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Post by hibernicus on Feb 17, 2012 19:06:09 GMT
A Guardian commentator notes why militant secularists (i.e. those who actively wish to root out others' religious belief) generally make such a bad show in debate. Certainly reminds me of the atheists I kicked off the board for violating the rules of debate. WARNING Exhibits many of the usual Guardianista right-on opinions, but it's still an interesting point coming from such a source. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/16/militant-secularist-fail-understand-debateEXTRACT There are three kinds of people in Britain today who might be taken for militant secularists: that is to say people who are not just themselves unbelievers, but have an emotional investment in the extirpation of religious belief in others. There are the adolescents who have just discovered "rationality"; there are gay people who feel personally threatened by traditional monotheist morality; and, in this country, there are parents frustrated by the admissions policy of religiously controlled schools... Their real offence, though, is that they don't understand the rules of secular debate. I know that this will appear a contradiction in terms: how can a secularist misunderstand the rules of secular debate? But Baggini's definition provides a way to understand this. A secularist, he says, is someone who appeals to natural reason, and not to divine law. And this kind of reason is by definition something shared by both sides in the argument. But the militant secularist takes for granted that "the religious" have no access to reason. There can be no reasoning with his opponents. All he can do is to repeat himself more loudly until the idiots understand. END Fr Edward Lucie-Smith offers some thoughts on the matter www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/02/17/why-religion-can-never-be-a-private-matter/EXTRACT Most, indeed all, Christians are or ought to be secularists, as they should all recognise the autonomy of the saeculum, the world. In other words, believing in God, we believe he created the world with its laws and that these laws are not arbitrary but are underpinned by the rule of reason. That is what secularism is, a belief in the autonomy of reason, which in theological terms we call “theonomous (ie God-given) autonomy”. Atheists will not agree about the origin of reason in God, but they will surely agree that reason is non-negotiable, indeed it is the basis of all negotiation. Hence we can discuss things like face-veils, using the langauge that reason gave us (and as it happens I complete agree with Ms Toynbee about face-veils: I think they are an affront to reason, but I think to make them illegal would itself be unreasonable.) However, what is this about religion being “a private matter”? This is misleading. Private matters of their nature often spill over into the public sphere. Prayer is private, but if I pray it may well influence my public behaviour: it may make me more tolerant and loving to people who disagree with me, for example. Again, sex is private, but marriage is public, but the two are clearly connected. Finally, Ms Toynbee criticises religious privilege, but please let us be careful here. When she talks of the monarchy and the House of Lords, she is correct. These are Anglican privileges, and I do not defend them. But when she talks of Church schools, we need to be clear that the freedom of association of religious people is not a privelege, it is a right. END
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 20, 2012 19:50:16 GMT
thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.com/2012/02/silly-little-questions-to-trip-people.html Thirsty Gargoyle analyses the Dawkins FOundation survey (being used to show that many/most nominal Christians in Britain are not really Christian at all) and notes its biases. These include specifically exempting attendance at religious services from questions about whether the respondent prays, as if attendance by adults at religious services were not a voluntary activity; questions on the authority of the Bible which seem to imply that the only alternatives are Protestant solifidianism and atheism, ignoring the Catholic position; questions which are so presented that the respondent is implicitly forced to present themselves as a bigot or a relativist. Here is the major point, which TG makes at the end: EXTRACT What does keep striking me, though, is the sheer bizarreness of Richard Dawkins' argument that because Britain isn't -- in his view -- a predominantly Christian country, there is no need for faith schools. I would have thought that if people of faith are in a minority there's an even more pressing argument for them having schools of their own in order to preserve whatever it is that they uniquely offer society. But perhaps Richard just thinks it should be purged from the public realm. For starters. END
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 21, 2012 17:27:54 GMT
I have moved Margaret Hickey's post in response to my comment on her IRISH CATHOLIC article about the Vatican embassy to the "Irish Catholic newspaper" thread since that is where the comment to which she is responding appeared. This thread is reserved for debates with atheists/over atheism
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Post by saintpatrick333 on Feb 28, 2012 22:14:06 GMT
As an american of Irish descent hoping to someday be able to move to and live in Ireland with my beloved Irish brothers and sisters, I can say with certainty that it is a travesty that so many people in Ireland would betray themselves and turn away from Christ. For those in Ireland who hold dear and steadfast to the Traditions and Faith of Christ's One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, God Bless you!! You are the lifeline keeping Ireland Irish. Without Catholicism Ireland becomes a lesser britain. I pray for Ireland (as well as america and the rest of the world) that humanity as a whole bring Christ back into their hearts and reject all the darkness that comes with secularization. Ireland was a shining beacon of Catholicism for many decades. If the Pope considered Ireland as a safe place to move to during world war 2 during the event of italian persecution, than that shows how much love God has for Ireland for its faithful loving people. I have seen what secularization has done firsthand here in america. School children who aren't even at the age where they begin finding attraction for the opposite sex are being pushed into learning about sexuality in all its perverse forms (they would never teach sex is sacred and reserved for the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony between one man and one woman). Though I fear for the direction Ireland is taking I have great faith in Christ and the Irish people and know full well Ireland will not be taken in by satan or his many tools to counfound and separate man from God. Ireland is a Catholic nation and one who will ultimately return Christ to His proper glory. The faithful Catholics in the Republic whose continued prayer and service to their communities and neighbors will see to that restoration. I just pray I might be able to contribute to that someday, be it as a Seminarian at Maynooth or as a member of the laity. God Bless Ireland and her people!
