Apologetic Arguments Analyzed.
I have noted that most debates revolved about philosophical apologetic arguments. I think this is a good thing because philosophy and logic is a common ground with premises agreed upon by almost all people. When one pulls logic out of it, if someone argues along the lines of logic and then makes the claim that god (or science) is outside of logic, then the common ground shatters. But imagine that the claim that god (or a field of science) can be logically shown upon agreed premises to be outside of logic. That would be a different story. In the case of god, I think the only way this has been attempted or could ever be is through a definition of god as simply being outside logic. Unfortunately, this is never going to work because no unbeliever will agree to the premise of the existence of a god and moreover one that is outside of logic. That would make the unbeliever a believer [of god] in the first place. In the case of science, logical derivations are not what concludes the validity of science. Science is worked upon from observations and hypotheses that work and the test of that working is the correct and accurate predictions of results. Theories that would most come to mind if one needs to think of a science that is close to illogical would be quantum theory and perhaps theories of the multiverse and such. While I don't know about the multiverse or whether it is even claimed a theory in the sense evolutionary and gravitational theory are held (rather than the school textbook's often definition of the word theory as something still needing to be proved before becoming a law), quantum mechanics are far as I know uses mathematics which is very much logical. The predictions of quantum theory have been tested and proven. I don't know if the theory of 10 dimensions share that status. And god? Can he also be proven without explicitly logic but through observations and predictions? Perhaps we would like to give a new set of rules by which we explain god rather than adopt the scientific method? Yes. We may. And there we have the apologetic arguments outside the realm of philosophy, though like science often still relying inherently on logic. And a new set of rules? Well, only if non-believers accept that new set of rules. It would be too much to ask for by saying, "We don't believe god should be proven through the narrowness of science. We propose a new way. We will pray for rain and if it rains, we have working evidence for god." Unreasonable? I think so, since we know that rain could have still happened even if you didn't pray or if you prayed to a bottle of beer. Miracles? Sure, only if they are indeed miracles beyond a doubt. To be fair, I would say this is a difficult basis for argument for god because, as mentioned in an earlier post "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" in small blue font, science is always fallible. So what may seem a miracle will always be doubted by skeptics who believe we have an incomplete understanding of the universe.
Let's take a look at non-philosophical apologetic arguments as listed in...of course, Wikipedia. For now I'll assume what it writes is accurate until I have time to research more on these non-philosophical arguments in apologetic sites. I hope you will agree this is not a biased approach.
4 types are listed:
Historical and Legal Evidentialism
Defense of Miracles
Prophetic Fulfillment
Biblical Apologetics
Historical and Legal Evidentialism
Defense of Miracles
Prophetic Fulfillment
Biblical Apologetics
Now, we can shelf prophetic fulfillment first because it relies on the accuracy of the events in the bible. This means accuracy of the bible because in overwhelming cases, the bible is the only source of the events. Disagree? Then we'll have to first discuss biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism. That is why I shelf prophetic fulfillment temporarily. It must be preceded with the two other apologetic arguments mentioned above.
Defense of Miracles argues that miracles are possible. I don't know the arguments yet, but it would likely be a direct clashing against science. Can't say much on this now.
Biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism are arguing the truth of the bible. Ah! This is the heart of the problem. This is the VERY heart of the problem. I once had 2 good friends who recommended reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ". That night, I found 5 connecting videos on it. My issue with it was this. Strobel spends the early section proving the validity and truth of the bible. The remaining 80% are arguments based on that validity. But, the proving was really not adequate proof. In other words, the biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism evidence was not convincing and advancing any arguments based on them was impossible. This exposes the very necessity of the truth of the bible in apologetics. If one believes the bible, then really, there is NO argument. The bible says Jesus is our Saviour. Then He is. The bible talks about the end times. Then there will be such end times. Again, as I mention in an earlier post "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" under point (1), apologetics should remember that their opponents do not believe in the bible the way believers do. The contents of the bible should not be used as a source of evidence in arguments until their opponents believe in the bible, after which I think there's really no battle anyway.
So why then do people not believe the bible? It doesn't take heresy or the selling of one's soul to find the bible difficult to hold as undisputable truth. Any theology, religion, or bible school student should know the problems with the bible.
The inconsistencies.
Who wrote the bible? Latin version, Greek version, rushed version, apocrypha.
