Great Moments in Calvinist Apologetics #238

Not to be outdone by Manata's sexual aggression, Peter Pike opens up "The First Adam" with this:

Peter Pike:
As I’ve studied theology, I’ve come to the conclusion that God really knew what was best when He decided to reveal Himself through the Old Testament shadows before He revealed Himself fully in the person of Christ.

So, Peter here has come to the conclusion that God really knew what was best, after all... Follow this maverick philosopher right through the whole post, to end up with this bit of extra insight from him in the comment stream:

Peter Pike:
We do know that Adam's sin did not catch God off-guard. It was foreordained, yet in such a way that Adam freely sinned. These concepts are all clear from Scripture.

Yes, in such a way, indeed!

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Great Moments in Calvinist Apologetics #237

Paul Manata has a long post up responding to me, but as so often happens there, the comment stream went off onto other topics. In this great moment, is waxing intellectual over the morality of Israelite enslavement of the virgins of conquered foes in the Old Testament:

Paul Manata:
Good, you're catcvhing on. I *want* you to keep coming back. I'm *banking* on your pride. it only allows me to rape your arguments in diffeent ways. (12/16/2007 6:51 PM)

This said in response to a poster named "Nikki".

Classic! Nikki put up a long response last night, too much for Manata, apparently. He deleted it, and announced the discussion closed. I guess his "rape your arguments" urge has passed.

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O'Leary's Handy Uses For Creationism

In part four of Denyse O'Leary's appreciation of John Lennox's book God's Undertaker:Has Science Buried God?, Ms. O'Leary draws out the usefulness of creationist ideas for the development of science. Based on what O'Leary provides, I'm inclined to just pass on this book, which otherwise would have been one that intrigued me. She doesn't do much to distinguish Lennox's points from her own, though, and having read a fair amount of O'Leary in the past couple years, it's clear that she sees just what she wants to see in whatever she surveys; the posts in this series present quotes from Lennox of dubious value, which she then make a mess of with her own riffage on Lennox's quote.

Here's an example, starting with Lennox:

John Lennox:
" ... the rise of science would have been seriously retarded if one particular doctrine of theology, the doctrine of creation had not been present." (God's Undertaker, p.22)

My initial reaction to that is to roll my eyes, but with just this little bit presented, one would have to look at the larger treatment in the text to make a fair evaluation. I don't know how Lennox supports this statement, but here's O'Leary's expansion:

Denyse O'Leary:
Why is a doctrine of creation important? Lennox points out that it frees science from the idea that we ought to be able to deduce what is happening in the universe from fixed prior principles. If - in contradiction to such an idea - we assume that God is entitled to create what he likes (trilobites, giraffes, and whales, to name some examples), then our duty is to address what exists rather than to set rules for what can exist. Unfortunately, centuries ago, many scientists attempted to proceed by setting rules about what can exist, according to their theories. Many of their ideas were in conflict with reality, and unproductive conflicts were common.

I held off posting on this yesterday when going through the other two sections, as I was sure I just wasn't reading this part right. But having looked at it several times now, the unavoidable conclusion is that O'Leary finds creationism valuable because it keeps us from artificially limiting reality. The examples she gives are baffling. Do we suppose that with a 'creationist view' that we would dispute the reality of the trilobite, the giraffe, the whale? It's as if O'Leary thinks we'd be inclined to say one or more of those things "aren't real" if we can't deduce them from "fixed prior principles". The giraffe may be standing right in front of us, but we are inclined to deny it because we can't deduce if from physical law, and this is what creationism saves us from?

Science is anchored in observation. To the extent any of those three can be objectively observed, we're obligated to accomodate for them in our model of reality. O'Leary has things reversed, so far as I can see here, suggesting that science want to define what's real, then map our observations onto it. That's nuts. We observe, test, kick, scrape, measure, watch and use all empirical tools at our disposal to establish the phenomena, then we define our reality based on that.

I suspect a part of the confusion for O'Leary here is the equivocation of the term "rule" or "law" here. In the creationist model, rules for reality are prescriptive, due to Christianity's metaphysical subjectivism. Reality is realized, and constrained by the will of God.