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 19, 2012 12:02:49 GMT
Edward Feser comments on the "Rally for Reason" scheduled to be held in Washington by Dawkins and Co, and discusses how the "new Atheists" use "Reason" as a slogan while singularly failing to practice it. I can think of two reasons for this: (a) New Atheism is at least partly driven by the delight of believing yourself to be an infinitely superior being while those around you are credulous fools - it is symptomatic of this mindset that the atheist comedian Ricky Gervais once made a film called THE INVENTION OF LYING whose central idea was that he lived in a world where everyone else was hopelessly naive and believed everything they were told, so Gervais could get whatever he wanted by lying to them, one of the first lies he came up with being the existence of God and an afterlife (b) New Atheism's principal strategy is not to disprove theism but to make atheism seem cool and religious belief uncool. This is very manipulative, dontcha think? edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/reason-rally-doubleplusgood-newspeak.htmlEXTRACT I have always hated mobs. Thus I dislike mass demonstrations with their slogans and banners, marches and sit-ins, and all the rest of the obnoxious apparatus of modern protest. Usually the cause is bad, and the participants are ignorant yahoos. But I dislike such rallies even when the cause is good and the participants well-meaning. They may sometimes be necessary, but they are always regrettable and to be avoided if possible. The reason is that reason is impossible with a crowd. Serious matters require calm reflection, sufficient background knowledge, careful distinctions, the give and take of objections and replies, and always the willingness to submit oneself to superior arguments and objective truth. But the thinking of a crowd is, in the best circumstances, dumbed down, slipshod, and banal; and at its worst there is no madness or evil to which a crowd might not descend. A crowd shouts, chants, emotes, and is always, always demanding this or that -- it is appetitive rather than cognitive. In a crowd, the rational in rational animal is always in danger of giving way, leaving just the animal, indeed a herd of animals. The individual, or a small group of friends, can dispute with Socrates about the good, the true, and the beautiful. The crowd votes to execute him. The individual, or a small group of disciples, can have their hearts moved by Christ. The crowd shouts for His crucifixion. How fitting, then, that the Counter-Religion that is the New Atheism has now decided to make of itself a mob. Something called the “Reason Rally” is scheduled for March 24 at the National Mall in Washington, D. C. and the Counter-Prophet Richard Dawkins is headlining as chief rouser of the “rationalist” rabble. The name alone exposes it for the farce that it is -- a “Reason Rally” being (for the reasons just given) somewhat akin to a “Chastity Orgy” or a “Temperance Kegger” [i.e. booze-up - HIB] As always, the New Atheist satirizes himself before you can do it for him. The aim of this “movement-wide event,” we are told, is “to unify, energize, and embolden” the secularist faithful. Naturally, this is not the reason of Socrates, but that of the “Religion of Reason,” of the French and Russian Revolutions, of Comte. It is “Reason” as a slogan, something to stick on a banner and march behind, and in the name of which to promote an agenda and shout down critics. Fortunately, the “movement” hasn’t yet reached the guillotine stage, and the mob will have to satisfy itself with “music, comedy, great speakers, and lots of fun” -- rather than, say, storming Vatican City and arresting the Pope, as Dawkins would no doubt prefer. And it seems some advance footage of the fun has somehow already been made available.
OK, just kidding -- and in fact it has not yet been announced whether a Two Minutes Hate will be part of the proceedings. But it would certainly be fitting given that it is the loathing of the perceived enemies of “reason,” rather than the love of truth and of rational argument, that will unite the communion of non-believers on the Mall come March 24. That, in any event, is the conclusion to which one is unavoidably led when considering the work of Dawkins and fellow “Reason Rally” speakers like P. Z. Myers, whose modus operandi is to spew venom at critics while explicitly refusing, as a matter of general policy, to engage rationally with their criticisms.
