201. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23631 by stevencarrwork on March 1, 2007 at 10:03 pm

Steve99 pointed out Plantinga's statement 'According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds'

Plantinga is famous in religious circles for his claims that there are only a few logically possible worlds which contain a omnibenevolent, omniscient God.

Many atheists point out that a world containg this amount of pointless suffering is incompatible with the existence of a all-good God.

Plantinga claims he can refute this by showing that there is at least ONE world which can contain evil and an all-good God.

But Plantinga now claims he believes that ALL possible worlds are compataible with the existence of an all-good God, not just one.

This is something he never attempts to show is possible.

As always, religious thought is a mass of contradictions, even by the very sophisticated theologians, of whom it is only necessary to mention their names to have refuted Dawkins.

202. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23557 by stevencarrwork on March 1, 2007 at 2:24 pm

Plantinga writes 'If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable - a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it.'

Plantinga just blew my irony-meter to pieces!

Plantinga himself, of course, maintains that it is possible that there are supernatural beings who are highly motivated to attack our reasoning and senses, and are perfectly capable of doing so.

Somebody who claims that it is possible that there are demons has no right whatever to believe anything that he himself says, because for all Plantinga knows, he might be possessed by a demon.

If naturalism is self-defeating (which it isn't) , supernaturalism is self-defeating in spades as even the Bible claims God deceives people (2 Thessalonians 2:11)

Natural selection was not the tool by which we developed a belief in natural selection, so Plantinga's argument makes as much sense as claiming that we should not believe we can play golf, because natural selection has not made us totally reliable golf-players.

203. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23554 by stevencarrwork on March 1, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Plantinga's arguments are pretty bad.

A Christian Evangelical Professor, Professor Greg Welty sent me an email once, confirming that Plantinga's defense to atheistic arguments could also be used to show that it is logically consistent to believe that people really only have one leg, even though our memory and senses tell us that almost everybody has two legs.

Plantinga comes up with some lovely stuff in his essay.

He says mind is organised complexity, and so the mind of God doesn't need explaining.

Anybody care to come up with a raft of theologians saying Dawkins is wrong because God is simple to contrast with Plantinga saying Dawkins is wrong because God is complex?

Plantinga asks 'Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?'

Answer. They aren't always reliable.

Plantinga complains that if evolution is true, our sense would not be reliable.

I guess the answer to this is literally staring him in the face.

Plantinga wears glasses, because his eyes have been designed by natural selection and are not always reliable.

You've got to love people who say that only a God could have designed such a complex thing as a human body, and then have to put on their reading glasses to read out the works telling them how God designed us.

204. My critics are wrong to call me dogmatic

Comment #22202 by stevencarrwork on February 13, 2007 at 12:36 pm

The irony of somebody in the Free Church of Scotland calling others dogmatic.

Of course, there was no irony, rather it was to be expected, that the Letter to the Times would not deal with Dawkins point that faith is , by definition, founded on dogma.

And that this dogma is believed, well, dogmatically is the best word.

And the letter to the Times did not deal with Dawkins point that McGrath misrepresents Dawkins views on a continuing basis, apparently relying on the fact the people who praise McGrath , in the main, won't read 'The God Delusion' to see how accurately McGrath presents Dawkins views.

205. Does Richard Dawkins exist?

Comment #21650 by stevencarrwork on February 10, 2007 at 10:51 am

Is this David Anderson the same David Anderson who used to post often on the Usenet Group uk.religion.christian ?

206. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21587 by stevencarrwork on February 10, 2007 at 2:50 am

Some questions science cannot answer

People have killed each other over these questions, yet science is helpless when faced with them.

Is the Holy Spirit consubstantial with God? Is He of the same essence as God?

Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son? Or did the Holy Spirit proceed only from the Father? (After 1,000 years the Eastern and Western Churches are still split on this)


In the Eucharist, is the substance of Jesus consubtantial with the substance of the bread and wine, or have the substance of the bread and wine transubstantiated into the substance of Jesus?

Science is useless to answer these questions, but they are the strengths of theologians like McGrath , who can answer them all simply by saying 'It is a mystery'.

207. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21581 by stevencarrwork on February 10, 2007 at 1:58 am

MCGRATH
'Both these scientists, with a long track record of peer-reviewed publications, made the case for belief in God as the best and most satisfying explanation of the way things are.'

CARR
And failed miserably.

It is little use quoting books by tailors that explain how wonderfully the Emperor's New Clothes suit him.


We still can't see any real material.

208. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21568 by stevencarrwork on February 10, 2007 at 12:24 am

McGrath claims Dawkins argues along the following lines 'Science has all the answers — and God isn't even on the short-list. Only science-hating idiots think otherwise.'

Presumably McGrath thinks nothing of lying for Jesus.

209. Interview with Alister McGrath, author of 'The Dawkins Delusion?'

Comment #20881 by stevencarrwork on February 6, 2007 at 10:33 pm

And McGrath continues to run away from Dawkins claim that if there is a God he has created animals to tear each other to pieces, simply to get food.

210. Interview with Alister McGrath, author of 'The Dawkins Delusion?'

Comment #20879 by stevencarrwork on February 6, 2007 at 10:23 pm

Once more, an article by McGrath is refreshingly short of any more evidence for God than it is for Santa Claus (who was a historical character by the way).

211. Believing In Things Unseen Is Not Delusion

Comment #20775 by stevencarrwork on February 6, 2007 at 12:35 pm

The man is just crazy if he thinks that 4 anonymous documents of unknown provenance are just as good evidence as the evidence for Agincourt.

Christians are often really, really, bad historians.


