Tag: Irreligion

Book Plunge: Irreligion Chapter 5

Was the fool right or was Anselm? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I don’t find the ontological argument convincing.

I know a lot of you will disagree with that one, and that’s okay. Many Thomists don’t. I know there are a few that do, but I am not one of them.

That being said, I still will say something when someone else gets an argument wrong, but that’s the curious thing. While Paulos blew it on the ontological argument, it seems he got the ontological argument correct in its formulation. He even goes into the history of it with Anselm and with the disagreement from Gaunilo.

It left me wondering why it is he got this argument right in its presentation and yet got the cosmological argument so incredibly wrong?

It has been said that most every philosopher in history who studies claims about theism since Anselm has had something to say about the ontological argument. I am not surprised it shows up on something like this. I am also not surprised that Paulos punts to David Hume again.

Anyway, let’s look at one long argument Paulos has.

If one assumes that God is both omnipotent and omniscient, an obvious contradiction arises. Being omniscient, God knows everything that will happen; He can predict the future trajectory of every snowflake, the sprouting of every blade of grass, and the deeds of every human being, as well as all of His own actions. But being omnipotent, He can act in any way and do anything He wants, including behaving in ways different from those He’d predicted, making His expectations uncertain and fallible. He thus can’t be both omnipotent and omniscient.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 41). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Uhhhh. Why?

You see, if God knows everything, the only reason He would change what He will do in the future (Although I do think there is no past or future with God, I hope you understand what I am saying) is because He gets new information. He can’t because He is omniscient. So why would He change what He is going to do? That makes Him a being in time anyway.

It really amazes me that these new atheist types talk so much about science and reason and asking big questions and finding answers. It sounds so incredible to them. They want to go out there with their curiosity and find the answers to what they ask!

Except for in religion.

Then they just drop a question, don’t bother to see what anyone has said about it for 2,000+ years, and then walk away celebrating like they made a major accomplishment. Then if a Christian comes along and asks what they think is a hard question for something like evolution, the atheist turns and mocks them for not doing their research to find the answer.

My saying about atheists is that too many of them honor reason and evidence with their lips, but their heads are far from them.

Still, we have only scratched the surface with how much worse Paulos will get.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Irreligion Chapter 4

Do improbable events just happen all the time? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter, Paulos is taking on the anthropic principle. Now as readers know, I’m not really a science guy so I’m not going to try to approach it from that angle. Seeing as he is a mathematician, I am going to try to give Paulos the benefit of the doubt on the math, despite I think I have great reason to distrust him, which we will get to later.

At the start, Paulos says this:

1. The values of physical constants, the matterantimatter imbalance, and various other physical laws are necessary for human beings to exist.

2. Human beings exist.

3. The physics must have been fine-tuned to the constants’ values to make us possible.

4. Therefore the fine-tuner, God, exists.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 28). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Little problem at the start. For one, this is quite simplistic. Second, does Paulos interact with any scientists who advocate this? No. There are secular scientists as well as Christian ones who have written on this. Where is their work cited? Not here.

He does at least mention Lee Smolin, who hypothesizes a theory of universes breaking off from other universes, a sort of Darwinian theory of a multiverse. The problem is even if this is true, how does this help? I am trying to explain one universe and you are suddenly going to say there are countless universes. It’s like a police officer trying to explain one dead body only to be told that there are 500 more out there and he thinks, “Oh. Well, I guess we can close up and go home then.”

From here, he goes into something called a Doomsday argument. Honestly, I’m looking at this and wondering what this has to do with the price of tea in China. He says that this kind of thinking makes more sense than various end-times scenarios held by many religious people. Perhaps it does, but Paulos assumes that all Christians hold to those kinds of end-times scenarios.

So let’s review. Has Paulos really interacted with the science behind this argument? Not for a moment. Has he looked at the philosophy used by some philosophers as well to explain why our existing in this time and space is unlikely? Of course, he hasn’t. Instead, Paulos has decided to punt to the subject of math and I suspect hope that in the end, none of us will notice that he has not interacted with any of the relevant material on the anthropic principle, and keep in mind I say this as someone who is not scientifically inclined and thus does not use the argument.

Paulos is unfortunately the kind of atheist who likes to do magic where he thinks he can say a few words and wave away a problem with his position. If these kinds of shallow answers seem convincing to him, that tells me more about his atheism than it does about his arguments. Atheists who want to take their worldview seriously should distance themselves from Paulos and encourage other atheists to do the same.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Irreligion Chapter 3

Can God be funny? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

This is an odd chapter. It’s dealing with the idea of pseudoscience and there was very little relevant to our purposes. As it is, I only highlighted one section in this chapter, and it’s not because I disagree with it, but because it is something worth commenting on.