Were there personal agendas? Status of women. Contempt for jews.
Were there accidents or translation issue. Was it a virgin or a young woman?
Why is there no historical evidence that Jews were in Eygpt.
Who wrote about Moses? He himself writing about his death?
What did the women see when they entered Jesus' tomb? What did they do after?
Why is Jesus traced through Joseph who isn't even the biological father?
Many more.
Recently, Bart Ehrman has become a popular source for people to read up on this and having read one of his books, "Misquoting Jesus", I highly recommend his works. They are easy to understand and he merely states facts that agreed upon by all scholars. It is Bible 101. Worried that Ehrman is lying and distorting facts? Well, it's always good to be skeptical and do research rather than trust one source. My input to this is that I took an Introduction to the Bible course in a Christian college in the states that is directly tied to the "Church of God" denomination, although technically they are non-denominational. I was new to all this back then and I struggled to make sense of the bible. I became an apologetic, I might say a very good one, without even reading apologetic material. I created my arguments, I looked at them as achievements, I made countless assumptions, I lost my faith without knowing it while thinking I was striving for the truth, I was mother teresa feeling no presence of god and believing it was a test, then I suddenly was no longer orthodox, to many I was speaking heresy, and then like Kafka's character in The Trial, I could choose to fight but never win, to concede, or to put the trial on infinite hold. Subconsciously, I put it on infinite hold and just as Kafka writes, there will be moments when you are forced again to make the decision. One day, I stopped putting it on hold. What this Intro to the Bible class taught me, the beginning of truth, is very simple and no different from what Ehrman writes about. Don't take my word for it. Find out more about biblical textual criticism.
After all...
Education is not about filling the bucket. It's about lighting the fire.
Fire's burning my bucket and giving me new vision.
So there we go. The non-philosophical apologetic arguments.
The philosophical arguments are more fun, though they are actually arguments for the existence of God, a generic one, rather than a specific one.
Cosmological argument.
First cause...unmoved mover...etc. Once again, I discussed this in some length in "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" under point (2MORE).
Teleological argument.
The fine-tuning argument. This is really an appeal to your imagination or lack thereof.
Say I grab 100 stack of cards and I shuffle them. The resulting order of the 5200 cards is very unlikely to occur considering the millions of other possible ordering. But, it WAS random. Now that the cards are in that order, the probability of it being that way is of course 1. I didn't actually order them in any way on purpose.
Say we imagine that there are billions of worlds (within a single universe). Billions of galaxies and freaking a lot of stars and such. Is it hard to imagine that somewhere the conditions are fine tuned for life? Even this can be misleading. It only needed to be fine-tuned for the way we developed, for amino acids to form and for us as humans to survive. But let's not forget that we are also fine-tuned for the world. we may be how we are because the world where the building blocks of our life started adapted for this world. And we don't know if other types of life (non-carbon based...etc) are impossible. Where did life start from? Well, this isn't really the teleological argument, but it might interest you to research the Miller-Urey experiment and similar topics. The very fact that we exist, that the probability of our existence is now set to 1 simply because we DO exist, is why the universe is observed to be fine tuned for our existence. I believe this is the gist of the anthropic principle.
Say we stumble across a watch in the gobi desert. What on earth...this could not have just happened? This must have been designed! Hence the argument for intelligent design. What about our anthropic principle? Since the watch does exist, it...could have come by chance out of unlikely odds right? Ugh...this doesn't sound convincing even though it's not impossible. But, we have a better explanation. It was designed! Fortunately for us, we now understand natural selection and evolution. A watch is now a bad analogy because, well, it WAS designed - we know that. The probability of it having come together by chance is irrelevant because we know it wasn't come together by chance. Let's look at a human being. Surely very complex. Designed? Understanding evolution, we now don't have to think so. Millions of years could have evolved us to be this complex being. It also better explains why sometimes we're born with 6 fingers, no skin, 3 boobs, stuck together, and always with vestiges like tailbones and appendixes. Irreducible complexity? That would pose a problem. I believe biologists, like Darwin, think that irreducible complexity would indeed challenge evolution severely. But there just hasn't been any thing of that nature yet. The eye, immune system, and bacteria flagellum have been shown to not be of irreducible complexity. The bombardier beetle too.
Ontological argument.
The concept of god means that god exist. Very much like [one of] Socrates' argument for the soul.
