going to have to bow to theology.

From the earliest times, Christianity has made empirical claims as evidence of its truth--largely having to do with miracle and prophecy. If scientists like Baggini and Coyne want to dispute them then let them have at it.

But so far they not only don't seem to have refuted them: they're too busy talking about whether magisteria are overlapping to even try.