Although the above isn’t particularly amusing, it isn’t reverential, either, and does suggest a couple of questions about religion and humor. Why is the notion of a fundamentalist comedian funny, or at least quite odd? Why does the idea of God as a comedian seem more appealing (at least to me) than the traditional view of God? Why does solemnity tend to infect almost all discussions of religion? Certainly an inability or reluctance to stand outside one’s preferred framework is part of the answer. So is an intolerance for tentativeness and whimsy. The incongruity necessary for appreciating humor is only recognizable with an open mind and fresh perspective. (A famous “argument” for an abstract proposition symbolized by p comes to mind. It’s ascribed to the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser and illustrates, or maybe mocks, this fluid capriciousness. “So if not p, what? q maybe?”)

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 25-26). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Do we ever think about Jesus laughing?

Why do we think of the Puritans as boring and stuck-up people?

Why do we associate negativity with words like “sermon” and “preach.”?

I have noticed that I think comedy is dying in the West, but I honestly think it’s because of leftism gaining a hold politically. If it gets to the point where you are not allowed to make jokes about X because they’re politically incorrect, we are closer to tyranny. My recommendation is to let the jokes be made and let the market decide.

Months ago I said that we shouldn’t protect people from jokes about X and I did have someone say that we should definitely allow comedians to make jokes about kids with cancer. My thought to something like that is, yes. Let them make jokes. Then let us silence them not by violent means, but in the market of public ideas. We don’t buy their books or listen to their shows or watch their videos or anything like that. That is the way freedom works. Freedom of speech is there not to protect speech we like, but speech we don’t like.

Christians need to be funny. We should get the most joy out of life compared to anyone else. Sometimes when we are told we believe some bizarre things, we should accept it. Yes. They are wild. What is even funnier about how wild they are, is that they’re also true.

I agree with Paulos to a point here. I do think we should treat God as holy, but that does not mean as boring. We are meant to enjoy Him and enjoy His creation. He created the world to be enjoyed and we are creatures that have the ability to laugh because we find something funny. We should use it.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Irreligion Chapter 2

Is there design? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

One of the problems atheists have with design arguments is they think all of them are meant to be scientific arguments. If anything, the classical teleological arguments are more arguments of order. There is science in the sense that if you do A, B will follow, That does not require any of our complex science today.

It could be that Paulos gets closer to the idea when he starts out chapter 2 this way.

The trees swaying in the breeze, the gentle hills and valleys, the lakes teeming with fish, are all beautifully exquisite. How could there not be a God?

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 10). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Actually, this is a good argument I think. Beauty is a powerful pointer to God. These are all material objects but there is something that transcends the matter somehow. It is interesting that normally atheists deny objective beauty.

Unfortunately, Paulos throws out any serious study of the argument by saying its best proponent is probably Paley. The problem is while Paley’s argument has a point to it, it is not at all something someone like Aquinas or Aristotle would have in mind by teleology. For those two, you could just have something like an iceberg floating in water and you could have the argument.

To make matters worse, Paulos then just goes on to argue Richard Dawkins’s Boeing 747 argument about how the creator has to be more complex. Why? Paulos I am sure holds to evolutionary theory which says the complexity we have today arose from simpler lifeforms. Why does he change it when it comes to God?

Not only that, but classically, Christianity has held that God is absolutely simple. (Of course, that would require that Paulos actually studied what he talked about.) I look at the argument and think that Paulos doesn’t know what he’s talking about immediately. Even if he did disagree with that approach, as even some Christians do, he should at least mention some Christians hold to divine simplicity.

But let’s look at how this goes for Paulos.

Suppose he claims complex things need a designer.

If so, then we have to ask how we have anything here since evolution is not a designer. If the reply is that not all complex things need a designer, then one could hypothetically say that God is also one of those things. I find that weak, but if Paulos can beg a question, why not the rest of us?

Paulos also tries to use the free market as an example of something without an intelligent designer, but as my friend David Marshall said in his Amazon review of the book:

Really bizarre is his illustration of how the Free Market accomplishes all kinds of complex planning without a Planner. Paulos goes on and on about this, citing Adam Smith and thinking he has scored a great point by cleverly citing an icon of conservatism. This is a “stunningly obvious” example of evolution working by itself, without need for a designer.

But of course, the free market involves millions of intelligent designers. Maybe that doesn’t matter to Paulos’ illustration, but that, too, ought to be “stunningly obvious,” and again, he ought not to just ignore this stunningly obvious fact.

So far, Paulos’s book is just awful.

But oh dear reader, it’s going to get much worse.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Irreligion Chapter 1

Does Paulos have the cosmological argument right? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So I started reading another atheist book. This one is by a mathematician named John Allen Paulos. A mathematician? They’re usually smart guys. Surely this one will be better than a lot of atheist material.

Hope swings eternal.

And then comes crashing right back down again.

Let’s start at the beginning, with the cosmological argument.

As I saw he was starting with the first cause, I was uttering that silent hope of “Please don’t say it. Please don’t say it. Please don’t say it.”

He said it.

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.

2. Nothing is its own cause.

3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.

4. So there has to be a first cause.

5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 3-4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

At this point, and we’re only on page 4, I know this is someone who I can’t take seriously. It will get even worse in this book, but I will save that for when we get there. When we get there, you will know I have no respect for Paulos whatsoever.

