Mark Shea and various drivel.

So in some distant corner of the internet I am discussion religion with religious people and was offered in part an article by Mark Shea that was dreadful, I did my due dilligence and tore it up but I figured since it hit upon some of the very general important bits of Plantinga's argument against naturalism I should repost it here.

Mark Shea's article is rather terrible. It first parrots the claim that if God doesn't exist that atheists should care less. This is both dismissive and wrong. I care deeply when my fellow human beings fritter their lives away on harmful dangerous nonsense.

And then it notes Haldane's objection which is parroted by C.S. Lewis and rehashed more modernly by the likes of Plantinga with his argument against naturalism. Largely that if minds are naturally evolved that they cannot be dependable. Therefore that belief is (minds are naturally evolved) is undependable. The mistake here is more subtle because it is discounting all of epistemology and science. It's entirely true that our minds are made of atoms and that our minds are evolved and that our minds suffer from massive cognitive biases and mistakes, hallucinations, sensory errors, perception mistakes, etc. The question then becomes how do we get around these problems? How can we, considering the limited nature of our brains, manage to come about to find beliefs which are likely true. Not just give us a feeling of certainty but which are something we should really accept. And the answer is largely by delegating our beliefs the best we can to reality. Testing those beliefs and coming up with the best conclusion we can and be ready to abandon that conclusion the instant it stops being the best. Generally, we need to build a functional epistemology from the ground up.

The conclusion that others offer is that we should just dive into our biases assume that our minds are designed by God and can do no wrong. And that believing otherwise forces one to do the really hard job of living a examined rather than unexamined life. But, that our brains are evolved and cognitive biases exist are manifestly true. The conclusions of Lewis and Plantinga is basically to claim that "maybe your brain is faulty, but my brain is perfect" which is the clearest hobgoblin of a faulty mind one could make manifest.

Short Film: The Atheist -- Dumbest thing I've seen in a while.

God doesn't want a good world he wants a super good world so he makes evil exist. And evil is like the hole in a doughnut or simply the absence of good. So let me get this straight, God is required by freewill to make a world where suffering can eventually exist. But what about natural disasters? Is it really the product of free will to kill tens of thousands in Haiti (what ever happened to that place, I assume it all turned out okay if they stopped paying attention on the news) or a quarter million during the Boxing Day Tsunami. What free will brought that about? And what logical contradiction is wrought by not allowing a young child to be tortured, raped, and killed? If I endeavor to stop such things, am I denying the rapist his free will? And if this world is suppose to be the greatest world God could create without a logical contradiction (Plantinga's argument) then certainly I could do nothing to make this world better, but I really think I can. Further, Christian doctrine suggests that there is something called "Heaven" which is suppose to be a better world, so if true then this can't really be the best world possible.

I've always been an advocate that the best theodicies (proposed answers to the problem of evil) are all themselves worse than the problem of evil. They try to violate one of the premises without seeming too terrible. If God is all-powerful, all-good, and is able to remove evil, then there should be no evil. Since there is evil, it must be the case that God is not all-powerful or god is not all-good. Also, fun side note Isaiah 45 has god say "I create evil." a few lines before insisting that nobody is besides him (a pretty silly notion for a God who sacrificed himself to himself to sit at his own right hand).

Such apologetics even jazzed up in a video are still crap. Go figure.

Brief History of Theology