Imagine that you are walking around Paris. Now, you're seeing yourself from 3rd person point of view right? Hmm...what is this..."consciousness" that is watching "me" move about Paris?
Imagine that you're asleep, and your soul or some inner essence of you gets up and looks at your body. Wait, now what's watching this soul? Hmm...more thoughts.
Imagine instead, that you get up from your bed. You stand up and look at your bed, and you see yourself, sleeping. You look down and see nothing, you ain't got no hands or legs. You walk/move to the corridors and into the bathroom. You stand in front of your sink and look into the mirror. What do you see? Nothing. But you're looking.
Here, we have the concept for a soul. We also have the concept of consciousness although whether consciousness can be independent of the soul (or the body) is another question. Now, since we have a concept of the soul, souls must exist. Otherwise, we can't imagine it. Aristotle defines nothing as "that which rocks dream of". But we can picture our soul can't we?
Well, I can have a concept of a unicorn. Do unicorns exist? I think not.
Hey, wait a second...you're being tricky here aren't you. The reason why you have a concept of a unicorn is because you saw a picture of a unicorn, so it DOES exist to some extent, as a picture!
Okay...but wait, I've never seen a unicorn animated to drink Guinness stout, but I can imagine it.
Ho ho!! wait there! More treachery! You have a concept of drinking stout and a concept of a unicorn. You're just mixing them. It's like saying you've never heard the sentence "I eat gravity" but you can utter it, meaning the sentence can exist, because you've got the nouns, verbs, and linguistic tools to form the sentence.
Wait, i'm confused. are we running in circles? You see, I said I have a concept of unicorns but that unicorns don't exist. Later, you said it does but what you meant was my previous sighting of unicorn pictures. It still doesn't mean that real unicorns exist!
Exactly.
Likewise, souls don't have to exist. Take the contrapositive: Atlas, the man carrying the world, doesn't exist. Therefore, you can't have a concept of him. Certainly not true (unless we go into metaphysics and say oh that's not REALLY a concept...etc but i'm not skilled in excessive metaphysics).
Applying this from souls to god, we don't have an argument for the existence of god. No, not at all.
Moral argument.
If there are morals, they must be derived from an absolute. Like Plato's perfect forms.
Why must they be derived from an absolute? Even if so, why God? I disagree with the premises of the argument.
When we draw a circle, it's not really a circle. It's kind of imperfect. It's a reflection of a true form. A true circle. Imagine you're watching a screen, and there is a fire behind some rocks. And all you can see are the shadows, the representations of the rocks on the screen. But that is not the screen itself. That's more or less Plato's discussion of perfect abstract forms.
While the abstract idea can exist, the form need not. And applying this to a slippery thing like "moral" makes it much less simple. Yet, this argument is in my opinion a very interesting one because even if you don't believe in a god or an absolute, this question will prick you unceasingly: on what basis is morality? is all permissible? (this is one of the great explorations of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) Why should I not just go out and steal and kill? In fact, I notice I still DON'T do it. Why? Is there some absolute morality still in me? Some remaining god?
When people quote Dostoevsky to illustrate how this is a great problem with taking God out of the equation, remember that Dostoevsky was a believer. I won't spoil the novel by talking about it here on this topic, but keep in mind that Dostoevsky was an author (a very good one) but not an absolute divine authority on existentialism, nihilism, morality, meaning...etc. Be cautious.
Some convincing notions against a necessity for God for morality is what everyone now calls the zeitgeist. The "spirit of the age". We are not moral because of religion. Christianity was used to understand the acceptability of slavery. Sexism can be justified in the bible. Martin Luther King Jr. may have be a Christian, but by no means can we say that it was nothing but the book that inspired his struggle. The moral environment of our time is pushing our standards of morality, not the holy books. Search up videos or works of Dawkins discussing this.
Another thing is that morality increased survivability. In fact, religion seems to have been important for us to become what we are today. The principle of cooperation was worked out by showing that when individuals worked together, they tended to succeed as a group over individuals who worked for themselves. Of course cooperation came at prices to the individual. But lest we think that concern purely for the self is the natural state of affairs outside of morality, we should note that in biology many creatures work for the good of the group and it is argued that this the for the survival of not only their phenotype but their extended phenotype.
Morality is not that elusive.
Transcendental argument.
Our ability to think and reason require a god.
