Thursday, June 30, 2016

Not Hate Mail - "Have You Seen William Lane Craig On The Metaxas Article?"



I don't read the Wall Street Journal very much.  I don't like their editorial policy and I'm not impressed with their reporting.   I'm not especially interested in what it has to say about the teleological argument or other, similar arguments.  I don't think the Wall Street Journal will be credible on religious questions until they hold that "What you do for the least among you, you do unto the Lord."  While I don't think that the improbability of that is nearly as much as the improbability of our life-sustaining universe arising out of random probability, I'm not holding my breath.  My belief doesn't hinge on the proclamations of current cosmology - I don't have any faith in the durability of ANY proclamations of cosmologists, anymore.  I don't have that kind of childlike faith in the completeness of human knowledge of physics in our time anymore than I did the proclamations of the Baltimore Catechism.  I'm sure they've gotten some things close to right but not enough to construct an entire system out of.

That isn't to say that, now that I've listened to the Youtube and read the transcript and read the articles discussed [I also don't go to The New Yorker for light on these issues.] that there aren't interesting things said in it.   I did think this point made by Craig was interesting, very interesting

In fact, I want to highlight a point in Metaxas’ original article that is not addressed by Krauss, and it is this question – Metaxas writes, “At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces?” At what point does the evidence suggest that there is more than just chance going on – that this is a result of design? I think that for somebody like Krauss who is committed to scientific naturalism, there is no point at which he would admit that. That just becomes question-begging. That is just an example of closed-mindedness. I want to know an answer in principle to Metaxas’ question. What point needs to be reached in order for it to be rational to say this is the result of some sort of designing intelligence? If you can’t give us some sort of idea of at what point the improbabilities would so accumulate that you would say all right this is where I think an inference to intelligent design would be tenable and legitimate. Then you are just begging the question against it assuming it cannot be true. That is just an exhibition of closed-mindedness.

Which isn't a question of science or of cosmology, it's a question that goes to the heart of the atheist-ideological use of science to promote atheism at the expense of religion.  The fact is that there is not ever going to be a final closing of these question in terms of physics or science but short of taking the dodge into agnosticism, that is more of a problem for atheism than it is for religious belief.  And, since it all boils down to what people are going to accept as convincing, if atheism rests on that kind of question begging in which they insist on including their own conclusion in the issues raised, that, itself, impeaches the credibility of atheist arguments about the presence of life, probabilities, and everything up to and including the ultimate creation of atheists, the multi-verse creation fable.  There has never been a more stupendously pretentious and outlandish creation of something by human beings as there has been in 20th century cosmology by atheists pretending what they have made is science.  The strongest evidence coming out of that is that there is and never will be any level of evidence of design that such people would accept.

I suspect this may generate many follow ups so I'm going to leave it here, for now.

3 comments:

  1. Well, Kierkegaard's observation still stands: those who believe in God don't need proof; those who don't won't accept any.

    It really is like proving you love someone: how do you do that to the satisfaction of someone not involved in the relationship? What proof do you produce that is absolutely satisfactory? How "random" can the "random forces" be before the "proof" is accepted by either side?

    And how many people have to accept God's reality before God is real? How many have to reject God's reality before God is fiction? Ultimately, those who insist on drawing such lines of demarcation place themselves irrevocably on one side or the other, and what does the other side matter to them, or either side matter to humanity (the rest of us)?

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    1. My question would be how many people believe and how much they have to believe before they treat the least among us decently, which probably has more to do with why most people are or are not atheists. I know a lot of professed religious believes don't do that very well but, unlike atheism, they are sort of guided by something they might find there into the right direction that they might stumble into it. I always remember the time at the CFI blog where the big question was if atheists should get involved with charity, and it was controversial. It reminded me of the Marxists and, even more coldbloodedly, the Fabians who discouraged charity. But they discouraged it out of principle, don't you know.

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    2. Charity has, after all, a very limited rational basis.

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