Let us not forget , that within 20 years of the alleged resurrection, converted Jesus-worshippers in Corinth were scoffing at the very idea that God would choose to raise a corpse from its grave.

Were Englishmen scoffing at the idea that archers were involved in the Battle of Agincourt?

212. Believing In Things Unseen Is Not Delusion

Comment #20771 by stevencarrwork on February 6, 2007 at 11:44 am

It is good to see religious people exposing the vacuity of their position.

'Perhaps, but we have no more reason to question the historicity of the major events of Jesus' life than we do, say, Agincourt.'

Perhaps Christians should say the same of the Koran, or the Book of Mormon.

Of course, they don't , and the same reasoning that Christians use about the Koran and the Book of Mormon applies to the New Testament.

See http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm for details.

213. A Christmas thunderbolt for the arch-enemy of religion

Comment #14855 by stevencarrwork on December 26, 2006 at 2:28 am

CORNWELL writes 'Whenever and wherever he deemed religionists a threat to his own self-idolatry he persecuted them and purged them.'

CARR
Well, to be fair to Hitler, Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer did try to blow him up.

Hitler could hardly have expected the followers of a religion which said 'Love your enemies', 'Turn the other cheek', and 'resist not evil' to carry out an act of murder.

There is another quote of Chesterton's which is relevant here 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.'

214. A Christmas thunderbolt for the arch-enemy of religion

Comment #14773 by stevencarrwork on December 25, 2006 at 1:44 am

'The profound verities of the Sermon on the Mount'?

What tosh!

Does Cornwell put oil on his head when he fasts?

215. A Christmas thunderbolt for the arch-enemy of religion

Comment #14772 by stevencarrwork on December 25, 2006 at 1:42 am

CORNWELl'But consider the wise warning of GK Chesterton. When people cease to believe in God, they come to believe not in nothing, but in anything.'

CARR
More ignorance from a Dawkins-reviewer. Chesterton did not say that.

CORNWELL
'Are you not aware that Hitler yearned for religion's capitulation to science? In his rambling table talk he declared that "the dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. When understanding of the universe has become widespread . . . then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity". '

CARR
I would like to see the original German for that!

I can find no passage in my copy of 'Tischgespraeche', by the original stenographer.

Hitler explicitly denied Darwinism and thought of human beings as specially created by God.

216. The Courtier's Reply

Comment #14769 by stevencarrwork on December 25, 2006 at 1:25 am

Of course theology is a non-subject, that you don't have to have spent 20 years studying before you can criticise.

In the Daily Telegraph on 23/12/2006, John Humphrys reported his shock when an Anglican vicar repeated the views of Sir John Polkinghorne,a Templeton Prizewinner and an expert witness for theology on "The Trouble with Atheism."

The vicar said :- "Terrible though it is to us, God grants the same freedom to cancer cells that he grants even to the most noble and virtuous of us."

Here is where Polkinghorne justifies such a view.

http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/CIS/polkinghorne/lecture6.html


John Polkinghorne :-
Nevertheless, science does offer theology some modest help here. Theologically we understand an evolving universe as a creation that is allowed by its Creator "to make itself", to explore and realize its God-given potentiality in its own way. Such a creation seems a greater good than a ready-made world.

It is a most fitting creation of the God of love, whose creation could never be just a divine puppet theatre.

Yet such a creation has a cost. The same cellular processes that have driven the fruitful history of evolution through genetic mutation, must necessarily allow other cells to mutate and become malignant.

The anguishing fact that there is cancer in creation is not gratuitous, something that a more compassionate or competent Creator could easily have remedied. It is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. I think this is mildly helpful in relations to the problem of evil and suffering.

CARR
But theology is a non-subject. What appeals to one person's taste is dismissed by another as bad taste.

See the blog http://exilefromgroggs.blogspot.com/2006/12/what-humphrys-found-out-about-god.html where a Templeton Prizewinner's theology is described as "...pretty silly thing for the vicar to say - it was poor science, and poor theology."


There are no facts to decide what is good theology and what is bad theology.

Good theology is what you can sell to the believers.

Bad theology is what does not sell.

217. Response to Richard Dawkins' Criticisms in The God Delusion

Comment #13228 by stevencarrwork on December 16, 2006 at 9:42 am

' I also argue that it leads us to expect the enormously complex data (enormously large numbers of protons, photons etc.behaving in exactly the same way)'

Why should we expect protons and electrons to behave differently to other protons and electrons, when if they did, we would not call them electrons or protons, but call them muons or neutrons instead?

Neutrons are defined by the way they behave, so they are all going to behave the same way.

If a neutron starts behaving differently, it is because it has decayed and is no longer a neutron.

Swinburne tries to justify his God's inaction.

It isn't that God isn't there. He is there, busy doing nothing .

Suppose one or two people had decided to go on a picnic that day in Hiroshima in 1945, and had left the city when the Americans dropped an atomb bomb on it.

Would that have been a good thing? A miraculous escape?

Let us see how prominent theologian Richard Swinburne, a Professor at Oxford University, answers that question on page 264 of his book 'The Existence of God'...


'Suppose that one less person had been burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less opportunity for courage and sympathy;one less piece of information about the effects of atomic radiation....'


But Richard, wouldn't there be one more person alive to show courage and sympathy?

If everybody was killed, who would take advantage of these thousands of millions of opportuities to show courage and sympathy?

Perhaps God got the balance just right at Hiroshima? Not too many dead, and certainly not one person too few....?

And should dead people really be counted in terms of 'information about the effects of atomic radiation'?

And let's not forget, God made sure every one of those exploding uranium atoms behaved in just the right way to make the bomb worked.