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Comment by doone on March 1, 2014 at 10:24pm

ATHEISM IS IN TROUBLE, ACCORDING TO TERRY EAGLETON.

Jonathan Rée at The Guardian:

Throughout the 20th century it went from strength to strength, as churches lost their congregations and theology was put to flight by natural science. But then there was 9/11 and everything changed. Traditional churchgoing may have continued its long decline, while the strident scepticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens still struck a chord with the book-buying classes, but, in the rest of the world, religion was rousing itself from a long slumber. Wild forms of worship – Christian, Islamic or other – have now taken hold of the poor and the oppressed. Religious faith has gone viral.

Or so it seems to Eagleton, and he thinks we should have seen it coming. He is a celebrated practitioner of wide-ranging intellectual commentary, with bestselling books to his credit and acres of polemical journalism. He always seems to have read all the philosophers and theorists that the rest of us find too fearsome, and he has a knack for fitting them neatly into place by means of a well-turned epigram or an alliterative turn of phrase. His prose is alive with dichotomies, insults and laugh-aloud jokes, and at the end we are invariably invited to savour the "irony" as the masterminds are shown losing their mojo as the truth slips out of their grasp. In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers.

more here.

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Comment by doone on February 23, 2014 at 12:45pm

New Atheism vs Apathetic Atheism

FEB 23 2014 @ 7:28AM

Thomas Wells explains why he rejects the atheism of Dawkins and Dennett:

The fundamental problem with all this is that the new atheists accept that religion is important enough that it matters whether one has the right or wrong beliefs about it, and have specific views about what religious beliefs one should hold. What separates them from me is that I don’t consider religion worthy of rational dissent, and I don’t consider that true freedom from religion would require me to rationally justify my lack of belief or interest in it. Of course god doesn’t exist. So what?

There are many supernatural things that some people believe in that I don’t, including Santa Claus, UFOs, crop circles, witches, ghosts, homeopathy, gods, fairies, and astrology. I see no particular reason to select out my non-belief in gods from that list of non-beliefs for special attention and justification. I see no no more reason to describe myself as an atheist, than as an afairieist, ahomeopathist, etc. To put it another way, my non-belief is apathetic: the nonexistence of God/Gods is a matter of great insignificance to me.

Comment by Onyango Makagutu on February 19, 2014 at 12:09am

Thanks Doone. Nice read

Comment by Neal on February 17, 2014 at 3:19pm

Good read, thanks.

Comment by doone on February 17, 2014 at 9:59am

THE ARGUMENT FOR DESIGN WAS REFUTED BY HUME

by Michael Lopresto 

It's commonplace today to think that the argument for design, with the aim of rationally establishing the existence of God, was refuted by Darwin in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species. This view is not only held by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins, but also top-notch philosophers such, John Mackie and Elliot Sober (and to some extent Arif Ahmed). Against this commonplace, the philosophers Simon Blackburn and Graham Oppy object that on logical grounds, David Hume (1711 - 1776), the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, dealt the argument for design its fatal blow. This was done in Hume's magnificent and delightful Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, but written over the middle years of the century.

So, what exactly is the argument for design? It's an argument intended to demonstrate the existence of God—and here we're concerned only with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God who's defined as being omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good—from the observation that there is apparent design in the world. The term "observation" is crucial here; the argument's not intended to proceed purely from the armchair like the ontological argument is, for instance, which seeks to deduce the existence of God from the mere concept GOD (the being which no greater can be conceived), and the ancillary premise that existence is a perfection. Indeed, the world could be any way at all—it could contain much more gratuitous evil, say, and the ontological argument wouldn't claim to be any less valid. This is because the ontological argument is purely a priori: it's an argument that proceeds independently of experience (observation) of the world.

The argument for design isn't like this. Rather, it's an a posteriori argument, deploying contingent truths about apparent design garnered from experience. Indeed, the argument can't even be deductively valid, as there is no valid inference from apparent design to intentional design. So the argument needs to be empirical in nature, namely, an inference to the best explanation (explanatory inference for short), which is an empirical inference par excellence (I think it's also probably the central inference of philosophy, but that's another story). So the argument for design, for the existence of God, is that the best explanation (philosophical premise) of apparent design (empirical premise) in nature is that nature was intentionally designed by God.