Presuppositional argument.
Basic beliefs in theists and non-theist require a god as a pre-condition.
Alvin Plantina's argument that belief in God is properly basic.
Pascal's wager.
If even an argument at all. But this is often used almost as a last line of defense. As an argument for a specific god, it fails because wagering on Jesus is not wagering on Allah (presumably you can't wager on too many especially since we're living in monotheistic times). You're also not wagering on Buddha, the Dalai Lama even, or obsolete gods like Zeus, or mother earth, although one could argue that you don't really suffer a penalty for not believing in Zeus or Baal (well, maybe you won't be fertile or have rain, but you don't go to Hell). And even if we bend it such that the wagering of your soul (if any) on God X has 99% chance of a good post-death result, there is no evidence for God X. We're still talking pony unicorns and space meatballs.
Education is not about filling the bucket. It's about lighting the fire.
Fire's burning my bucket and giving me new vision.
So there we go. The non-philosophical apologetic arguments.
The philosophical arguments are more fun, though they are actually arguments for the existence of God, a generic one, rather than a specific one.
Cosmological argument.
First cause...unmoved mover...etc. Once again, I discussed this in some length in "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" under point (2MORE).
Teleological argument.
The fine-tuning argument. This is really an appeal to your imagination or lack thereof.
Say I grab 100 stack of cards and I shuffle them. The resulting order of the 5200 cards is very unlikely to occur considering the millions of other possible ordering. But, it WAS random. Now that the cards are in that order, the probability of it being that way is of course 1. I didn't actually order them in any way on purpose.
Say we imagine that there are billions of worlds (within a single universe). Billions of galaxies and freaking a lot of stars and such. Is it hard to imagine that somewhere the conditions are fine tuned for life? Even this can be misleading. It only needed to be fine-tuned for the way we developed, for amino acids to form and for us as humans to survive. But let's not forget that we are also fine-tuned for the world. we may be how we are because the world where the building blocks of our life started adapted for this world. And we don't know if other types of life (non-carbon based...etc) are impossible. Where did life start from? Well, this isn't really the teleological argument, but it might interest you to research the Miller-Urey experiment and similar topics. The very fact that we exist, that the probability of our existence is now set to 1 simply because we DO exist, is why the universe is observed to be fine tuned for our existence. I believe this is the gist of the anthropic principle.
Say we stumble across a watch in the gobi desert. What on earth...this could not have just happened? This must have been designed! Hence the argument for intelligent design. What about our anthropic principle? Since the watch does exist, it...could have come by chance out of unlikely odds right? Ugh...this doesn't sound convincing even though it's not impossible. But, we have a better explanation. It was designed! Fortunately for us, we now understand natural selection and evolution. A watch is now a bad analogy because, well, it WAS designed - we know that. The probability of it having come together by chance is irrelevant because we know it wasn't come together by chance. Let's look at a human being. Surely very complex. Designed? Understanding evolution, we now don't have to think so. Millions of years could have evolved us to be this complex being. It also better explains why sometimes we're born with 6 fingers, no skin, 3 boobs, stuck together, and always with vestiges like tailbones and appendixes. Irreducible complexity? That would pose a problem. I believe biologists, like Darwin, think that irreducible complexity would indeed challenge evolution severely. But there just hasn't been any thing of that nature yet. The eye, immune system, and bacteria flagellum have been shown to not be of irreducible complexity. The bombardier beetle too.
Ontological argument.
The concept of god means that god exist. Very much like [one of] Socrates' argument for the soul.
Imagine that you are walking around Paris. Now, you're seeing yourself from 3rd person point of view right? Hmm...what is this..."consciousness" that is watching "me" move about Paris?
Imagine that you're asleep, and your soul or some inner essence of you gets up and looks at your body. Wait, now what's watching this soul? Hmm...more thoughts.
Imagine instead, that you get up from your bed. You stand up and look at your bed, and you see yourself, sleeping. You look down and see nothing, you ain't got no hands or legs. You walk/move to the corridors and into the bathroom. You stand in front of your sink and look into the mirror. What do you see? Nothing. But you're looking.
Here, we have the concept for a soul. We also have the concept of consciousness although whether consciousness can be independent of the soul (or the body) is another question. Now, since we have a concept of the soul, souls must exist. Otherwise, we can't imagine it. Aristotle defines nothing as "that which rocks dream of". But we can picture our soul can't we?
