- pearlgirl
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
My only objection is the standard that Dr. Scharp seems to think is necessary. Not just the subjective argument which I think is a good enough reason to reject it, but mostly b/c given the choices even at 49.1% I would still find theism the best choice, and using Pascal as a guide it is helpful to remember Atheism offers no explanation, no purpose, no coherence to our experience(free will, moral intuition, stark altruism) , no hope for the injustice in the world, no reason for suffering. It offers nothing but the promise of the most money and guns running the agenda and people calling the shots on what society should value. Our little political experiment, while not perfect ,has allowed for peace and unprecedented flourishing of human rights...even if it weren't true there is a good argument that the undergirding of our laws and founding documents are preferable to anything else in human history. That undergirding is theism. (BTW if anyone reads the journals of George Washington they will not be persuaded that He was a deist )
I understand his point, we do need to be quite skeptical of our preference...but that holds for any world view, any time any where. Given proper weighting I assert Theism is to be preferred unless the weight against it is overwhelming.
Beyond that, he was respectful, well prepared and seemed to enjoy the process (no obvious axe to grind against a God he does not believe in...and that is refreshing)
- Dennis
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Hi pearl,
pearlgirl wrote:
Atheism offers no explanation, no purpose, no coherence to our experience(free will, moral intuition, stark altruism) , no hope for the injustice in the world, no reason for suffering.
These points will be the fundamental disagreement points on metaphysical grounds for the Classical Theist. But I don't think that all of them simply follow from Atheism.
John, could you please draw a distinction between contingent truths and necessary truths, and how 'violating' necessary truths could probably lead into the kind of contradiction Dr. Scharp is looking for, whereas the former wouldn't? Or is this wrongheaded somewhere?
Last edited by Dennis (4/18/2016 8:17 am)
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Thread Starter- KevinScharp
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Because it would be so irrational to give up our best scientific theories in favor of some ancient texts about miracles. And it's not what the same person would do with respect to other ancient texts about miracles (e.g., Homer).
This is what I've contested, ever since. There's nothing I would need to give up. Those theories are contingent upon how the world works, and how the world works is contingent upon God's creative causality. Hitting the 'reset' button simply means a suspension of the conditions which are contingent upon God himself.
You've admitted that you'd give up all our best scientific theories that are incompatible with the alleged miracles. So there is something you would need to give up. What would be the consequences? I suppose that would depend on what you'd replace those theories with. Whatever it is, it is going to have an impact on scientific practice and technology.
Here's another form of critique. If you're conception of science simply concerns itself without leaving defined what it is actually describing (since you've repeatedly failed to answer this), then there's no reason to assume it'd be irrational to do anything. You're the one refusing to define what science is about. And that is plenty insufficient.
Nice, I like this -- it's a more fruitful direction for you. However, I did say explicitly what science is about: all natural phenomena. That's not a definition, but it is an answer to your question.
That's why I said, other than for mere pragmatic purposes (say that we even give those theories up), what form of critique would this be? You've not established that science produces actual knowledge of the world. In fact, you refuse to say what it is about. If that's the case, why would it be irrational to do this disservice? This would actually hurt your conception of what science is, since it's nothing but methodological device. To what end?
I don't have to establish that science produces knowledge -- although it obviously does if anything does. If you reject our best scientific theories then you should plan on giving up your reliance on them as well. I'm assuming you're not prepared to do without technology, so what's your plan here? Rely on the fruits of science while steadfastly refusing to accept scientific theories? That hardly seems reasonable. I'm genuinely asking here; this isn't a rhetorical device.
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Nice, I like this -- it's a more fruitful direction for you. However, I did say explicitly what science is about: all natural phenomena. That's not a definition, but it is an answer to your question.
Sweet. What is a natural phenomena? That's the next question.
I don't have to establish that science produces knowledge -- although it obviously does if anything does. If you reject our best scientific theories then you should plan on giving up your reliance on them as well. I'm assuming you're not prepared to do without technology, so what's your plan here? Rely on the fruits of science while steadfastly refusing to accept scientific theories? That hardly seems reasonable. I'm genuinely asking here; this isn't a rhetorical device.
The plan is to build science in a rigoros natural philosophy. Relying on the 'fruits of science' only insofar as there is a metaphysic to support it. You and I disagree that science produces knowledge about the world in and of itself, I reject this and claim that this simply gives the most impoverished form of knowledge where the heavy-work is done by the natural philosophy on which a scientist makes any prediction.
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Thread Starter- KevinScharp
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Why think that that is metaphysically possible? If Jesus's body disappears, and it had mass, and no new mass/energy is added by God, then then we're talking about a mathematical contradiction. That's not metaphysically possible.
Technically Jesus' body rose into the sky until it was no longer visible. We don't know what was done with its mass/energy:
Acts 1:9:
And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.