Continue reading "The Argument for Design was Refuted by Hume"

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Comment by doone on February 16, 2014 at 6:41pm

The Basis Of God

FEB 16 2014 @ 11:19AM

Adam Gopnik ponders shifting cultural attitudes toward atheism and belief:

[T]he need for God never vanishes. Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man, asked to explain the origin of God, admits that early humans first adored “a guy in our village named Phil, and for a time we worshipped him.” Phil “was big, and mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands!” One day, a thunderstorm came up, and a lightning bolt hit Phil. “We gathered around and saw that he was dead. Then we said to one another, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!’ ” The basic urge to recognize something bigger than Phil still gives theistic theories an audience, even as their explanations of the lightning-maker turn ever gappier and gassier. …

As the explanations get more desperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster. David Bentley Hart’s recent “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss” (Yale) doesn’t even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got the party started; instead, it roots the proof of his existence in the existence of the universe itself. Since you can explain the universe only by means of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many of them)? The answer to this unanswerable question is God. He stands outside everything, “the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract,” the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception, is minimalist in effect. Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil’s problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all. This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels. A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology—the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full.

Comment by doone on February 15, 2014 at 7:55pm

Only God Can Make A Sunset

Comment by doone on February 13, 2014 at 8:54pm

The Bible's anachronistic camel problem  FEB 13

There are too many camels in the Bible. Evidence suggests they were domesticated in Israel centuries after the events in Genesis took place.

Camels probably had little or no role in the lives of such early Jewish patriarchs as Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, who lived in the first half of the second millennium B.C., and yet stories about them mention these domesticated pack animals more than 20 times. Genesis 24, for example, tells of Abraham's servant going by camel on a mission to find a wife for Isaac.

These anachronisms are telling evidence that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it narrates and is not always reliable as verifiable history. These camel stories "do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium," said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, "but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period."

Dr. Mizrahi likened the practice to a historical account of medieval events that veers off to a description of "how people in the Middle Ages used semitrailers in order to transport goods from one European kingdom to another."

Update: Added "in Israel" to clarify the camel domestication timeline...they were domesticated much earlier in the Arabian Peninsula.

Archaeologists have established that camels were probably domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In the southern Levant, where Israel is located, the oldest known domesticated camel bones are from the Aravah Valley, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and was an ancient center of copper production. At a 2009 dig, Dr. Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found to the 11th to 9th century BCE.

(via @arbesman)

Comment by doone on February 13, 2014 at 9:00am

A Flood Story Older Than Noah

FEB 13 2014 @ 8:31AM

A recently deciphered Mesopotamian tablet offers yet another alternative telling of the flood story – and at 3,750 years, it predates the Genesis version we know so well. Mark Esposito is enthused:

The find is important because it points up the similarities in the ways ancient cultures viewed the world and coped with its unpredictable circumstances. Seeing themselves as pawns before angry gods and survivors of catastrophes beyond their control empowered these civilizations and brought disparate tribes together. Indeed, some scholars have opined that a function of ancient religion was to galvanize groups of humans with a common ancestry and belief system regardless of the effects of geography or political culture. The flood story seems have served that function many times over as it spread throughout the Fertile Crescent into Egypt and North Africa and beyond. You can read about flood stories around the world here. There are hundreds.

British Museum curator Irving Finkel, author of the forthcoming The Ark Before Noah, explains what makes this new story unlike the others:

When the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humor, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark. Atra-hasis’s Ark, however, was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fiber rope, wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished vessel. The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 square meters (equivalent to two-thirds the area of a football pitch), and six-meter high walls. The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would reach from London to Edinburgh!

To anyone who has the typical image learnt from children’s toys and book illustrations in mind, a round Ark is bizarre at first, but, on reflection, the idea makes sense. A waterproofed coracle would never sink,and being round isn’t a problem – it never had to go anywhere: all it had to do was float and keep the contents safe: a cosmic lifeboat. Palm-and-pitch coracles had been seen on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers since time immemorial: they were still a common sight on Iraq’s great waterways in the 1950s.

Comment by Onyango Makagutu on February 4, 2014 at 8:48am

doone, there is a similar argument but the proponent argues that Satan is the worst possible being that can exist and since existence is a perfection, a worst possible being that exists in reality is better than that doesn't exist. It is here attached.

New.pdf

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