In the scientific view, the rules are descriptive. There's no underlying prescription, and the 'rules' than are identify are rules only by virtue of their identifying symmetries and uniform dynamics. So, to a scientist, "[setting] up rules for what can exist" is a fantastically confused statement. We don't make up rules for what exists, we just do our best to describe what exists, and how it exists. Descriptive, not prescriptive. Maybe that's a key clue for O'Leary.

Denyse O'Leary:
Having taught sections of the Design or Chance? adult night school course at St. Michael's in the University of Toronto, I also have a clear sense of another issue: A doctrine of creation encourages people to believe that the universe is worth studying because it puts a limit on the things you would need to know in order to understand. For one thing, even by positing an actual beginning of time, it closes off an infinite past in which virtually anything could have, and has, happened.

Here, I believe we have O'Leary projecting her own confusions about the concept or reality on the general population. Even if we grant her premise -- that the masses need things "dumbed down" so as not to exasperate them -- this in no way retards science itself. If anything, creationism thwarts the advancement of science by positing "pedagogical falsehoods" on the syllabus. A concept may make things easier to understand, no doubt, but that is not, in and of itself, scientifically useful. It's only as useful as it is accurate, performative in predictions and explanations, and unfalsified by salient tests.

Denyse O'Leary:
Assume, for example, that our theory of the universe does not include a doctrine of creation. We might assert - as some cultures have - that the universe is supported on an infinite series of turtles who (in some greater infinity) are swimming in an endless sea. Why study it? The information gained from one turtle may be no use in interpreting another, and then - even if you could get to the end of the turtles (which you cannot, because the series is infinite) - you would then confront the endless sea. All the information you have accumulated is a mass of interesting sludge, really. The prospect of understanding the universe is actually impossible. Lennox aided my understanding of this question by noting that the Jesuit Fathers who visited the advanced kingdom of China in the early modern period had difficulty at first persuading the Chinese scholars that many features of the universe can be understood by simple equations. They had not expected to find the unverse comprehensible in that way.

I don't know of any cultures that suppose that "the universe is supported on an infinite series of turtles". This objection isn't material to O'Leary's point, but it's indicative of the kind of ... "whatever!" approach she brings to science and the philosophy of science. From what I can find (see here, for example and here), Hindu culture has imagined the earth (as opposed to O'Lery's use of 'universe' here) as borne on the back of an elephant, which stood on a single tortoise, and that's about as close as I can come to finding support for her statement here. The Wikipedia article on "Turtles All The Way Down" attributes the "infinite turtles" idea to a single person, someone sparring with Bertrand Russell after a lecture. I won't make a bigger issue of this than just to note: when you start looking at the "building blocks" O'Leary uses, even those often are imaginary, or widely mistaken.

But suppose we are presented with a "turtles all the way down" cosmology. Now what? Well, to the extent you could verify it, you'd have a most significant answer. There are fewer more profound answers to be had, if the theory checks out. Oddly, O'Leary claims this would all be "interesting sludge, really", in yet another example of her command of the language. "Sludge"? She then announces that this would render the prospect of understanding the universe "actually impossible". Yet, she's just posed the foundations for understanding the universe. If the reality is "turtles all the way down", something we can verify, or even just verify that these turtles really do extend a very, very, very long way down and that they do somehow "support the universe", then a significant level of understanding the universe has been "actually achieved".

I know, I know. O'Leary's paragraph here is more incoherent than it is wrong.

I'm just sayin'.

Just to really get things thoroughly confused, O'Leary points to mathematical principles as a useful means for modeling and describing our universe, an approach that apparently hadn't occurred to the Chinese before some Jesuits introduced the idea. But that's not creationism at all, and in fact is the very antithesis of creationism. In proposing math as a key resource in understanding the universe, the Jesuits were proposing a perfectly materialist model of the universe. There's nothing "creationist" about the inverse-square law. In fact, maths are the building blocks for the "non-created" model of the universe, a universe governed by impersonal physical dynamics, rather than the arbitrary will of God. I can't think what O'Leary imagined the pedagogical value of math to be in terms of creationism, but for now, I'm thinking she's as confused about what Lennox is really saying as she is on the cultural popularity of "turtles all the way down".