Thus, that Dawkins’ arguments are directed at ludicrous straw men has been demonstrated time and again (for example, here). Yet he resolutely declines to answer those who have exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in his writings -- dismissing them as “fleas,” without explaining how exactly they have got his arguments wrong -- or, in general, to debate anyone with expertise in the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile, the even more vitriolic P. Z. Myers’ main claim to New Atheist fame is his “Courtier’s reply” dodge, a shamelessly question-begging rationalization for remaining ignorant of what the other side actually says. New Atheists will ridicule their opponents, but actually read only each others’ work. Hence Christopher Hitchens derives his main arguments from Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss learns everything he needs to know from Hitchens, and Dawkins has his confidence in the atheist worldview bolstered from reading Krauss. And now this mutual mental onanism will be expanded across the National Mall. Somewhere Joycelyn Elders is smiling. [Joycelyn Elders was Bill Clinton's Surgeon-General; among other dotty pronouncements she famously declared that masturbation was healthy and should be encouraged - HIB]
As Alex Rosenberg, without a trace of irony, assures the secularist reader of his Atheist’s Guide to Reality, “we won’t treat theism as a serious alternative that stills [sic] needs to be refuted. [We] have moved past that point. We know the truth.” And that, dear reader, is what passes for the “reality-based” alternative to “faith-based” thinking -- just like black is white, ignorance is strength, war is peace, and a “Reason Rally” is somehow different from groupthink... END
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 13, 2012 22:36:14 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on May 26, 2012 20:25:08 GMT
An useful piece from the CATHOLIC HERALD on how not to debate with atheists: www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/2012/05/17/five-ways-to-lose-the-argument-with-atheists/EXTRACT tailoring our words and our tone to the highest common denominator of human sentiment may not convince the people with whom we are immediately interacting, but may at least begin to win the hearts and minds of any bystanders who are watching. Focusing on how we can best practise the spiritual works of mercy (especially instructing the uninformed, counselling the doubtful, and bearing wrongs patiently) in our arguments with atheists will help us minister to our opponents in the most effective way. In doing so, and in witnessing to the truth of our Faith, humbly, gently and respectfully, we may truly witness to the virtue, as well as the rationality, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. END
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 20, 2012 20:25:54 GMT
This post may be of interest to both Catholics and atheists - Fr Dwight Longenecker argues in support of Newman's statement that the only logical positions are Catholicism or atheism and there is no sustainable middle ground between them (or, to put it another way, that the Protestant questioning of the authority of the Church leads inexorably to disbelief in God): www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2012/06/suicide-or-catholicism.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 20, 2012 20:32:43 GMT
Here's another interesting Longenecker post in which he argues that many US atheists seem to get their idea of religion from anti-intellectual Protestant fundamentalism, and that this variety of religion is indeed woefully anti-intellectual and deserves many of their criticisms. (Bear in mind that Fr Longenecker was raised a Protestant fundamentalist, which may influence how he sees this). This raises the question - given that many/most Irish atheists and unbelievers are ex-Catholics, what is there about Irish Catholicism that leads them to pick up the stereotype of religion as mindless? Is it traditional Catholic authoritarianism, or anti-intellectual devotionalism (e.g. of the sort we often find associated with certain types of Marian apparition) or liberal content-free catechesis of the sort that prefers to talk about the Eucharist as "blessed bread"? Any thoughts on the matter? Or are atheists less honest that Fr Longenecker lets on? Is it all about the pelvic issues? (Even if this was the case, there would still be an element of blame involved for Catholics not evangelising on the "pelvic issues" strongly enough to make the Catholic position come across as reasonable - however difficult - rather than a mere arbitrary imposition. www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2012/06/atheist-former-fundies.html EXTRACT I have spent some time this afternoon reading the combox for Leah Libresco’s last post for the atheist portal. The comments from the atheists are very interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it is amazing how many of the commenters speak rather aggressively about religion being “irrational”. We must believe that this is their honest and sincere perception of religion. They must have got this impression from their experience of religion, and therefore we must blame the Christians who have preached and followed a religion that is indeed irrational, ignorant and stupid. While I admit that there are plenty of poorly educated Catholics, the Protestant fundamentalists have a lot to answer for here. Not only are too many of them uneducated and irrational in their approach, but they intentionally adopt a certain anti-rationalism and anti intellectualism. When I was at Bob Jones University I can remember how the “preacher boys” the guys who were training to be Baptist preachers would often assume a Southern country accent when they got into the pulpit. There was a certain country preacher style they would put on. They deliberately adopted this country style and an aggressively anti intellectual posture to go with it. The second impression from reading the atheist comments is how much of their understanding of Christianity and the Christian God is determined by Sunday school and revivalist fundamentalism. They think it is real smart to ask how kangaroos got on Noah’s ark or to throw stones at a “loving God who would torture somebody forever in hell.” Sadly, they never seem to have experienced any form of Christianity which actually proposes intelligent answers to such Sunday School questions. The third thing I notice about this sort of atheist is that they are very angry and aggressive. I suspect they have been wounded by their fundamentalist upbringing or the fundamentalist culture in America. They have seen through Christianity if that is what Christianity is, and they can’t help lashing out. I understand. The saddest problem with atheists of this sort is that along with the stupid fundamentalism they were given, and the ignorant version of Christianity they were taught, they were also taught that Catholics were, among all other religions, the very worst. Their ignorance