Petersen’s Failed Attempts to Refute Leonard Peikoff: Preamble

In a brief essay titled A Response to Dr. Leonard Peikoff on the Existence of God, the founder of ”Answers for Hope Ministries” and “Clarkian Presuppositionalist” (according to his bio page) Jason Petersen interacts with a set of statements transcribed from Leonard Peikoff’s lecture series titled The Philosophy of Objectivism. The transcription of Peikoff’s statements can be found here. Peikoff’s statements encapsulate several brief reasons why it is proper for rational individuals to reject all forms of god-belief. Petersen treats Peikoff’s statements as though they were intended to be fully developed arguments, which they are not.

Although Petersen allows that Objectivism is “one of the more interesting atheist philosophies,” his goal in his paper is to “demonstrate that there is no substance to the Objectivist’s objections to God, or specifically, Christianity.” Perhaps Petersen is under the impression that merely interacting with Peikoff’s brief asides should be sufficient to discredit Objectivism in toto. If that is the case, Petersen puts his reputation as a serious thinker into grave doubt.

Before launching into his interaction with Peikoff’s statements, Petersen gives some prefatory remarks about Peikoff in particular and Objectivism as a whole. I will confine the present blog entry to considering the remarks he gives here and examine his responses to Peikoff’s statements in subsequent entries.

“Atheism Can’t Ground Objective Morality”?

In a blog entry titled flogging, Steve Hays of Triablogue attempts to wrestle with rules given in the Old Testament (specifically Exodus 21:20-21, 26-27) concerning what should happen if a slave-owner beats one of his slaves.

Specifically, the law stipulates what should happen if a slave-owner strikes his slave: if the slave dies immediately (“under his hand”), then the slave-owner is to “be avenged”, but “if the slave survives a day or two, [the slave owner] is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.” No matter how one seeks to interpret this, one thing is certain: the biblical code is positively affirming the premise that an individual can be a piece of property belonging to another. (There goes the concept of individual rights in toto.)

Deriving "Ought" from Dirt

In his blog entry Shooting Blanks, Steve Hays reacts to comments offered by members of RationalSkepticism.org in response to one of Hays’ own blog entries, titled Funeral for atheism.

One of the comments, by someone posting under the moniker “Rumraket,” included the following statement:

You still can't derive any moral "Oughts" from the "is" of whatever property you give your pet deity.

Hays countered this by interjecting the following unargued assertions:

Actually, you can derive an "ought" from an "is" if the "is" has a meaningful purpose. If it was designed by a wise, benevolent Creator, with a particular nature and telos.

According to what Hays claims here, so long as the “is” in question has certain qualities which Hays has stipulated, one can derive an “ought” from it.

What Alternative Do “Apostates” Have After Leaving Christianity?

Over on Triablogue, Steve Hays posted a blog entry reacting to statements made by Christian apologist Mike Licona (remember – he’s the guy who blurted out “I want it to be true” in a podcast featuring a discussion between himself, Gary Habermas and Robert Price - see here for details).

In his blog entry, Hays' remarks are instructive in that they expose how a mind marinated in religious doublethink tries to gerrymander a selected handful of data sets in favor of a confessional investment. In his blog entry, Hays quotes from and reacts to a post by Christian apologist Mike Licona.

Hays quotes Licona, who writes:

I’ve doubted the truth of my Christian faith many times; sometimes to the point of almost walking away from it.

Reacting to this, Hays writes:

Professing Christians who feel this way need to stop and ask themselves, where would they be going? Walk away…for what?

In addition to asking why they feel this way, I think this is a fair question for believers to contemplate since departing from one worldview naturally leaves a void which would need to be filled by something else. And indeed, it’s quite likely that most people who depart from Christianity have no reliable set of principles which can guide them to a proper, fully integrated and non-contradictory worldview that should fill that void. After all, Christianity does not provide a thinker with such reliable principles. So leaving Christianity, can at first, seem like entering into utter darkness. What’s ironic is that this darkness was there all along, and Christianity was simply trying to divert the believer’s attention to contentless trivialities that have no importance to human life in the first place. So it is true that leaving Christianity is a good start, but it’s not an end in itself. Making the decision to stop believing in religious nonsense is wonderful, but this choice in and of itself does not determine what should replace it. At least one could say Christianity is an attempt – albeit one steeped in mystical primitivism – to address questions which a worldview worthy of a thinking human being should address. So if one leaves Christianity, where should he go?