[καὶ ταῦτα εἰπὼν βλεπόντων αὐτῶν ἐπήρθη καὶ νεφέλη ὑπέλαβεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αὐτῶν.]
It could have been converted to energy, stored somewhere, chopped to bits, who knows? It's not even clear that after the resurrection itself the body is material in the way we normally understand material any longer. I don't know how God reconciles his actions with his general laws. Jesus claims to no be a spirit/ghost after his ressurection, but other than that, it's not clear.
So he has a material body -- and it ended up in heaven, which I'm assuming is not a location in spacetime. So some mass/energy disappeared.
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Professor Scharp, I've nearly finished typing up a summary for your part of the original debate, and I think I've understood you to claim that the "No Divine Psychology Argument" cuts against the cosmological argument and the teleological argument. (see around 23:00 in the linked video).
I have something like 83.1415926535% confidence that we classical theists will disagree with you on fundamental metaphysical grounds, but I would like you to expand on this claim before I forward a criticism of it, since it would be helpful to understand what you mean by it. The cosmological argument and the teleological argument are easy to misconstrue, and even theists do so frequently, so I want to make sure there isn't a simple misunderstanding. I see how one could make an *easy* misunderstanding re the teleological argument, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the divine psychology objection would, even on a loose understanding, affect the cosmological argument.
Sweet, thank you. Yes, I think it affects the cosmological argument. I went over this a bit in the discussion, but didn't really explore it well. I can write up something on this point this afternoon.
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
You've admitted that you'd give up all our best scientific theories that are incompatible with the alleged miracles. So there is something you would need to give up. What would be the consequences? I suppose that would depend on what you'd replace those theories with. Whatever it is, it is going to have an impact on scientific practice and technology.
This would only be the case if tomorrow, or 5 seconds after writing this comment the creative Causality of God makes the world so that the whole identity conditions for the conservation of energy changes completely. For that to happen, the things on which this law supervenes must be changed, and if that is changed, then it no longer is what it was. It'd be a totally different thing. Until and unless this 'new thing' comes to light which radically differs from the previous one on which the law of conservation supervened upon, I wouldn't concede.
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Thread Starter- KevinScharp
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
My only objection is the standard that Dr. Scharp seems to think is necessary. Not just the subjective argument which I think is a good enough reason to reject it, but mostly b/c given the choices even at 49.1% I would still find theism the best choice, and using Pascal as a guide it is helpful to remember.
If your confidence for some claim is less than 50%, then by definition you think that claim is more likely to be false than true. Either way, you're still invoking a standard, so I don't see why you think one is unnecessary.
Atheism offers no explanation, no purpose, no coherence to our experience(free will, moral intuition, stark altruism) , no hope for the injustice in the world, no reason for suffering. It offers nothing but the promise of the most money and guns running the agenda and people calling the shots on what society should value. Our little political experiment, while not perfect ,has allowed for peace and unprecedented flourishing of human rights...even if it weren't true there is a good argument that the undergirding of our laws and founding documents are preferable to anything else in human history. That undergirding is theism. (BTW if anyone reads the journals of George Washington they will not be persuaded that He was a deist )
These sorts of gross mischaracterizations and caricatures don't help the conversation.
I understand his point, we do need to be quite skeptical of our preference...but that holds for any world view, any time any where. Given proper weighting I assert Theism is to be preferred unless the weight against it is overwhelming.
So ... extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence?
Beyond that, he was respectful, well prepared and seemed to enjoy the process (no obvious axe to grind against a God he does not believe in...and that is refreshing)
Thanks for that -- I did enjoy it tremendously, as did Craig (as he told me at the end and is evident from his remarks about it in his defenders podcast). I hope we can do it again.
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Hi John(sorry to bother you again!)
What kind of ontological status would the law of conservation have? Is it a thing in and of itself, is it a property, is it a relation?
Last edited by Dennis (4/18/2016 8:40 am)
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Thread Starter- KevinScharp
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Re: William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God?
Nice, I like this -- it's a more fruitful direction for you. However, I did say explicitly what science is about: all natural phenomena. That's not a definition, but it is an answer to your question.
Sweet. What is a natural phenomena? That's the next question.
Good, that's the right question (along with 'what is science?' which has curiously been absent from the discussion). Just to be clear, 'phenomenon' is singular and 'phenomena' is plural. Anything that happens in spacetime is a natural phenomenon. Is that a definition? No, but it'll do for accurately characterizing the scope of the scientific theories to which I'm appealing. Notice that the theist relies on the concept of natural phenomena as well when defining miracles -- which are natural phenomena with supernatural causes -- and the universe -- which is the totality of all causally connected natural phenomena containing us. Notice also that Craig defers to James Sinclair on this matter, who then appeals to spacetime as well.