of intelligent and articulate Catholicism is complete. What they do know about Catholicism is made up of the lies, half truths, scandals and foolishness they have picked up first from their fundamentalist background and second from the anti Catholic propaganda in the academy and thirdly in the prevailing anti Catholic propaganda in contemporary media, and fourthly from bad Catholics. For them to actually stop and discover the true Catholicism–an ancient religion that is compassionate, humane, intelligent, beautiful, strong and true–a religion that scales the heights of human achievement and deals with the depths of human depravity–a religion that is at once poetic and prosaic, magnificent and humble, glorious and simple, hilarious and tragic, a religion that is both noble and poor, majestic and plain, wise and innocent–a religion that offers the complexity of the worlds great philosophers and the simplicity of the unlettered–all bundled up in a faith that encompasses all cultures, races and nations–the old and the young, the poor and the rich, the outcasts and the elite… For them to stop and see such a Catholicism–such a Christianity. It seems impossible–except for the miracle of grace. END
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 20, 2012 21:02:13 GMT
This CATHOLIC HERALD piece inspired me to discuss a question of evangelisation which has been on my mind for some time. In 1820 (not 1870 as stated in the linked CATHOLIC HERALD) column a young English aristocrat called George Spencer was visiting Paris and (as he later recorded) was tempted to engage in the fashionable dissipations which English gentlemen associated with such visits. In this state of mind he went to the Opera House in Paris (given that the Opera actresses notoriously doubled as prostitutes, he may not have had purely artistic matters in mind). It so happened that the night's performance was Mozart's DON GIOVANNI: EXTRACT ' The last scene,' he writes, ' represents Don Giovanni seized in the midst of his hcentious career by a troop of devils and hurried down to Hell. As I saw this scene, I was terrified at my own state. I knew that God, who knew what was within me, must look on me as one in the same class as Don Giovanni . . . this holy warning I was to find in an opera-house in Paris.' END Now the interesting point about this is that a superficial reading would suggest that Spencer was moved simply by fear of Hell - but if you look more closely, you will see that his real shock was not just that he would go to Hell if he behaved like Don Giovanni, but that he would DESERVE to go to Hell. In other words, he already accepted Christian moral teaching on this point, and the story of Don Giovanni awakened him to its implications. My question is; how do we reach out to people who do not already accept in theory Christian morality on this point (this is not the only area where such conflict exists, but we will take it as the example to hand) but who see sexuality as an area of personal empowerment and any restriction on it (other than mutual consent) as an arbitrary restriction whose only role is to give other people power over you? This is an old question, as will be seen from the fact that while Dr Oddie notes that the music of the damnation scene in Don Giovanni suggests Mozart wished his audience to view Don Giovanni's refusal to repent with horror, there is a longstanding critical tradition, going back to the early nineteenth century of seeing Don Giovanni's refusal to repent as an admirable assertion of personal integrity. It does really seem to me that a great deal of modern culture, including the "heroic" self-image of atheism held by many atheists, is based on the view that despair is a form of heroism and any form of cosmic hope - and the Cross is the great symbol of hope even in the most terrible suffering - is a trap devised to enslave you. How do we break this down? Perhaps one ingredient may be the prayers of Fr Ignatius Spencer and the other saints. www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/06/20/don-giovannis-terrifying-descent-into-hell-inspired-ignatius-spencer-to-become-a-catholic-but-without-faith-a-secular-age-doesnt-get-mozart-either/ I should add that Mr Oddie is not quite accurate on another point - Spencer had already been predestined by his family (as an aristocratic younger son) to the Anglican ministry, and the result of his encounter with Don Giovanni was to awaken his fervour as an Anglican. His conversion to Catholicism (he became a celebrated Passionist Father and a frequent visitor to Ireland as preacher) took place some years later under circumstances described here: barberi.wordpress.com/servant-of-god-father-ignatius-of-st-paul/a-short-account-of-the-conversion-of-the-hon-and-rev-george-spencer-to-the-catholic-faith/For more on Bl. Ignatius Spencer, see Ben Lodge's 2005 pamphlet published by the English Catholic Truth Society in their "Saints of the Isles" series.
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Post by vocoprotatiano on Jun 21, 2012 22:58:51 GMT
A chairde, Dia 's Muire daoibh. INdeed; fideism is the other side of the atheist coin. The trouble with our atheists here is that most of them seem to have come to this with the assumption that we are all like Redmond and when we try to explain what we really believe they pay no attention. I would pull you up on that hibernicus. I do read your posts and for the most part they can be interesting up to a point. This cannot be said about Redmond's rather odd posts. You have made a false assumption here. I do not think you are anything like him at all. I think I have a fair idea about what you believe in a ball-park manner of speaking. The thing is, and here is the thing, I just find it difficult to comprehend how someone as intelligent as you are can accept stories about talking snakes, walking on water, the virgin birth, prophets’ living for 100's of years etc, as the truth. I don’t refer to these stories in particular, but the general gist of what I am saying is, the book people of the christian faith hold up as being the word of god (be it the actual words he muttered or be it divinely inspired by him and written by men) is a book full of stories that were circulating in other texts before they were ever in the bible. Having researched the book itself, it seems to me that it contains no information at all that was not already present in other contemporary books. All these stories of floods, walking on water, prophets’ being taken up to paradise are all contained within many other books of that time period, with different characters of course. It seems to me that it contains no information within it that would not have been known to Iron Age people. Nothing about DNA, Electricity, or any other marvels that have made life better for human kind. It contains many stories with morals. Some are good stories and some are downright barbaric. However, in this way, it is the same as any other book of the time period. They all have stories like these. It does not support the existence of a divine creator one iota