Denyse O'Leary:
So a doctrine of creation imposes limits on what we must understand in order to gain a picture of our universe. That is critical for science as we understand it. If we assume that if the Big Bang happened roughly 13.7 billion years ago (conventional dating), then anything that could not have taken place within that period by random movements alone either did not happen or happened because of exterior or prior guidance. Or something else? At any rate, we are justified in seeking an explanation.

I'll agree that creationism imposes limits on understanding. But this is positively perverse, epistemologically. And the example she gives demonstrate this. If we are to discover a process or phenomenon that exists and requires 20 billion years of running to reach the state it is in now, we'd have to revise our estimates of the age of the universe. QED, so long as we have reason to trust the calculations on the process timeline. The existing estimates are where they are based on the demands for a model that harmonizes all that we have to go on. If you change the evidence and facts in view, then the estimates might very well need to be changed to accomodate it.

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YWAM/NewLife Killer In His Own Words

Given BarryA over at Uncommon Descent's "interest" in the question of atheism inciting murderous hatred in Matthew Murray, the man identified as the shooter in the YWAM/NewLife killings, there are some "interesting" stretches of commentary from Murray's online postings to review here. For what it's worth, the comments put together in that post seem much more problematic for the kind of Christianity Murray grew up in.

I'm a homeschooler. I've got six kids, four of school age, and their entire schooling has been homeschooling. My wife is quite active in the local homeschool co-op, and we are surrounded by evangelical homeschoolers; this is my demographic. We use Sonlight curriculum, and because of that, both my wife and I have been active in their online community for homeschooling families for years.

I'm intimately familiar with the culture of Matthew Murray's upbringing.

But you know what? For all the references and anger, all the possible "incitement to hate" that I could try and identify in Murray's words, all of that is secondary. This is a young man who went right off the deep end. He's responsible for his terrible actions, and no matter how vicious or hypocritical or humiliating he found his lot in life to be, growing up in a homeschooling fundamentalist Christian home, that's not sufficient to make it "interesting" to me to suggest fundamentalist Christianity is somehow to blame for the murders.

Unlike Barry, who simply popped off with an opportunistic bit of musing, the posts from Murray here shine at least a little bit of light on the mind and attitudes behind the killings. I wonder how "interesting" Barry thinks the situation is now, having read the posts of nghtmrchld26?

It doesn't matter, as far as blame is concerned for the killing, however. For all of that, Murray bears the guilt for his actions. It was his choice, his course of action, and his alone.

What remains is the lingering sense that BarryA, ostensibly concerned about the spread of hatred, about demonization, has engaged in the very practice he's concerned about. Barry's no more empowered to unilaterally instill hate in his readers than Ted Haggard or Richard Dawkins are in theirs (does Haggard have an audience anymore?); we must choose to adopt the hatred being offered. But posts like Barry's represent the offer, just as much as the angry words of those he's upset by (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al).

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The Hatred Libel

Barry Arrington is one of my favorite posters at Uncommon Descent. Posts like this are so good at showing the bankruptcy of ID, that one naturally wonders if "BarryA" is extraordinary success in the "deep cover troll" operations that get launched from time to time by the feisty folks at AntiEvolution.org.

This post in particular has the scent of a "false flag operation", putatively pro-ID, but powerful in its discrediting the cause it purportedly advances. BarryA is a contributor at UD, not just a commenter, and I can't recall where, but I know I've read posts by people who are familiar with this guy in real life, so this must be legit. And just so we're clear, that's fine with me.


Do Dawkins and Dennett Incite Hatred? is the title of the post.

Wherein, BarryA says this:

BarryA:
The media is reporting that Matthew Murray posted the following on the web: ”I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. …God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”

Look at the last part of that quote closely. One wonders if Murray has been reading Dawkins or Dennett. By blaming the world’s ills on religious people do Dawkins and Dennett incite to hatred and make it more likely that tragedies of this sort can occur? I don’t know, but it is an interesting question.

