Keith Parsons's Blog, page 3

Theism, Atheism, and Tragic Loss

This is the response by one Dennis Prager to an earlier article published in the NY times by Susan Jacoby:



http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337673/atheist-response-sandy-hook-dennis-prager# 



Does atheism offer less to those who mourn than theism? Let’s start by asking what theism has to offer. Well, naturally, there is the hope of eternal life, right? Surely, mourners are deeply comforted by the promise that their bereavement is only temporary and that they will be reunited in heaven with those they have lost. This is a wonderful assurance, right?

Bertrand Russell tells the story of a woman who had lost her only daughter and was, naturally, grief stricken. When a well-meaning friend reminded her that her daughter was now in heaven and enjoying eternal bliss, the bereaved parent glumly replied “Yes, of course, but I wish you would not talk about such unpleasant subjects.” The death of a loved one is a terrible thing, and abstract reassurances about eternal bliss or eventual reunion do not work.

And this is a good thing. It is natural but exactly wrong to rush to console those in deep mourning. Speaking personally, when I have deeply grieved the last thing I wanted was some “comforter” offering me glib reassurances. Whatever one’s theological beliefs such words will inevitably sound cheap, facile, and superficial. (Job’s “comforters” were his worst torment) Mere words are pathetically inadequate for those who deeply grieve. Grief is real, raw, and deep. Visions of ethereal bliss are thin, insubstantial, and emotionally vacuous.

No, grief must be given its day. It must be given its savage due. That is the only way to deal with it honestly and healthily. What do mourners want from others? Tears not words. They want others to grieve with them and share in their pain. “Comforting” words tacitly rebuke grief; sharing the pain of loss affirms and validates those dreadful but necessary feelings.

What can atheists really offer those who grieve? The same things that anyone else can—just to be there and to share the grief by letting the mourner know that his or her pain is yours as well. Atheists harbor no delusions about an all-powerful being that will someday, somehow, in some totally mysterious and incomprehensible way make everything right. Atheists therefore are required to face the absolute finality of death with the grim honesty that sees the senseless as truly senseless and eschews pious bromides. Those who have suffered a tragic and pointless loss deserve such honesty, not a false comfort that candy coats and trivializes.

Atheism and Intraorganizational Free Speech

That is the title of a 1996 essay by Michael Martin on the Secular Web. Martin concludes:

The suppression of expressions not only has harmful results but is inconsistent with atheists' criticism of religion's suppression of speech. It also defeats what is in the atheistic organizations' own best interests. I conclude therefore that atheistic organizations should not suppress expression of opinion in their ranks unless such expressions are defamatory, seditious, invasive of privacy, or incitive to violence.

LINK

The Argument from Scale (AS) Revisited, Part 2 (Revised)

(Note: the revised version of this post begins in the third paragraph after the section title, “The Ratio of Explanatory Powers.”)

In part 1 of my series on the evidential Argument from Scale (AS), I concluded that Everitt's formulation of AS is unsuccessful. At the same time, however, I said that there is something about the AS I find intuitive and so I wanted to try revising AS as a Bayesian argument to see if I could make a stronger version. The purpose of this post is to attempt to do just that.

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Is religious freedom threatened by gay rights?

Last year I was a
participant in a
conference on Religious Freedom at Magdalen College Oxford. The conference
focused particularly on "the emerging
conflict between new equal rights claims on behalf of homosexuals and existing
claims of religious freedom."




Cases
such as the right to wear a cross at work, or to turn homosexual
couples away from your B&B were discussed, or of registrars to
refuse to conduct civil partnership ceremonies, were discussed. Many
religious people the conference felt that they were being victimized.
Here's my paper and post script conference responses to the responses
made by John Finnis and Christopher McCrudden.



I
post it today because the landmark ruling of the European Court of
Human Rights on various claims of anti-religious discrimination - a case
in which McCrudden has been involved - is due today.




SHIFTS IN THE MORAL AND LEGAL LANDSCAPE



The UK has seen a
revolution in its moral and legal attitudes over the last couple of centuries,
particularly with regard to discrimination.

One of the earliest
beneficiaries of changes to the law to protect minorities from unfair
discrimination was the Roman Catholic community. The Catholic Relief act in
1829 aimed to protect Roman Catholics from such discrimination. Legislation to
protect Jews was soon to follow. Today, our freedom to hold and espouse, or
reject and criticise, different religious beliefs, is protected by law.

Our moral attitudes
towards women, black people and gay people have also shifted dramatically, and
this too has been reflected in the law. Gone are the days when women could be
refused employment or the vote because they are women. Gone are the days when
hotel owners could put up signs saying “No blacks”. Gone, too, are the days
when men having sex with men in private risked imprisonment.

Today, most of us
subscribe to the principle that the State and the law ought
to treat all citizens equally. They should not discriminate between citizens or
groups of citizens, granting privileges to, or penalizing, one group but not
another, unless there is some difference
that justifies that difference in treatment.

Of course it isn’t always
wrong for the State or the law to discriminate. We suppose it is right that the
State should withhold from children rights and privileges that it extends to
adults, and only progressively afford them those rights as they mature. But
there is an obvious justification for that: younger children are not
sufficiently mature to exercise those rights and privileges responsibly. It may
also be legitimate for the State to make, say, breast cancer screening freely
available to all women but not all men, on the grounds that the risk to men is
significantly lower.

However, almost all of
us accept that such discriminatory practices are proper only where there exists
a difference between the two groups that actually justifies treating them
differently.
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Ontology 101 part 3

The following three criteria can be used to generate a set of categories of kinds of entities:






C1. Is this entity a natural entity?