Generally, there are two ways to address the question of what a former believer might (or should) accept as a worldview in place of Christianity. The first way is to use reason as his guide. The other way is to abandon reason and exchange one form of irrationality for another. Of course, if Christianity is one’s starting point, he has already abandoned reason and thus needs to rediscover it, just as the West did during the Renaissance. But given these two alternatives, which one does Hays recommend? Let’s examine his reaction to the problem.

STB: Four Years and Counting

On August 27, 2010, I published a blog entry titled A Critique of Sye Ten Bruggencate’s www.proofthatgodexists.org in which I examined and refuted Sye’s case for the existence of the god he has enshrined in his imagination. That was four years ago.

To date, Sye Ten Bruggencate has yet to vindicate his argument against my refutation. Given Sye’s boisterous activity and self-promoting presence in the internet universe, I highly doubt that his failure to salvage his argument from my criticism is simply a consequence of oversight or lack of interest in apologetics. Rather, it seems that he is unable to respond to the objections which I have raised against his argument because his argument is indeed fatally weak for the reasons that I have presented.

Moreover, since Sye continues to produce videos of himself aggressively regurgitating his canned presuppositionalist gambits and slogans, it appears that he’s banking his apologetic on the hope that any would-be victims of his predatory evangelism will be completely unaware of the faults of his position and thus vulnerable to its insidious gimmickry.

Sye is of the mentality that happily mistakes philosophy for a spectator sport. He is like a politician who was spawned out of a high school debate club, able to take any random position assigned to him and defend it without regard to his own convictions or sense of truth and constantly campaigning for some agenda on behalf of some ulterior gain. Contrary to the tired and all-too predictable posturing, truth does not matter to such an individual. What matters most is being able to return to the benches and being greeted with gleeful approval from the backslappers who’ve been watching and cheering from there all along.

Thus I don’t expect that Sye will ever return to defend his argument against the points that have been raised against it here. He would prefer to pretend that such points have never been raised. The cheap, second-handed gimmick of characterizing logic, science, moral principles, etc., as “immaterial” things that cannot be “accounted for” by those who reject supernaturalism is, sadly, all too effective on those who have been left utterly philosophically defenseless by our worsening education system and decaying culture, and it is on preying on such vulnerable minds that Sye would rather spend his efforts and energy.

Again, it comes down to choices, which means it comes down to character. A person who chooses to worship a deity who – according to its own mythology – chose to sit back and allow villainous individuals to torture and execute its own child when it could have effortlessly intervened to protect its child, has already made a fundamental choice about the kind of moral fiber his character shall be made of. It is such self-debasement that the Christian worldview requires as a minimal price that the believer has to pay up front, even before realizing the toxic nature of the emptiness he’s about to buy.

by Dawson Bethrick

Does Religion Dull One’s Ability to Distinguish Between Fact and Fantasy?

A visitor to my website recently brought my attention to a noteworthy article about a study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science. The article, with its provocative title, can be found here:

Researchers: Children exposed to religion have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction

According to the article, the researchers in the study

demonstrate that children typically have a “sensitivity to the implausible or magical elements in a narrative,” and can determine whether the characters in the narrative are real or fictional by references to fantastical elements within the narrative, such as “invisible sails” or “a sword that protects you from danger every time.”

However, their research does not bear this out so well among children who have been exposed (presumably in a positively reinforcing manner) to religious teaching. The article states:

“Children with exposure to religion — via church attendance, parochial schooling, or both — judged [characters in religious stories] to be real,” the authors wrote. “By contrast, children with no such exposure judged them to be pretend,” just as they had the characters in fairy tales. But children with exposure to religion judged many characters in fantastical, but not explicitly religious stories, to also be real — the equivalent of being incapable of differentiating between Mark Twain’s character Tom Sawyer and an account of George Washington’s life.

The abstract of the study itself, which can be found here, reads as follows:

In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.

I have not examined the details of the study any further than what the lead article and the study’s abstract say about it, so I cannot comment on the methods employed in the study beyond what is given in these two sources.

However, on the face of it, this seems to be nothing less than scientific confirmation of the kind of outcome one would expect from people under the influence of religion if what I have argued is correct. For several years I have been pointing out how religion subsists on blurring the fundamental distinction between reality and imagination. The reader who brought this article to my attention commented that my infamous question – “How can I reliably distinguish between what the believer calls ‘God’ and what he may merely be imagining?” – continues to go unanswered.