Now, this is a post at Uncommon Descent, the flagship (!) blog for the Intelligent Design movement. This is a blog that is continually at pains to point out that ID is a scientific enterprise, and unrelated and unattached to religion qua religion. From Dembski on down to DaveScot, offenders are repeatedly scolded about conflating ID and Christianity or any particular brand of God. ID defenders routinely bristle at the suggestion that ID is a proxy for evangelical Christianity.

But here, the flagship ID blog is pursuing the intricate scientific details of teleogical design with respect to... well, Barry's not going in that direction at all.

This post is about the scariness of atheism.

There's not much "intelligent design" (pseudo-)science to work with here. Like so many other posts at UD, this is a political missive. Another grenade launched from the ID trench of the Culture Wars.

But remember: ID really is about the science.

As for the "merits" of the post, well, I think the large significance of this post is that BarryA feel comfortable with this kind of "interesting" question in this context. Looking the rationale he's offering topples it over pretty quickly.

• Does BarryA suppose that those who cause the world's ills somehow deserve to be killed, even if we grant Barry his premise?
• Does Barry believe people are responsible for their own actions, or not?
• Does Christian "hatred" of the abomination of homosexual intercourse implicate Christianity in the hate-motivated murders of homosexuals?
  

It's just a non-starter from BarryA, here. And that's what's most disturbing. It's so poorly thought out, that the "design inference" for this post is that it's a bit of low opportunism, an attempt at cheap rhetorical points to make with the faithful on the blog by exploiting a tragedy.

There's a nice self-referential aspect to this post though. Barry's sort of testing his own theory, by spreading his own brand of ill to the world. What now, BarryA? Who's reading your posts, and are you worried?

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O'Leary: Lennox Part 3

In part 3 of Denye O'Leary's appreciation of John Lennox and his book God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, she tackles the idea of information. She quotes Lennox, who finds it "remarkable" that information is invisible, and comments:

Denyse O'Leary:
Not only that, but information, as Lennox goes on to demonstrate, is immaterial. Example: The knowledge that the concert you hoped to attend has been cancelled due to an ice storm is immaterial. The storm is quite material, but your knowledge that the concert has been cancelled is immaterial, even though it may have been conveyed by material things.

Shades of George Gilder, actually!

There's a Nobel Prize embedded in here, apparently. Forget the rest of this, that's what's remarkable, that Lennox has demonstrated that information is immaterial. I just recently finished reading Leff & Rex's Maxwell's Demon 2, which is a tour de force review of the subject of Maxwell's Demon. Which is, of course, all about information and entropy. While the subject is complex, and to be sure, even established 'experts' in information theory occasionally have disagreements about some of the basics of information as a scientific concept (see Tom Schneider's rejection of "self-information" in favor of "surprisal", for example), "information" is perfectly and completely physical.

And this little example Denyse throws out here is a point at which we can reasonably doubt that Denyse has even the bare beginnings of the conceptual framework needed to be a meaningful contributor in these discussions. I haven't read Lennox's book, and I'm quite prepared to allow that he as a more sophisticated view of the concept of information than Denyse relates here. But as it is, Denyse betrays complete incompetence with the subject matter here. Her example is the "information" that a concert has been canceled, due to a storm. The storm is material, but the information that the concert has been nixed is immaterial.

I'll try to resist the obvious opportunities at humor here, but what does Denyse think her brain is for, anyway? Does she suppose her brain is material? Is it real? The "information" Denyse claims is immaterial is most certainly material -- and is represented by the electrical configurations -- the "brain-states" of any and all who received and stored the message about the canceled show. Now granted, one can't "see" the electrical patterns that reify this knowledge because they are safely ensconced inside someone's skull. The ice storm that prompted the cancellation is a different matter, and quite observable, perfectly "visible", if maybe a little whited-out.

So the visible ice storm leads to a decision (a brain-state) in some individual that determins the show should be canceled. Additional bits of information (brain-states) are marshalled into the service of communicating that decision, and the recipients of this information reach new brain-states as a result of receiving the message. All the electrons are in the right places.