in my opinion. However it is a good read. I still pick it up now and again and have a flick through. Not so much the old testament but more the new. Its an easier read in my opinion. Not so much gore and revenge etc. I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent here…… what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t think you are the same as people like Redmond. That is not my position regarding you and for you to say so is incorrect. My actual position is one of incomprehension that intelligent people still, in this day and age, believe in a divine creator when there is absolutely no evidence (in my opinion) for such a being/entity. Actually, the deepest thinkers in physics and mathematics struggle with the 'obvious truth' which you baldly state. You see, even with quantum uncertainty, an effect without a cause is anathema. The effect may be disconnected from the cause in 3space, but when the postulated 10space of string theory is invoked, this disconnect ceases to be real. The physicist are still left with an uncaused cause. Perhaps we should call this The Uncaused Cause. This ancient 'wisdom' does contain some strangely modern ideas, even though they are couched in archaic ideas. Consider 'Earth, Air, Fire, and Water', the Four Primary Elements. We now know that the hundred plus elements are not immutable, neither are the particles which comprise them immutable. Our modern Elements are not as elementary as we once supposed. What of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water? Again, consider the archaic language and ideas. What is Earth? it is a solid material. What is Air? it is a gas. What is Water? it is a liquid. What is Fire? it is plasma. These are the FOUR states in which matter can exist. These four states are immutable. Matter can move between these state, but there are no other states. These states then are ELEMENTARY. Consider the Concept of the Seventh, or Highest Heaven. All concepts of Divinity, whether of minor divinities, or the Prime Divinity, all these are presumed to exist in higher heavens, that is, they exist OUTSIDE our space and time. They are HYPERDIMENSIONAL beings. Is it really a coincidence that when the dimensions of 3Space are added to the number of layers of Heaven, we get the same number of dimensions as are predicted by string theory?. What about Methuselah living 900 years? Well, this gets complicated. Who was the father of Methuselah, why, Enoch. Who, and what was Enoch? He is the author, (reputed author), of a couple of non biblical books, both concerned with the passage, and measurement of time. He had deduced that a solar year was not exactly 365.25 days, as the Romans had thought, but was in fact much closer to 365 and 31/128 days. He devised a calendar of 364 days in a civil year, which needed to be corrected every 7 years to correct for 364 being a day less than 365, and further corrected every 28 years to account for the approximate quarter of a day. This 364 day year had the great advantage over other calendars inasmuch as it contained exactly 52 weeks. Each year consisted of 13 weeks, and all the months had 30 days. However, 13 weeks is 91 days, so the four quarter days were considered not to be part of a month, so were 'feast' days. So where is this bumbling leading? well, because the year was reckoned to be 365 + 31/128 days, and not 365 + 1/4 days, then the calendar was in error of 1 day for each 128 year, and therefore, by exactly 1 week in 896 years, and on that year, the 28 year intercalation had to be omitted. That defined the end of the cycle, or Methuselah. 900 is a very good quick and dirty approximation to 896. Le meas, Deghebh.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 18, 2012 12:58:29 GMT
Edward Feser describes how he came to be an atheist, starting with loss of belief in Catholicism around 12/13 as a result of Protestant sola scriptura arguments, and how he returned to theism and to Catholicism, largely (in the first instance) through wrestling with various atheist philosophers and realising though them that the issue was not so self-evident as it seems to Richard Dawkins and Co. This IMHO is a warning for Catholics. Just because Dawkins and his admirers are simple-minded charlatans who don't know what they are talking about, it does not follow that ALL atheists are on their level, and in order to understand atheism we need to have a sense of the issues involved. This is where conspiracy theory is so harmful, because it serves as a substitute for thought and encourages us to think that everyone who disagrees is a conscious liar. (Young-earth creationism, is a classic example of this - it implies that the whole of science is a conscious conspiracy to deny the self-evident truth of YEC. Other examples will no doubt come to mind. This sort of thing leads directly to fideism - since it assumes everyone who disagrees is a liar, there is no scope for natural reason - and when the existence of natural reason nonetheless makes itself felt, it leads directly to Dawkinsian atheism, since this assumes all religion is this sort of irrational fideism: edwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html#moreEXTRACT At the high tide of my undergrad Brash Young Atheist stage, I had taken a class on medieval philosophy with the late John Cronquist, an atheist professor at Cal State Fullerton who was absolutely contemptuous of Christianity. Campus apologists of the Protestant stripe were a frequent target of his ire, though he had a choice quip or two about Catholicism as well. He was one of the smartest and most well-read people I have ever known -- the kind of guy you find intellectually intimidating and hope not to get in an argument with -- and I liked him very much. One of the odd and interesting things about that course, though, was how respectfully Cronquist treated some of the medievals, especially Aquinas. He said that compared to them, contemporary pop apologists were “like a pimple on the ass of an athlete.” (I remember him dramatically pointing to his own posterior as he said this, for emphasis.) He obviously didn’t buy the Scholastic system for a moment, but he treated the material as worth taking a semester to try to understand. And he said a couple of things that stood out. First, for reasons I don’t recall him elaborating on much, he seemed to think that the Third Way in particular might have something to be said for it. Second, he said that the mind-body problem, which he seemed to think was terribly vexing, really boiled down to the problem of universals. For years I would wonder what he meant by that. (I now think it must have had to do with the way our grasp of abstract concepts features in Aristotelian arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.) At the time I filed these remarks away as curiosities (just as I had then regarded the material we covered in the class as mere curiosities). But I think his example made it easier for me, years later, to take a second look at Aquinas as I prepared course material. I look back at my first lectures on the Five