Many apologists for the philosophical primitivism of religion have kicked and squirmed in response to this question. But as my blog’s visitor rightly points out, none have been able to answer this question in a manner that salvages religion from my critique.

by Dawson Bethrick

A Response to Christian James

A Christian leaving comments on my blog Dave's McPresuppositions, Part V, has left two additional comments that I reply to below.

In my exchange of comments with Christian James, I had asked him if there was anything that he would not sacrifice for Jesus. He winced at this question and resisted answering it. He would not come out and give a firm yes or no to the question, but instead chose to remain in his closet on the matter.

 

After some back and forth which is available for readers to review at the above link, Christian submitted two more comments today, and instead of replying in the comments, I am replying directly to him in the form of a new blog entry.

Dave's McPresuppositions, Part V

As I embark on the fifth installment of my series of posts directly engaging Dave McPhillips’ faltering comments campaign against reason and objectivity, I ask readers to pay close attention to the pattern that Dave’s objections continually exhibit, namely a pattern of reaching for skeptical angles aimed at undermining reason, intellectual integrity and confidence in one’s own faculties.

Presuppositionalists are in the habit of relying on such patterns, not only because their worldview requires men to renounce their minds and prostrate themselves before authoritarian mystics and witch doctors whose say-so is supposed to serve as the end-all, be-all of knowledge, but also because it is so effective on many non-Christians who have themselves already accepted skepticism’s core premises.

On those few occasions when presuppositionalists are confronted with firm, sustained and uncompromising endorsements of reason, they can typically be found replying with a “yeah, but” sequence of utterances and quickly proceeding to deploy skeptical tactics intended to undermine reason and one’s confidence in his own ability to use it. Apologists recoil at reason as though it were Kryptonite to their inflatable superman. The bible does not lay out an epistemology of reason, and it’s obvious to anyone who reads it that believers are expected to swallow everything it says uncritically on its own say-so, regardless of the fact that its claims are unsupported by evidence and contrary to reason. That’s the express opposite of reason. In the “good old days” of the Dark Ages, Christians could be more open and forthright about their worldview’s pronounced antagonism against reason. Martin Luther, one of the Reformation’s most outspoken exponents, was notorious for his explicit rejection of reason. Luther recognized the threat that the Renaissance posed to the religious worldview, and in response to this threat he dug his heels in and put even greater outspoken emphasis on Christianity’s aversion to reason. This was no accident.

Dave's McPresuppositions, Part IV

I continue now with the fourth installment of my extended interaction with some of Dave McPhillips’ comments which he posted here Previous installments in this series can be found here:

Part I 

Part II 

Part III

Up to this point I have been showing how Dave’s own worldview cannot address questions which he has raised against Objectivism, a worldview which is diametrically opposed to his Christian worldview. Dave had issued a series of questions and charged me with failing to address them when he first raised them (they had not been raised before, so how could I be reasonably expected to have addressed them until they were raised?). I then turned those questions back to Dave and challenged him to answer them. To date, his responses to his own questions have made a miserable showing. Let’s see if he can recover any hint of credibility on behalf of his worldview in the proceeding exchange.

Dave's McPresuppositions, Part III

In this post I continue my exploration of Dave McPhillips’ comments which he posted here.

This is the third of a series of installments in which I interact with Dave’s attempts to defend his god-belief and promulgate the skeptical view of the human mind that is so vital to religious faith. For earlier installments, readers are invited to read Part I and Part II of this series.

In this installment, we explore Dave’s claim that “Christians have a rational basis” for their beliefs and his questions about reason from the perspective of rational philosophy. Indeed, it is good when a mystic at least asks about reason and its foundations, for his own worldview will not provide suitable answers to these. That is because the mystic’s worldview is fundamentally opposed to reason.

Dave's McPresuppositions, Part II

I continue now with my examination of Dave McPhillips’ comments which he posted here. This is a continuation from Part I of this series.

In the present installment, we pick up from where the last one left off – specifically with an examination of the implications of Christianity’s foundations with regard to the issue of metaphysical primacy.

I had written:

(2.) “Your statements confirm my analysis that Christianity assumes the primacy of consciousness at the most fundamental level – i.e., characterizing existence as having its source in some act of consciousness – i.e., metaphysical subjectivism.”