But Denyse can't see 'em, so apparently they don't exist. Kind of a grown-up version of the mistake my 1 year old twins make in thinking that if they can't see me, I can't see them.

Doesn't exist. Immaterial.

I won't even bother with the conflation these examples introduce, the confusion they spread in confusing the "retail" definition of information (knowledge or data that is contextualized for human processing, like the news of a canceled concert) and the scientific definition of information, (the reduction in uncertainty about physical configurations). Denyse isn't ready for "Remedial Information Theory 100" just yet.

Maybe a way to point at the major blunder Denyse is promoting here is to ask: OK, take away all physical objects and entities, for the sake of argument, here. Does this "immaterial" information about the canceled concert still exist? If there are no brains in the entire universe, would such news be "immaterial information"? If not, why not? If she should reply that of course, immaterial information needs a material "home" -- a place to exist -- then I'd say she's on the road to recover from this mistake. She's not there yet, but you can see the right answer from that point.

Information is physical. Where there is physical existence, there is information. Where there is no physical existence, there is no information.

Assuming, of course, that Denyse is confused, and that Lennox hasn't -- mirable dictu! -- actually inverted the whole of physics and demonstratede that information is immaterial.

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CalvinDude: The Retroactive Trap Reflex

Peter Pike has a reflex that urges him to respond to objections to his posts with: "See! I knew someone would say that! Fell right into my trap!" Goodness knows Pike has "retro-trapped" me too many times to count over at Triablogue, prior to my bannination. Here's Peter retro-trapping Michael Spencer -- the Internet Monk -- who wasn't thrilled with Pike's self-serving analysis of the recent shootings in Aravada and Colorado Springs, CO.

iMonk:
Peter Pike at Triablogue says prayer only makes sense in reformed theology. This follows his post that the shootings at New Life Church- now revealed to be by a disgruntled ex-YWAM member- should make you a Calvinist.

Is there any astonishment left for the hubris and condescension in these kinds of statements? When an Arminian or non-Calvinist says the reverse of these sorts of things, the walls come down under the crush of internet theologians trying to get their 2 cents in to show how offended they are.

Peter first equivocates:

Peter Pike:
Now first I must note that I never said the shootings at New Life Church “should make you a Calvinist.” If Spencer is going to get upset at me, he should at least get upset for something I actually wrote. I said that the response to the shootings at New Life Church demonstrated that Arminians were closet Calvinists. It didn’t make them Calvinists, it demonstrated that they held Calvinists views without realizing it.

That's quite a distinction; iMonk says "make you a Calvinist", and Pike says you should realize you already ARE a Calvinist. But forget that: all one needs to do is look at the title of Pike's orginal post on this topic -- "When Aminians Become Calvinists". Or read it, and see even more clearly how ridiculous Pike protest is here. Flares and chaff set off by Pike as pedantic distractions...

Then:

Peter Pike:
Again, anyone can refer to my posts to see I actually presented an argument. Spencer gave us feigned indignation, as if that were a valid response. All Spencer offers is ad hominem, but that’s to be expected from the iMonk.

Pretty good "goof density" in that paragraph. Whether what Pike provided in his original post was an 'argument' is a question I'll leave up to the reader, but it doesn't matter if Pike "actually presented an argument" or not, here; that is not even hinted at as part of iMonk's objection. It's just so much distractive hand waving: Hey, I actually presented an argument you know! He apparently thinks this somehow gets him off the hook, away from the point of iMonk's short observation. Not.

But wait, there's more. "Spencer gave us feined indignation", he informs us. How does he know the indignation is feigned? He doesn't say. But he's confident that it is feigned, which all that he needs to declare iMonk's words 'invalid' here. Now, I'm all for earnest, honest communications, and I can definitely see "feigned indignation" as disingenuous, if that was the case (which hasn't been established in the least), but in no way does feigning indignation diminish iMonk's point; it stands as stated, and we don't need to know or care if iMonk is indignant or not, never mind whether any indignation is authentic.