For now, let’s note that no intellectual has ever made the ridiculous argument that Paulos put forward. Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Plotinus, Augustine, Leibniz, Aquinas, Descartes, Plantinga, Craig, etc. I don’t care who you are talking about. This is not the argument. I don’t care what an ignorant pastor said from the pulpit one time. I care about what the actual argument is.

This is covered in great detail by Edward Feser here.

The figure with the dunce cap in the article is fitting for Paulos. Feser, after pointing out how no one makes this argument and even professional philosophers arguing against the cosmological argument get it wrong says:

And that, I submit, is the reason why the stupid “Everything has a cause” argument – a complete fabrication, an urban legend, something no philosopher has ever defended – perpetually haunts the debate over the cosmological argument.  It gives atheists an easy target, and a way rhetorically to make even their most sophisticated opponents seem silly and not worth bothering with.  It‘s a slimy debating trick, nothing more – a shameless exercise in what I have elsewhere called “meta-sophistry.”  (I make no judgment about whether Le Poidevin’s or Dennett’s sleaziness was deliberate.  But that they should know better is beyond question.)

Getting back to the dunce, I mean Paulos, he says:

A slight variation of this is the so-called cosmological argument, which dates back to Aristotle and depends on the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe (or some primitive precursor to it). It states that whatever has a beginning must have a cause and since the universe is thought to have a beginning, it must have a cause.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Except Aristotle doesn’t think this. Aristotle thought the universe was eternal. Even the Christian Aquinas said that reason alone cannot establish that the universe had a beginning. He believed it did, but that was because he saw that in Scripture. Consider Aristotle first in book 8 of his Physics:

(Further, how can there be any ‘before’ and ‘after’ without the existence of time? Or how can there be any time without the existence of motion? If, then, time is the number of motion or itself a kind of motion, it follows that, if there is always time, motion must also be eternal. But so far as time is concerned we see that all with one exception are in agreement in saying that it is uncreated: in fact, it is just this that enables Democritus to show that all things cannot have had a becoming: for time, he says, is uncreated. Plato alone asserts the creation of time, saying that it had a becoming together with the universe, the universe according to him having had a becoming. Now since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the moment, and the moment a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time: for the extremity of the last period of time that we take must be found in some moment, since time contains no point of contact for us except the moment. Therefore, since the moment is both a beginning and an end, there must always be time on both sides of it. But if this is true of time, it is evident that it must also be true of motion, time being a kind of affection of motion.)

While he did hold to an unmoved mover, he did believe that there was something that was always in motion. That would be the universe. There’s a reason Paulos never quotes anyone who makes the ridiculous argument he claims is the first cause argument.

As for Aquinas:

n the contrary, The articles of faith cannot be proved demonstratively, because faith is of things “that appear not” (Hebrews 11:1). But that God is the Creator of the world: hence that the world began, is an article of faith; for we say, “I believe in one God,” etc. And again, Gregory says (Hom. i in Ezech.), that Moses prophesied of the past, saying, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”: in which words the newness of the world is stated. Therefore the newness of the world is known only by revelation; and therefore it cannot be proved demonstratively.

That the world had a beginning cannot be proved demonstratively.

Hint Paulos. If you want to argue against a position, it helps to learn what that position is.

Of course, Paulos says “Why can’t the universe be the first cause?” ignoring that Aristotle and Aquinas would both reply because it is in motion and its motion needs to be dependent on something outside of itself that is not in motion. Asking “What caused God?” is the usual question which of course, Paulos never consulted these philosophers on to see what they said. It’s more like “Gotcha! Bet you never thought of that one, huh?!”

No. They did. I have something on this here.

He also goes on to go after Augustine for his answer to this question was “He was creating Hell for people who ask questions like that.” Never mind that that was Carthaginian humor Augustine engaged in. Never mind also that Augustine was the one who said it was a nonsense question because God created time. Also, never mind that Paulos gives no sources. Paulos also says that placing God outside of space and time would preclude divine intervention in worldly affairs. Why? Because I suppose. Paulos doesn’t tell us.

He also quotes Hume saying that A causes B means that whenever we have seen A, we have seen it followed by the effect of B. It seems odd Paulos would say this. If this is the case, we have no basis to trust science. Today, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe tomorrow it will be 130 degrees. Maybe tomorrow at that temperature it will turn into pink lemonade. Who knows?

As for natural laws, Paulos says either we need to know why God chose the laws the way that He did or if He did choose them, then God Himself is subject to those laws. Why? Again, we don’t know. Paulos sits on his atheist throne and speaks ex cathedra and hopes all his little atheist minions will bow down and say “Brilliant insight!” Those of us who enjoy thinking ask “Why?”

He then quotes Leibniz as saying:

The sufficient reason for the universe, he stated, “is a necessary Being bearing the reason for its existence within itself.” The necessary being is God, the first cause, who caused or brought about not only the physical world but also somehow Himself.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 8). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

No. Leibniz does not believe God brought about Himself.

But whatever helps you sleep at night.

Based on this, it’s pretty clear why Paulos is an atheist. He does not understand the arguments and he does not read books that disagree with him. Sad, really.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)