Ways with extreme embarrassment. If you’d heard them, you’d have thought I was cribbing from an advance copy of The God Delusion, if not in tone then at least in the substance of my criticisms. But that started slowly to change as I read more about the arguments and began to work the material into my lectures. A good friend of mine, who had also gone from Catholicism to atheism and was a fellow grad student, was familiar with William Lane Craig’s book The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, and seemed to find it useful in preparing his own lectures on the subject. Our discussions of the arguments were very helpful. Furthermore, Atheism and Theism by J. J. C. Smart and John Haldane had recently appeared, with Haldane defending, and Smart treating respectfully, some old-fashioned Thomistic arguments for the existence of God. Such materials opened up a new world. The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base. The immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at. I still didn’t agree with the arguments, but at least teaching them was getting interesting. I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered. One of my smartest students expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good argument for God’s existence after all! (Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.) None of this undermined my commitment to naturalism for some time. I published my first several journal articles while still in grad school, and two of them were criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity. (I’m now a staunch Trinitarian, of course. But once again, it turns out that I still more or less agree with the arguments I then presented. The versions of Trinitarianism I then attacked are, I continue to think, wrong. But Trinitarianism itself is true.) But the language of act and potency, per se and per accidens causal series and the like started to enter my lectures on Aquinas, and before long, my thinking. It was all very strange. Aquinas’s arguments had a certain power when all of this metaphysical background was taken account of. And there was a certain plausibility to the metaphysics. There were reasons for distinguishing between actuality and potentiality, the different kinds of causal series, and so forth. Yet no one seemed to talk that way anymore -- or, again, at least no one “mainstream.” Could there really be anything to it all if contemporary philosophers weren’t saying anything about it? And yet, precisely because they weren’t talking about it, they weren’t refuting it either. Indeed, when they did say anything about Aquinas’s arguments at all, most of them showed only that they couldn’t even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken. Arguments from current philosophical fashion are bad enough. But when most philosophers not only do not accept a certain view, but demonstrate that they don’t even understand what it is, things can start to smell very fishy indeed. And so they did. I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else. Even writers like Searle, who I admired greatly and whose naturalism I shared, had no plausible positive alternative. McGinn-style mysterianism started to seem like a dodge, especially given that certain arguments (like the Platonic realist ones) seemed to show that matter simply is not in fact all that there is, not merely that we can’t know how it can be all that there is. Some secular writers were even toying with Aristotelian ideas anyway. The only reason for not taking Aquinas and similar thinkers seriously seemed to be that most other academic philosophers weren’t taking them seriously. And yet as I had come to learn, many of them didn’t even understand Aquinas and Co. in the first place, and their own naturalism was riddled with problems. Against Aquinas, for naturalism -- the case increasingly seemed to come down to the consensus of the profession. And what exactly was that worth? It isn’t worth a damn thing, of course. Careerists might not see that, nor might a young man more excited by the “question what your parents taught you” side of philosophy than all that “objective pursuit of truth” stuff. But a grownup will see it, and a philosopher had sure as hell better see it. I don’t know exactly when everything clicked. There was no single event, but a gradual transformation. As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.” Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!” By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe. There’s more to the story than that, of course. In particular, it would take an essay of its own to explain why I returned to the Catholic Church, specifically, as I would by the end of 2001. But I can already hear some readers protesting at what I have said. I don’t mean the New Atheist types, always on the hunt for some ad hominem nugget that will excuse them from having to take the actual arguments of the other side seriously. (God Himself could come down from on high and put before such people an airtight ontological proof of His existence while parting the Red Sea, and they’d still insist that what really motivated these arguments was a desire to rationalize His moral prejudices. And that their own continued disbelief was just a matter of, you know, following the evidence where it leads.) No, I’m talking about a certain kind of religious believer, the type who’s always going on about how faith is really a matter of the heart rather than the head, that no one’s ever been argued into religion, etc. It will be said by such a believer that my change of view was too rationalistic, too cerebral, too bloodless, too focused on a theoretical knowledge of the God of the philosophers rather than a personal response to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But the dichotomy is a false one, and the implied conception of the relationship between faith and reason not only foolish but heterodox. As to the heterodoxy and foolishness of fideism, and the correct understanding of the relationship of faith and reason, I have addressed that set of issues in a previous post. As to the “heart versus head” stuff, it seems to me to rest on an erroneous bifurcation of human nature. Man is a unity, his rationality and animality, intellect and passions, theoretical and moral lives all ultimately oriented toward the same end. That is why even a pagan like Aristotle knew that our happiness lay in “the contemplation and service of God,” whose existence he knew of via philosophical argumentation. That is why Plotinus could know that we “forget the father, God” because of “self-will.” While the pagan may have no access to the supernatural end that only grace makes possible, he is still capable of a natural knowledge of God, and will naturally tend to love what he knows. As Plotinus’s remark indicates, that does not mean that the will does not have a role to play. But that is true wherever reason leads us to a conclusion we might not like, not merely in matters of religion. And once you have allowed yourself to see the truth that reason leads you to, what reason apprehends is (given the convertibility of the transcendentals) as good and beautiful as it is real. If you find yourself intellectually convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it. Of course, there are those whose heads and hearts are so out of sync that they cannot follow both at the same time. But we shouldn’t mistake this pathology for an insight into human nature. Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much. When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back. As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed. But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true. END