Pike has provided us a non sequitur in his first sentence, then followed with unsubstantiated charges of dishonesty from iMonk, all to 'prove' another irrelevant point. The last leg of his stool here is a nice bit of unwitting irony; "All Spenced offers is ad hominem, but that's to be expected from iMonk."

Delicious! We can be quite sure Peter has no sense of self-critique here, as this would send up red flags immediately if he did. Here, he criticizes iMonk for his ad hominem argumentation by giving us a nice little ad hominem thumb in iMonk's eye. "That's to be expected", eh? Why? Well, iMonk is just a very bad person, don't you see, a non-Calvinist, and that's reason enough, when Pike thinks about it.

Pike pulls the "drama queen" card, and slaps it on the table:

Peter Pike:
Spencer claims that I have exerted “hubris and condescension in these kind of statements” yet he offers no evidence as to why that would be the case. I guess my fatal flaw was looking at an event and stating what I thought was true about it. I guess we’re not supposed to worry about truth these days, since apparently keeping the offended in Hell is more important.

Heh. I guess we're not supposed to worry about truth these days...

Poor Peter. The 'truth martyr' laid low by the Arminian who would rather keep people in Hell rather than offend them with the Truth of Peter Pike™. Think of it as just another crown for you in Heaven, Peter. Keep your chin up, d00d.

Pike has a flare or two left he wants to fire off as distractions and confusion before he turns the table, bring the full force of his 'retro-trap' down on the unsuspecting iMonk:

Peter Pike:
Anyone can look at my argument and see that New Life Church played no part in it. It set the stage for what I wrote, but it had nothing to do with the reasons I provided. Indeed, the tragedy involved could have been anything, and as such was an objective argument that was not limited to any one particular event. I only mentioned New Life because A) it just happened and B) it happened near me.

Peter: what the hell are ya talkin' about? This isn't even remotely attached to anything iMonk said. You're right, you could have used any tragedy, and iMonk's comments work the same way. There's nothing particular about this incident at all, regarding his objection. He's just noting that, like Piper's 'we all deserve to die' bit of wisdom in response to the I-35 bridge collapse in MN, you display the kind of morally tone-deaf timing and reasoning that broadcasts a much more important message about your mind and values than anything you say in your posts (and that's sayin' something!). The tragedy could have been any tragedy, it wouldn't have mattered. The point is that this kind of rationale strikes you as coherent for any tragedy, as you've admitted here. That is the basis for the objection.

Now Pike wants to play offense:

Peter Pike:
In fact, it is Spencer who bends to hubris here. Notice how Spencer goes out of his way to inform us that the shooter has been revealed to be a former YWAM member? I only ask: why does this information matter? Why should your argument change depending on who the shooter was? If what you stand for changes because of something as trivial as this, then how pathetic is your argument in the first place?

I'm looking at iMonk's post to see where he suggests it matters at all who the shooter is... I got nothin'. You? It looks like an interjection iMonk put in there as a bit of late breaking news. But no matter, there's nothing there that makes things more "Arminian" or "Calvinist" or that has any theological argument behind it all from iMonk. Maybe this information doesn't matter. How he gets from there, to "if what you stand for changes because of something as trivial as this...", well, it's comments like that that make me feel stupid for even bothering to comment on this.

Hold the phone, though. Pike's painting this as iMonk '[bending] to hubris', here. How's that work again? By interjecting the news that the shooter was a disgruntled ex-YWAMer?

Right, got it, thanks.

Now, Pike's phaser gets put on "Surreal-Stun":

Peter Pike:
It certainly didn’t matter to my argument who the shooter was. It could have been Dick Cheney for all it would have affected my position. Spencer brings this up because it is he who is attempting to use the violence at New Life in a hubristic and condescending manner. He is using the murders there to stifle the presentation of the truth.