Dave replied:

Yes, you are right. I do believe in the primacy of consciousness, not my own or any other human but God’s. without the mind of God nothing is possible.

Finally one of them concedes one of my fundamental objections against Christianity!

Dave's McPresuppositions, Part I

Christians who comment on my blog typically indulge in the practice of mere assertion: they simply assert what they believe and give no background rationale for why they believe or how they came to believe it. The how of knowledge is completely missing from their slogan-laced spiel. Also missing from what they offer in their comments is any informed concern for maintaining objectivity. Objectivity has at root to do with the relationship between consciousness and its objects. But the bible gives believers no guidance on this matter, keeping it safely out of view.

One might suppose that this is accidental, and for the primitives responsible for authoring and compiling the writings that eventually made their way into the bible, this may be the case. But for modern-day believers, their failure to consider the relationship between consciousness and its objects in an explicit manner is philosophically inexcusable. This is especially the case when apologists for a religious worldview condemn rival positions for being “subjective” or “irrational.” Such objections carry no weight when coming from a religious perspective, since religious perspectives themselves are inherently subjective and irrational.

Objectivity is adherence to the primacy of existence throughout one’s knowledge and judgments. Rationality is adherence to reason as one’s only means of knowledge, one’s only standard of judgment and one’s only guide to action. One will not find these virtues either explained or endorsed in “sacred writings” like the biblical storybook. On the contrary, at every turn throughout the biblical narrative, one finds assault after assault on the integrity of the human mind, as though this one thing – claimed at the same to have been created by the Christian god itself – were the source of all evil and woe in the universe, as though it were a “dung heap” that needed to be flushed down some cosmic toilet once and for all.

Dawson's Razor

I think it may be beneficial for readers to have a specific blog post on what I have come to call “Dawson’s razor.” So in this entry I cull together some pointers to help make clear what exactly this principle means, why it is important, and how it can be used.

In philosophy, a “razor” is “a principle or premise that allows one to eliminate unlikely explanations for a phenomenon” (per Wikipedia.org).

The most famous example is Occam’s razor, the principle which states “that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

Shining a Bright Light into Dave's Dark Cave

Dave McPhillips posted several comments responding to blog A Reply to Dave McPhillips on Bahnsen’s Treatment of the Problem of Evil. Dave is another wannabe presuppositionalist, trying his hand well beyond his skill and well beyond his knowledge of the topics that come up in debate. The darkness of ignorance encouraged by the Christian worldview is strong with Dave McPhillips: it has served to keep him from the light and has effectively reduced him to repeating apologetic slogans liked a well-trained presuppositionalist marionette.

For those who have been following my blog for several years now, do you notice a pattern? Every couple months another apologist comes by, often with some drive-by comment, speaking his nonsense and often not realizing how summarily he and his worldview have been refuted. Many disappear after the first round, but on occasion they return after a brief season only to wedge their feet deeper into their oral cavity. All too often this takes the form of simply asserting dismissive remarks like “that’s arbitrary,” “that’s subjective,” “that begs the question,” etc., without even attempting to explain why the tidbit in question commits the offense so charged. In fact, had my critics bothered to read more of my blog than just the brief passage that made them bristle to begin with, they would find that I have already anticipated their objections and have validated my position, even if they do not approve of it.

 

But after a few short rounds, they disappear for good and never come back, never the wiser, never the more enlightened. This is the effect of Christianity: it corrals the believer’s mind into a cave of ignorance where it seeks to enslave it to its mystical fantasies. Very few seem to find the courage it takes to question Christianity’s subjective premises and recognize them for what they are. To do this requires the choice to be determined in one’s honesty. Without this choice, the believer will be forever ensnared in Christianity’s tangled web of lies and deceits.

So here we go again.

How Bahnsen Gives Away the Farm in His Debate with Gordon Stein

Taking the points I make in my blog entry Presuppositionalist Pseudolosophy as a point of departure, we now turn to a poignant example in the annals of presuppositionalist debating history which shows how easily apologists succumb to the ignorance-riddled view of knowledge on which they base their sophistry.

Presuppositionalists make explicit appeals to products of human psychological activity, such as concepts, laws, propositions, etc., and make claims to the effect that they do not change and are not subject to space and time. Because of these attributes, theists associate such phenomena with the supernatural. They even go so far as to treat products of human psychological activity as though they were entities existing independent of human cognition, perhaps floating in the air or in some other dimension, and somehow they are pressed into our passive consciousnesses by means of supernatural force.