Well, I can have a concept of a unicorn. Do unicorns exist? I think not.
Hey, wait a second...you're being tricky here aren't you. The reason why you have a concept of a unicorn is because you saw a picture of a unicorn, so it DOES exist to some extent, as a picture!
Okay...but wait, I've never seen a unicorn animated to drink Guinness stout, but I can imagine it.
Ho ho!! wait there! More treachery! You have a concept of drinking stout and a concept of a unicorn. You're just mixing them. It's like saying you've never heard the sentence "I eat gravity" but you can utter it, meaning the sentence can exist, because you've got the nouns, verbs, and linguistic tools to form the sentence.
Wait, i'm confused. are we running in circles? You see, I said I have a concept of unicorns but that unicorns don't exist. Later, you said it does but what you meant was my previous sighting of unicorn pictures. It still doesn't mean that real unicorns exist!
Exactly.
Likewise, souls don't have to exist. Take the contrapositive: Atlas, the man carrying the world, doesn't exist. Therefore, you can't have a concept of him. Certainly not true (unless we go into metaphysics and say oh that's not REALLY a concept...etc but i'm not skilled in excessive metaphysics).
Applying this from souls to god, we don't have an argument for the existence of god. No, not at all.
Moral argument.
If there are morals, they must be derived from an absolute. Like Plato's perfect forms.
Why must they be derived from an absolute? Even if so, why God? I disagree with the premises of the argument.
When we draw a circle, it's not really a circle. It's kind of imperfect. It's a reflection of a true form. A true circle. Imagine you're watching a screen, and there is a fire behind some rocks. And all you can see are the shadows, the representations of the rocks on the screen. But that is not the screen itself. That's more or less Plato's discussion of perfect abstract forms.
While the abstract idea can exist, the form need not. And applying this to a slippery thing like "moral" makes it much less simple. Yet, this argument is in my opinion a very interesting one because even if you don't believe in a god or an absolute, this question will prick you unceasingly: on what basis is morality? is all permissible? (this is one of the great explorations of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) Why should I not just go out and steal and kill? In fact, I notice I still DON'T do it. Why? Is there some absolute morality still in me? Some remaining god?
When people quote Dostoevsky to illustrate how this is a great problem with taking God out of the equation, remember that Dostoevsky was a believer. I won't spoil the novel by talking about it here on this topic, but keep in mind that Dostoevsky was an author (a very good one) but not an absolute divine authority on existentialism, nihilism, morality, meaning...etc. Be cautious.
Some convincing notions against a necessity for God for morality is what everyone now calls the zeitgeist. The "spirit of the age". We are not moral because of religion. Christianity was used to understand the acceptability of slavery. Sexism can be justified in the bible. Martin Luther King Jr. may have be a Christian, but by no means can we say that it was nothing but the book that inspired his struggle. The moral environment of our time is pushing our standards of morality, not the holy books. Search up videos or works of Dawkins discussing this.
Another thing is that morality increased survivability. In fact, religion seems to have been important for us to become what we are today. The principle of cooperation was worked out by showing that when individuals worked together, they tended to succeed as a group over individuals who worked for themselves. Of course cooperation came at prices to the individual. But lest we think that concern purely for the self is the natural state of affairs outside of morality, we should note that in biology many creatures work for the good of the group and it is argued that this the for the survival of not only their phenotype but their extended phenotype.
Morality is not that elusive.
Transcendental argument.
Our ability to think and reason require a god.
Presuppositional argument.
Basic beliefs in theists and non-theist require a god as a pre-condition.
Alvin Plantina's argument that belief in God is properly basic.
Pascal's wager.
If even an argument at all. But this is often used almost as a last line of defense. As an argument for a specific god, it fails because wagering on Jesus is not wagering on Allah (presumably you can't wager on too many especially since we're living in monotheistic times). You're also not wagering on Buddha, the Dalai Lama even, or obsolete gods like Zeus, or mother earth, although one could argue that you don't really suffer a penalty for not believing in Zeus or Baal (well, maybe you won't be fertile or have rain, but you don't go to Hell). And even if we bend it such that the wagering of your soul (if any) on God X has 99% chance of a good post-death result, there is no evidence for God X. We're still talking pony unicorns and space meatballs.
No comments:
Post a Comment