We've got no basis to think that the news about the shooter being an ex-YWAMer means anything here. Somehow, this has become the frontispiece for Pike's argument, the angry claw of his "retro-trap", as it were. Somehow, just somehow -- we are surely fools to ask why or how -- this fact (if it is a fact) has transformed the iMonk argument into a nefarious attempt to "use the violence at New Life in a hubristic and condescending manner". As if that wasn't bad enough, Pike piles on at this point, mercilessly highlight this as a sinister attempt to... -- wait for it -- ... STIFLE THE PRESENTATION OF THE TRUTH.

Maybe I should have said "Comedy-Stun" above.

OK, that's more than I can bear in wading through this crap for now. Pike goes on to compare himself to Jesus in his zeal to "save through offense", and graciously offers to give the iMonk one more chance. Interestingly, though, Pike offers this in the meta, expanding on a cryptic comment at the end of the post about the book "Lord of the Flies":

Peter Pike:
I mean like in the book by William Golding. The severed boar's head became the "Lord of the Flies."

BTW, I totally don't recommend the book. I had to read it in school or else I'd gladly know nothing about it whatsoever. If you haven't read it, don't. If you haven't seen the movies, don't.


But that's just my suggestion.

Very interesting. If you've read Lord of the Flies, and you've read some Peter Pike, this totally makes sense, doesn't it?


UPDATE: iMonk has appealed to the grace of Peter Pike, and attempted to get things right in this post at the Boar's Head Tavern.

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Manata Mangles Secular Morality

It would take weeks to catalog all the problem in Paul Manata's, um, "takedown" of the Ethical Atheist in this post. Let's just get a taste for the confusion with this paragraph from the post:

iv) The cash value of (iii) is that there is a sense in which we can say that atheists cannot be moral. Now, certainly we don't mean that they can't (or don't) follow moral norms (but there are some norms that they do not follow, e.g., praying), we mean that they cannot meet all the requirements needed for us to judge them as "good" people. Thus in a minimalist sense, atheists can be moral. That is, they can follow (many of) the right standards. Of course this was recognized far before these contemporary debates (cf. Romans ch. 2). My more qualified sense is something that the atheist can accept since it depends on theism being true. Thus if theism is true, the atheist cannot be "good" where "good" means more than merely following your duty, or even exhibiting a couple of good character traits (though this would have to be defined biblically, and so it would be hard for the atheist to really have these. Perhaps he can have them in a minimal way. I leave that open for discussion). But, I take it that in this debate, and the sense the Ethical Atheist meant it in, the claim that "atheists can't be moral" is usually intended to connote the idea that atheists cannot adhere to some basic, fundamental, paradigm cases of morality according to a normative model. That is, atheists can refrain from murdering, lying, stealing, etc. (Of course, even here, qualification could be made, for there is much more to following those commands than ordinarily thought. But again, I'm speaking in a very minimalist way. Perhaps a way in which the atheist can accept as what constitutes following moral precepts.)

(emphasis mine)

Got that? The bolded sentence is the jewel in the mix, here. Paul is simply decimating when he lays out his arguments with "if theism is true". Here, we are treated to the observation that IF theism is true, and THEISTs get to define all the terms ("moral", "good", etc.), well, then there is a sense in which those atheist just can't qualify as "good" or "moral". Chew on that for a moment to fully savor its depth and wisdom.

Pure gold.

Let's turn that around for a moment. Would Paul say this?:
"If atheism is true, the theist cannot be good where good means more than following your duty, or exhibiting a couple of good character traits (though these would have to be defined rationally, so it would be very hard for the theist to have even these)."

Well, duh, Paul. If you begin by assuming the primary question (a/theism?), then let the "winner" define the criteria, the "winner" can fashion things any way they want (note how Paul suggest that 'theism' would require Biblical justification for good character traits... 'theism' being a kind of unconscious euphemism for his brand of Calvinism).

Earlier in the post, Paul dismisses the argument the Ethical Atheist is adressing -- "atheists can't be moral" -- as a "canard"; no one actually claims that, suggests Paul. But he can't hold off more than a paragraph or two before launching into just that argument.... "if theism is true", of course.