Often Christian apologists will interrogate non-Christians on whether they think everything that exists is “material” or physical. The underlying implication of such questions is that the theist has mind-independent phenomena in mind here. But then they quickly shift focus, perhaps for some apologetic expedience, to things which are mind-dependent. This becomes apparent when theists raise as examples things like truth, universals, mathematics, the laws of logic, etc.

Fumbling at the First Down

In an audio exchange with AronRa, Sye Ten Bruggencate offers some clues as to just how absurd his worldview really is.

For example, at one point he affirms the view that “knowledge is justified true belief” (23:03 – 23:04).

So on this view, knowledge is a species of belief – a belief that is true and has been justified.

But Sye also states “if it’s a belief, it’s not knowledge” (39:11 – 39:12).

Is the Concept of Evidence Itself Evidence that God Exists?

In a podcast hosted by “The Bible-Thumping Wingnut”, professional presuppositionalist grandstander Sye Ten Bruggencate makes the following claim (1:11:38 – 1:11:31):

The very concept of evidence is evidence that God exists.

Even though Sye claims he will explain this (in fact, he just makes additional assertions saying very similar things that eventually terminate in the claim “you can’t account for truth” or something along these lines), he offers no genuine argument for this assertion. Of course, that’s not surprising. Indeed, if one accepts this claim, why would one not accept the claim that “the very concept of evidence is evidence that Blarko the WonderBeing exists”? So often presuppers act as if their own say so were sufficient to establish their claims.

But if Sye is going to make this kind of claim about a concept, then we should ask what his worldview teaches about concepts in general. But as I have pointed out in previous blog entries, the bible says nothing about concepts. For the Christian worldview, the very concept ‘concept’ is a void that can be molded and reshaped to fit any need out of apologetic expedience. In Christianity, concepts as such have no objective identity; they can be made into whatever the believer wants them to be, simply because he wants them to be what he finds convenient under the pressure of the scrutiny of the moment.

Presuppositionalism, Circular Argument, and Oliphant’s Defense

Presuppositionalist apologists frequently complain that their critics have misunderstood their apologetic platform when they charge that their vindication of Christianity employs the fallacy of petitio principia - that their argument for the existence of the Christian god begs the question. Since this objection is raised by both Christians and non-Christians, advocates of presuppositionalism should be concerned. Indeed, from what I have been able to determine, only presuppositionalists themselves hold that their methodology is not fallaciously circular.

Whatever the case may be, since this objection is so frequently encountered, one would think that presuppositionalists would take greater care in locating the source of the problem – whether it is in fact a problem haunting their argument scheme, or the manner in which it has been marketed which misrepresents its product – and correcting it. Instead, presuppositionalists seem to have adopted a more reactionary stance of letting things sit as they are and circling the wagons when the objection is raised yet again, which of course is inevitable.

A Reply to Dave McPhillips on Bahnsen’s Treatment of the Problem of Evil

A visitor to my blog posting under the name Dave McPhillips recently submitted a comment in response to my blog entry titled Greg Bahnsen on the Problem of Evil.

Here is what Dave wrote:

The problem of evil is not a problem for the believer but rather a problem for the unbeliever. what Bahnsen and Van Til were teaching is that if one wishes to hold a moral complaint against anything in this world one must have a standard of morality with which to evaluate between good and evil.Moreover,one must first define what they mean by "evil" given their espoused worldview and how that definition is meaningful. As a Christian I have a standard of morality by which to distinguish good from evil (i.e. the holy character of God) but as an unbeliever who holds that we live in a random chance universe that is material in nature, there would be no objective immaterial invariant moral standard with which to evaluate right and wrong. in the end all unbelieving systems of thought relegate morality to the realm of subjective relativism. if so, then who's to say whats right or wrong? it would simply be different strokes for different folks.

Those who have read my above-linked blog entry will note that Dave does not interact directly with what I have stated there. Nor does Dave make any attempt to defend Bahnsen's proposed solution to the problem of evil.

On the Claim to Have Experienced “the Supernatural”

A frequent visitor to my blog recently posed the following question:

Also Dawson there has been something that i always wanted to ask you, what do you think of people whom always claimed to have experianced the supernatural? how do you explain stuff like that in an objectivist worldivew

So how does Objectivism explain people who claim to have experienced the supernatural?