C2*. Is this entity able to affect a natural entity?

C3. Is this entity a person?




We are looking at various pairings of these criteria to see whether some combinations can be eliminated as being incoherent.  In previous posts, I briefly considered the pairing of (C1) and (C2*),  and the pairing of  (C1) and (C3), and now I will consider the pairing of (C2*) and (C3).





Able (to affect a natural entity) vs. Personal




A    P

T    T

T    F

F    T

F    F





AP1: Able and Personal

Human beings are able to affect natural entities and humans are persons, so it seems clear that this is a logically possible kind of entity, because there are in fact such entities.  If God exists, then God would also be an example of an entity that is personal and that is able to affect natural entities.  The same is true of angels and ghosts and polytheistic gods. 





AP2: Able and Non-Personal

A stone is able to break a window, and a stone is not a person, and a window is a physical entity (and thus a natural entity), so clearly there are non-personal entities that are able to affect natural entities.





AP3: Non-Able and Personal

Hmmmm.  This seems a bit more puzzling. Ghosts are generally conceived of as able to affect natural entities (thus they rattle chains in attics, make stairs creak, make the air in a room turn cool, and cause images to appear in video and in photographs).  Those who believe in ghosts, believe that there is evidence of the presence and activity of ghosts, and this implies that ghosts are able to affect natural entities (chains, stairs, air temperature, and light).  But it seems like we can imagine a ghost-like person who was unable to affect natural entities.  A ghost who could not rattle chains, make stairs creak, cool the air in rooms, or even make any sort of visible appearance.  Obviously, such a ghost-like creature would not provide any empirical evidence of its existence, so we have no way of knowing (at least through our senses) that such persons exist, but it is not obvious to me that this idea is incoherent.  




A key objection to the idea of a 'bodiless person' is the probelm of personal identity for such 'persons'.  Such a ghost-like person has no physical body (otherwise the physical body would allow the ghost-like person to affect natural entities), and furthermore such a ghost-like person could not communicate (in any ordinary fashion) what sort of memories, beliefs, and intentions it had, so we could not identify such persons by means of psychological criteria (such as possessing the same memories or the same personality or the same beliefs).  Nevertheless, even if we could not detect or know anything about the memories, beliefs, or intentions of such a person, it does not follow that such a person has no memories, no beliefs, and no intentions.  So, there could be continuity of memories over time in the person; it is just that we would not be able to know or determine this to be the case.




This is, no doubt, a controversial question (whether it is logically possible for ghost-like persons to exist who were unable to affect natural entities), but it is not clear to me, without further argument, that such persons are logically impossible.





AP4: Non-Able and Non-Personal

Numbers are not able to affect natural entities and numbers are not persons, so if numbers are entities, then it looks like there are entities that in fact fall into this category.



To be continued...

New Chick Tract

You can't even tell where the religious weirdness ends and the political right-wing weirdness begins.

The Evidential Argument from Divine Hiddenness: The General Fact and 10 More Specific Facts

 

The General Fact of Divine Hiddenness (aka Reasonable Nonbelief)

There are many people, including myself, who don't believe in God but who wish that some sort of a theistic God did exist. Now the Apostle Paul, in Romans 1:19-21, implies that the existence of God is just obvious to everyone, even atheists and agnostics. But just think about that for a second. How do you prove that something is obvious to another person? Lots of nonbelievers claim that the existence of God is not obvious to them. Indeed, many nonbelievers claim that it is just obvious that it is not obvious that theism is true! Why is this evidence for atheism over theism? Because if theism is true, we would expect nonbelief in God to be unreasonable. What possible reason could God, if He existed, have for not revealing Himself? God is not shy, God is not busy, and so forth. But if atheism is true, there is no God and we would expect nonbelief to be reasonable. Therefore, reasonable nonbelief is more likely on atheism than on theism.

Specific Facts about Divine Hiddenness (Reasonable Nonbelief)

In addition to the general fact of reasonable nonbelief (DH), J.L. Schellenberg has shown that there are other, more specific facts about reasonable nonbelief which are evidence favoring atheism over theism. The numbering/labeling scheme is mine; page numbers are references to Schellenberg’s impressive book, The Wisdom to Doubt.

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Marcus McElhaney on Austin Dacey’s Debate with WLC

Marcus McElhaney responds to a recent blog post at Debunking Christianity which links to a video of Austin Dacey’s debate with William Lane Craig on God’s existence. Since I believe Dacey’s debate with Craig is one of the better debate performances by an atheist, this caught my eye. Here I want to comment on McElhaney’s critique.

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AdamHazzard’s Quick Parable Comparing Atheistic and Divine Command Theoretic Metaethics

I just read this in the combox on Randal Rauser’s blog.

An atheist and a divine-command theorist are approached by someone who says to them, "God is telling me to kill my child. Am I crazy?"

The atheist doesn't hesitate. "Yes! You need to seek help immediately!"

While the divine-command theorist shuffles his feet and says, "Well, that depends. Is your name Abraham?"

Is this parable a fair representation of divine command theory?

The Argument from Scale (AS) Revisited, Part 5: John Loftus on the Size of the Universe

In this post, I want to offer some preliminary observations regarding John Loftus’s claim that “the size of the universe leads to atheism.”

Before I do so, I want to emphasize that I am going to comment on the linked blog post only. I will not discuss anything that Loftus has written in chapter 24 of his book, Why I Became an Atheist, where he discusses the issue in further detail.

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