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 3, 2012 15:18:35 GMT
Another little something aimed at teaching New Atheists how to think: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/08/a-baltimore-catechism-for-the-new-atheistsEXTRACT One of the more striking differences between the New Atheists and, say, Freud or Nietzsche is the willingness of the former to engage natural theology on its own terms. Not that they get very far in their clumsy forays—it’s all pretty halfhearted and amateurish stuff, indeed sometimes wincingly embarrassing. Thus Lawrence Krauss tries to address the scholastic axiom nihil ex nihilo fit (“nothing can come from nothing”) in his book A Universe from Nothing, where he argues, based on string theory, that a vibration in a ten-dimensional string or “brane” started it all. As was already pointed out by Edward Feser in the June/July issue of First Things, even if one grants that string theory is true, Krauss has already conceded the very medieval axiom he thought he was dispatching, since, after all, a “brane” (assuming it exists) is something. Checkmate. Now one Alex Rosenberg has gingerly stepped onto this vaudeville stage with The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, where scientific reductionism becomes—there is no other term for it—a full-bore reductio ad absurdum. As it happens, the Times Literary Supplement gave the book to the philosopher Anthony Kenny to review, perhaps because he could never be accused of any parti pris in this debate, since he has in the past leveled his own severe criticisms against classical Christian theism for relying on an “outdated Aristotelian cosmology.” These skeptical conclusions, however, have not lead Kenny to a two-fisted atheism; for as he said in his 2004 book The Unknown God: “There is no such thing, I concluded, as the God of scholastic or rationalist philosophy; but of course that is not the only possible conception of God.” Whatever orthodox believers may think of Kenny’s journey over these decades from classical theism to something vaguer, he is at least an equal-opportunity basher: For his aversion to absolutism can equally well be employed against the New Atheists, who affect an apodictic absolutism in their argumentation that makes them as impregnable to counterevidence as anything found in a creationist textbook. In his recent book God and the New Atheism, the Georgetown theologian John Haught has usefully captured this quasi-religious absolutism among the New Atheists by summarizing their position as a seven-point “creed”: 1. Apart from nature, which includes human beings and our cultural creations, there is nothing. There is no God, no soul, and no life beyond death. 2. Nature is self-originating, not the creation of God. 3. The universe has no overall point or purpose, although individual human lives can be lived purposefully. 4. Since God does not exist, all explanations and all causes are purely natural and can be understood only by science. 5. All the various features of living beings, including human intelligence and behavior, can be explained ultimately in purely natural terms, and today that usually means in evolutionary, specifically Darwinian terms. 6. Faith in God is the cause of innumerable evils and should be rejected on moral grounds. 7. Morality does not require belief in God, and people behave better without faith than with it. Freud and Nietzsche no doubt had their dogmatic commitments, but at least they would have recognized the sixth and seventh axioms especially as quite preposterous. They were too familiar with the evil lurking in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the human heart to think it could be expelled by the simple expedient of evicting God. In that light, what’s really new about the New Atheists is their reliance on an oxymoron: they actually seem to believe in a utopian Darwinism—a faith-based science if there ever was one. Accordingly, I have long felt that the best (if not the only) way of addressing these dogmatisms is just to sit back and let the New Atheists hang themselves by their own rope. Which is where Kenny comes in, as he transposes their assumptions into a kind of atheist Baltimore Catechism: KENNY QUOTE The main tenets of this philosophy are bracingly summed up in a series of questions and answers: Is there a God? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Why am I here? Just dumb luck. Does prayer work? Of course not. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? You must be kidding. Is there free will? Not a chance! What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. END OF KENNY QUOTE The great value of this boiled-down atheist catechism is that it directly and ineluctably leads Rosenberg to one of the most hilarious conclusions in all of the New Atheist literature; and Kenny has great fun skewering Rosenberg’s eye-popping absurdities: KENNY QUOTE One of Rosenberg’s more extravagant claims is that nobody ever thinks about anything. […] His argument goes like this: the mind is identical with the brain, so a thought must be an event in the brain. But no clump of neurons can be about anything. Therefore, no thought is about anything. END OF KENNY QUOTE This cranial absence of referentiality to the outside world would include, of course, all the “thoughts” in Rosenberg’s book. Checkmate again. END
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2012 18:05:31 GMT