It's unfortunate that Paul fails so completely to grasp what is being argued by the Ethical Atheist. He has a quite a challenge trying to paint a veneer of coherence over his Calvinism, just on its own terms, but this post is an example of the kind of mental train wreck that comes out of adopting the "worldview" he's chosen. He cannot proceed, of course, from the agnostic point of rational inquiry, neither assuming theism true nor assuming it false. His game's up as soon as he allows that kind of abstraction. So he's bound to thinking about atheism through his lens of presuppositionalist Calvinism, which produces things like... well, go read the post.

You'll see what I mean.

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Phil Johnson: Certainly Clueless

Phil Johnson from this post over at Pyromaniacs a couple days ago:

Any assertion not so qualified risks being labeled "excessive confidence," which according to Brian McLaren is a "cancer" responsible for practically everything that's wrong in the world.

Except for one thing. When you start seeing what a noxious malignancy certainty is, then it's OK to be really, really confident about uncertainty itself. In McLaren's words, "Thinking along these lines, I became convinced that, yes, many of our world's worst atrocities were indeed the result of overconfidence" (Everything Must Change, p. 39).

You won't hear postmodernists or their Emerging-church cousins saying many things with that kind of settled conviction! But their doubts about certainty per se are unwaveringly emphatic.

You don't have to read very much of Phil's stuff to understand his penchant for projecting his own problems onto his opponents. Here, he's annoyed because Emergent types somehow maintain some certainty in their uncertainty about various theological issues.

You see, certainty for Phil is some thing you do, like mowing your lawn. It's not the result of a process of weighing and evaluation evidences with reason and logic, it's the means to an end, not the end itself, of an inquiry or anything else. A good pyromaniac is certain because being certain is good, so long its about the things a Pyro should be certain about (other things not sanctioned by Johnson demand solipsistic skepticism, but that's for another post).

We're dealing two different objects of scrutiny here, and this is a either a subtlety Phil just can't grasp, or Phil's hard in "spin mode" here. Uncertainty about theological propositions is the natural, rational, default position, if only because for so many theological claims there is no "feedback loop" to provide any objective verification about the basic soundness of the claim. Certainty about doubts themselves is trvial to justify, on the other hand. The doubts may be unfounded, but certainty about the fact that one has doubts needs nothing more than a little introspection to establish. In the case of historical abuses and tragic moral transgressions by Christians, there's little controversy in being certain there either. Can we be certain that murderous abuses of ecclesiastical power by, say, Torquemada or Calvin were, in fact, cases of extreme overconfidence in one's theological views?

Think about what uncertainty in that regard means from Phil's standpoint: Maybe Torquemada was right after all, or the nice folks who put Michael Servetus to death were as right as rain, and entitled to their confidence in it.

Here's a paragraph from a little further on in the post:

Ironically, the canonization of doubt as a virtue is also a clear echo of the very worst tendency of modernism (see the Ronald Nash quote above)—which means, really, that the "postmodern" skepticism of our Emerging friends isn't technically postmodern at all. Their modernist ancestors were fine with so-called scientific certainties; but they despised spiritual certainties—especially certainties grounded in the conviction that the Bible is truly God's Word. Emergent Christianity has expanded (not rejected) the modernist mindset by insisting on uncertainty about everything—except, of course, the infallible dogma of uncertainty.

Setting aside Phil's hyperbole here ("canonization of doubt" -- sheesh, point me to that canon, I'd like to see that!), what we have is Phil's objection to confidence in modernist empirical claims not being extended automatically to similar confidence in pre-modern spiritual claims. This may be news to Phil, but it shouldn't be news to anyone else -- these are claims with completely different epistemic foundations. They have different levels of trust to the reasoning mind because they deserve different levels of trust. Spiritual claims do not and cannot perform and be tested or falsified the way empirical claims can. We trust empirical claims because they are performative, and we reserve confidence in spiritual claims because they are speculative, and afford no validation or verification -- even in Phil's best case -- until after the inquirer is dead.

It's a hall of mirrors, looking through the "Phil Johnson" lens - an inchoate epistemology if there ever was one. That's bad enough, but read the whole post (or any of his posts), and note the supreme confidence Phil has in his perverted certainty.

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