In the course of a post discussing the Aristotelean contrast between the intellect (the faculty which allows us to comprehend abstract concepts) and the imagination (the faculty by which we receive and process sense-impressions), Edward Feser makes a very interesting point. New Atheists when discussing religion always argue that supernatural concepts can have no meaning except in terms of the sense-concepts used to describe them, and so these need only be addressed in the crudest terms (e.g. God as old man in sky sitting on golden throne), while at the same time those of them who have any scientific knowledge are perfectly well aware that science requires the use of abstract concepts which cannot be adequately presented in terms of the senses. This (if I understand Mr Feser correctly) reinforces the point that New Atheism isn't about real intellectual exchange- it's a rhetorical strategy aimed at making belief look ridiculous in order to discourage people from engaging with it. EXTRACT And this is where so many New Atheist types come to grief. (As I find I keep having to reassure the hypersensitive reader, no, I don’t mean all atheists. I mean the kind of atheist who seriously thinks a Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or Laurence Krauss deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with J. L. Mackie, J. Howard Sobel, or Quentin Smith.) Those among them who actually know something about science (and not merely how to shout “Science!”) are well aware that you are not going to understand physics properly if you take too seriously the mental images we tend to form when we hear terms like “spacetime,” “particle,” “energy,” and the like. They are well aware that physics requires us to abstract from ordinary experience, to move away from what we can visualize or otherwise imagine. The man on the street may think that whatever is real must be something you could in principle see, hear, touch, smell, or taste, but the more scientifically savvy sort of New Atheist knows that this is a vulgar prejudice, and that it is with the intellect rather than the senses that we truly understand the world. And yet, when dealing with metaphysical or theological concepts New Atheist types suddenly become complete Philistines, feigning an inability to grasp anything but the most crude and literal physical descriptions. Hence if you claim that the human mind is immaterial, they suppose that you simply must be committed to the existence of a sort of magical goop that floats above the brain; and if you say that the universe has a cause they will insist that you must believe in a kind of super-Edison who draws up blueprints, gets out his tools, and sets to work. And when you object to these preposterous straw men, they will pretend that they cannot understand your language in any other way, that it is mere empty verbiage unless read in such a crassly mundane fashion. Of course, if they held physics to the same narrow, literalistic standard, they would have to dismiss wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, gravity wells, electric fields, centers of gravity, and on and on. (I’ve discussed this double standard before, here and here.) It is no good to object that the predictive and technological successes of physics justify this double standard, for two reasons. First, the predictive and technological successes of physics are relevant only to the epistemic credentials of physics, but not to its intelligibility. In other words, that such-and-such a theory in physics has been confirmed experimentally and/or had various practical applications is relevant to showing that it is correct, but it is not necessarily relevant to interpreting the content of the theory. Physicists knew well enough what Einstein was claiming before tests like the 1919 and 1922 eclipse experiments provided evidence that he was right. Similarly, though string theory has proved notoriously difficult to test, we know well enough what the theory means; the trouble is just finding out whether it’s true. (No one would make the asinine claim that string theory simply must be committed to the existence of literal microscopic shoelaces unless and until some experimental test of the theory is devised.) So, even if it were correct to say that metaphysical and theological claims cannot be rationally justified, it simply wouldn’t follow that such claims must be given the crude readings New Atheists often foist upon them, on pain of being empty verbiage. But it is, in any case, not correct to say that they cannot be rationally justified, which brings us to the second problem. That the methods of empirical science are rational does not entail that they are the only methods that are rational. In particular, and as I have pointed out many times, it is simply a blatant non sequitur to claim that science’s success in discovering those aspects of reality that are susceptible of strict prediction and control shows that those aspects exhaust reality. This is like a drunk’s insisting that because it is only under the streetlamp that there is light to look for his keys, it follows that the keys cannot be elsewhere and/or that there cannot be methods by which they might be sought elsewhere. As I have also pointed out many times, the premises from which the historically most important arguments for God’s existence proceed derive, not from natural science, but from metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. They are, that is to say, premises that any possible natural science must take for granted, and are thus more secure than the claims of natural science, not less -- or so many natural theologians would claim. Obviously such claims are controversial, but the point is that to insist that metaphysical and theological assertions must be justified via the methods of natural science if they are to be worthy of attention is not to refute the metaphysician or theologian, but merely to beg the question against the metaphysician or theologian. Philosophical arguments are different from empirical scientific arguments, but they are no less rational than empirical scientific arguments. .. END OF EXTRACT edwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2012/08/think-mcfly-think.html#more
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 31, 2012 19:55:34 GMT
I have read that, in the early days of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks staged various debates with Christian intellectuals in an effort to show them up. The debates had to be stopped because the Christians, to the surprise of the Bolsheviks, had a habit of winning them. In some ways I think the advent of the New Atheists (have they come and gone at this stage?) is a blessing because it makes more people think about questions of theism, atheism, materialism, and so forth-- and a lot of people will end up thinking their way past atheism and materialism.
Certainly I can say that Edward Feser's book the Last Superstition-- itself a response to the New Atheists-- played an enormous part in my own acceptance of theism and Catholicism.
Having said that, I do wonder if he should dismiss the importance of the empirical results of intangible concepts and theories as unimportant. I remember when I was moving towards faith I got frustrated at defences of the miraculous that concentrated on the philosophical possibility of the miraculous. I was perfectly content that miracles were conceptually possible. I wanted to know if they had happened. I was far more intimidated by the Amazing Randi's million-dollar challenge for evidence of the supernatural, and all the failures of the various Psychical Societies etc., than I was by any New Atheist "philistinism" (as Feser so well puts it) against the possibility of the immaterial.
Feser's Last Superstition won me over, not because it "opened a space" for the immaterial-- that seemed easy enough-- but because it demonstrated that we just couldn't do without teleology, final causes, universals, a Prime Mover etc.
I give thanks for Feser in my prayers.
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